My primary program of research concerns the application of social psychological theory to illness prevention and health promotion and is comprised of a synthesis of basic research on how people process and respond to health information with the development and evaluation of theory-based interventions to promote healthy behavior. Through this work, my colleagues and I engage with a diverse array of issues including, but not limited to, how people evaluate and process health-relevant information, why and when different health communication strategies (e.g., message framing) are most effective, specifying the decision processes that underlie the initiation and maintenance of behavior change, and delineating the mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of behavioral interventions as well as the conditions under which they are most effective. We have also begun to pursue the integration of interpersonal processes and perspectives into prevailing models of health behavior, which have tended to take an intrapersonal perspective.