Research Interests and Foci

The persistence of group-based inequality in the U.S. and around the world motivates my research program on how social perception processes give rise to disparities in health and well-being. I focus on the role of categorization and stereotyping processes in health care and sexual trauma domains with respect to social identities historically harmed by inequality and identities that are often overlooked in psychological science.

Health care inequities

Lines of work:

Do gender stereotypes about emotional dramatization lead to biased expectations of women's and men's pain? Are these gender sterotypes applied similarly across race?
How might gender stereotypes influence expectations and judgments of nonbinary and transgender individuals' pain experiences?
Are stereotypes about life hardship and insensitivity to pain that are commonly applied to low socioeconomic status adults also applied to low socioeconomic status children?
Do race-gender overlap beliefs lead to Black, relative to White, women being judged as invulnerable to health conditions that are more common among women than men (but not conditions that are similarly common among women and men)?
How are prototypes of suicide risk racialized and gendered? What consequences might this have?
How do beliefs about emotionality influence people's own willingness to report pain and seek care?

Sexual trauma biases

Lines of work:

How do body shape cues influence sexual perceptions and responses to disclosures of sexual trauma?
Do beliefs depicting Black women as less feminine and more masculine than White women yield beliefs about Black women being less likely to experience sexual trauma and health conditions associated with femininity than White women?
How do perceivers respond to disclosures of sexual trauma from nonbinary individuals compared to women? Do gender stereotypes associated with femininity or masculinity contribute to these responses?
How does the language used to describe an individual who has experienced sexual trauma (e.g., victim or survivor) influence mental representations of this experience?
How does the language used to describe an individual who has experienced sexual trauma (e.g., victim or survivor) influence expectations of physical and social pain?

Ongoing work: identity complexity

Lines of work:

Do Multiracial categorization biases have consequences for perceptions of vulnerability to race-associated health conditions?
What role do group membership, numeracy, and social status play in categorization biases?
What identity do people spontaneously attend to when multiple dimensions of identity are salient?
Which facial features do perceivers attend to when categorizing Black and White men's and women's race and gender?
How do perceivers integrate visual or auditory cues to gender with binary and nonbinary gender pronouns?
What stereotype content do perceivers hold for nonbinary gender identities?