Rate My Professor Heather Douglas

Dr. Heather Douglas is a Lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia. An interdisciplinary applied psychologist with expertise in individual differences assessment and measurement, including intelligence and personality assessment, she earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Newcastle in 2014. Her doctoral thesis explored the mechanisms by which personality traits translate into behavior through values, goals, and vocational interests. She also holds a Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) from the same institution. As a social, personality, and individual differences psychologist, Dr. Douglas investigates the factors from internal and external worlds that influence professional behavior and performance. Her research integrates motives, emotions, thoughts, sense of self, personality traits, and other systems to explain how behaviors arise and change moment-to-moment based on environmental settings. This work has applications in designing effective recruitment processes, access and equity initiatives, and user-friendly environments in organizations such as hospitals and universities.

Dr. Douglas's career includes serving as Lecturer in Psychology at Murdoch University from 2016 to 2018, where she developed and introduced the Graduate Diploma in Psychology Program at the Murdoch Singapore Campus and taught undergraduate programs while supervising research students. Prior to that, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University's Australian Institute of Health Innovation from 2014 to 2016 and at the University of New South Wales from 2013 to 2014, focusing on social participation indicators for aged care quality and the impacts of multi-tasking and interruptions on healthcare professionals. Her research addresses key issues such as the imposter phenomenon, the balance of confidence in high-performers, cognitive and social biases including the backfire effect, equity in higher education outcomes amid population diversification, and organizational behavior in health systems. Notable publications include 'The problem with confidence: too much and too little results in poorer achievement, inner conflict, and social inhibition' in Frontiers in Psychology (2023), 'Intuiting or rationalising self-other agreement in leadership?' in Leadership and Organization Development Journal (2024), and conference presentations such as 'The strengths of an imposter: Assessing character strengths of individuals experiencing imposter phenomenon' (2025) and 'Why women in STEM feel like impostors: The role of stereotype threat' (2025). Her findings contribute to improving worker wellbeing, productivity, and error reduction, such as mitigating prescribing errors in emergency departments through better management of interruptions.