• In the United States (at the state level), cultural sexism is highly correlated with cultural looseness-tightness (Johnson & Curley, 2021; Johnson, Martinez-Berman, & Curley, 2022).

About SHARP

The Systematic Health Action Research Program (SHARP Lab) is led by UConn Professor Blair T. Johnson. His current research interests encompass these areas, although undergraduate and graduate students' research portfolios are tailored to match both the needs of the students and the lab:

  1. The play of ignorance and expertise in social behavior and wellness.
  2. Hidden biases in attitudes, social judgments, and social behavior.
  3. How the factors above affect reactions to communications that have the intent of persuasion.
  4. How interventions might affect wellness, ranging from exercise to mindfulness to antidepressants.
  5. How individual- and community-level factors affect individual functioning, defined in terms of both mental health and physical health. These factors can range from prejudice and stereotypes to income inequality.

These factors are not necessarily listed in order of priority; moreover, priorities may change based on numerous factors. To study these phenomena, we creatively address problems with a wide variety of inter-disciplinary approaches, especially health, clinical, and developmental psychology; economics; geography; communication sciences; public health; social epidemiology; sociology; graphical displays; data science; statistics; experiments; and others. The SHARP lab also hosts the editorial office of Psychological Bulletin (2020-2026).

SHARP Logo (Robert E. Low)

Join SHARP!

SHARP is the Systematic Health Action Research Program. If you are interested in assisting in the SHARP Lab and you are a UConn student or someone who happens to live in our community, then please complete one of these forms. We also encourage new students in honors (freshmen or sophomores; perhaps first-semester juniors) to help with ongoing research. We are especially interested in students who could manage three or more credits of work in our lab.

If you are a potential new graduate student, then please complete this form.

Does Psychology of the Arts interest you? There is an undergraduate writing seminar offered for Fall 2024, see draft syllabus here. Please complete this form if you want a permission number. Note that enrollment is limited to 19 students.

Funding

Research in the SHARP lab has been funded since 1995 by a series of grants from the National Institutes of Health. It also has received funding from UConns Research Foundation, the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP), Elsevier, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), and from CLASs Bennett Fund for Innovative Education in Health and Society.