Before completing this form about graduate work in the social psychology graduate program at UConn with Prof. Johnson, you may wish to learn more. Prospective students should show promise of being a good substantive match and have potential or actual skills in important methods.

Currently, Prof. Johnson is particularly interested in graduate students who are focused on such substantive subjects as:

• Interventions to alter ignorance, expertise, and/or bias (e.g., mindfulness)
• Bias in attitudes and social judgments, either implicit or explicit
• Ignorance disguised as over-confident expertise (Dunning-Kruger effect)
  
• The role of habits in social behavior, social judgments, culture, and health (e.g., recent interview here)
• How factors listed above might be impeded or accelerated by networks that act as ecological forces (e.g., income inequality, poverty, community-level prejudice/stereotypes, green space)

The primary methods we are using in studies on these subjects include:

• Meta-analyses as part of systematic reviews (methods pieces: one, two, three, four, five, six)
• Meta-reviews (methods pieces: one, two, three)
• In-person and online surveys and experiments
• Archival databases
• Big-data gathering and analytic strategies
• Joining spatial databases to add community-level predictors to individual-level data (methods pieces: one, two, three, four)

The most relevant recent SHARP articles regarding these subjects include these (though watch Google Scholar for more recent possibilities), and these help flesh out the substantive side of the equation:

•  Johnson, B. T., Acabchuk, R. L., George, E. A. et al. (2023). Mental and physical health impacts of mindfulness training for college undergraduates: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Mindfulness, 14, 2077–2096 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-023-02212-6
• Johnson, B. T., Martinez-Berman, L., & Curley, C. M. (2022). Formation of attitudes: How people (wittingly or unwittingly) develop their viewpoints. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology.
• McCloskey, K., & Johnson, B. T. (2019). Habits, quick and easy: Perceived complexity moderates the associations of contextual stability and rewards with behavioral automaticity. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1556. (link)
• Johnson, B. T., & Curley, C. M. (2021). Divining structural factors related to intervention success or failure: Cultural sexism versus other macro-level factors. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 28(3), 313–316. (one; two)
• Johnson, B. T., & Acabchuk, R. L. (2018). What are the keys to a longer, happier life? Answers from five decades of health psychology research. Social Science & Medicine, 196, 218-226. (link)
• Johnson, B. T., Redding, C. A., DiClemente, R. J., Mustanski, B. S., Dodge, B., Sheeran, P., … & Fishbein, M. (2010). A network-individual-resource model for HIV prevention. AIDS and Behavior, 14(2), 204-221. (link)

(Last updated: Wednesday, 02 October 2024)