My primary interest is in the study of health behavior from a social psychological perspective, including sexual risk reduction in populations at risk for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). I am also interested in the promotion of physical activity. I have developed a program of research that assesses differential psychological and physiological responses to exercise, and the possible genetic and biological substrates of those responses.

My interests also encompass evolutionary social psychological topics including the study of attraction, mating, and romantic relationships, and the possible influence of our evolutionary history on current mating behavior.

General interests concern the ways in which humans' current psychological design is a product of evolutionary selection. Current research generally concerns this issue in regard to phenomena that occur within close relationships such as sexual relationships, friendships, and familial relationships. Other research concerns the developmental expressions of adaptations.

Additional interests include individual differences, behavior genetics, psychometric theory, and philosophy of science.

Evolutionary social psychology is my main focus, especially the study of human mental adaptations for judgment, decision-making, strategic behavior, and communication in social and sexual domains. This includes work on mutual mate choice and sexual selection theory, analysis of human mental traits as fitness indicators (reliable cues of underlying phenotypic traits and genetic quality), analysis of social attribution heuristics as adapted to the statistical structure of individual differences (including genetic and phenotypic covariances), and analysis of animate motion perception mechanisms as adapted to typical patterns of intentional movement.

Also, consumer behavior: applications of evolutionary psychology in product design and aesthetics, marketing, advertising, and branding (book in progress on this topic); use of genetic algorithms for interactive online product design.