The chair of the Psi Chi/J.P. Guilford Undergraduate Research Awards Committee, Christopher Koch, PhD, has announced the winners of the competition. Psi Chi congratulates these 2005-06 winners of the Guilford Awards and wishes them continued success. Cash awards were as follows: $1,000 for first place, $650 for second place, and $350 for third place. We encourage all Psi Chi members to begin now to prepare papers to submit for the 2006-07 research competition

Read abstracts of these award winning papers here.

Janet Stepaniuk is a fourth-year honors student in the department of psychology at the University of Victoria in Canada. She is interested in the area of lifespan development because the contribution of knowledge in this area has both applied and theoretical importance for all. She believes it is a worthwhile contribution to science as more research is needed to understand and to help develop preventative measures for the expanding aging population. She is currently the president of the Psi Chi chapter and is very pleased to be part of the first chapter in Canada. She is honored to be a part of the tradition of excellence within psychology and she looks forward to her chosen career of academia.

Laurel M. Peterson graduated summa cum laude and with honors from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. During her internship with the Collaboration in Hypertension to Reduce Disparities, she realized the importance of the human element in medical treatment. Despite the existence of effective medicine, people still die prematurely of diseases that are controllable. She believes success of treatment does not just depend on medicine, but on psychology as well. Through the course of her career she hopes to bridge the gap between treatment and health by examining the role of human perceptions, behaviors, and habits. This research, carried out in pursuit of honors, attempted to investigate these concepts for a particularly challenging adherence issue, weight loss behavior. She hopes to continue her research by pursuing her PhD in health psychology, researching the myriad of factors that affect the treatment of adults suffering from obesity, nicotine addiction, cancer, or hypertension. Receiving the Guilford Psychology Research Award is an enormous honor for Ms. Peterson, but it also enhances the dissemination of her research to a greater audience concerned with the obesity epidemic in our society. She is currently working as a policy analyst and program coordinator for the National Association of Mental Health Planning and Advisory Councils and Mental Health America.

Sarah C. Preston is from Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated cum laude with a BS in psychology from Davidson College in Davidson, NC in May of 2006. She received the Sigma Xi award for the research she did for her Senior Honors Thesis, entitled "Children's Own Perceptions and Their Perception of Adults' Evaluations of Lying and Truth-Telling." She is also a member of Order of Omega and Psi Chi. Ms. Preston was a four-year member of the cheerleading squad and of Warner Hall eating house. She has plans to teach for a few years before attending graduate school to earn a degree in clinical psychology.