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Professor, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Adjunct Professor, Department of Health Behavior

Paschal Sheeran is a social psychologist whose research concerns self-regulation – how people direct their thoughts, feelings and actions to achieve their goals. His particular interests are health behavior change and emotion regulation with research on:

1) The intention-behavior ‘gap.’ His research shows that people successfully translate intentions into action only about 50 percent of the time, and pinpoints factors that determine consistencies between intentions and behavior.

2) The use of implementation intentions to reduce the intention-behavior ‘gap’ and improve rates of performance of health behaviors.

3) Using meta-analysis to assess how much change in health-related intentions and behavior accrues from interventions that change the key predictors specified by health behavior theories.

4) His recent work has begun to examine nonconscious routes to action and the self-regulation of implicit influence.