Social-Personality Division

Questions that guide my current research include:

1. How can we persuade others to engage in socially beneficial behaviors? Under what conditions do changes in attitudes predict behavior? How do attitudes change over time, and what role does memory play (e.g., sleeper effects)? When do we seek out information that is likely to confirm vs. challenge prior attitudes? How do attitudes become automatic and what brain activity supports this automation?

2. How is action structured and socially conditioned? Do action goals promote changes in attitudes and behavioral routines? Do people engage in behavior for the sake of being active, and what are the potential consequences of this tendency in the context of psychopathology (e.g., ADHD, bipolar disorder)? What are the brain functional patterns underlying these tendencies? Do these tendencies vary across cultures?

3. Does the grammatic and syntactic structure of our thoughts influence our overt behavior? Under what conditions do randomly strung thoughts acquire coherence?

4. How can we use the psychology of social cognition, attitudes, and motivation for health promotion? What types of campaigns and interventions work for which ethnic and gender groups?


For PDF copies of publications, see:

http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~dalbarra/publications.html

Representative Publications:

• Senay, I., Albarracin, D., & Noguchi, K. (in press). Motivating goal-directed behavior through introspective self-talk: The role of the interrogative form of simple future tense. Psychological Science.
• Hart, W.P., & Albarracin, D. (2009). What I was doing versus what I did: Verb aspect influences memory and future actions. Psychological Science, 20, 138-244.
• Wright, P., Albarracin, D., Li, H., Brown, R.D., & Liu, Y. (2008). Event-related responses to bottom-up and top-down emotional appraisal are dissociated in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. Neuroimage.
• Albarracin, D., Handley, I., Noguchi, K., McCulloch, K. C., Li, H., Leeper, J., Broan, R., Earl., A., & Hart, W.P. (2008). Increasing and decreasing motor and cognitive output: A model of general action and inaction goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Albarracin, D., Gillette, J., Earl, A., Glasman, L.R., Durantini, M.R., & Ho., M.H. (2005). A test of major assumptions about behavior change: A comprehensive look at HIV prevention interventions since the beginning of the epidemic. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 856-897.

Classes Recently Taught:

• Psych 593
• Psych 552