Stereotyping & Prejudice

Mixed Valence Attitudes

Graduate work under Emily Balcetis’ SPAM Lab.

In this recent line of work, I am interested in exploring the following questions: What are the group held beliefs marginalized groups have about other marginalized groups? How do these mixed-valence attitudes shape our interactions towards other groups and impact our own identity?

Minoritized Adolescents’ Perceptions of Leadership

Graduate work under Emily Balcetis’ SPAM Lab.

With this research, we aim to test interventions that break stereotypic leadership beliefs by diversifying children’s mental representations of leaders, and ultimately strengthen their belief that they belong in leadership. We developed a workshop to break the stereotypic beliefs about who can and should be a leader among racial and ethnic minority adolescents. 

Latinx Face Perception

Undergraduate work under Debbie Ma’s SIP Lab.

Through my work with the SIP lab, we focused on face perception and categorization, as well as intergroup relationships and coalition building. One of the central questions in the lab is to understand the social and cognitive factors that give rise to multiracial categorizations. One of the common findings in the lab and in the literature suggested that people often wrongly categorize multiracial faces as Latinx, an effect referred to as the so-called emergent race effect.

To understand this phenomenon better, I have examined what types of facial features give rise to Latinx categorizations. 

Social Learning of Bias

Undergraduate work under Mina Cikara’s HINL Lab.

As a Leadership Alliance Summer Research Intern, I was afforded the opportunity to work with Professor Mina Cikara, who directs the Harvard Intergroup Neuroscience Lab. As part of a larger collaboration between Professor Cikara and Professor David Amodio’s graduate student, David Schultner, I conducted a project on the propagation of biases through the mechanisms of social learning. In a series of studies, they found that observers of prejudiced behavior copy those prejudices in their own social choices (even at a cost to themselves) when interacting with novel group members. Our project over the summer investigated how having a prior affiliation with a group influences subsequent interactions with those groups’ members and found, through mixed effects models and applied computational models of reinforcement learning in R, that social learning of bias was unaffected by prior affiliations. 

Diversity & Health Equity

Racially Targeted Junk Food Marketing

Graduate work under Emily Balcetis’ SPAM Lab.

In this line of study, we are interested in looking at the effects of racially targeted food marketing on minoritized adolescents. Our big question is: For adolescents, does seeing someone who looks like you in an ad impact your food choices? This area of interest is important because it may potentially highlight factors that exacerbate issues of health inequity for racially minoritized populations.

Undergraduate NIH BUILD PODER Senior Project: Examining the Relationship between Racially Marginalized Pediatric Mental Health Service Providers and their Clients

Undergraduate work under Rika Meyer’s CATCH Lab.

This project aims to highlight the obstacles racial-ethnic marginalized groups experience when entering the professional field of pediatric mental health services and the potential impact on clients. The study design for my senior project includes a survey sample of self-identifying marginalized pediatric mental health service providers using measures that look at compassion satisfaction and fatigue, burnout, work discrimination and the relationship these measurements and sharing marginalized identities have with meeting treatment goals. 

Notably, my project proposal received a poster presentation award at my university’s annual research competition in 2022. In 2023, I was also awarded one of six CSUN Presidential Scholarships on the basis of my academic record, personal strengths, the project’s potential in advancing the psychology field, and its contribution to the broader CSUN community.