The Social Relations Lab, led by Geraldine Downey, studies several topics that allow us to discern the effects of situational factors on the individual, and the effects of individuals on their environment and their immediate situation.
One of the focuses of our research has been rejection sensitivity (RS), a cognitive-affective processing dynamic through which repeated experiences of rejection can lead people to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to rejection. Researchers in the lab have extended the RS model to study how some people experience and react to rejection based on certain individual characteristics of the self, including social categories such as race and gender.
Much of our current work seeks to illuminate individual and structural pathways through which the stigma associated with carceral identity can adversely affect interpersonal functioning and well-being outcomes in high-stakes domains. One of the goals of this work is to inform the development of evidence-based interventions that can disrupt stigma in ways that enable flourishing during reentry.