Ronald D. Rogge

• Associate Professor of Psychology

PhD, University of California Los Angeles, 2003

462 Meliora Hall
(585) 273-3270
ronald.rogge@rochester.edu

Office Hours: By appointment

Research Overview

Professor Rogge will not be accepting applications for graduate students for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Ron Rogge is a clinical faculty member whose research focuses on understanding dynamics within romantic relationships and families.

Websites for Dr. Rogge:

• Dr. Rogge's LAB Website
• The MindFlex Assessment System Website
• The Agapé Relationship Wellness App

Basic Research

His basic research studies examine how

• Individual factors (e.g., neuroticism, anger, aggressiveness, depression, anxiety, alcohol use, and axis II pathology)
• Couples behavior with each other (e.g., communication, empathy, forgiveness, social support, humor, partner aggression, coparenting dynamics)
• Sexuality and sexual activity (e.g., sexual activity, the salience of male and female sexual health and orgasms, diversity in relationship structures - including nonmonogamous arrangements; diversity in sexuality - including traditional LGBT self-identities as well as newer classifications like heteroflexibility, gender diversity)
• Eastern ideological traditions (drawing from Buddhism and Taoism, as well as from the mindfulness and ACT literatures, we have increasingly begun incorporating mindfulness and psychological flexibility into our projects and examining how tenets of Buddhism are linked to greater wellbeing through various forms of mindfulness and emotional flexibility - the Unified Flexibility & Mindfulness model)
• Environmental factors (e.g., life stress, socio-economic status, demographics, neighborhood dilapidation, neighborhood cohesion)
• Implicit attitudes (e.g., subconscious attitudes toward a partner or family member that can shape the course of relationships)
• Health behaviors/factors (e.g., exercise, diet, sleep hygiene)

collectively contribute to the development of individual, relationships, and family wellbeing and flourishing or discord and distress.

Applied Research

In addition, Dr. Rogge's research also explores methods of preventing marital and family discord through interventions designed to strengthen relationships and families.

• Promoting Awareness, Improving Relationships (PAIR). The PAIR program is an innovative approach that encourages couples to use popular media (movies and TV shows) as a method of easing into discussions of their own relationships. PAIR offered comparable 3-year benefits to those seen with the CARE and PREP programs, cutting the divorce rate in half over the early years of marriage (Rogge et al., 2013). We now have data from an RCT of PAIR vs. a waitlist in 170 couples and are preparing manuscripts from that study.
• The Agapé Relationship Wellness App. Dr. Rogge is also on the founding team of a tech start-up company, helping to develop a smartphone app for couples that enhances their relationships by building moments of connection with just a few minutes each day. Couples using the app are sent daily prompts like, “If you were going to give your partner an award, what would it be for?” and when both partners have answered, they can see each other’s responses. Agapé can be found in the google and apple stores and has over 12,000 daily users. Dr. Rogge is currently conducting a single-arm intervention study following 320 couples through their first month of using the app.
• Reflecting to Enrich Family Life and Enhance Coparental Teamwork (REFLECT). The REFLECT program builds on the findings with PAIR, extending this innovative approach to the task of strengthening families. Thus, REFLECT encourages coparents to use popular media (movies and TV shows) as a method of easing into parenting discussions. A recent pilot study in 36 families suggested that in comparison to a no-treatment control group, families completing REFLECT discussions demonstrated more adaptive coparenting (greater cooperation and support) and greater use of adaptive parenting strategies.
• The MindFlex Assessment System. In collaboration with Kelly Wilson and Jaci Rolffs, Dr. Rogge developed a measure assessing the 6 dimensions of psychological flexibility and the 6 corresponding dimensions of inflexibility within the Hexaflex model: The Multidimensional Psychological Flexibility Inventory or MPFI. We are now validating the use of that scale in clinical populations by developing the MindFlex Assessment System. This is an online system that administers and scores the MPFI for clients in therapy, generating psychological flexibility profiles for their therapists and helping to track changes in flexibility and wellbeing across the course of treatment.

To explore these research interests, Dr. Rogge has 1) conducted a project in his own lab that followed 303 newlywed couples on a yearly basis over the first four years of marriage, 2) conducted a joint project with Dr. Reis following 175 newlywed couples over the first 18 months of marriage, and developed and implemented an innovative program of online research comprised of a series of over large-scale online research projects - see http://www.couples-research.com - that have collected data from over 70,000 online respondents, augmenting his laboratory studies of romantic relationships and families. Dr. Rogge and his students typically use advanced multivariate statistical techniques (e.g., Item Response Theory, Hierarchical Linear Modeling, Structural Equation Modeling, Multilevel SEM, Latent Profile Analysis, network analysis, meta-analysis) to examine the relationships between sets of variables being examined.

Mentoring Style

Dr. Rogge provides fairly intensive mentoring to his students to help ensure a high level of training and success. Dr. Rogge uses a blend of various mentoring styles (see below) to best meet the needs of his students, tailoring his efforts to each student as they progress through their doctoral degrees. Although Dr. Rogge’s approach to mentoring each student will grow and evolve over time as their needs naturally shift and change, the following graph gives a sense of the typical blend of mentoring styles that he engages over the course of 5 years with a student.

As can be seen in the graph, Dr. Rogge engages the roles of affirmer, protector, and clarifier sufficiently to create a safe, supportive, and caring environment. Having said that, he prefers to spend as much time as possible in the roles of educator, advisor, and ideator, as the more time he can engage in those roles with each mentee, the more his joint programs of research with them will flourish.

Courses Offered (subject to change)

• PSYC 209:  Psychology of Human Sexuality
• PSYC 513:  Meta-analysis
• PSYC 515:  Hierarchical Linear Modeling
• PSYC 572:  Clinical Psychology Research Methods
• PSYC 587:  Overview of Marital Research
• 5PM 472:  Measurement Theory/Statistics

Selected Publications

• Rogge, R. D., Lin, Y. Y., Swanson, D. P., Amaro, A. (2022). Tracing the Path toward Mindfulness back to its Origins: Linking Tenets of Buddhism to Mindfulness within the Buddhism-Informed Unified flexibility and Mindfulness (BI-UFM) Model. Mindfulness, online first.
• Pollard, A., & Rogge, R. D. (2022). Love in the time of COVID-19: A multi-wave study examining the salience of sexual health during a pandemic. Archives of Sexual Behavior, online first, 1-25.
• Peltz. J., Crasta, D., Daks, J., & Rogge, R. D. (2021). Shocks to the system: The influence of COVID-19-related stressors on coparental and family functioning. Developmental Psychology, 57(10), 1693-1707
• Hangen, F., & Rogge, R. D. (2021). Focusing the conceptualization of erotophilia and erotophobia on global attitudes toward sex: Development and validation of the Sex Positive-Negative Scale. Archives of Sexual Behavior, online first, 1-25
• Kohut, T., Dobson, K., Balzarini, R. N., Rogge, R. D., Shaw, A., McNulty, J. K., Russell, V. M., Fisher, W. A. & Campbell, L. (2021). But What’s Your Partner up to? Associations between Relationship Quality and Pornography Use Depend on Contextual Patterns of Use within the Couple. Frontiers in Psychology, 2891.
• Rogge, R. D., & Daks, J. S. (2020). Embracing the intricacies of the path toward mindfulness: Broadening our Conceptualization of the Process of Cultivating Mindfulness in Day-to-Day Life by Developing the Unified Flexibility and Mindfulness Model. Mindfulness, 12, 701-721.
• Daks, J. S., & Rogge, R. D. (2020). Examining the correlates of psychological flexibility in romantic relationships and family dynamics: A meta-analysis. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 18, 214-238.
• Rogge, R. D., Daks, J. S., Dubler, B. A., & Saint, K. J. (2019). It's all about the process: Examining the convergent validity, conceptual coverage, unique predictive validity, and clinical utility of ACT process measures. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science.
• Hangen,F., Crasta, D., & Rogge, R. D. (2019). Delineating the Boundaries between Nonmonogamy and Infidelity:  Bringing Consent Back into Definitions of Consensual Nonmonogamy with Latent Profile Analysis. Journal of Sex Research.
• Peltz, J. S., Rogge, R. D., & O’Connor, T. (2019). Adolescent sleep quality mediates family chaos and adolescent mental health: A daily diary-based study. Journal of Family Psychology, 33, 259-269.
• Legate, N. & Rogge, R. D. (2019). Identifying Basic Classes of Sexual Orientation with Latent Profile Analysis: Developing the Multivariate Sexual Orientation Classification System. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48, 1403-1422.
• Rogge, R. D., Crasta, D., & Legate, N. (2019). Is Tinder-Grindr use risky? Distinguishing venue from individuals’ behavior as unique predictors of sexual risk. Archives of Sexual Behavior, online first, 1-15
• Peltz, J. S., Rogge, R. D., & Sturge-Apple, M. (2018). Transactions within the family: Coparenting mediates associations between parents' relationship satisfaction and the parent-child bond. Journal of Family Psychology, 32, 553-564.
• Crasta, D., Funk, J.L., Lee, S., & Rogge, R.D. (2018). Out drinking the Joneses: Neighborhood factors moderating the effects of drinking on relationship quality over the first four years of marriage. Family Process, 57, 960-978.
• Reis, H. T., Maniaci, M. R., & Rogge, R. D. (2017). Compassionate acts and everyday emotional well-being among newlyweds. Emotion, 17, 751.
• Shaw, A. M., & Rogge, R. D. (2017). Symbolic meanings of sex in relationships: Developing the Meanings of Sexual Behavior Inventory. Psychological Assessment, 29, 1221-1234.
• Shaw, A. M., & Rogge, R. D. (2016). Evaluating and Refining the Construct of Sexual Quality with Item Response Theory: Development of the Quality of Sex Inventory. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 45, 249-270.
• Sturge-Apple, M. L., Rogge, R. D., Peltz, J. S., Suor, J. H., & Skibo, M. A. (2015). Delving Beyond Conscious Attitudes: Validation of an Innovative Tool for Assessing Parental Implicit Attitudes Toward Physical Punishment. Infant and Child Development, 24, 240-255.
• Maniaci, M. R., & Rogge, R. D. (2014). Caring about Carelessness: Participant Inattention and its Effects on Research. Journal of Research in Personality, 48, 61-83.
• Reis, H. T., Maniaci, M. R., & Rogge, R. D. (2014). The expression for compassionate love in everyday compassionate acts. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 31, 1-26.
• Rogge, R. D., Cobb, R. J., Johnson, M. D., Lawrence, E., & Bradbury, T. N. (2013). Is skills training necessary for the primary prevention of marital distress and dissolution: A 3-year experimental study of three interventions. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 81, 949-961.
• Lee, S., Rogge, R. D., & Reis, H. T. (2010). Assessing the Seeds of Relationship Decay: Using Implicit Evaluations to Detect the Early Stages of Disillusionment. Psychological Science, 21, 857-864.
• Saavedra, M. C., Chapman, K. E., & Rogge, R. D. (2010). Examining Mechanisms between Attachment and Relationship Quality: Hostile Conflict and Mindfulness as Moderators. Journal of Family Psychology, 24, 380-390.
• Funk, J. L., & Rogge, R. D. (2007). Testing the Ruler with Item Response Theory: Increasing Precision of Measurement for Relationship Satisfaction with the Couples Satisfaction index. Journal of Family Psychology, 21, 572-583.
• Barnes, S., Brown, K. W., Krusemark, E., Capbell, W. K., & Rogge, R. D. (2007). The Role of Mindfulness in Romantic Relationship Satisfaction and Responses to Relationship Stress. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 33, 1-19.