STEPHANIE SHIELDS
SCHOLAR
Stephanie is Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at Penn State University. Her research is at the intersection of emotion, gender, and feminist psychology. She focuses on the politics of emotion in everyday life, specifically, the use of emotion representation (e.g., emotion language) to assert or challenge status and power.
Current projects include perception of tears in competitive sports, perception of gendered expressions of emotion in the workplace, and the relation between beliefs about emotional authenticity and evaluations of others’ legitimacy and competence. She is also interested in intersectionality theory and how social psychological research can be more responsive to this perspective. A third line of research is concerned with development of interventions to educate about the nature and cumulative effects of unconscious bias in the workplace.
​
Her experiential learning tool, WAGES, illustrates the cumulative effect of apparently minor biases in the academic workplace.
​
She also studies the social context of psychological research, especially the history of the psychology of women and gender, and women’s participation in American psychology. Speaking from the Heart: Gender and the Social Meaning of Emotion (Cambridge, 2002), received the Association for Women in Psychology’s Distinguished Publication Award, as did her special issue of Sex Roles on intersectionality of social identities.
She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. She is a recipient of the Carolyn W. Sherif Award, the highest award conferred by Society for the Psychology of Women, which recognizes contributions to the field of the psychology of women as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and leader.
​
Stephanie has served as Director of Women’s Studies at Penn State and the University of California, Davis, and was founding director of the UC Davis Consortium for Women and Research. She is a past-president of the Society for the Psychology of Women, Division 35 of the American Psychological Association.
​
Her research has been supported by external funding from the National Science Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the University of California 4-H Center for Youth Development, as well as competitive internal grants at UC Davis and Penn State.
​
Her editorial experience includes Feminism & Psychology, Sex Roles, (editorial boards), and Review of General Psychology, Psychology of Women Quarterly, Emotion, and Teaching of Psychology (consulting editor). She was the founding editor of The Emotion Researcher of the International Society for Research on Emotion (isre.org).
She is pleased to have the opportunity to make connections between her research and the practical concerns of people’s everyday lives. In recent years, her work has been quoted in Slate, Elle (Canada), Toronto Globe & Mail, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times, and The Times (London).
​