Research

Much of my research explores how we can better motivate healthy eating. I use large, naturally occurring language data (e.g., restaurant menus, social media) to test whether the ways in which healthy foods are portrayed in popular culture actually motivate people to want to eat them. I use these insights to design and test novel interventions for increasing peoples’ healthy food choices in real-world settings, such as whether labeling healthy foods with an emphasis on taste and enjoyment increases consumption and enjoyment.

This line of work includes testing whether popular cultural influences, like movies and celebrity social media accounts, depict healthy diets as normative and desirable, whether restaurant price impacts the extent to which healthy foods are described with appealing words, and using computational linguistics to understand the ways in which we communicate with one another about healthy foods on social media. My latest work in this area with Ayelet Fishbach focuses on understanding other biases that undermine healthy choices, such as how people mentally represent healthy foods as raw and whether we use more emotions when talking about unhealthy foods than healthy foods.

A second line of my research explores health information processing, such as the effects of conveying health risk information such as personal genetic risk information. People now learn about their genetic risks for diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and obesity from the comfort of their homes, but does this information actually motivate health behaviors? I use lab experiments in clinical settings to test the psychological, behavioral, and physiological consequences of receiving genetic risk information.

Ongoing work includes investigating affective and acute stress responses to receiving genetic risk information and how processes unfold over time.