I am a clinical psychology graduate student, and I have two main research interests. I study how people
interpret ambiguous situations. In particular, I am interested in understanding how the cognitive-affective
units (i.e., experiences, goals, expectancies, etc.) that comprise a person’s personality influence his or
her perceptions of ambiguous situations. I also study the etiology and consequences of transgressive sexual
behaviors, like sexual assault and sexual harassment. I have combined those interests and am investigating
the factors (such as a person’s sexual assault history, beliefs about interpersonal relationships, etc.) that
influence people’s perceptions of social situations in which other people may (or may not) be sexually interested
in each other.
One of my projects focuses on assessing perceptions of sexual interest over the course of a social situation. Research has shown that men (relative to women) and people with a sexual assault history (relative to people with no history of sexual assault) have more sexualized overall impression of social interactions and behaviors. My research is aimed at understanding (1) how people’s perceptions unfold (and perhaps, change) over the course of social interactions, (2) how unfolding perceptions may differ as a function of gender and sexual assault history, and (3) how particular events within the social interaction (for example, when Person A teases Person B) influences perceptions.
To address the aforementioned issues, I have adapted a dynamic social psychology technique known as the (computer) mouse paradigm (Vallacher, Nowak, & Kaufman, 1994) which allows me to record subjects’ sexual intent perceptions multiple times per second. The mouse paradigm is essentially a continuum that is presented on a computer screen while subjects view and/or think about a given stimulus (see Figure 1). Subjects record some aspect of their subjective experiences (in this case their perceptions of another person’s sexual interest) by moving a red line on the continuum using their computer mouse. Subjects’ mouse positions (pixel positions) are recorded multiple times per second and converted to a number. Ultimately, subjects’ perceptions are plotted, and one can examine the trajectory of subjects’ perceptions (see Figure 2).
My second project concerns perceptions or associations that occur automatically. Specifically, I am studying the automatic biases people may have about sexuality, and I do so using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Questions that I am addressing include: How sexual (versus friendly) are people’s associations about men, women, and themselves? Do men and women’s associations differ? Do people’s associations differ as a function of their consensual and/or nonconsensual sexual experiences? How do people’s associations change when they are primed with sexual (vs. friendly) stimuli?