Academic Interests and Research: social psychology, family, mental health, gender, and emotions.

Courses Taught: Undergraduate: Individual and Society, Research Methods, Sociology of Family, and Sociology of Gender. 
Graduate: Family and Work, Self, Identity, & Interaction, Social Psychology, and Sociology of Sentiments and Emotions.

My research focuses on social psychological processes related to mental health, gender, and the family.  I have examined factors related to the meanings of social roles (e.g., “a mother”), self-identities (e.g., “myself as a father”), and domestic chores (e.g., “preparing meals for my family”).  I have also examined processes related to the division of labor in the home.  In addition, I have used panel data (two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households) to examine the factors that shape attitudes about gender.  Currently, I am involved in two collaborative projects examining the effects of stigma.  One is focused on the stigma of mental illness; the other is focused on the stigma of a juvenile delinquency adjudication.  Both lines of research suggest that the cultural meanings attached to the stigmatized category affect the labeled individuals’ self-meanings.  In my research on the stigma of mental illness, I use affect control theory and its computer program, Interact, to simulate the way that stigmatized self-meanings are likely to affect psychiatric patients’ social interaction patterns.