Comm Studies Assistant Professor Jessica Frampton Researches the ‘Dark Side’ of Relationships
One elective undergraduate communication studies class with an engaging instructor is all it took for Assistant Professor Jessica Frampton to decide to pursue her master’s degree in the field. Once she was in her graduate program and realized academia was a career that would pay her to research how people communicated and interacted with one another, she went all in.
Frampton came to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in fall 2022 and brought her expertise in interpersonal communication to the School of Communication Studies. In her graduate programs at Clemson University and The Ohio State University, she studied communication and technology and started steering her research program to delve into relationship stressors and what she calls “the dark side of relationships.” In particular, she became interested in an understudied phenomenon called retroactive jealousy.
“It’s jealousy about people’s exes who are clearly no longer in the picture. Our current models of jealousy don’t explain that type of jealousy, so one of my dissertation studies, which is now published in a journal, developed a model of jealousy that could help explain that experience. The other study examined how people communicate about this type of jealousy. There are a lot of people who have that experience,” Frampton said.
Recently, some of her work on the topic was used by practitioners in counseling and psychology who built therapy and treatments based on her model and published two academic papers on their work. It is this type of practical application and ability to help people that makes researching what is often a disturbing or depressing topic worthwhile, Frampton said.
Technology also plays a significant role in the work that she does, as it plays a significant role in modern-day relationships. Some of her latest work underway is exploring the roles artificial intelligence (AI) can play in relationships, such as AI-mediated communication or comparing relational processes that occur in chatbot relationships to those that occur in human ones. She is also looking more into the role of technology in breakups.
Frampton has several papers currently in under review for publication and is also actively working on data collection and analysis for multiple other projects. She enjoys collaborating with others and said that working in a department that is focused solely on interpersonal and organizational communication makes it easy to get advice from others and to find co-authors for papers.
One of the papers she’s currently working on is with co-author Associate Professor Laura Miller, where the two are looking at how relationships are affected when one person is diagnosed with heart disease. She’s also combining her expertise in technology with that of Assistant Professor Roth Smith’s organizational communication background to explore the use and impact of AI in cybervetting job applicants.
While her interests can vary, they often always come back to both the dark side of romantic relationships and/or technology. Technology may always be changing, but at the core of interpersonal communication, the theories are still useful, she said.
“Interpersonal communication processes occur on and offline. I don’t think technology often fundamentally changes interpersonal communication; it usually just enables things to happen in a different way or in a different channel. People still did the same things without social media and phones, such as tracking whereabouts of partners, ghosting someone, or finding information about someone’s exes—though technology might make those behaviors easier to do or more common,” she said, but noted that it is possible that some technology may ultimately change interpersonal processes if it has new features that are not like what we have seen before and it becomes more embedded in everyday life.
Frampton is still early on in her career and her tenure at UT but she’s looking forward to continuing to go deeper into her research on retroactive jealousy and other relationship stressors and seeing where it takes her next. Because interpersonal communication is a universal experience, it’s not uncommon for people to regularly throw research ideas her way, so she’s never at a loss of ideas.
In addition to her own research, Frampton also works with students on their research interests and recently began advising an undergraduate student in a study around anxious attachment in romantic relationships. That student, Isabella Mangano, recently was awarded a grant to pursue this research for her undergraduate honors thesis and won first place for her presentation on the research at the College of Communication and Information’s 46th Annual Research Symposium, which you can read more about here. Another student Frampton mentors, Ava Franzoy, was also awarded a grant to pursue research on the role of technology in coping with infidelity, and her paper was recently accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. You can read more about that project here.
Comm Studies Assistant Professor Jessica Frampton Researches the ‘Dark Side’ of Relationships written by Hillary Tune and originally published on the College of Communication & Information site.