Intended Audience
The Department of Psychology welcomes Dr. Michelle Stock as the second speaker in its 2019-2020 lecture series: The Psychology of the Opioid Crisis. She will speak on "Explaining and reducing the association between racial discrimination and substance use"
Dr. Stock received her Ph.D. in psychology from Iowa State University. She is an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the George Washington University teaching classes in social psychology, health psychology, health interventions, and social influence.
Dr. Stock focuses her research on applying social-psychological theories to the study of risky health cognitions and behaviors, including substance use, sexual behaviors, and UV exposure. Her experimental and survey research focuses on the application of dual-processing models, in particular the Prototype-Willingness model (Gibbons, Gerrard, & Lane, 2003), to provide a framework for understanding the cognitive (both heuristic and reasoned) constructs and situational factors that affect health decisions. The research conducted in her lab can be split into three main areas:
1) the relation among risk behavior, social comparison, and perceptions of risk;
2) applying social psychological theory and the Prototype-Willingness model to health interventions;
3) examining the relation between racial discrimination and risky health cognitions and behaviors as well as risk and protective factors that may help explain and that may reduce this relation.