Office: 705A Gruening
Phone: 474-6178; Fax: 474-5781
E-mail: inna.rivkin@uaf.edu

    I was born in Russia, but moved to the U.S. in 1977. I received my B.A. in psychology from UC Berkeley in 1993, and my Ph.D. in social psychology (with minors in health psychology and psychometrics) from UCLA in 2000. I completed a post-doctoral fellowship in an interdisciplinary research training program on psychosocial and mental health services for people living with HIV. I was awarded a UCLA AIDS Institute Seed Grant for a project examining the effects of an expressive writing intervention on immune function and psychological adjustment for people living with HIV (Rivkin, Gustafson, Weingarten and Chin, 2006). I worked at UCLA as project director for the Eban program, a multi-site NIMH funded trial testing a culturally congruent HIV/STD risk reduction intervention for HIV-discordant African-American couples. I moved to Alaska in 2006 and worked as a visiting faculty member in the Psychology Department at UAA, before joining the faculty here at UAF in 2007.

The central theme of my research is adaptation in a social and cultural context, involving examination of the factors that promote physical and psychological health for people coping with stressful events. My work explores the effects of health interventions that incorporate cultural and community strengths, such as culturally congruent HIV risk reduction, health promotion, and coping interventions. I am also interested in how actively confronting a stressful event and expressing the accompanying emotions affect health and well-being, and in the role that the social and cultural context play in this process.

In addition to being an active researcher, I enjoy teaching. I have taught undergraduate courses in Health Psychology, Research Methods, General Psychology, and Personality, and Ph.D. courses in Community Psychology, Program Evaluation, and Community Practicum. Music and nature are also important in my life. In my spare time, I enjoy singing, songwriting, hiking, skiing, and paragliding with my husband, Adam.

Publications:

Rivkin, I. D., Gustafson, J., & Weingarten, I., & Chin, D. (2006). The effects of expressive writing on adjustment to HIV. AIDS and Behavior, 10(1), 13-26.

Myers, H., Wyatt, G. E., Loeb, T. B., Carmona, J. V., Warda, U., Longshore, D., Rivkin, I. D., Chin, D., & Liu, H. (2006). Severity of child sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress and risky sexual behaviors among HIVpositive women. AIDS and Behavior, 10(2), 191-199.

Liu, H., Longshore, D., Williams, J. K., Rivkin, I. D., Loeb, T., Warda, U. S., Carmona, J. V., Myers, H., & Wyatt, G. (2006). Substance abuse and medication adherence among HIV-positive women with histories of childsexual abuse. AIDS and Behavior, 10(3), 279-286.

Wyatt, G. E., Longshore, D., Chin, D., Carmona, J. V., Loeb, T. B., Myers, H. F., Warda, U., Liu, H., & Rivkin, I. D. (2004). The efficacy of an integrated risk reduction intervention for HIV-positive women with child sexual abuse histories. AIDS and Behavior, 8(4), 453-462.

Wyatt, G. E., Loeb, T. B., Rivkin, I. D., Carmona, J. V., Chin, D., Williams, J., Myers, H., Longshore, D., & Sykora, C.; UCLA Women’s Health Project (2003). What does child sexual abuse have to do with    HIV prevention? Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, UCSF, Child Sexual Abuse Fact Sheet #52E, September 2003.

Loeb, T. B., Williams, J. K., Carmona, J. V., Rivkin, I. D., Wyatt, G. E., Chin, D., & Asuan-O’Brian, A. (2002). Child sexual abuse associations with the sexual functioning of adolescents and adults. In J.R. Heiman & C.M. Davis (Eds.), Annual Review of Sex Research, Volume XIII (pp. 307-345). Allentown, PA: Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.

Rivkin, I. D. & Taylor, S. E. (1999). The effects of mental simulation on coping with controllable stressful events. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(12), 1451-1462.

Grolnick, W. S., Kurowski, C. O., McMenamy, J. M., Rivkin, I. D., & Bridges, L. J. (1998). Mothers’ strategies for regulating their toddlers’ distress. Infant Behavior and Development, 21(3), 437-450.

Taylor, S. E., Pham, L. B., Rivkin, I. D., & Armor, D. A. (1998). Harnessing the imagination: Mental simulation, self-regulation, and coping. American Psychologist, 53(4), 429-439.

Han, E. E., & Rivkin, I. D. (1998). Relations between study habits, sleep, stress, and academic performance. Journal of Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences, 12, 23-32.

Coleman, E. B., Brown, A. L., & Rivkin, I. D. (1997). The effects of instructional explanations on inferences from scientific text. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 6(4), 347-365.