I completed my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at Colorado State University under the direction of Jerry L. Deffenbacher, Ph.D. My dissertation was a treatment outcome study involving a partial component analysis of the Cognitive Therapy approach developed by Aaron Beck, applied to generally angry college students. Much of my initial work at the University of Southern Mississippi reflected my interest in the treatment of persons experiencing clinically dysfunctional anger. I established an anger management program through our in-house training clinic, trained a number of graduate student therapists in evidence-based anger management, and collected treatment outcome data. In addition, I expanded some my previous work on driving anger to consider aggressive and risky driving more broadly. My lab conducted a number of studies examining the role of personality traits (e.g., boredom proneness, sensation seeking, impulsivity, Type A personality) and other variables from the clinical traffic psychology literature.

A few years later, some of my graduate students became interested in relational aggression. While there were some fascinating studies in this area with children and early adolescents, we were surprised how little was known about relational aggression among college students. Initially, we focused on identifying some of the mental health correlates of relational aggression and victimization (e.g., depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse, academic burnout). We then expanded our focus to learning more about how normal and dark personality traits (e.g., psychopathy, narcissism) related to relational and cyber aggression.