I am a Professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Southern Mississippi. I teach graduate courses in Assessment & Diagnosis (PSY 712) and Group Counseling & Psychotherapy (PSY 710) for students enrolled in the Counseling Psychology master’s and doctoral programs. I also teach undergraduate courses in Forensic Psychology (PSY 440) and Adult Psychopathology (PSY 436).

I received my doctorate in Counseling Psychology at Colorado State University under the direction of Jerry L. Deffenbacher, Ph.D. I was fascinated by his work on cognitive-behavioral treatments for angry individuals, and I worked with him in evaluating interventions for generally angry college students and angry drivers. My dissertation was a treatment study involving a partial component analysis of Cognitive Therapy for generally angry college students.

I carried my interest in the treatment of individuals experiencing dysfunctional anger to Southern Miss. I set up an anger management program through our in-house training clinic, trained therapists, and collected treatment outcome data. I learned that the treatment protocols I had previously used with college students required modification for use with the community adults we were serving. My efforts along these lines focused on developing brief strategies for enhancing treatment motivation (i.e., client readiness for change) and refining our anger management protocol to better accommodate mandated clients.

I soon expanded my previous work on driving anger to aggressive and risky driving, examining the role of personality traits (e.g., boredom proneness, sensation seeking, impulsivity, Type A personality) and other variables (e.g., driving anger expression, hostile thoughts) which had not received sufficient attention in the traffic psychology literature. A few years later, some of my graduate students became interested in relational aggression and persuaded me that this was something we needed to study. Much of my recent work has focused on the contribution of both normal and dark personality traits to relational and cyber aggression among college students.

Additional information about me can be found on my website.