Faculty Research

MICHAEL E. ADDIS
Dr. Addis's research focuses on the role of socio-cultural constructions of masculinity in different men's experience of, expression of, and response to problems in living. His current work, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, focuses on understanding psychosocial barriers to men's use of mental health services. Dr. Addis is also involved in collaborative research with students on masculinity and depression, men's self- disclosure, the way adolescent boys cope with soft emotions, and a variety of other projects. In addition to the above work, Dr. Addis has a longstanding interest in the relationships between research and clinical practice, and the dissemination of research-based psychosocial interventions. More about Dr. Addis and his research.

Visit Dr. Addis' Men's Coping Project.

JEFFREY ARNETT
Dr. Arnett's main scholarly interests include media uses in adolescence, the psychology of globalization, responses to cigarette advertising, and anything involving "emerging adults" (ages 18-29). He is the author of numerous articles on emerging adulthood and of the textbook Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach (2007, Prentice Hall). His book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press. He has also edited a book on emerging adulthood, Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, published in 2006 by APA Books. He is the editor of Journal of Adolescent Research and of two encyclopedias, the International Encyclopedia of Adolescence (2007, Routledge, 4 volumes) and the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media (2007, Sage Publications, 2 volumes). More information on Dr. Arnett and his research can be found at www.jeffreyarnett.com.

MICHAEL BAMBERG
Dr. Bamberg's research is in the area of Discourse and Identity with an emphasis on how Narratives (particularly Small-Stories) are embedded in conversations and employed as general sense-making and identity-building strategies. His current research projects are in the areas of adolescent and gendered identities in 10- to 15-year-old males. Another, closely related issue is the role of emotions, values and morality in how people construct their selfhood and identity. He is the editor of the Journal Narrative Inquiry; his recent book publications: Selves and Identities in Narrative @ Discourse (Benjamins, 2007); Discourse @ Identity (Cambridge UP, 2006); Narrative--State of the Art (Benjamins, 2007) More about Dr. Bamberg and his research.

ROGER BIBACE
Dr. Bibace focuses on partnerships in clinical, educational and research contexts. These partnerships require symmetrical relationships between professionals and patients, students and research participants. Concrete activities by partners (questions, answers, feedback) facilitate partnerships. Life-span health psychology is one research area of application.

NANCY BUDWIG
Dr. Budwig's research focuses on language development and language socialization. Her research on language development is grounded in a functionalist perspective, highlighting the ways in which language forms are acquired in tandem with learning to communicate. This work has aimed to better understand the protracted nature of children's organization of linguistic forms and the functions they serve. In a second set of studies, Dr. Budwig has focused on the role of language in socialization. Her emphasis shifts from language as the domain of study, to viewing language as a system through which the child comes to co-construct meaning. This research examines ways children's participation in language practice contributes to the construction of culturally relevant senses of personhood. Current research on language development and language socialization has drawn upon, within, and between culture comparisons of American, German and Hindi-speaking children interacting with their caregivers and peers. More about Dr. Budwig and her research.

ESTEBAN CARDEMIL
Dr. Cardemil's research focuses on the role of race, ethnicity and social class on psychopathology, with a particular emphasis on the applicability of cognitive and family models to depression. Current research projects take place in the local community and most typically involve work with adolescents in school. Projects have begun to examine how emotion regulation processes, and their sociocultural influences, may be related to the development of depressive symptoms in urban adolescents.  More about Dr. Cardemil and his research.

Read an interview with Dr. Cardemil and some of his students.

JAMES CÓRDOVA
The goal of Dr. Córdova's research program is to increase our understanding of the processes that affect marital/couple health and deterioration, particularly those processes that can be manipulated to promote greater relationship, mental and physical health. Dr. Córdova's work involves the theoretical delineation of those processes, the demonstration of their proximal role in relationship health and the construction of empirically testable procedures for their therapeutic manipulation. The principal processes addressed in Dr. Córdova's work include intimacy, acceptance, depression and the adoption of healthy relationship practices. Dr. Córdova's current projects include: (1) the Marriage Checkup, a motivational interviewing approach to intervening with at-risk couples; (2) observing the process of intimacy development in couples' interactions; (3) studying the role of emotional skillfulness in relationship health; and (4) developing a couple-based therapy for depression. Read an interview with Dr. Córdova and one of his students.

Visit Dr. Córdova's Center for Couples and Family Research.

MARICELLA CORREA-CHÁVEZ
Dr. Correa-Chávez’ research examines learning as a cultural activity tied to people’s participation in community traditions and institutions (like school). The focus is on the different cultural ways children use attention in learning, in social interaction, and in communication. She also examines how patterns of attention are related to family participation in community traditions and institutions across generations. Her work with children from a number of different cultural communities takes place in schools and community organizations both in the United States and Latin America. She teaches courses on Developmental Psychology and specialized courses on issues of culture, development, and learning.

JOSEPH DE RIVERA
Dr. de Rivera is interested in emotional experience and when our feelings and narratives lead us to care for others and act on their behalf (rather than paralyze us or lead us to be destructive). He teaches social psychology and peace studies, and his research has focused on describing the structure and dynamics of emotion in individuals and collective life. What is the role of positive emotions such as joy; when does anger lead to political action; can we measure emotional climates and cultures of peace; how can love rather than fear govern our imagination and determine our behavior? More about Dr. De Rivera and his research.

Read an interview with Dr. de Rivera and some of his students.

ABBIE GOLDBERG
Dr. Goldberg is interested in how a variety of contexts (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, social class, work-family variables) shape processes of development and mental health. Her research focuses on exploring parenthood, relationship quality, and well-being in diverse families (e.g., adoptive parent families, lesbian/gay parent families). She is currently exploring the transition to adoptive parenthood among a diverse group of couples. she teaches courses on gender and family, ethics, and developmental psychopathology. Her clinical interests include adolescent mental health and substance abuse and dependence. She is particularly interested in understanding these problems in the context of the family. She teaches courses on gender and family, ethics, and developmental psychopathology. More about Dr. Goldberg and her research.

WENDY S. GROLNICK
Dr. Grolnick's research interests are in motivational development and the contexts that facilitate it. Her work has focused on how parent and school contexts facilitate or undermine children's self-regulation and competence across a variety of populations including elementary age children, adolescents, and at-risk youth. Her recent work also addresses factors in the external environment, such as stress and support, in children, such as temperament, and in parents' psychologies that enable patents to provide motivationally supportive environments for their children. Dr. Grolnick is currently involved in a large-scale study (funded by the William T. Grant Foundation) of how parents structure the environment for children in various cultural groups and how this facilitates children's internalization and adjustment.  She is also interested in the development of emotional self-regulation, including its social-contextual, and temperamental determinants.

RACHEL JOFFE FALMAGNE
Dr. Falmagne's interests focus on (i) the manner in which societal discourses of knowledge, social location, discursive construction and personal agency are jointly constitutive of subjectivity and thought through their dialectical interplay; (ii) the gendered foundations of thought, culture, epistemic norms (such as the norm of rationalism developed in Western societies) and development, and (iii) critical epistemological and methodological issues for the social sciences. Her research draws on flexible interview methods, and examines the modes of knowledge and other resources upon which people draw when sorting out contradictory accounts in complex situations, how those resources interplay with one another in the reasoning process, and how people situate themselves in relation to the problem. She focuses on the manner in which people appropriate, resist, modulate or transform various formative cultural discourses of knowledge, and how people's reasoning about everyday situations can be understood in the context of their social location and cultural history, with particular attention to gender, social class, 'race' and ethnicity.

DENISE HINES
Dr. Hines’ research centers on issues of family violence. As a doctoral student at Boston University, she received an NIMH individual predoctoral National Research Service Award to conduct a study on genetic and environmental influences on intimate partner violence, a study that she plans to replicate and expand on in future research. Through her affiliation with the University of New Hampshire, she conducts research using data from the International Dating Violence Study, in which she investigates the cross-cultural validity of various theories of dating violence. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the mental health of men who sustain partner violence from their female partners and seek help. She also just received a grant, along with Dr. Kathy Palm, to study the efficacy of a bystander intervention program in preventing sexual and dating violence at Clark University.

LENE ARNETT JENSEN
One line of Dr. Jensen's research is in the area of moral development. This work takes a "cultural-developmental" approach, addressing how moral reasoning is both culturally and developmentally situated. Her work has included members of diverse religious communities in India and the United States. In more recent research, she has addressed cultural identity formation in the context of migration and globalization. A current project with adolescents and their parents who have immigrated to the United States from El Salvador and India, examines their cultural identity development as well as ties between cultural identity and engagement with civil society, school, and family. Dr. Jensen received her B.A. from Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, in 1989 and her Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago in 1996. Her dissertation received The William Henry Dissertation Prize from the University of Chicago, and the 1996 Dissertation Award from the Association for Moral Education. Dr. Jensen is Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

Visit her web site at http://www.lenearnettjensen.com

JAMES D. LAIRD
Dr. Laird's research explores feelings, how they arise, may be controlled, affect behavior and are organized. In the course of his research on the role of the body in the self-perception of emotional feelings, he has identified individual differences in the degree to which people's feelings are "embodied." Recent research has focused on everyday life consequences of these differences, such as differences in women's susceptibility to PMS, individual differences in pain experience and in the role of autonomic cues in emotional experience. More about Dr. Laird and his research.

KATHY PALM
Dr. Palm's current research interests include examining the role of emotion regulation (e.g., distress tolerance) in nicotine dependence and other substance use disorders, and treatment development for co-occurring substance use and anxiety disorders. On-going research projects include a laboratory study examining predictors of relapse to smoking after a quit attempt and a treatment development study evaluating a new smoking cessation treatment for dual-smoking couples. Student involvement will include reading the latest literature on substance dependence, running participants in the laboratory study, and conducting assessments with community smokers.

JAAN VALSINER
Dr. Valsiner's general interests are in the cultural organization of mental and affective processes in human development across the whole life span. He is also interested in psychology's history as a resource of ideas for contemporary advancement of the discipline, and in theoretical models of human development. Currently, his specific research directions include the study of young adults' self as an autodialogic process.

JOHANNA RAY VOLLHARDT
Dr. Vollhardt’s research focuses on the different ways in which members of groups who have been victimized in the past make sense of their group’s experiences. She is interested in the underlying social psychological processes and conditions that give rise to constructive, rather than destructive outcomes of the experience of victimization. Her current research is concerned with the development of measures of victim consciousness, factors that predict exclusive versus inclusive victim consciousness, and ways in which inclusive victim consciousness can be facilitated. Most of her work has been conducted among members of various ethnic, racial, and religious minority groups in the U.S., but she has also worked in Poland (with Jews who experienced an antisemitic purge in 1968) and with the NGO Radio La Benevolencija in Rwanda and the Congo. Other research interests include the improvement of intergroup relations through various social psychological processes such as attributions. She uses multiple methods, ranging from semi-structured interviews and content analysis to survey research and quasi-experiments.

MARIANNE WISER
Dr. Wiser is studying conceptual change in children, students and the history of science. Her work in science education focuses on how children's own understanding of the physical world can be transformed into scientific understanding. This involves exploring children's ideas, as well as developing and testing science curricula in the preschool to 8th grade range. Her research in symbolic development includes young children's pre-literacy skills, their use of models and maps, and their understanding of number, counting, and number notations.