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. One ongoing research project is an NIMH-funded investigation of a depression prevention program for low-income Latina mothers. This study investigates the efficacy of the Family Coping Skills Program, a prevention program that integrates group and family-based interventions. Another research project that was recently funded by NARSAD examines the development of depressive symptoms in a low-income, urban sample of children. In this project, Dr. Cardemil followed the development of depressive symptoms and their correlates in middle-school children for two years. In addition, he is interested in expanding traditional conceptions of psychotherapy to more explicitly include consideration of issues of race, ethnicity and culture. 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.

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 recent work has focused on work-family linkages, roles and responsibilities, mental health, and quality of personal relationships across the transition to parenthood among lesbian couples. The next stage in Dr. Goldberg's work involves following up the couples in this original study, whose children are now toddlers. Dr. Goldberg is also involved in ongoing research that explores the experiences of working-class, dual- earner, heterosexual couples during the transition to parenthood and back to work. Finally, Dr. Goldberg is also interested in the identification of risk and protective factors for adolescent substance abuse and psychopathology. 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, including relations between motivational processes and adjustment in schoolchildren and at-risk youth, social contexts that facilitate children's self-regulation and factors that enable socializers to provide motivationally supportive environments. 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.

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.

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.

MARIANNE WISER
Dr. Wiser is studying conceptual change in children, students and the history of science. Her main topic of research is symbolic development in young children. This includes the development of their understanding of the nature and function of printed words (pre-reading skills), and how they come to understand the alphabetic nature of our writing system. Research also includes young children's ability to use models and maps. Another topic of research is teaching and learning physics in high school, with special emphasis on microgenetic processes, mental models, parallels with history of science and the integration of situated cognition approaches with theories of mental representations. Her current research also includes young children's understanding of physical and biological concepts such as matter and cells, and how the kinds of explanations parents provide for physical and biological phenomena influence their children's own explanations and beliefs about the world.