Randall S. Jorgensen, PhD

Professor, Clinical Psychology Program, Syracuse University (Affiliate)

Research Overview

The overarching theme of my research relates to examining patterns of social stress, physiological activity, and individual differences (e.g., cardiovascular disease risk, anger management, avoidant coping, negative affectivity, and physical symptom reporting) in relation to physical and perceived well-being. Current projects include (a) predicting of physical symptoms and daily negative affectivity and interpersonal stress from Eysenck’s personality typology, (b) development of a procedure to assess vocal stress from recorded speech (my colleagues and I plan to use this frequency analysis to predict CHD from the MRFIT data), (c) isolating psychometrically sound video stimuli showing the change from neutral to affect laden facial expressions (may prove useful to health research involving sensitivity versus insensitivity to social affective cues), and (d) the prediction of sub-clinical cardiovascular disease (vascular stiffness) from a combination of prehypertension, heavy alcohol consumption, and peripheral (cardiovascular reactivity) and central (eye-blink startle) markers of stress reactivity. The latter research area involves colleagues in both the departments of psychology and exercise science at SU.

Education

1975 A.B Psychology University of California, Los Angeles, California
1979 M.A. Major: Clinical Psychology University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
1983 Ph.D. Major: Clinical Psychology University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

Recent Publications