Overview

My early research examined social influences on self-perceptions, centered around social comparison. I quickly became fascinated by social media. My graduate school research demonstrated that social media users frequently compare ourselves to unrealistic, idealized versions of other people, and feel worse about ourselves as a result. I found that social media has an especially negative effect on people who are sensitive to social comparison.

While working towards my PhD in Experimental (Social) Psychology, I became intrigued by the positive side of social media as well. Today, as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF, I have three primary lines of research: adolescent e-cigarette use, tobacco use disparities in the LGBTQ+ community, and co-occurring health risk behaviors. Below are a few of the major projects with which I have been involved.

Recent publications stemming from these projects and more are listed here.

Current Projects

• Influence of Social Media on Teen E-Cig Use
  • Uses a mixed-methods approach to examine teens’ experiences with e-cigarette content on social media and its effects
  • Role: Principal Investigator
• The Put It Out Project
  • Two pilot clinical trials testing the efficacy of the Put It Out Project, a Facebook smoking cessation intervention tailored to LGBTQ+ young adults
  • Roles: Project fellow, Smoking cessation counselor

Selected Completed Projects

• ENDS Use in Adolescents
  • Pilot study examining patterns of e-cigarette use in teens over time and the development of dependence symptoms
  • Role: Project fellow
• Effects of Social and Temporal Comparison on Health-Relevant Self-Perceptions
  • Experimentally tested the effects of social and temporal comparison on young adults’ perceptions of their health and fitness
  • Role: Doctoral candidate (dissertation)