HPV Vaccinations in College Students: Assessing Knowledge, Attitude, and Intention with Religious Attitudes and Behavior

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Christian Kindt and Dr. Wendy Birmingham, Psychology Department Introduction Most religions promote abstinence of sexual intimacy prior to marriage. This ideology may discount the use of vaccinations that religious individuals consider only applicable to those who are sexually active. These individuals may not take the time to investigate the benefits of such vaccinations and indeed […]

Social Integration and Emotional Regulation

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Kimberly Stevens and Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Psychology Department Introduction Midlife adults face a wide variety of physiological, emotional, and cognitive stressors that place them at risk for impaired physical health and longevity. Social integration—which includes high levels of social engagement as well as maintaining a diverse network of social roles—has been shown to protect against […]

Self-regulation, Inhibition Response, and Perceived Parental Support: an fMRI Investigation of Adolescents with ADHD

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Erin Kaseda and Dr. Wendy Birmingham, Psychology Department Introduction It is estimated that between 5-10% of children and adolescents in the United States have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For adolescents with ADHD, parent-child relationships and peer relationships may experience increased conflict. Interpersonal difficulties among family members put children with ADHD at risk for […]

Goal Setting and Goal Achievement in Marathon and Half-Marathon Runners

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Jared Richardson and Dr. Benjamin Ogles, Psychology Department Introduction Goal setting provides multiple benefits in the realm of athletics. These include overcoming fear of failure (Wikman, Stelter, Melzer, Hauge, & Elbe, 2014), performing at a higher level in both training and competition (Filby, Maynard, & Graydon, 1999), and increasing motivation (Sullivan & Strode, 2010). Marathon […]

Study, Test, Test: A Formula to Distinguish Memory Specificity in Declarative Memory

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Jordan Clark and Dr. Brock Kirwan, Psychology Department The goal of this project was to increase our understanding of how human memory works. Specifically, we wanted to investigate what happens in the brain when we make memory mistakes, and to see if there are regions of the brain whose relative activation levels could be predictive […]

Context Dependent Memory Specificity

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Todd Winn, Leila LeSueur, and Dr. Brock Kirwan, Psychology Department Introduction In current literature, researchers have proposed that the relationshipbetween objects and the context they are found in is integral to long-term declarative memory, and converges at hippocampal processes. In order to explore the effect of visual context on memory, our experiment was designed to […]

Parental Knowledge, Attitudes, and Intentions Regarding HPV Vaccination in Religious Populations

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Kristina Hall and Dr. Wendy Birmingham, Psychology Department Introduction According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, about 79 million Americans are currently infected with HPV (“Human Papillomavirus (HPV)”, 2016). In fact, it is so common that most sexually active adults will be infected at some point in their life (“Human Papillomavirus (HPV)”, 2016). […]

Understanding the Neural Networks of Eye Movements in Reading

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Trenton Jackman and Dr. Steven Luke, Psychology Department Introduction Reading is a part of everyday life. Humans read street signs, textbooks, emails, manuals, novels, and many other things. While reading we move our eyes 2-4 times per second. Each movement is called a saccade, and each pause between movements is called a fixation. These eye-movements […]

Fixation-Related fMRI and Syntactic Networks in the Brain

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Brent Foster and Dr. Steven Luke, Neuroscience Department Introduction Humans comprehend language at varying levels of complexity. Syntax, in particular, deals with the arrangement of words and phrases into meaningful sentences. For instance, in English we expect most sentences to follow some variation of the order “Subject–Verb–Object” such as “The boy (Subject) ate (Verb) cake […]

How is Perfectionism Related to Neural Indices of Error Processing and Negative Feedback?

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Jayden Goodwin and Dr. Michael Larson, Psychology Department Introduction Perfectionism, or the pursuit of error-free performance, is often associated with shame, guilt, failure, and low self-esteem (Kilbert, Langhinrichsen-Rohling, & Saito, 2005; Stahl, Acharki, Kresimon, Völler, & Gibbons, 2015). Individuals with psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders, and anxiety disorders often display these […]