The Social Perception, Attitudes, Mental Simulation Lab

Charlotte Tate received a Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of Oregon in 2006. She publishes under the name "Charlotte Chuck Tate" to have female visibility and transgender visibilty simultaneously. (She has also published under the name "Chuck Tate" [from 2000-2011].)

Dr. Tate is a transgender woman who is genderqueer in her gender presentation. Specifically, she is a woman who is butch-presenting. (See our glossary of gender-related terms or the hyperlinks above for definitions of these three terms.) She was hired in 2009 as an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at San Francisco State University and as the Graduate Coordinator of the Social Psychology Master's of Arts program. Before working at San Francisco State University, Dr. Tate was an Assistant Professor at California State University, Bakersfield, teaching and conducting research at their Antelope Valley center in southern California (2006-2009). For more information about Dr. Tate's research and professional experience, please view her homepage or current vita.

Cris Youssef

Ghislaine Atkins is a first-year M.A. student who hails all the way from sunny South Florida. Her research interests include: race, prejudice, social interaction, perception, interracial interaction ,and computer mediated communication. She is currently examining the literature of race relations in an online setting as she begins the preliminary research for her Master’s Thesis.

Patrick Boyd is a second-year M.A. student focusing on mental simulation of the future and terror management theory.  His interests in this area include how creativity and prefactual thinking can influence responses to reminders of mortality.

Gina Pippin is a second-year M. A. student whose thesis work focuses on prejudicial judgments based on the interaction between classism and racism.

Lab Members |

Ann Harter is senior undergraduate researcher studying how implicit attitudes toward sexual expression and behavior – even those people explicitly disagree with – influence our attitudes and evaluations of sexuality.  For example, how do individuals align their enjoyment of and desire to watch pornography with the cultural perception that “porn is bad?” Ann is exploring this research question as part of the Psychology Honors Thesis Program.

Leigh Smith recently graduated from SFSU where she studied Psychology, Physics and Mathematics. Broadly, she is interested in how the interplay of cognitive and physiological processes shapes our experiences in close relationships, especially in terms of relationship classification, formation, maintenance and dissolution. She is very enthusiastic about statistical techniques and analyses, and has worked as a teaching assistant for introductory and intermediate level statistics classes. She is also a project director in the Emotion, Health and Psychophysiology Lab at UCSF, directed by Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes. She hopes to pursue a Ph. D. in Social Psychology.

Katherine Sorensen graduated with her M.A. degree in Summer 2011. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate working with Dr. Wesley Moons in the Social Evaluation and Emotion Lab at the University of California, Davis. In the SPAMS Lab, Katherine's thesis work demonstrated that sexism--rather than stigma consciousness--appears to influence the perception of contempt. Katherine also worked in Dr. David Matsumoto’s Culture and Emotion Research Lab (CERL) investigating the effect of nonverbal displays of emotion on group behaviors.