About Us

Associate Professor
Principal Investigator/ Faculty Advisor
Ph.D. from the University of Southern California

Dr. Charles' research examines emotional processes across the adult life span. Dr. Charles is interested in how subjective experience varies across the life course, and how differences in subjective experience may be related to differences in cognitive processes. She is also interested in the interplay between health and emotion, including the relationship between physical health factors (both health behavior and health status) and emotional processes, and how these relationships may vary as a function of age.

Gloria Luong

University of California, Irvine 2008

M.A. in Social Ecology

University of California, Riverside 2006

B.A. in Psychology

Gloria’s research interests include positive and negative interactions in close personal relationships and how they affect health outcomes. More specifically, she is interested in how people react to these interactions behaviorally, emotionally, and physiologically, and how these reactions may change across the adult life span. Currently, she is exploring these age differences in reactivity to negative interactions. For example, do people get better at regulating their emotions and feeling less physiological distress in response to negative exchanges as they age? Or do they confer benefits (such as better emotion regulation) but also some disadvantages (such as less physiological flexibility) in response to negative interactions as they get older? How do adults' strategies for dealing with negative interactions change across the life span? Gloria’s current research projects aim to resolve these questions.

James Mackay

James is primarily interested in how the perception of control over one’s environment relates to affective well-being and to indicators of physical health across the lifespan.

In a previous study of adults with spinal cord injury, he found that being tenaciously engaged with goals was associated with better affective well-being; in contrast, blaming the self for failures or denying that failure has occurred were associated with worse affective well-being, particularly among older participants. He presented this research as a poster at the 2005 conference of the Gerontological Society of America and am currently finishing the manuscript for publication.

Currently, he is working on the lab’s Caregiver Study to assess how control perceptions and stressor appraisals influence stress reactivity among older women who provide care for their husbands with Alzheimer’s disease (and age-matched comparison women). His primary outcome in that study is the pattern of cortisol reactivity in response to induced laboratory stressors and to stressors in daily life.

He is also collaborating with Dr. Charles and colleagues at Penn State University and the University of Wisconsin on a study of older women who relocated and then have been followed over time for several years. Again, he is looking at patterns of cortisol reactivity and their relationships to control and stressor appraisals, but he will also be addressing other indicators of health including immune response and lipid profile.

For future studies, he is very interested in telomeres which are the genetic material at the end of chromosomes that, in part, govern the number of times that many of our cells are able to divide and are related to the development of cancerous tissues. A recent study has shown that perception of significant chronic life stress is associated with shortened telomeres (and then fewer possible replications) in blood cells. He hopes to shed light on how stress “gets into the cell” and to address whether perceived control and stressor appraisals help explain cancer onset or progression through this mechanism.

 Post-Doctoral Scholar

Jennifer Piazza 

University of California, Irvine 2008

Ph.D. in Health Psychology

University of California, Irvine, 2003

M.A. Social Ecology

Ithaca College, 1998

B.A. in Psychology

B.A. in Planned Studies (Writing)

Jennifer is currently a post-doctorate student working with Susan Charles at UCI and Dave Almeida at Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in health, chronic illness, stress, and cortisol in older adults. While working in the Emotion Lab as a graduate student, Jennifer coordinated and implemented the Caregiver Study.