My research interest is to understand motivations, motivated cognition and decision in communication research, especially with applications to health communication.

• One major direction is motivated decision making. This has led to my research on examining underlying motivations of media use and key health variables, such as diet and exercise. My current focus is on understanding the dynamic reciprocal influences of these behaviors in order to predict health behavioral choices, changes, and how communication can promote these healthy changes. In my future work, I plan to further the research to better understand how motivations and communication can change decision making, and real-time information processing of mediated health campaign messages.

• Another major direction of mine is to understand the dynamics of communication and information processing. This has resulted in work on communication and stereotype formation with several collaborators. In my future work, I plan to expand this line of work to narrative processing and entertainment education.