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 evident that emotions have influenced humans for millennia. My work seeks to understand the effects 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 enhances our ability to recall misinformation on social media? In addition to investigating the influence of individual emotions, my research explores the intricacies of more complex emotional experiences, such as mixed emotions– where multiple, often 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, in some cases, 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.

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 paints a more complicated picture. My work attends to these complexities by investigating the particulars of how and why people engage with narrative information, with a specific focus on exploring the emotional, cognitive, and meta-cognitive mechanisms through which stories influence attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. 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 in stories about contentious health topics, and a typology of state and trait empathy in media selection, processing, and effects.