About
Additional Research Interests: Attitudes, Values, Health and Well-Being, Media and Behavior, Unconscious Processes, Gender & Feminist Psychology
Professor of Communication and Media; Adjunct Professor of Psychology; Research Professor, Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research.
Professor Dal Cin obtained her B.A.H. from Queen's University (Canada) and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Waterloo (Canada), where she held a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She came to the University of Michigan in 2007, following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the NorrisCotton Cancer Center (Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School).
Professor Dal Cin's major research interest is how everyday experiences with media affect thought, emotion, and behavior, and how these in turn shape media’s effects and the media-related choices people make. Her work examines the processes of story-based belief change, the role of identification with characters, the impact that stories have on behavior, and how these effects might occur outside viewers' conscious awareness. She studies the experience of media use, the effects it has on important outcomes, and the processes that underlie these effects, paying particular attention to the impacts of individual differences and the influence of context, including developmental stage. Her work integrates social-cognitive research on media influence and learning with communication science and social psychological research on media effects.
Current research includes the role of communication media in health behavior, stereotyping, adolescent development, and older adulthood.
Professor Dal Cin's work has appeared at national and international conferences, and in academic journals including the American Journal of Preventive Medicine; Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (now JAMA: Pediatrics); Communication Theory; Health Communication; Health Psychology; Human Communication Research; Information, Communication, & Society; Journal of Neuroscience; Media Psychology; New Media & Society; Pediatrics; and Psychological Science.
Prospective Graduate Students: Students interested in applying to Michigan to work with me as a primary advisor: please note that I do not participate in graduate admissions in the Psychology Department. Students interested in the doctoral program in Communication and Media: I do not anticipate taking on primary responsibility for newly-admitted doctoral students in F2023. Graduate & undergraduate students already at UM who are interested joining our MaPiEL Lab research group, please send me an email.
Field(s) of Study
- Social Psychology
- Media Psychology
- Wellbeing and the Media
