Patrick T Vargas

Patrick T Vargas is a Professor in the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising at the College of Media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with additional appointments as Professor in Psychology and the Institute of Communications Research, and Affiliate at the Center for Social & Behavioral Science. His research fingerprint is dominated by Pharmaceutical Advertising (100%), Evaluative Conditioning (77%), and Ethics (66%), reflecting interdisciplinary work bridging advertising, psychology, and health communication.

His core research examines cross-cultural health persuasion (e.g., Korean-American differences), cognitive mechanisms in consumer selective exposure to product visuals, self-presentation dynamics on social media, and computational text analysis of social media content. Key interests include Extraversion (66%), Counterfactual Thinking (66%), and Negative Affect (52%) as psychological drivers of advertising response, with strong emphasis on ethical implications in marketing practices.

Recent publications (2019-2021) demonstrate methodological diversity from experimental studies on cause-related marketing to computational social media analytics, consistently addressing real-world advertising challenges through psychological frameworks. His work shows increasing integration of health communication contexts with digital media platforms, particularly in cross-cultural health message effectiveness and social media self-presentation.

No information is available regarding student advising, research grants, laboratory teams, or specific future research directions in the provided text.