Faculty research activities
All SPFC faculty members engage in research, present scholarly papers at national and international conferences, and author scientific publications (articles, chapters, or books). Manuscripts often include undergraduate and graduate students as co-authors.
Faculty research interests vary widely and include topics such as psychosocial adjustment to chronic illness, psychology of volunteerism and service-learning, women’s health, stress, and mindfulnes, parenting effects on children’s emotional control, theology, stigma, and mental health, drama therapy in family counseling, ethnic identity and ethnic conflict, depression in adolescent girls, development of children on the autism spectrum, spirituality in collaborative health care, substance abuse in high-risk adolescents, trauma psychology, effective mentoring in organizations, leadership development, and more.
Learn more about individual faculty member research interests.
Behavioral and clinical laboratory programs
Our research team is particularly interested in parent-child relationships and parental emotion socialization during childhood and adolescence. Previous projects have focused on aggression; however, more recent projects examine the influence of parent-child relationships on symptoms of depression and anxiety.
The research conducted in this lab focuses on parent-child relationships and parental emotion socialization during childhood and adolescence. Our most recent projects have examined the influence of parent-child relationships on symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Moral Emotion and Implicit Bias Lab
Come join our research team, which focuses on two topics: moral emotions and implicit bias. In our moral emotion research, we study the nature of guilt and shame, and how they drive our responses and impact wellbeing after doing wrong, hurting others, and violating our moral standards. In our implicit bias research, we study a variety of implicit biases, including focusing on improving the popular “Implicit Association Test,” a widely used tool for studying implicit biases in race, consumer behavior, and more. If you are interested in joining our team and are a current SPU undergraduate student, email Dr. Carpenter at tcarpenter@spu.edu.
What shapes your impression of strangers? How can mental imagery change the way you judge yourself? These are just a few of the questions we ask as we seek to better understand how people think about themselves and others as well as the judgments and behaviors that follow.