 Teaching: | Visiting Assistant Professor and Research Associate
Department of Sociology, Duke University
I conduct research on the emotional and behavioral implications of identity processes in social interaction. My dissertation research examines social position, connectedness, and influence as structural predictors of societal variability in cultural meaning. I have recently two studies on stereotype content, which examine behavioral and emotional responses to stereotyped groups, and compare sentiments toward stereotyped groups in three societies (U.S., Germany, and Japan). My other works in progress broadly deal with issues of justice and emotion, individual differences in impression formation, and change in cultural meaning.
Broadly speaking, my intellectual interests include identity, culture, emotion, and social networks. In both my research and teaching, I emphasize interdisciplinary and multi-level approaches to theory and method. I take a social psychological perspective rooted in the structural symbolic interactionist tradition, wherein the self is comprised of and defined by its multiple role memberships. This heritage is manifest in my use of affect control theory, a control system model of cultural meaning maintenance, social behavior, and emotion. Methodologically, I primarily collect my own data using both survey and experimental methods. I also employ simulation techniques, based upon affect control equations for impression formation, to formulate hypotheses and test new ideas.
Prior to my graduate work at Duke, I studied cultural differences in both the threshold for emotion recognition and the use of contextual information in emotion perception. I also worked briefly as the coordinator of Tanya Chartrand's Social Cognition Research Lab at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, running studies on nonconscious behavioral mimicry and ego depletion.
• MA in Sociology, Duke University, September 2008 • MA in Psychology, Wake Forest University, May 2005 |