Barbara Lehman

My research focuses on stress and coping. Specifically, my current priorities include explorations of culture, social support, and mindfulness meditation. I enjoy using multiple methodological approaches, often including experience sampling designs in combination with experimental approaches. I enjoy drawing on advanced statistical approaches in my research and teaching, recently including techniques like multilevel modeling, Bayesian analyses, and structural equation modeling.

The dynamic biopsychosocial model that has implicitly guided my research over the last 15 years is described by Lehman, David, and Gruber (2017). The model construes human health as a product of the reciprocal influences of biological, psychological, interpersonal, and macrosystem contextual dynamics that unfold over personal and historical time. Variations in social behavior, emotional health, and physical well-being are a function of the interplay of these experiences. Innovative accounts of psychological phenomena require crossing sub-disciplinary boundaries and drawing on novel research methodologies.

Stress and Coping in Everyday Life

Many theories of the effects of stress on health rely on the concept of allostatic load, which suggests that bodily functions become dysregulated through repeated activation of stress response systems to major and minor life events. My research in this area is designed to help test the theory of allostatic load by examining cardiovascular responses to naturally occurring stressful life experiences. I have also studied individual differences in psychosocial functioning that predict heightened, dysregulated, or prolonged physiological reactions to daily stressful life events. Such factors include differences in social interaction anxiety (Lehman, Cane, Tallon, & Smith, 2014; Lehman & Conley, 2010), test anxiety (Conley & Lehman, 2012), and pessimism (Jones, Lehman, Kirsch, & Hennessy, 2016), social support, and mindfulness (as elaborated below). Most recently, we (Lawley, Caley, & Lehman, under review) have examined the role of financial strain on psychological health during COVID-19.

Socially Supportive Relationships

Supportive social relationships can provide an important buffer for the effects of stress on physical health outcomes. In the last several years my students and I have examined the effects of social support on responses to stressful events. For example, some of my undergraduate students have examined distinctions among social support provided by friends and by family members during the COVID-19 pandemic (Elwood, Carlson, Krumm, & Lehman, in preparation). My colleague Dr. Christie Scollon and I conducted a study of everyday experiences with socially supportive relationships. Projects stemming from this study have explored cultural differences in the emotional correlates of giving (Pourmand, Lawley, & Lehman, 2021) and receiving (Lawley, Willett, Scollon & Lehman, 2019) social support.

Another area of my research is on the topic of invisible support—social support that is not noticed by the support recipient. Kirsch and Lehman (2014) contributed to this literature by examining whether those provided with invisible social support, visible social support, or explicitly non-evaluative visible social support differed in their rate of cardiovascular recovery following a standardized laboratory stress task. Results suggested that those in the standard visible social support condition showed less efficient cardiovascular recovery following the stress task than did those who received either nonevaluative visible social support or invisible social support.

Coping Using Mindfulness Meditation and Other Contemplative Approaches

My recent research has also probed the processes by which mindfulness meditation affects psychological and physical health. My students and I conducted five different experiments to probe the effects of mindfulness meditation on momentary and daily processes, including eating and craving, coping flexibility and flourishing (Jones, Lehman, Noriega, & Dinnel, 2019), mind wandering and rumination (Diana David’s thesis), and high and low activation positive and negative emotions (Jones, Graham-Engeland, & Lehman, 2016; Jones, Graham-Engeland, Smyth, & Lehman, 2018). My students and I are currently examining the self-regulatory processes through which meditation interventions may exert their powerful effects.