Social Well-Being Laboratory
("Swell" Lab)
Welcome to the Social Well-Being (Swell) Lab! We are located at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
What we do:
We study how social relationships and communication processes influence well-being (broadly defined). Our goal is to understand how people can connect with others in ways that help them thrive, especially in this digital age, when people must learn to navigate both their offline and online social world adaptively.
Broadly, the varied social contexts we study can be organized into
two categories:
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Everyday Social Interaction: From casual conversations to exchanging social support, this line of research focuses on the various social interactions occurring in daily lives. For example, what should you say to those who are going through a difficult time? Why would someone prefer to talk about their problems to
a mere acquaintance but not to their spouse? How does using social media affect our well-being or physical health?
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Relationship Construals: Although people spend much time interacting with others, they also spend just as much time (if not more) thinking about others (e.g., how they think of us, what we think of them). Here, we focus on how the different ways of thinking about our relationships influence our lives. For example, can some ways of thinking of our supportive friends promote vs. undermine goal-pursuit? What are some personality traits or motivational states that enable people to benefit more from their social relationships?
Lab Members
PhD Student
Stephanie Gillis
Stephanie is a Social Impact Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication. Her research focuses on health communication, women's health, and stigma in communication and media contexts. Her work aims to understand how strategic message design can help promote various health behaviors.
PhD Student
Zach Glowacki
Zach is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Zach studies trust, social perception, and interpersonal relationships via a nonverbal behavioral lens; facial expressions (e.g., macro, and micro expressions), body behavior, tone of voice, and their complimentary role in emotion, deceptive, and relationship initiation trait impressions.
PhD Student
Dan Kulesza
Dan is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Dan's research interests focus on empathy and communication, emphasizing perspective-taking in the contexts of intergroup communication, morality, interpersonal communication, and media psychology..
PhD Student
Tahleen Lattimer
Tahleen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research explores the relationship between health and media as it relates to minority populations across the lifespan. With this, her work examines how media can be harnessed to educate audiences and promote social change through community activism
PhD Student
Madison Neurohr
Madison is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research examines real world implications of nonverbal behavior, including identifying terrorism and deception, and how evolution and social perception are affected by these nonverbal features. She recently won a National Science Foundation grant to pursue examining systems to better detect dangerous people
PhD Student
Madeline Taggart
Madeline is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research focuses on the relationship between morality and mass media, across contexts such as entertainment and real world crime
Lab Alumni
Zena Toh (PhD student, U Buffalo)
Zhiying (Zoey) Yue (PhD student, U Buffalo)
Jody Chin Sing Wong (PhD student, U Buffalo)
Taylor Shrapnell (MA student, Univ. of Michigan)
Chloe Sprague (Undergraduate thesis student, Univ. of Michigan)
Salomi Rami (Undergraduate thesis student, Univ. of Michigan)
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