Rate My Professor Clayton Neighbors

Clayton Neighbors is the Moores Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Psychology Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston. He also directs Social, Personality, & Health Psychology and the Social Influences and Health Behaviors Lab. Neighbors earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Methods from the University of Houston in 2000, his M.S. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Lamar University in 1996, and his B.S. in Psychology from Lamar University in 1994. His academic career includes positions at the University of Washington as Associate Professor (2007-2010) and Assistant Professor (2004-2007) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Assistant Professor at North Dakota State University (2002-2004), and postdoctoral training at the University of Washington's Addictive Behaviors Research Center (2000-2001).

Neighbors' research investigates social and motivational influences on the etiology, prevention, and treatment of health-risk behaviors such as alcohol and substance use, problem gambling, body image disturbances, eating disorders, intimate partner violence, and aggressive driving. His interests encompass social norms and their application to prevention and brief interventions, self-determination and susceptibility to social influences, models of intimate partner violence and aggressive driving for intervention, spiritual and religious influences on behavior and mental health, event-specific prevention, social comparison, and social identity. This work receives funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Mental Health, Department of Defense, and National Center for Responsible Gaming. He received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions from American Psychological Association Division 50 (Addictions) in 2007 and serves as consulting editor for journals including Addictive Behaviors and Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. Key publications include "Targeting misperceptions of descriptive drinking norms: Efficacy of a computer-delivered personalized normative feedback intervention" (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2004), "Efficacy of web-based personalized normative feedback: A two-year randomized controlled trial" (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2010), and the co-authored book Theories of Social Influence on Adolescent and Young Adult Alcohol Use (Nova Science Publishers, 2010). His contributions have shaped interventions targeting misperceptions of drinking norms among college students and other at-risk populations.