Our research has important implications for a fuller understanding of those whose motives or concerns develop into self-reinforcing mental pathologies.

One of our current research goals is to understand how social affiliation, status-seeking, and disease-avoidance goals-motives implicated in mental pathologies including social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypochondria, depression, and eating disorders-may sometimes enhance, sometimes suppress, and sometimes distort the processing of information about other people and oneself.

A second aim is to expand our current efforts to understand which motives take priority and actively suppress or inhibit the usual effects of other motives, as well as the social circumstances that set the stage for such prioritization.

We are currently performing studies designed to extend our findings from sub-clinical populations to those with diagnosable clinical disorders. The expanded consideration of individual differences in the clinical and sub-clinical range should not only provide additional traction toward understanding individuals with social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, in particular, but also inspire several interesting extensions to our basic model of motivated cognition, in general.