I was a research assistant for Dr. Elizibeth Brondolo's lab at St. John's University. We are researching schemas and the effects of racism on social stress and health using the IAT. Through this research I've interacted with particpants and my labmates through researching our lab protocol and by having weekly meetings with our members. I am also learning the software programs SAS and SPSS by inputting information from our study into the programs.

The Implicit Association Test was invented and introduced by Greenwald, Schwartz and McGhee in 1998. It was developed to address low validity in test responses regarding stereotypes, feelings about other races, attitudes and other related subjects. Participants were usually unwilling to give truthful answers about how they felt about these topics using self reporting measures (Nosek, Bar-Anan, & Sriram, 2009). Stereotype Confirmation Bias occurs when a person has information on a set of individuals and when that information confirms biases and stereotypes. Biases can be conscious (explicit) or unconscious (implicit) (Cooper et al 2012). For example, when a white American thinks of a black American, either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is subconsciously paired with that that thought. The IAT is used to measure these implicit feelings and biases. The IAT is a chronometric procedure that quantifies strength of conceptual associations by contrasting latencies across conditions (Nosek & Sriram, 2007). Participants are given sets of paired words and a stimulus (i.e. a picture). The participant is shown the stimuli along with the set of words and is to use the response keys to log an answer. (I.e. Black, white, good, bad). When these words are paired with each other, the participant is to use the response keys to pair the words with the pictures. There are four categories and two conditions (i.e. White- good, black-bad and white-bad, black-good). The difference in average response latency between conditions is taken as an indicator of differential association strengths among the concepts (Nosek et. Al 2009). This means that however much time is taken between answers is measured as the strength of the connections between the word pairings and the stimuli given. These latencies are measured because they show the most accurate results. The more time taken to give a response the more, the more the participant has taken the time to think about what answer they should give, meaning that the response was not implicit. The IAT has gained much credibility and popularity over the few years it has been used (Rezaei 2011).

Cooper, L., Roter, D., Carson, K., Beach, M. C., Sabin, J., Greenwald, A., & Inui, T. (2012). The

Associations of Clinicians’ Implicit Attitudes About Race with Medical Visit Communication and Patient Ratings of Interpersonal Care. American Journal Of Public Health, 102(5)

Nosek, B.A., Bar-Anan, Y., Sriram, N., Greenwald, A.G. (2009) Understanding and Using the

Brief Implicit Association Test: I. Recommended Scoring Procedures.

Nosek, B. A., & Sriram, N. (2007). Faulty assumptions: A comment on Blanton, Jaccard,

Gonzales, and Christie (2006). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 393-398.

Rezaei, A.R. (2011) Validity and reliability of the IAT: Measuring gender and ethnic stereotypes. Computers in Human Behavior.