Welcome to
the SWEL Lab!
We are a research group in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University. Our work focuses on weight, eating, and lifestyle interventions, with the overarching goal of helping people improve their health without making them feel stressed or stigmatized in the process.
We approach our research questions from a biopsychosocial perspective, and we employ a broad range of study types in our work, including traditional lab-based experiments, field studies using mobile health (mHealth) applications, survey research in workplaces, and translational work in healthcare settings.
Our Mission:
In our work, we seek to answer one central question:
How can we motivate people to engage in healthy behaviors without making them feel stressed, judged, or demoralized?
We believe that this work is crucial to broader efforts to promote health equity, as these unintended consequences of traditional weight-related interventions (e.g., stress, stigma) are harmful to people’s mental, social, and physical health
