Dr. Cory Pedersen works at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in the Psychology Department at the time. Here we talked about psychology in her office, part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education?
Dr. Cory Pedersen: At the undergraduate level, at the University of Calgary. At the graduate level, at the University of British Columbia, from where I earned a Masters and Ph.D. degree in Developmental Psychology.
Jacobsen: What originally interested you in psychology? In particular, what interested you about human sexuality?
Pedersen: Well, I acquired my degree from the department of educational psychology and special education. I applied there because I particularly wanted to work with one of the faculty, Dr. Kim Schonert-Reichl. She was doing research in socio-emotional learning and competence, and how it relates to things like psychopathology and peer relationships. That’s what I was initially interested in. In particular, I wanted to study those variables as they related to mental illness and various childhood mental disorders, and I especially wanted to work with Kim. However, well into my academic career, after many years teaching adolescent development, it came to my attention that textbook coverage of sexual development was lacking in many respects, and outright wrong (I hypothesized), in others. So I developed my first lab at Kwantlen (tentatively called a “Development Lab”) and conducted two large scale studies on sexual development among adolescents. From there, I developed an entire human sexuality course and changed the focus of my research to human sexuality.
Jacobsen: What topics have you researched in your career?
Pedersen: As a graduate student, I was in two different research labs at UBC. One was the Socioemotional Development Lab run by Kim. We investigated things like moral reasoning, moral development, peer relationships, bullying, conduct disorder, empathy, and pro-social moral reasoning.. My masters work came out of that lab. The other lab I worked in was the Self-Regulated Learning Lab, which involved work on the self-regulated learning components of learning disabilities among children and adults. Kids and adults with learning disabilities tend to lack self-regulated learning. They tend to be unaware of their own learning difficulties. We developed some self-regulated learning strategies to help them monitor their own cognition, and their own learning styles. I was in that lab, and we did a number of studies in the local schools.
For my Doctoral Dissertation, I looked at children’s conceptions of mental illness, ‘how do children come to understand mental illness in their peers?’ They do see it – unfortunately. How do they understand its cause, its prognosis, its severity? How do they perceive these individuals in terms of friendship quality? Whether they would be good friends or bad friends, whether they would like them or not. And since leaving graduate school, and coming to Kwantlen, I have done several studies; most recently on human sexuality among adolescents and emerging adults. Things like the developmental progression of sexual events in life of adolescents and emerging adults. What do they do in their developmental progression? In other words, what they do first, what do they do next, and so on, and whether these series of events predict their level of promiscuity and level of unusual sexual activities. I also did another study on the predictors – I do a lot of regression research – of infidelity as measured by the big five personality variables.
Jacobsen: What areas are you currently researching?
Pedersen: I have a couple of things on the go. Right now in my human sexuality lab we are looking at changes to current trends in exotic dance. We have two directions in which we are going. If you look at the popular media, you have lately seen a lot of exotic dance put out there as normative behavior. A person can take pole dancing classes. A person can learn how to lap dance, provide a lap dance. Popular culture is trending towards putting lap dancing and pole dancing out as a good means for aerobic exercise. Some researchers have coined the term `stripper chic`, which is the new culture of empowerment for exotic dancers. Given that, we hypothesize that there has been a shift. Traditionally, exotic dance has been stigmatized in the literature. Much literature has come out of the field of sociology, which results in a tendency towards female liberalism. Female exotic dancers have been viewed largely as victims. But we have a different take on that. While admittedly many exotic dancers have been victimized, we are putting forth the argument that exotic dancing can actually be sexually liberating. That exotic dancers are earning legitimate capital gain. They are providing a legitimate service, and with the general trend toward what is called `stripper chic, it may be changing not just societal views, but the views among exotic dancers too. The view of their own stigma; that their personal identity is viewed more positively. Also, we are going to look at predictors (regression is my thing!) of things like psychopathology, self-esteem, and standard measures of restrictive or permissive sexuality. We hypothesize that there will be no difference between the average population – Kwantlen students – and exotic dancers.
The other study that we are looking at is the enmeshment of gender identity with sexual orientation. There is considerable anecdote, even research, that people confuse sexual orientation with gender identity. For instance, there is a perception that if someone is gay, this person must not be gender normed; the perception that gay men are feminine and that lesbian women are masculine. We plan to tease this enmeshment apart by having participants evaluate the degree to which they think a gay person would be suitable for a job description that is exceptionally masculine or feminine. Of course, we think gay men will be viewed as less competent and that lesbian women will be viewed as more competent in a traditionally masculine job and visa versa.
Jacobsen: What epistemologies, methodologies, and tools do you use for your research?
Pedersen: Almost all of my research is cross-sectional. I have not conducted any longitudinal designs, as many trained in developmental psychology do. Most of my research is quasi-experimental in nature that does not involve any manipulation of variables for the most part, but only to examine variables as they exist in cross-sections of the population. Two exceptions to this general trend; the study recently done in my lab on the confounding of gender and sexual orientation, and work with my honours student on sexual paraphilia. These were both experimental designs.
—
Original publication on www.in-sightjournal.com.
—
—
Image Credit: Getty Images.