Tracey Revenson

Social Personality Psychology

office: rm 6304.18, Psychology
phone: 212.817.8709
email: trevenson@gc.cuny.edu

The official bio:

Tracey A. Revenson, Ph.D. is Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is appointed to the Social-Personality and Developmental Psychology Programs as well as the Women's Studies Concentration. She is a member of the HPC and UHI and served as Director of the Health Psychology Concentration from 1995-1999. She was one of the first generation to receive postdoctoral training in health psychology, at the University of California, Irvine, after receiving a Ph.D. in Community Psychology from New York University.

Dr. Revenson was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Women's Health: Research on Gender, Behavior and Policy. Her books include A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks (revised edition, Penguin, 1996), Understanding Rheumatoid Arthritis (Routledge, 1996), the Handbook of Health Psychology (Erlbaum, 2001), A Quarter Century of Community Psychology (Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, 2002) and Ecological Research to Promote Social Change: Community Psychology (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002).

Dr. Revenson's primary research interests include: stress and coping processes among individuals, couples, and families facing chronic physical illnesses; the influence on supportive and non-supportive interpersonal relationships on health; couples' (dyadic) coping processes; psychosocial issues of breast cancer survivorship and the interplay of gender and racism on health, particularly mental health, cardiovascular reactivity and smoking. She was awarded a Senior International Fellowship from the Fogarty International Center at NIH in 1991 to study cross-cultural issues in coping with chronic illness.

Professor Revensen's research for the past decade has focused on psychosocial adaptation to chronic stress - that is, how recurring life strains affect individuals, families and communities, and how individuals, families and communities cope with these chronic strains. My training was in community psychology and social ecology. As a consequence, my research is conducted in naturalistic settings and examines behavior within the broader context of the ecology of human development. For example, the research moves from asking whether coping and social support affect health and well-being to asking the questions of how, when, why, and for whom support and coping have their strongest influence. For the most part I do quantitative research, examining the unique and joint influences of contextual factors at multiple levels of analysis.

The lion's share of my work has centered on the stressor of major physical illness. I have studied stress and coping processes among children, adolescents and adults, married couples, and families facing recently-diagnosed and long-term chronic illnesses; the use of age and gender stereotypes by physicians; the influence of supportive and non-supportive interpersonal relationship on health; and why mutual-help groups work. Within the past few years my focus has turned more to women's health issues. Again, I am not interested in simple gender differences, but in understanding how gender influences psychosocial adaptation.

The following are ongoing studies for which I invite students (new and old) to become involved:

Fears of Recurrence, Coping, and Psychological Adjustment among Long-Term Breast Cancer Survivors. This longitudinal study was conceptualized by Suzanne Vickberg, Ph.D. for her dissertation, and I am fortunate that this became a long-term collaboration. We have been following 100 breast cancer survivors from 1-7 years post-treatment to understand the phenomenon of "anticipatory coping" and how coping processes change over time. We are also looking at how survivors make estimates of their risk for recurrence and how social constraints may hinder coping efforts. We will be collecting the third wave of data in Spring, 2003.

Personality and Physiological Predictors of Mental and Physical Health Symptoms in the Aftermath of 9-11 (Co-Investigators: Steve Lepore and Peter Weston). The major goal of this study is to determine if stable, physiological measures of reactivity and personality dispositions such as anger and ethnic identity predict the degree to which persons experience psychological distress and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in response to the recent terrorist attacks in New York City. A prominent, though not widely tested, theory in the fields of behavioral and psychosomatic medicine is that individual differences in reactivity to stress can account for variation in mental and physical health following exposure to stress. Thus, among persons who were high reactors prior to the disaster- i.e., those persons who exhibited exaggerated responses to stressors in a controlled laboratory setting before 9-11-we expect an exponential degree of emotional and somatic problems, as well as symptoms of PTSD in the months following the terrorist attacks. This study may lead to other questions concerning long-term coping responses to community traumas.

The Roles of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Stress in Smoking Behavior (Co-Investigators: Steve Lepore and Bill Cross). This pilot study examines the role of stress - specifically stress associated with racial discrimination - in mediating potential race and gender differences in smoking behaviors. Recent research shows that racial discrimination is both a source of stress and a strong predictor of smoking among African-Americans. Gender is also relevant, as smoking has anxiolytic effects in women but not men, which might influence women's dependence on cigarettes. The study will assess stress responses and smoking behavior through both self-report measures and physiological responses to a racially-loaded (manipulated) stressor in the laboratory. Smoking parameters (e.g., puff frequency, puff duration), etc. are then modeled in a chemistry laboratory at the Institute for Cancer Prevention to determine chemical metabolism of tar, nicotine, etc. Thus, we will be able to determine if gender and ethnic differences in responses to racial stress affect not only health behavior but also physiological outcomes.

Educational and Psychosocial Interventions to Increase Quality of Life for Colorectal Patients (Co-Investigators: Steve Lepore and Erica Lubetkin, M.D.) project will test the feasibility of implementing a novel psychosocial intervention with colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. The intervention aims to increase quality of life by addressing both the informational and emotional needs of patients. Informational needs will be addressed through patient education. Emotional needs will be addressed by providing patients with an opportunity to increase their cognitive and emotional processing of traumatic life events through expressive writing. Expressive writing has been found to be effective at enhancing physical and mental health in persons experiencing diverse traumatic life events, including breast cancer, but it has not been used with CRC patients or in combination with an educational intervention.

Patient and Marital Adaptation to Rheumatic Disease. This is a longitudinal study of 113 married couples in which one spouse has a rheumatic disease (3/4 of the patients are women) and a matched comparison sample of 38 "healthy" couples. The original data were collected in 1991; in 1999, we collected follow-up data on one-third of the sample to examine whether coping is a long-term predictor of adjustment. In addition to couples-level coping, other theoretical foci of the research are : 1) the division of labor among husbands and wives, and how it is affected by chronic illness; 2) the provision of social support between spouses and 3) the ability to measure coping through self-report. This is a large data set begging for secondary analysis.

Recent publications (* asterisks denote students or post-doctoral fellows)

Revenson, T.A., Kayser, K., & Bodenmann, G. (in preparation). Emerging perspectives on couples' coping with stress. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Yali, A.M., & Revenson, T.A. (under review). Impact of changes in population demographics on health psychology. Health Psychology.

Danoff-Burg, S*., Revenson, T.A., & Trudeau, K*. (revision under review). Unmitigated communion and women's adjustment to rheumatoid arthritis. Journal of Personality.

Stanton, A., & Revenson, T.A. (in press). Adaptation to chronic illness. In H. S. Friedman & R.C. Silver (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Health Psychology. NY: Oxford University Press.

Revenson, T.A. (in press). Scenes from a marriage: Examining support, coping, and gender within the context of chronic illness. In J. Suls & K. Wallston (Eds.), Social Psychological Foundations of Health and Illness. Blackwell Publishing.

Revenson, T.A., D'Augelli A.R., French, S.E., Hughes, D.L., Livert, D.*, Seidman, E., Shinn, M., & Yoshikawa, H. (Eds.) (2002). A Quarter Century of Community Psychology: Readings from the American Journal of Community Psychology. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Revenson, T.A., D'Augelli A.R, French, S.E., Hughes, D.L., Livert, D*., Seidman, E., Shinn, M., & Yoshikawa, H. (Eds.) (2002). Ecological Research to Promote Social Change: Methodological Advances from Community Psychology. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Revenson, T.A, & Seidman, E. (2002). Looking backward and moving forward: Reflections on a quarter century of community psychology. In T.A. Revenson, A.R. D'Augelli, S.E. French, D.L. Hughes, D. Livert, E. Seidman, M. Shinn, & H. Yoshikawa (Eds.), A Quarter Century of Community Psychology: Readings from The American Journal of Community Psychology (pp. 3-31).New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Revenson, T.A. (2001). Chronic illness adjustment. In J. Worrell (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Women and Gender, volume 1 (pp. 245-256). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Baum, A. Revenson, T.A., & Singer J.E. (Eds). (2001). Handbook of Health Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Danoff-Burg, S*., Revenson, T.A., & Ayala, J.* (2000). Researcher knows best? Toward a closer match between the concept and measurement of coping. Journal of Health Psychology, 5 (2). 183-194.

Danoff-Burg, S*, & Revenson, T.A. (2000). Rheumatic illness and relationships: Coping as a joint venture. In K.B. Schmaling & T.G. Sher (Eds.), The Psychology of Couples and Illness (pp. 105-134). Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Degotardi, P.J.*, Revenson, T.A., & Ilowite, N. (1999). Family-level coping in juvenile rheumatoid arthritis: Assessing the utility of a quantitative family interview. Arthritis Care and Research, 12 (5), 314-324.

Jordan, C.* & Revenson, T.A. (1999). Gender differences in coping strategies with infertility: A meta-analysis. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 22 (4), 341-358.

Revenson, T.A., & McFarlane, T.A.* (1998). Women's health. In H.S. Friedman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Mental Health, vol. 3 (pp. 707-719). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Abraido-Lanza, A.F.,* Guier, C., & Revenson, T.A. (1996). Coping and social support resources among Latinas with arthritis. Arthritis Care and Research, 9 (6), 501-508.
Courses I teach regularly:

Health Psychology
Psychology of Women's Health
Ethical Issues for Research Psychologists
Community Psychology
Psychological Measurement: Theory, Research and Application