Overview

My research focuses on the origins or "etiology" of media and communication behavior in genetic traits and parent-child socialization patterns.  In particular, I’m interested in knowing how genes and parent socialization of media behaviors in childhood influence our long-term news and political communication habits as well as attendant perceptual, attitudinal, and behavioral effects.  My broad, secondary area of research is political communication and media effects processes. 

Recent Publications and Working Projects

​This is a book chapter project that uses survey data on MZ and DZ twin pairs, siblings, and random pairs to analyze the impact of genetic relatedness on  indicators of media  and communication behavior.   This work will be published in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Communication Science and Biology.

I am working on this experimental project with Kent State collaborators. This project examines cognitive processing of political misinformation and how exposure affects outcomes such as epistemic political efficacy (EPE).  Two papers from these data are under revision or review.