For more than 30 years, Laura Akers has been studying the psychology and rhetoric of both social movements and individual behavior. Her focus on cognitive framing (different ways to organize our understanding) emphasizes the roles of narrative, metaphor, and cognitive style.   Her research on public interest communication has included research on sociopolitical violence (terrorism, genocide, and state terror) as well as the language of the environmental movement.

Dr. Akers is an expert on meta-narratives, the background group-narratives that function as key cultural beliefs about societies. More recently she has been studying the role of rhetorical “salience markers” in drawing public attention to issues of interest – using language to draw sharp contrasts, convey magnitude, describe order and disorder, evoke traditions and alternative perspectives, and suggest opportunities to experience discovery and insight.

Meanwhile, Dr. Akers’s NIH-funded research at ORI has focused on cognitive framing to help people quit tobacco and to support others in quitting tobacco. As part of this work, she has studied tobacco users’ metaphors for addiction and cessation, which can illuminate the ways people interpret their experiences with tobacco and thereby help researchers design more effective quitting programs. Dr. Akers also has considerable expertise in the design and evaluation of online interventions for individual behavior change.