University of California, Santa Barbara

Graduate Student, Communication

Thesis Title: The Dyanmics of Perceived Message Effectiveness in Public Service Announcements

About

I'm a PhD candidate working on my dissertation, as well as a few other projects.  Here's the lowdown on what keeps me busy:


Anti-Drug Public-Service Announcement (PSA) Study (2007-current): Multi-year, multi-study research project under Dr. René Weber examining effectiveness and cognitive effects of anti-drug PSAs, involving static questionnaire, dynamic self-report, and brain-imaging (fMRI) data.  I collaborated in questionnaire and experiment design, data collection, analysis/processing, Federal grant application, and publication writing; and my dissertation builds on this project.


Environmental PSA Study (in development):  A collaboration between Dr. Weber, a fellow graduate student, and myself.  This study will replicate some of the quantitative methods of the anti-drug PSA study, modifying the persuasive theories to reflect different message features and target audience segments for environmental PSAs.


Presidential Debate Study (2006-2007; in development):  A quantitative test of some of the hypothesized effects of formal aspects of the Second 2000 Presidential Debate (Bush/Gore) from an earlier article (under review).  The continuous-response methods are derived from those used in the PSA studies.


Flow Theory/Research (2007-current):  A novel, biological theory of flow as a synchronization of attention and reward brain networks (Weber et al., 2009).  I was invited to collaborate on formulating this theory in 2007 and have followed up with several writings including my doctoral qualifying exams and a first-author book chapter.  Early tests of this theory exist, and it provides a promising basis for a fruitful line of neurophysiological research.

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