Alexandra Black

Dr. Black has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and specializes in close relationship research and advanced quantitative methods. Broadly, her work focuses on identifying how vulnerable people can thrive both as individuals and within the context of close relationships. 

Primarily, Dr. Black has examined how committed people respond to alternative threat. She is particularly interested in how people perceive their partners interacting with alternatives and what implications those assessments have for relationship stability. In other words, how do people in relationships determine if their partners are trustworthy? Are these perceptions based on relationship dynamics (i.e., existing trust or perceived partner commitment), or are they determined by dispositional differences (e.g., attachment insecurity)? Dr. Black's construct, Perceptions of the Partner's Devaluation of attractive alternatives (PPD), has been applied to the contexts of attachment buffering and social media (e.g., Instagram, dating apps, and most recently Tik Tok). More recently, Dr. Black's work has shifted to examining attachment dynamics during the transition to parenthood and she has developed the Model of Bisexual Stigma and Mental Health (Black et al., in prep). 

Dr. Black currently has three ongoing lines of research: 1) examining how a person perceives their partner's interactions with alternatives, 2) partner buffering to promote relationship security, and 3) the impact biphobia has on the mental health and well-being of bisexual people. She primarily uses Actor Partner Interdependence Modeling (APIM) and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to analyze dyadic and longitudinal data. She has tutored and taught courses in statistics at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. 

Before becoming a Postdoctoral Scholar at ASU, Dr. Black was a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor at The University of Pittsburgh. She taught a Close Relationships Seminar course and an Advanced Research Methods in Social Psychology course. Dr. Black advocates for her students and prioritizes creating an inclusive and safe classroom.