Research questions for spring 2026 include:
- How do people's cultural beliefs about dignity, honor, and face relate to their personal growth-focused or protection-focused values?
- What do people believe are the best ways to pursue their goals? When are these beliefs more accurate?
- Do people put their money where their mouth is when it comes to paying for the natural environment?
- How well do research findings replicate at Ithaca College and around the world? (Our team is part of an international research replicability project with more than 360 collaborating institutions.)
You do not need to have taken Social Psychology or Personality before joining this team. With that said, it's good to take at least one of these courses if your join the Social and Personality Research Team. The prerequisite for this team is having finished Research Methods in Psychology.
The idea of doing research might seem intimidating, but the way we do it on this team makes it fun and not as hard as you might expect. Working together makes our research fun. Students have a lot of voice in the design of the studies, and we all work together in troubleshooting them. We analyze data together, figure out what results mean, and write up results to present at professional conferences.
The work outside of class is highly consistent week to week, and takes 4-5 hours per week. Almost every week, students run a research session in a lab, recruit for research participants, read an assigned research article, do 1-2 short writing assignments, analyze data from our studies, and do group presentations for our team. These activities build research skills that are great for graduate school, including literature review, working closely with others on research, writing in APA style, and analyzing data using SPSS.
Every year, we present our work at the Annual Convention of the Eastern Psychological Association and other professional conferences. In the past 10 years, over 60 of my research team students and I have co-authored and presented 40 posters at professional conferences.
We do high-impact research that gets published in top journals. So, my research team is a great way to test drive what being in a graduate school lab group could be like. About 60% of the students who have done two or more semesters of my research team have gone to graduate or professional school. Most have gone to graduate programs in:
- Clinical or Counseling Psychology Master’s or PhD programs (23 alumni)
- MSW (Masters in Social Work) programs (12 alumni)
- School or Educational Psychology Master’s, PhD, PsyD, or EdD programs (9 alumni)
- Social or Social/Personality Psychology Master’s or PhD programs (7 alumni)
Our research team is as much about team as it is about research! So, at the end of each spring semester, if the weather is good, we have one day of class when I lead our team on a hike on Ithaca College Natural Lands. Here is a picture from our team hike in 2026.