Students
Heather Rees is a second year graduate student in CSUN’s general experimental psychology program. She works as a lab manager in Professor Debbie Ma’s social cognition lab. Heather is interested in studying the intersection of automatic and controlled mental processes with regard to a variety of behaviors. Her thesis investigates the mechanisms behind feature based stereotyping, a form of stereotyping in which the more “prototypic” or typical an individual’s features are of their social group, the more that individual will be stereotyped. In order to do this she is employing an empirical test to determine whether feature-based stereotyping is category mediated or if stereotypes are activated directly by features. Heather hopes to obtain a PhD employing a social-cognitive approach to the study of stereotyping, goal pursuit, persuasion, and number of behaviors with implications for health.