About me...
I am in my fourth year of the doctoral program in Social Psychology at Rutgers University. I am currently working primarily with my advisor, Dr. Laurie A. Rudman, and with Dr. Diana T. Sanchez. I graduated in May 2005 from Lafayette College, where I was a double major in Psychology and Art. At Lafayette I worked primarily with Dr. Susan A. Basow (psychology) and Dr. Edward Kerns (art).
I have several current research interests, most of which involve the study of impression formation, stereotyping, and prejudice. For example, my masters thesis explored how negative reactions for counterstereotypical behavior contributes to cultural stereotype maintenance.
Many of the projects I am working on utilize the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT relies on response latency data to assess nonconscious associations (or implicit attitudes). For example, many individuals are able to more quickly pair women with family words than career words and are able to more quickly pair men with career words than family words. This would be evidence of an implicit association between women and family and men and careers.
I am interested in the predictive utility and malleability of implicit attitudes. Previous research suggests that these nonconscious associations can influence our behavior, and I am interested in the conditions under which this is likely to occur. In addition, I am interested in the sources of implicit attitudes (in particular, the role of affect), and how these nonconscious associations can be changed.
I tend to get fired up about politics and social justice issues. I am interested in increasing the application of social psychological research to real world situations and in figuring out how to more effectively inform social policy.
