People

Christine Ruva

Professor and Sarasota-Manatee campus Chair

CONTACT

Office: SMC B310
Phone: 941/359-4629
Email

LINKS

Curriculum Vitae

BIO

Christine Ruva joined the faculty of the University of South Florida as a visiting assistant professor on the Tampa campus in 2001, and then in 2004 as an assistant professor on the Sarasota-Manatee campus. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of South Florida in the area of Cognitive and Neural Sciences. She received her BA in psychology from the University of Tampa. After receiving her BA degree she worked as a probation and parole officer for the state of Florida where she held the position of sex offender specialist.

RESEARCH

Research Interests
Broadly construed, my research interests fall in the area of Psychology and Law. More specifically, my research focuses on applying principles of memory, social perception, and group decision-making to the area of jury decision-making.

Research Synopsis
My research utilizes both quantitative and qualitative (i.e., content analysis of jury deliberations) methods to explore jury decision making. Much of my research has explored the effects of pretrial publicity (media coverage of cases making their way to trial) on jurors’ perceptions, emotions, memories, interpretation of trial evidence, deliberation behavior, and verdicts. My research also explores how individual differences of jurors and defendants influence jurors’ perceptions, deliberation behaviors, and verdicts.

A number of variables can bias juror decision making. My research explores the effectiveness of remedies (e.g., deliberation, expert testimony, and voir dire) available to the courts for reducing juror bias (e.g., bias associated with pretrial publicity, gender, age, and race).

The podcast and US Supreme Court Brief below provide nice overviews of my research exploring the biasing effects of pretrial publicity on jury decision making.

Ruva, C.L. (2018). Bias, pretrial publicity, and deliberation. Excited Utterance – Evidence and Proof Podcast. The host of this program is Edward Cheng, Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School.

Brief for Supreme Court of the United States, as Amici Curiae Supporting Respondents, United States of America v. Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, (2021) (no. 20-443).

SPECIALTY AREA

CNS (Cognition)

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

(Student author in bold)

Ruva, C.L. (2024). Pre-trial publicity’s effects on jurors’ and judges' decisions. In M. K. Miller, L. A. Yelderman, J. A. Cantone, & M. Huss (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of the psychology of legal decision-making. (pp. 103-116). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009119375

Ruva, C. L., Smith, K. D., & Sykes, E. C. (2023). Gender, generations, and guilt: Defendant gender and age affect jurors’ decisions and perceptions in an intimate partner homicide trial. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38 (23-24), 1289-1212. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605231191227

Jones, A. M. & Ruva, C. L. (2023). Implicit and ingrained: Reducing unconscious bias among jurors. In E. Verona & B. Fox (Eds.), Routledge handbook of evidence-based criminal justice practices. Routledge. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8911-786X

Ruva, C. L. & Sykes, E. C. (2023). With theater, you have to be ready for anything: University response, expert testimony, and sample influence jurors’ decisions and counterfactual endorsement in a crime control theater case. Psychology, Crime & Law, 29 (5), 488-513. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2022.2027947

Ruva, C.L., Sykes, E. C., Smith, K. D., Deaton, L. R., & Erdem, S. (2022). Battling bias: Can two implicit bias remedies reduce juror racial bias? Psychology, Crime & Law. Advance online publication. https://10.1080/1068316X.2022.2115494

Ruva, C. L., Diaz Ortega, S.E., & O’Grady, K.A. (2022). What drives a Jury’s Deliberations? The influence of pretrial publicity and jury composition on deliberation slant and content. Psychology, Public Policy, & Law, 28(1), 32-52. https://doi.org/10.1037/law0000310

Jones, A.M., Wong, K., Meyers, C.N., & Ruva, C.L. (2022). Trial by tabloid: Can implicit bias education reduce pretrial publicity bias? Criminal Justice and Behavior, 49(2), 259-278. https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548211026956

Ruva C. L., & Coy, A. (2020). Your bias is rubbing off on me: The impact of pretrial publicity and jury composition on guilt decisions, trial evidence interpretation, and impression formation. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 26 (1), 22-35. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/law0000220

Ruva, C. L., & Guenther, C. C. (2017). Keep your bias to yourself: How deliberating with differently biased others affects mock-jurors’ guilt decisions, perceptions of the defendant, memories, and evidence interpretation. Law and Human Behavior, 41(5), 478-493. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000256

Ruva, C. L., & Guenther, C. C. (2015). From the shadows into the light: How pretrial publicity and deliberation affect mock jurors’ decisions, impressions, and memory. Law and Human Behavior, 39(3), 294-310. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000117