About

I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Media and the Director of the Cognition & Emotion Lab at Texas Tech University. I received my Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2014 with a double major in Cognitive Science and Mass Communication.

My work deals with risky behavior (e.g. non-medical use of prescription medication and the use of illegal drugs) among college students. Specifically, my research investigates how risk is communicated to an audience, and how media psychology can help determine not only what but when and how information should be placed in a message to be most effective. This work demonstrates how changes in the emotional tone of a message over time influence cognitive and emotional processes, and how these reactions manifest as attitudes, memory, behavioral intentions, and other effects.

This research shows that messages that co-present pleasant and unpleasant information trigger physiological arousal, cognitive resource allocation, which results in ambivalence about the risky behavior. This has led to the development of the Biopsychological Model for Anti-Drug PSA Processing, which predicts that providing social norms about a risky behavior will lead to: 1) a reduction in attitude ambivalence, 2) more negative attitudes toward the specific behavior, 3) greater memory for the social norms, 4) lower intentions for risky behavior, and the Coactivation Cascade Model, which predicts several defensive processing effects (e.g. reactance, counter arguing, selective avoidance, etc.) based upon a series of biological and motivational processes.

This work has been published in Communication Monographs, Media Psychology, Prevention Science, Politics and the Life Sciences, Health Communication, and the Annals of the International Communication Association, has won top paper awards at ICA, NCA, and AEJMC. This work is currently internally funded by the Teaching and Research Excellence Fund and the Seed Grant for Interdisciplinary Research at Texas Tech, and externally funded by the Arts in Medicine Grant from the CH Foundation and the 2019 NEA Research Labs Grant.

My work also approaches cognitive biases and message content features from the perspective of sports communication. Specifically, my research has demonstrated that sports fanship affects cognitive and emotional processing, and biases subsequent judgments of credibility and enjoyment. This work has been published in Mass Communication & Society, the Journal of Sports Media, and the International Journal of Sport Communication, and has also won a top paper award at AEJMC.

My graduate teaching and mentorship style emphasizes a problem-centered approach to empirical inquiry and places students in the middle of the research process throughout their time either in my course or my lab. This has led to multiple conference presentations, top paper awards, and journal publications with my undergraduate and graduate research assistants. On the graduate level, I teach courses related to Media Effects, Quantitative Research Methods, Mass Communication Theory, and Theory Construction and Epistemology, as well as special topics courses related to programming for communication science, psychophysiological measurement and meaning, and advanced statistics courses centered around multilevel modeling techniques. In addition, my research-track masters students have built strong pedigrees of research and have continued their academic trajectories in doctoral programs after graduation, and my doctoral students have gone on to work in both industry and the academy.

On the undergraduate level, I teach basic courses such as Introduction to Digital and Social Media, Principles of Photography, Introduction to Media Production and Composition, and Foundations of Digital Post-Production and Workflow. My undergraduate teaching emphasizes the application of media psychology to the creation of effective messages that tell compelling stories, and incorporates hands-on, immersive, client-centric activities that bring in current theory and apply it to creative media production.

This approach led to the creation of an adventure media course where students work directly with multiple outdoor companies and tourist boards to produce social media and editorial content, as well as a series of short documentaries over the course of week-long excursions in the backcountry. These teaching efforts earned the Professing Excellence Award in 2015 and the L.U. Kaiser Innovation in Teaching Award in 2018.