Our Research Program

Research Focus

    Our focus is on health behavior (exercise, dieting, and healthy/nutritious eating) that has both theoretical and practical significance.
    From a theoretical standpoint, there isn’t a good understanding of behavior that is done repeatedly over a long time because most social psychological research and theory deals with behavior that occurs at a single point in time. From a practical standpoint, physical activity and nutrition play a significant role in the prevention of the leading causes of death in the United States.                  



  • Beginning in 1984, we began conducting research on health behavior. This has led from a focus on people’s attitudes and intentions to the role that self-schemas (i.e., self-images in personally important domains) play in acting on intentions.
  • Research conducted within the lab here at Villanova provided the first demonstrations that self-schemas are linked to behavior and that they moderate the relationship between intention and behavior.
  • Research has also led to the development and tests of a physical activity self-definition model aimed at explaining how we come to see ourselves in terms of physical activities (e.g., exerciser, runner, swimmer, skier, basketball player).


Current Questions

Lab members are currently focusing on three general questions:
  • How do people come to define themselves in terms of specific physical or nutritional activities?
  • How can we create effective theory-based interventions to promote exercise and healthy/nutritious eating?
  • How does our social world affect our health behavior and our health-related sense of self?