Psychology students, profs give strong showing at conference

In 2015 Miranda joined the research team in assistant psychology Professor Shelly S. McCoy’s emerging adult risk behavior lab at McCoy’s invitation. Along with psychology Professor Leslie Martin and La Sierra neuroscience graduate Vedeline Torreon he studied a survey of 136 college students conducted by McCoy on variables of conscientiousness, emotion regulation, physical health and psychological health. While the connection between regulation of emotion and conscientiousness has been tied to physical wellbeing, “we wanted to see if those same variables could predict people’s levels of psychological wellbeing,” Miranda said. “We hypothesized that emotion regulation and conscientiousness would be good predictors of psychological wellbeing, and our research showed exactly that.”

“Hopefully we can continue to do more research on this subject,” said the future clinical psychologist.

His months of work on the joint project as a student research collaborator did more than open a window of interest – it also landed him a prestigious Psi Chi Research Award during the Western Psychological Association's annual spring conference this year in Long Beach.

Miranda, a senior this school year, served as La Sierra University’s Psi Chi chapter president last year. The research award he won is limited to members of Psi Chi, an internationally recognized honor society. 

This is the second consecutive year La Sierra Psi Chi student members, under the direction of McCoy, have won the top research prize. In May 2015, the Psi Chi society awarded Torreon and 2015 psychology graduate Tatevik Zakaryan the award for their work with McCoy on a study of data from another university that showed a link between environmental factors and binge drinking among college women.

“This makes two years in a row,” McCoy said. “We are excited and thankful for the experience.”

The Psi Chi award highlighted a banner year at the conference for La Sierra psychology students and faculty members who gave 11 poster presentations. By all accounts, the showing was a record number for the university. 

Posters were presented by psychology professors McCoy, Christophe Le Dantec, In-Kyeong Kim and Leslie Martin and their students. Le Dantec, assistant professor in neuroscience, and seven of his students gave two poster presentations. “These two posters evaluated how the duration of visual stimuli was affected by their location in the visual field,” Le Dantec said. “The farther the stimuli were from the central vision, the shorter the durations were perceived. Interestingly, this significant effect found with monochromatic stimuli was not as obvious with colored stimuli.”

Le Dantec said the research will be submitted for publication to an international research journal. Next steps this fall will involve electroencephalogram, or EEG tests.

Kim and her students Melissa Vo and Rana Mahmood studied the effect of social influence on memory for a poster research project titled “Investigation of Memory Conformity in Social Context without Confederates.”

The analysis they conducted served as a continuum of the research Kim began at Cornell University while on sabbatical last year. She and the students met regularly to go over research articles and to collect data on campus, at local schools and senior centers and conduct analysis for presentation.

“The study is as an analog to an eyewitness situation in which multiple witnesses are interviewed in the presence of each other,” Kim explained. “Hearing the other witnesses may affect what someone claims to have seen. And even if they are aware of this at the time, it may become embedded in memory, possibly creating false memory. Previous research such as misinformation or social contagion paradigms used confederates to lie or intentionally add misleading information. The goal of the current study is to investigate memory conformity without confederates.”

Kim is preparing an article for publication about the ongoing study.

She and her students also presented a research poster titled “Developmental Changes of Memory Conformity” which considers various ages of study subjects in analyzing whether learning specific languages for certain spatial relationships facilitates the understanding of spatial concept.

Martin and her student, Casey Chatman, presented a research poster on “Development of a Scale to Measure Vaccine Perceptions,” and Martin also gave a symposium titled “Doing Good Can Make Us Better.”