Meet Jessica Jordan
Assistant Teaching Professor, Psychology
Email: jjordan@ut.edu
Address: 401 W. Kennedy Blvd. Tampa, FL 33606
Mailbox: Q
Building:
PH
Room: 507
Education
2015, Virginia Commonwealth University, MSW
2022, University of South Florida, PhD
Courses Taught
General Psychology
Statistics and Experimental Methods 1
Careers in Psychology
Career Specialties
Jordan studies the role of gender stereotypes and gender roles within romantic and sexual relationship, with a focus on sexual communication and sexual consent practices. She also researches how different classist attitudes predict treatment of people who are poor and/or receive social welfare interventions.
Professional and Community Activities
As a researcher, Jordan uses an interdisciplinary perspective, often drawing on extant research in sociology, public health, and social work, and using experimental, quantitative and qualitative methods. Her primary area of research explores the intersection of gender and sexual behavior, with implications for sexual well-being and relationship health. For example, through a series of surveys and experiments, she found that women withhold sexual feedback and fake orgasms to protect their partner’s sense of masculinity and that women perceive their lack of orgasm as a masculinity threat. In other work, she used qualitative analyses to uncover themes of young adults’ self-appraisals of their own lower quality sexual experience, finding that respondents who described a lower quality sexual experience with a man were more likely to appraise their experience as lower-quality due to feelings of lower personal autonomy and greater physical pain, while those in relationships with women described more benign lower-quality experiences (e.g. feeling distracted or disconnected). In her dissertation, Jordan examines the barriers, including gender roles and peer norms, that heterosexual, gay, and lesbian young adults experience in asking for affirmative consent. These studies carry implications for young adults’ sexual health in areas such as consent, condom use, and sexual autonomy, by highlighting attitudes that predict healthy sexual communication.
Jordan has also conducted field research by interviewing women outside of nightclubs. In this study, we found that found that women who self-objectified were less likely to report feeling cold, despite uncharacteristically low temperatures in Tampa.
In her secondary area of research, which addresses economic inequalities and prejudice, Jordan investigates the dualistic nature of prejudice against people who are poor. She has developed a model of Ambivalent Classism, which captures both antagonistic and kindly, yet patronizing, attitudes about people who are poor, and created an accompanying scale (Ambivalent Classism Inventory [ACI]). The ACI has been used to predict support for restrictive social policies that undermine personal agency and predict poorer outcomes for interventions (e.g. health, housing, etc.) and has been translated into Spanish in a Spanish-speaking country. This work was born out of her prior social work experience and developed in consultation with practicing social workers.
Selected publications:
Jordan, J.A., Vandello, J.A., Heesacker, M., Larson-Konar, D.M. (2022). Do women withhold honest sexual communication when their partner’s manhood is threatened? Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI: 10.1177/19485506211067884.
Felig, R.N., Jordan, J.A., Shepard, S.L., Courtney, E.P. Goldenberg, J.L., Roberts, T.A. (2021). Why looking hot means not feeling cold: The effects of self-objectification on how cold women feel when out on the town. The British Journal of Social Psychology. DOI:10.1111/bjso.12489.
Jordan, J.A., Lawler, J., Bosson, J.K. (2020). Ambivalent classism: The importance of assessing hostile and benevolent ideologies about poor people. Basic and Applied Social Psychology. DOI:10.1080/01973533.2020.1828084.
Selected Press Coverage:
Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/articles-heterodoxy/202201/when-feeling-hot-stops-you-feeling-cold)
Honors and Awards
Teaching Awards:
Eve Levine Graduate Student Teaching Award (2021)
Provost's Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Teaching Assistant: Honorable Mention (2020, 2021)