SMU Assistant Professor of Sociology Nicholas Harrigan was featured for his 2013 collaborative research with SMU undergraduates on signed ties. Assistant Prof Harrigan and his student collaborator Janice Yap surveyed SMU Social Science students on positive and negative times in the university context, and found that the variance in the survey findings was dominated by balance theory, status theory and homophily, which is the tendency to like people that are similar to us and dislike people that are different to us. The successful outcome of this project led to Assistant Prof Harrigan’s work on the triumvirate of negative ties being recently published in the top-ranked journal Social Networks.