University of California, Riverside http://faculty.ucr.edu/~ksweeny What does your research focus on? I have two primary lines of research, both of which address the question of how people manage difficult life events. My first line of research examines the understudied experience of awaiting uncertain news. People frequently face difficult waiting periods More
Prevailing wisdom suggests that our genes remain largely fixed over time. But, an emerging field of research is beginning to prove this intuition wrong. Scientists are uncovering increasing evidence that changes in the expression of hundreds of genes can occur as a result of the social environments we inhabit. As More
The Huffington Post: We all know that rejection seriously hurts — and now a new study shows how it could actually be bad for our health. Scientists from the University of British Columbia, Brandeis University and the University of California, Los Angeles have found that social stressors could affect our More
Data from healthy adolescents indicate that recent exposure to targeted rejection activates the molecular signaling pathways that regulate inflammation. More
From 24-hour cable news to YouTube and Twitter, today’s mass media can turn local disasters into international events within minutes, and research reveals that widespread transmission can have a traumatic impact far beyond the people who are directly exposed. More
Huffington Post: Health experts call these “first-world problems,” meaning the accumulated stresses of daily life and the negative emotions they arouse. There’s little doubt that worry and anger and sadness are linked to illness and mortality, right down to the cellular level, but isn’t this just the downside of privilege More
