Research Areas
News, Partisanship, and Democracy
I primarily investigate how news and the contemporary political information environment relate to polarization, partisan identity, and attitudes about democracy in the U.S. My dissertation research in this area explored how news media exaggerates the extent of partisan conflict and what this means for perceptions of politics and polarization.
Encountering and Avoiding Political Information
I also study how people, especially those uninterested in politics, interface with the political information around them. I am particularly interested in nontraditional (i.e., non-news) paths to learning about politics, including learning via social media.
Identity and Communication
Much of my work examines how identity influences the ways people encounter, attend to, and process information. I approach this from several directions, considering both broad factors shaping communication dynamics and psychophysiological indicators of implicit cognitive and affective processes.