Clinical Counseling Psychology

Theoretical and comparative syntax of natural languages focusing on models of parameterization for deriving grammars from universal principles.

My research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit standard propositional models. I am especially interested in metaphor and other forms of figurative speech; in slurs and other forms of ‘loaded’ language; in cognitive perspectives and emotions; and in non-sentential representational systems such as maps and diagrams.

Philosophical problems concerning intentionality and consciousness; issues of non-monotonic reasoning.

The unifying themes in my action-research, clinical work, and policy/advocacy are the development of positive, constructive life paths for children and youth and the organization of opportunities to allow this to happen in equitable ways. This has brought me into areas such as social-emotional learning (SEL), its more recent variation, social-emotional and character development (SECD), emotional intelligence, social competence promotion, character education, primary prevention, school-based, evidence-based intervention, and socialization of identity.

Our research focuses on understanding how chronic stress exposure alters behavior in both sexes and whether neural circuits can be leveraged to reverse maladaptive effects of stress exposure.

Social cognitive and perceptual processes involved in successful goal pursuit; self-regulation and self-control.

Computer models of syntactic parsing and language comprehension.

Social perception, stereotypes and prejudice, science reform, applied philosophy of science.

Blog Website

Application of natural language processing and facial recognition models to the study of social cognition (stereotypes, psychological intersectionality, first impressions); social biases in machine learning.