Faculty Narrative
Kenneth Wallston, PhD, MAProfessor of Psychology in Nursing
PhD in Nursing Science Program
Dr. Ken Wallston is a Professor of Psychology in Nursing and holds secondary appointments in the College of Arts & Science and Peabody College. He has been at VUSN since 1971. A founder of the discipline of health psychology, Dr. Wallston is also very active in the interdisciplinary field of behavioral medicine. In 2003, along with Dr. Jerry Suls at the University of Iowa, he co-edited the book, Social Psychological Foundations of Health and Illness, published by Blackwell.
Dr. Wallston is one of the developers of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC) Scales, a set of measures assessing beliefs about control over a person's health status (http://www.vanderbilt.edu/nursing/kwallston/mhlcscales.htm). In 2005 he guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of Health Psychology that contained an article on the validity of the MHLC scales.
With colleagues in psychology and nursing, Dr. Wallston has also developed and validated a number of other measures of individual differences -- e.g., the Perceived Health Competence Scale, the Vanderbilt Multidimensional Pain Coping Inventory, the Perceived Vulnerability Scale, and the Brief Resilient Coping Scale. All of these measures are in the public domain and are available at no cost to health researchers by contacting him at ken.wallston@vanderbilt.edu. His latest instruments include the Cognitive Adaptability Index and the Perceived Medical Condition Self-Management Scales.
In the early 1980s, Dr. Wallston began studying adjustment to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) under the auspices of a grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research and the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal Conditions and Skin. This grant supported two longitudinal panel studies of adults with RA, out of which have come a great number of publications.
Wallston's current research efforts revolve around examining effects of Pennebaker's expressive writing task. He has been looking at the psychological, behavioral, and physiological effects of having individuals disclose their thoughts and feelings in writing about particularly stressful or traumatic events that they have experienced. Subject populations include patients with HIV/AIDS or diabetes and cigarette smokers. He is also involved as a co-investigator in two other diabetes studies -- one examining diabetes numeracy, another looking at ways of using the Internet to educate adolescents with type 1 diabetes. In addition, he is investigating the effects of public service messages on individuals' attitudes toward air pollution and their driving behaviors.