Our lab promotes the development of research regarding people with threatened identities, and examines the social, affective and behavioral consequences of their experiences. Any individual can have part of his/her identity that is devalued or stigmatized in some way—women in the sciences, gay/lesbian, bi-sexuals in American society, aging workers in technology firms, African-Americans in intellectual settings, people contending with mental illness, certain immigrants in the United States. We are interested in the common thread which ties these experiences together: threats to identity people face in settings where their group has been historically marginalized. Such identity threats contribute to intellectual underperformance, mental illness, and inequities in social and career opportunities. Our goal is to understand the nature of this threat and ways that institutions can mitigate it.

We approach this problem from multiple levels of analysis: a cultural level of analysis, examining how threat is manifested in different cultural contexts; a societal level of analysis, examining features of mainstream settings that trigger or forestall threat; a situational level of analysis, examining how the experience of threat differs among distinct social groups; and, most recently, a molecular level of analysis, examining how threat manifests itself in physiological and neurobiological responses. Accordingly, our lab uses a variety of methods to examine stigma, ranging from field studies in stores and schools, to content analysis of media publications, to laboratory studies measuring neurobiological markers of stress.