Julia Capestrain and Wesley Hill are research assistants in Dr. Karen Mooney’s lab. They are currently working on a project that examines how college students’ relationships with parents, best friends, and romantic partners are associated with individual adjustment (self-concept, academic performance, and various characteristics and behaviors). Julia and Wes have been adminsitering the study questionnaires, entering the data, cleaning the data, analyzing the data, and preparing posters. They presented some of their initial findings at the Association for Psychological Science’s 24th Annual Convention in Chicago in May 2012.
Julia and Wes have also used this dataset to test their own hypotheses. Julia Capestrain examined differences in the quality of romantic relationships for traditional and nontraditional students. She presented her findings at the UIS StARS Symposium in April 2012 and the Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago in May 2012. Nicole Landreth also collaborated on this project and was a co-author on the poster. Julia won a Travel Award from Psi Chi’s Midwestern Regional Steering Committee to attend the conference.
Wes Hill looked at the relation between students’ patterns of self-perception and behavior problems. He presented his findings at the UIS StARS Symposium (winning first place for Social Sciences Oral Presentation) and the ILLOWA 39th Annual Undergraduate Psychology Conference at Eureka College.
Kristoffer Barrington and Andrew Hathaway are currently research assistants in Dr. Karen Pressley’s lab. They are conducting a study that examines the differences in the type of attention effects based on the duration of an emotional stimulus. Preliminary data were presented at the UIS StARS conference in April 2012.
In addition, Andrew Hathaway was awarded the CLAS Student-Faculty Creative Activities award for the research he plans to conduct next year entitled: The Modulation of Spatial Attention with Emotional Stimuli in Males Versus Females.
Martha Rubio is working with Dr. Shuang-Yueh Pui on a project examining the effect of choice set size (large or small) on whether people choose to defer their choice among indecisives and decisives. Martha has been active with data collection, data entry, and analyzing the data. They presented the results of the study at the UIS StARS Symposium in April 2012.
Jodi Fishburn has been working with Dr. Pui on a project that examines the impact of work-school conflict on unhealthy eating and exercise behaviors college students. Jodi has been actively involved in analyzing the data and results were presented at the UIS StARS Symposium in April 2012.
Cassandra David has been working with Dr. Sheryl
Reminger and Dr. David Towers to design a research study that will use eyetracking equipment to study how people respond to emotional stimuli. The eyetracking equipment can be used to study both the position of a person’s gaze when the person looks at emotional visual images, and it can also measure pupil dilation when a person listens to emotional sounds. The information provided by the eyetracker can be used to better understand how people process emotional information and how these processes impact behavior. During the spring 2012 semester, Cassandra investigated how eyetracking has been used in studies of individuals who experience social anxiety, and she was invaluable in her help setting up the eyetracking and experimental equipment. She will continue to assist with the project during the summer.
Lucy Parker, Stacey Windisch, Andrew Hathaway, and Robert Torrence have been assisting Dr. Frances Shen in a project that examines the impact of parental pressure and support, educational channeling, and internalized stereotyping on the career development of Asian American college students. They have been working on data collection since Fall 2011. Findings were presented at the UIS StARS Symposium in April 2012 and will also be presented at the annual APA Convention in Orlando, FL in August 2012.
Rebecca Goldsborough has been collaborating with Dr. Shen on a project examining the impact of discrimination, social support, adherence to traditional Asian values, and perceived parental attitudes towards homosexuality on the development of internalized homonegativity and poor psychological well-being among Asian American lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons. They were awarded the UIS CLAS Student-Faculty Creative Activities funding and the UIS Summer Competitive Grant for this project. Rebecca and Dr. Shen presented their preliminary findings at the UIS StARS Symposium in April 2012 and will also be presenting at the annual Asian American
Psychological Association Convention in Orlando, FL in August 2012.
Kayla Weitekamp worked with Dr. Carrie Switzer on the Educational Aspirations study. This study examines the differences between traditional and nontraditional aged college students in their motivation to go to college, the perceived barriers to attending college, and their academic self-efficacy while in college. Kayla administered the study questionnaires and entered the data that had been collected into a statistical database.
Rachel Tohme and Kaitlin Easton also worked on an additional phase of the study that is focused on collecting information from students from underrepresented groups. They presented their findings about racial/ethnic differences among college students in terms of their academic self-efficacy and motivation to attend college at the UIS StARS Symposium in April 2012 and they won the Best Social Science Poster Award. Dr. Frances Shen was a co-faculty sponsor on this study.
Kayla Weitekamp is also currently assisting Dr. Marcel Yoder on a project that investigates the effect of interaction on person perception. The purpose of this study is to determine what similarities and differences there are between our impressions depending on whether we interact with another, see a short video of that person, versus merely a photo. Initial results demonstrate that when judging others’ facial attractiveness, these judges are related but different. Attractive persons are seen as attractive regardless of how other interact with them, but at the same time, persons are seen as more attractive when viewed face to face than when view on video or photo.
