David Sherman, Ph. D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Department of Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660 
Phone: (805) 893-2142
Email: david.sherman(at)psych.ucsb.edu

 

UCSB		David Sherman

 

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Background

Teaching

Research

Family

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Background:

I grew up in Stratford, CT and then completed my undergraduate degree in psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I received my Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford University and post-doctoral training in health psychology at UCLA. I am currently an assistant professor in social psychology at the Department of Psychology at UCSB. I live in Santa Barbara, CA with my wife and two children, Jacob and Isabelle.

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Teaching:

 

Psychology 7: Introduction to Experimental Psychology

Psychology 101: Health Psychology

Psychology 112L: Laboratory in Social Psychology

Psychology 594: Motivational Theories in Social Psychology (syllabus)

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Research Interests

I am interested in how people cope with threatening events and information. Two processes that I have been particularly interested in are self-affirmation and social support. A third line of research examines motivational factors underlying the processing of health messages.

 

Self-Affirmation

Self-affirmation is the process by which people respond to threats in one area of their life by affirming some other aspect of the self. When affirmed in this manner, people are generally less defensive and more accepting of threatening information. My colleagues and I examine these processes in regards to events and information that threaten both the individual (e.g., health threats, stress) as well as the collective (e.g., team defeats or threats to social identities).

Relevant papers (paper downloads are for personal use only):

• Sherman, D. K., Kinias, Z., Major, B., Kim, H.S., & Prenovost, M. A. (2007). The group as a resource: Reducing biased attributions for group success and failure via group-affirmation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1100-1112. PDF
• Cohen, G. L., Sherman, D. K., Bastardi, A., McGoey, M., Hsu, A., & Ross, L. (2007). Bridging the partisan divide: Self-affirmation reduces ideological closed-mindedness and inflexibility in negotiation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 415-430 PDF
• Creswell, J. D., Lam, S., Stanton, A. L., Taylor, S.E., Bower, J. E., & Sherman, D. K. (2007). Does self-affirmation, cognitive processing, or discovery of meaning explain cancer-related health benefits of expressive writing? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 238-250. PDF
• Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L. (2006). The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 38, pp. 183-242). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. PDF
• Creswell, J. D., Welch, W., Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Gruenewald, T., & Mann, T. (2005). Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses. Psychological Science, 16, 846-851. PDF
• Sherman, D. K., & Kim, H. S. (2005). Is there an “I” in “team”? The role of the self in group-serving judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 108-120. PDF
• Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L., (2002). Accepting threatening information: Self-affirmation and the reduction of defensive biases. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 119-123. PDF
• Sherman, D. A. K., Nelson, L. D., & Steele, C. M. (2000). Do messages about health risks threaten the self? Increasing the acceptance of threatening health messages via self-affirmation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1046-1058. PDF

Culture and Social Support
Social support is one means by which people respond to stressful and threatening events. My colleagues and I have been examining how people from different cultural backgrounds differ in their use of social support. We find that those from individualistic cultures tend to seek social support to a greater extent than those from more collectivistic cultures, and this difference has implications for their health and relationships.

• Taylor, S. E., Welch, W., Kim, H. S., Sherman, D. K. (2007). Cultural differences in the impact of social support on psychological and biological stress responses. Psychological Science, 18, 831-837
• Kim, H. S., Sherman, D. K., Ko, D., & Taylor, S. E. (2006). Pursuit of comfort and pursuit of harmony: Culture, relationships and social support seeking. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 1595-1607. PDF
• Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Kim, H. S., Jarcho, J., Takagi, K., & Dunagan, M. S. (2004). Culture and social support: Who seeks it and why? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 354-362. PDF

Health Messages
A third line of research examines motivational factors that promote acceptance of health information, focusing on the interaction between approach/avoidance motivations and message framing.

• Updegraff, J. A., Sherman, D. K., Luyster, F. S., & Mann, T. (2007). Understanding how tailored communications work: The effects of message quality and congruency on perceptions of health messages. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 248-256. PDF
• Sherman, D. K., Mann, T., & Updegraff, J. A. (2006). Approach/avoidance orientation, message framing, and health behavior: Understanding the congruency effect. Motivation and Emotion, 30, 165-169. PDF
• Mann, T., Sherman, D., & Updegraff, J. (2004). Dispositional motivations and message framing: A test of the congruency hypothesis in college students. Health Psychology, 23, 330-334. PDF

Other Papers

• Kim, H. S., & Sherman, D. K. (2008). What do we see in a tilted square? A validation of the Figure Independence Scale. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 47-60. PDF
• Sherman, D. K., Nelson, L. D., & Ross, L. D. (2003). Naïve realism and affirmative action: Adversaries are more similar than they think. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 25, 275-290. PDF
• Sherman, D. K. & Kim, H. S. (2002). Affective perseverance: The resistance of affect to cognitive invalidation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 224-237. PDF
• Steele, C. M. & Sherman, D. A. (1999). The psychological predicament of women on welfare. In D. Prentice & D. Miller (Eds.), Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict. pp. 393-428. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. PDF