People and Research

My general research interests are centered around regulatory processes in close relationships, both on the couple/group level and the individual level. This includes affective responses, coping behaviors, and conflict situations which may inhibit regulation efforts. The regulatory competition between the couple/group and individual levels is also a main interest of mine, specifically when the effective regulation of one level impedes the regulation of the other. In all of my research I seek to develop novel and deterministic mathematical models for explaining these phenomena and adapt statistical models that help researchers to more accurately predict and understand nuanced patterns in individuals' behaviors.

n particular, in the Trope lab, I am looking at how self-relevant evaluations, such as individual-level affect, and relationship-relevant evaluations, such as feelings of intimacy and being loved, have tendencies to be construed as more concrete (lower level) and abstract (higher level) respectively. This research aims to resolve a conflict in the social support literature regarding both the positive, relationship level, and the negative, self-level, effects of social support receipt. Feelings of being loved and intimate are likely to be global feelings that span the entirety of the relationship and that are timeless, whereas feelings of anxiety, depression, and anger are local feelings that are relatively fleeting and time-specific. Using the logic of Construal Level Theory I thus intend to show that the temporal resiliency of the positive and negative effects of social support differ such that the negative, affective, effects decay at a faster rate than the positive, relational, effects. This will be accomplished using autoregressive models to determine how long the effects of support persist in affecting later evaluations. Such results may lead us back to the historical assumption that support is primarily good, which has been challenged in recent years.