My primary research interests are in the areas of interpersonal perception, nonverbal decoding accuracy, deception detection, and empathic accuracy. I am particularly interested in how people use verbal and nonverbal cues to infer the thoughts, emotions, and intentions of other people. Frequently, our ability make accurate inferences about others' affective states goes awry due to motivational biases. I am interested in the causes of such biases.

Conventional wisdom suggests that we are best at reading the affective states of those people who are closest to us. However, my research suggests that empathic accuracy is neither an inevitable concomitant of relationship familiarity nor even necessarily an advantageous one. In fact, friends who are not particularly close may sometimes be better at decoding each others' covertly expressed negative emotions than friends who feel more close to each other.

In the past, I have also conducted research on the ironic effects of attempting to suppress thoughts, as well as the psychosocial antecedents of health-risk behaviors among adolescents.