Research Overview
Our lab integrates perspectives from social, personality, and health psychology to study how the social environment influences physical and mental health and well-being. We use Ecological Momentary Assessment and daily diary methods to study emotions, stress, social interactions, physical health, and physiological states as people go about their daily lives. Rather than relying exclusively on single-timepoint self-report, our work follows large samples through their daily lives using smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment paired with embedded physiological sensors, capturing heart rate, blood pressure, sleep, and emotional states as they naturally co-occur. We also integrate these methods with lab experiments, big data methods, and longitudinal designs to ask questions concerning between-person and within-person processes. To understand such relationships, we rely on multilevel modeling and structural equation modeling. Although we use these analytic techniques simply as a means to answer questions concerning health and well-being, the framework offered by multilevel modeling shapes our research interests.
Conceptual framework with examples of research areas
Ongoing Areas of Research
Social and Emotional Influences on Health and Well-being in Daily Life
Emotions, social interactions, and behaviors change from one time to the next depending on various contextual factors. Using Ecological Momentary Assessment and daily diary designs, our research tracks how everday emotional experiences, such as nostalgia, gratitude, stress, loneliness, and emotion regulation strategies, shape subjective well-being, mental health, and health-relevant states as they unfold in real time. These studies often focus on within-person relationships and contrast with retrospective, global self-reports that can distort how people actually feel day to day.
Dynamic Processes of Stress, Resilience, Health, and Well-being
In this line of research, we trace the psychophysiological pathways linking stress, sleep, and resilience-promoting factors (e.g., gratitude, optimism) to concrete health markers, such as blood pressure and heart rate, spanning samples across the adult lifespan. We also include intervention/experimental work testing whether lab-derived stress-reduction techniques actually hold up when delivered to people in the midst of their daily lives, moving beyond correlational designs to establish causal effects in daily life.
Health Disparities and Inequality
In one area of research, we examine how socioeconomic status influences health and well-being in daily life. Related to this, we consider health disparities by considering why people from minoritized groups experience worse health and well-being than other groups of people.
Politics, Religion, and the Experience of Meaning and Purpose in Life
One of the central themes of our work centers on the experience of meaning in life as this is an important component of well-being. Judgments of meaning in life can change from one day to the next, and we examine the contextual factors that influence these daily judgments and how they differ from global evaluations of meaning in life. We also distinguish between finding meaning in life and searching for meaning in life. Connected to this, we examine politics and religion and their relationship to meaning in life and well-being. In one area of research, we examine why conservatives tend to find more meaning and purpose in their life than liberals. In another ongoing stream of research, we examine how particular religious beliefs and practices influence well-being in daily life.