简介

Dr. Brannon is a social psychologist with research interests in the areas of persuasion (changing attitudes) and compliance/social influence (changing behavior). Dr. Brannon conducts “full-cycle” social psychological research, which means that she conducts basic research studying the processes of persuasion and compliance and extends this research to applied areas. Her two main applied research interests are health psychology and consumer psychology. Much of her current research deals with the interface of these two areas, "social marketing." Social marketing is a relatively recent trend in the applied literature in which researchers apply tried-and-true marketing and social influence techniques to the improvement of social problems (for example, encouraging health-promoting behaviors). Although Dr. Brannon is interested in conducting research to address a variety of social problems, much of her current work is in the area of health persuasion. Dr. Brannon uses a variety of approaches to address these issues. She enjoys interdisciplinary research and frequently integrates ideas from other fields into her studies. For example, several studies have examined how to tailor persuasive messages to recipients’ personalities in order to improve processing of the messages. Two other areas of interest are promoting prosocial (helping) behaviors and examining the benefits of religiosity. These areas of research focus on “positive psychology,” or how to bring out what is good in people.