Name
Area
Research Question
How can schools best address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students?
What child, family, and school factors contribute to the heightened risk for psychiatric disorders in youth with developmental delays across childhood and adolescence?
What are the risk factors that lead to the development of serious mental illness in adolescence?
Can statistics for structural equations be improved? Are model-based reliability coefficients better? Can new Guttman scaling rival Rasch or 2PL IRT? Do bifactor rotations or trinary betas ever fail?
Understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying the cognitive processing of vision
How can we optimize human learning, retention, and transfer, and how does forgetting play an adaptive role in remembering?
What predicts successful school outcomes for young children with autism spectrum disorder?
How are perceptions, memories, and behaviors encoded by the activity of spiking neurons in the brain?
How do different parts of the mind/brain work together such that language "means something"? What mental structures constitute these meanings? How is language related to the rest of “thought”?
I investigate how the brain abstracts generalizable knowledge from our experiences, uses this to guide new decisions, and learns from their outcomes.
How do stressful experiences influence the body and physical health, and what types of psychological processes and interventions can protect against those effects?
Broadly speaking, my methodological research agenda involves the development, integration, and evaluation of innovative latent variable models that have wide-ranging applications in social and behavioral sciences.
How do early experiences influence emotional, cognitive, physical, and brain development in ways that contribute to mental health and illness?
How do we remember and why do we forget, and how does this change across the lifespan? How and why do we selectively remember important information, and is this adaptive as we get older?
What are the cognitive and neural mechanisms that shape motivation and reward valuation in decisions that affect one's own well-being and the well-being of others?
How can we optimize the development and delivery of evidence based interventions for underserved communities?
How can we design systems and treatments that yield the greatest public health impact for children and families?
What interventions are most cost effective in improving couple relationships?
How do emotion and motivation influence attention and memory?
What are the biopsychosocial risk factors for anxiety and depression and how can they be targeted in order to optimize treatment effects?
Why do our social relationships have such a profound impact on our emotional and physical health? Why does being rejected feel painful, whereas being connected to others feels so good?
How to advance the SEM framework for enhanced inferential validity and how to further extend its applicability to address a broader range of research questions across various applied research scenarios?
How do people make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity?
How do we perceive rhythm, melody, and emotion in music? How can statistical practices be improved in psychology and other sciences?
How do sociocultural experience and biobehavioral development interact during adolescence and young adulthood?
What are the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent behavior?
The Original Cognitive Interview: Investigative Interview techniques for use with victims, witnesses, and potential deceivers.
How can teachers help students learn math in a way that students can make sense of, remember, and apply?
Are the key variables for intimate conversation similar to the variables for maintainig close realtionships?, Are uncommon honesty, acceptance, and expressed empathy preictors of durable, satisfying relationships?
What is the neurobiological basis of atypical sensory processing across neurodevelopmental and clinical conditions? How do these sensory differences affect higher-order social and cognitive functioning and how can we treat them?
How does culture affect human development? How can we integrate psychology with the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, communication studies, political science, and ethnographic arts to answer this question?
How do sex differences in brain and behavior develop? What digital teaching tools are effective in neuroscience education?
How can an understanding of early development improve educational practices, parenting, and policy?
What are the risk factors for onset and course of depression, particularly stress, family, interpersonal, and genetic predictors and how they work together?
How do language users incorporate different sources of information to produce sufficiently rich representations? How do linguistic and extra-linguistic information constrain interpretation during sentence processing?
What can evolutionary thinking tell us about our intimate relationships?
How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?
What is the role of stress in shaping brain development and how do these neurodevelopmental changes influence the etiology, course, and treatment of depression?
What information about cognitive processes can be gleaned from statistical analyses of large data sources such as classifications and languages?
What are the psychological barriers to positive social relations and well-being in diverse groups?
What are the psychological, behavioral, and biological factors that contribute to healthy aging, and what strategies can be delivered to reverse adverse biological mechanisms (i.e., inflammation) and prevent chronic diseases of aging?
How does the brain compute past experience, or reward history, to contribute to decision making at the present time? How does this change in addiction?
How do we form first impressions of other people from only a glimpse of their face or body? How are multiple identities integrated to yield a single impression of another person?
How do infants construct representations of the physical and social environment?
How do school contextual factors (e.g., ethnic composition, organizational structure) affect peer relationships and student well-being? What psychosocial benefits are associated with diversity (and for whom)?
What can neuroimaging tell us about differences in brain structure and function in individuals with schizophrenia? How do such differences relate to cognition and neurodevelopment?
How do we visually perceive and represent objects, shapes, scenes, and events, and how do these processes interact with thinking and learning?
How does learning occur in the brain?
What is the process that people use to make everyday decisions?
How do synaptic changes result in learning, as studied in an invertebrate? How are do mammalian fear-learning circuits work, as studied with computational neural models?
How do humans maximize the benefits + minimize the costs of our social worlds? What is the design of friendship psychology? How do people—particularly women—navigate friendships, rivalries, and other social hurdles (e.g., stigma)?
How well do evidence-based treatments, developed and tested in research settings, work in community mental health settings serving diverse and disadvantaged families and children?
How does emotion modulate memory? How is emotional memory altered in depression and aging? Can we rescue memory impairment using interventions such as music, emotion regulation, etc.? How do individual differences play a role in what we remember (e.g. menopause, retirement, culture, antidepressant use, etc.)?
What factors predict, mediate, and moderate outcomes of children with ADHD and disruptive behavior disorders?
Why are our brains wired to be social?
How can we motivate and enable people to embark on highly impactful altruistic projects and pursue them effectively?
Why does the world look the way it is, and with many visual illusions? Why does the percept make sense, from an information processing perspective?
What are the computational mechanisms underlying human perception and reasoning? How might intelligent machines emulate them?
What are the roles of family risk and protective processes and family interventions in the course and treatment of bipolar disorder and psychosis?
How does brain function go awry in schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, and what cognition, emotion, and brain connectivity phenomena help us understand this?
(i) How does consciousness emerge from neural activity? (ii) What is the relationship between language and thought?
How do we account for dependencies in data when exploring questions of how, when, and their combination? Can repeated-measures designs assist in reducing reproducibility issues? What strengths and weaknesses do these designs have?
What are effective, accessible, and sustainable ways to improve the wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities around the world who have been affected by trauma?
What is the nature and role of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and how can we remediate them to improve the course of this disorder?
How do our brains track and encode information about the structure of our social networks? How does social network position impact cognition and behavior? How do we understand and mentally traverse social, spatial, and temporal distances?
When and why do social identities become politicized—and with what consequences for mass politics in diversifying nations, like the United States?
How does addiction progress and what treatments best target each stage?
How can technology induce personalized, non-ordinary experiences to promote adaptive belief updating and enhance well-being?
Do psychological traits apply to all members of a diverse population, or is there important qualitative variation?
How do daily stressors and emotions shape the fabric of family life and, over time, the health of parents and children?
How does the brain create and retrieve memories, and how do we regulate these processes to achieve our goals?
Why do we remember some events vividly, while others fade or change over time? How do brain networks shape the way we understand and reconstruct event details?
How does the quality of our closest relationships (marital and family) affect our health, and what biological mechanisms explain those effects?
How do children learn and how does the learning environment contribute?
How does the brain use prediction to construct emotions, guide social understanding, and adapt to new situations?
How do culture and other factors affect care-seeking, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment adherence in ethnically diverse individuals with neuromedical illnesses? How do infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C impact neurocognitive function?
What creates the psychological commitment to persist in developing one's talent? What are the consequences of developing one's talent?
What new kinds of molecular cages -- important in biology (endocytosis, viruses), chemistry (fullerenes), materials science (nanotubes), mathematics (polyhedra) and architecture (space frames) -- can we discover?
What makes for healthy pregnancy, birth and offspring? Is stress related to adverse outcomes and how?
How do race and ethnicity affect American politics -- both in promoting partisanship among ethnic minorities and in eliciting prejudice from whites?
How does interaction between the senses affect how we perceive the world, ourselves, and how we learn? How can these interactions be used to improve perception and learning?
How does early adversity impact neurodevelopment? How do children and adolescents regulate their emotions and make decisions?
What factors promote or impede psychological and physical health in adults undergoing chronically stressful experiences, such as living with a cancer diagnosis, and how can they be targeted in effective interventions?
How do people learn things that are hard to learn? Things that are learned over weeks, months, or years? What kinds of teaching methods facilitate deep learning in complex domains?
How do the experiences of stress and trauma contribute to accelerated aging and risk for chronic disease?
How do dynamic brain network interactions support high-level cognitive processes across the lifespan?
How do traditional and newer media impact the social behavior of preadolescent and adolescents?
What are the neurochemical mechanisms of motivation and decision making?
What factors lead to positive outcomes for families adopting children from foster care, and which therapeutic interventions enhance these factors?
How psychological processes and socio-contextual factors interact with one another and relate to health behaviors and outcomes in vulnerable populations?
How do interactions between cognition, emotion, and stress contribute to risk for psychoses and dysfunction in schizophrenia, and do they suggest pathways for intervention?