My primary search interests concern the following: naturally occurring social interaction, day-to-day variability in psychological states, state versus trait measurement of psychological constructs, the impact of societal income inequality on individuals, and multilevel random coefficient modeling.

The social interaction research has examined relationships between interaction and psychological well-being, and suggests that well-being is not related to quantity of interactions, whereas it is related to the rewards people derive from interaction. My recent research on day-to-day variability in psychological states, focusing on reactivity to daily events, suggests that positive events buffer the effects of negative events for poorly adjusted people, but not for the well-adjusted. My research on state and trait measurement focuses on how to use multilevel modeling to examine relationships between states, traits, and situational variable. My research on income inequality has focused on relationships between inequality and social capital, although I expect that this will expand in the future. My work on multilevel random coefficient modeling focuses primarily on developing applications of such techniques to the multilevel data structures common to social and personality psychology.