Emotions animate the human condition. Indeed, from the first line of Homer’s The Iliad (“Rage– Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”) to the musings of Charlie Brown, it is apparent that emotions have influenced humans for millennia. My work seeks to understand the intricacies of emotional experiences and their impact on the ways we select, process, and are ultimately influenced by various types of mediated information For example, what is it about being in an angry state of mind that might enhance one’s ability to recall misinformation on social media? When it comes to persuasion, does hope really spring eternal? What can we gain from a more theoretically systematic treatment of empathy in media selection, processing, and effects? And finally– what’s the deal with schadenfreude? In addition to investigating individual emotions, my research seeks to explore the intricacies of more complex emotional experiences, such as mixed emotions– where multiple, sometimes conflicting emotions occur simultaneously or in rapid succession– and meta-emotions, or emotions about emotions.

Uncertainty– or the awareness that there is something one does not know– is ubiquitous in life and central to science. As Karl Popper famously argued: “The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever.” However, the effective communication of uncertainty in science faces several challenges, including the potential for public misunderstanding and the emergence of misinformation about the reliability and validity of scientific findings. On one hand, aversion to uncertainty is considered to be “one of the most robust phenomena documented in the decision-making literature.” On the other, however, the experience of uncertainty has been found to promote curiosity, cultivate trust, and perhaps even alleviate psychological reactance. To explore these nuances, my work investigates the boundary conditions that determine the influence of communicated uncertainty on judgements and decision-making in contexts related to health and science. Currently, I am thinking about whether the preemptive acknowledgement of uncertainty might offer protection against the spread of misinformation at the onset of public health crises. More broadly, I am also interested in organizing existing work on uncertainty to advance more systematic and parsimonious theorizing on the role of uncertainty in communication.

Stories are undeniably powerful. Not only do they entertain us, they also inspire, challenge, and ultimately shape our understanding of the world. But while “nothing beats a good story”might feel like a truism, media psychology research reveals a more complicated reality. My work attends to these complexities by investigating the particulars of how, why, and to what end people engage with narrative information. I’m currently working on projects exploring the conditions under which vicarious affirmations enhance persuasive outcomes in a short film about the HPV vaccine, the potential value of expectancy violations and plot ambiguity in stories about contentious health topics, and the role that attitude certainty might play in increasing (or decreasing) narrative effectiveness.