Primary Research

My primary research focuses on the role that virtual environments may   play in diagnosing and changing real-life decision-making and behavior.

View my Curriculum Vitae.

I am part of an NIAID/NIH funded RO1 research team (PIs: Lynn Miller, Robert Appleby, Stephen Read) that is looking specifically at how cognitive and affect-based interventions embedded in ‘virtual experiences’ via interactive video, are able to produce change in risky decision-making relevant to HIV prevention for three high-risk populations (African-American, Latino, and Caucasian) of men who have sex with men (MSM). 

View a clip of one version of the IAV video here.

My dissertation explores how behavior and behavior change elicited within virtual environments, may be diagnostic of real world risk-taking beyond traditional cognitive self-report measures (e.g. intentions, self-efficacy).

More specifically, I found that MSM’s past decision-making predicted their virtual decision-making and that their virtual decision-making predicted MSM’s risk behavior over the next 3 months.  In addition, decisions in the virtual environment accounted for 12% of the variance above and beyond traditional variables (e.g., intentions, self-efficacy) in predicting future unprotected sex 3 months subsequently. 

Combined, cognitive and affective responses of MSM predicted about 25% of the variance in future unprotected sex.  Furthermore, in additional analyses, we’ve found that the interactive communication intervention accounted for greater reduction in risky behavior than a wait-list control, a yoked control (who saw the interactive video but didn’t make choices), and a one-on-one intervention. 

This novel line of health communication research is at the nexus of the newly emerging ‘serious games’ discipline, which seeks to utilize interactive environments as a way to socially optimize learning within virtual environments in order to reduce real-life risking taking among at-risk populations.

Dissertation Committee:                                                                                  Chair  Dr. Lynn Miller, Dr. Michael Cody, Dr. Stephen Read