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Summer Research Grant 2001-02 Winners

Psi Chi reports a successful first year for its new Summer Research Grant program, with six $3,500 grants awarded. Each of the grants included a stipend of $2,500 to the winning Psi Chi student plus $1,000 to the sponsoring faculty member at the research institution. The 2001-02 Summer Research Grant winners are listed below (alphabetically). Psi Chi congratulates these winners, and encourages all members to apply for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Read about all the winners' abstracts and biographies below.

Age and Gender Differences in Decision Making
Spaska S. Dvoiatchka
Concord College (WV)

The study examined cognitive processes in decision making among young and older adults. Participants were presented with 3 scenarios about purchasing an automobile and were asked to make a decision for themselves and other individuals based on information about different automobiles. Their decision quality, task performance, and cognitive ability were assessed. Two types of information search strategies were distinguished. Compensatory search strategy is an exhaustive strategy that relies on mathematical averaging of the features of each alternative, while noncompensatory strategy is a selective strategy that reduces the number of variable alternatives quickly so that less information must be searched. Age and gender were expected to influence the search strategy used by the participants. Young adults were expected to use compensatory strategies and offer higher quality decisions whereas old adults were expected to use noncompensatory strategies. Men were expected to be more selective and women were expected to be more comprehensive in their searches. At present, conclusive results are not available because the data are still being analyzed and interpreted.

Spaska S. Dvoiatchka is originally from Bulgaria, where she graduated from high school in May 1999. She is currently a senior majoring in psychology and sociology at Concord College in Athens, W.Va. Ms. Dvoiatchka's overall GPA since her first semester has been 4.0.
    Ms. Dvoiatchka's current interests revolve around graduate school applications. Otherwise, she enjoys reading about and conducting research, doing community service, and drawing. Ms. Dvoiatchka has been a Psi Chi member since March 2001 and a student affiliate of the American Psychological Association since October 2001. She is also an advanced tutor with Student Support Services at Concord College, and she earned the Outstanding Tutor of the Year Award for 2000-2001. For the 2000-2001 academic year, she was included in the National Dean's List.
    After spending four productive years at Concord, Ms. Dvoiatchka will be graduating in May 2003 and intends to go to graduate school, for which she is currently applying. Ms. Dvoiatchka is interested in a PhD in clinical psychology with an emphasis on child, adolescent, and family psychology. For a future career, she would like to be able to do both therapy and research with problem children and adolescents within a family context. In addition, she would like to devote some of her time to teaching.

The Impossible/Improbable Distinction: A Study of Children's Understanding of Possibility
Jessica Gale
Pomona College (CA)

The present study examines when and by what mechanisms children begin to make the ontological distinction between impossible and improbable events. After being read an illustrated story depicting a number of impossible, improbable, and probable events, 4- and 5-year-old children reported whether they had experienced each event and whether they believed each event was possible. When they indicated that an event was impossible, children were asked to justify their responses. Unlike an adult control group, children consistently failed to differentiate impossible and improbable events, and systematically judged both types of events to be impossible. There was a developmental trend in the ability to correctly classify possible and unexperienced events, with older children making correct classifications more often than younger children. Children's justifications differed qualitatively from adults and differed across the 3 event types. There was a developmental trend with regard to the ability to provide ontological justifications. This study suggests that children's understanding of possibility may be based on a model that differs from the model invoked by adults.

Jessica Gale is currently a junior at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. In addition to her summer research at Harvard University's Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Ms. Gale is in her third year as a research assistant on a project investigating the development of children's theory of mind and parent - child storytelling. She also serves as a student mentor and student-faculty liaison for Pomona's Psychology Department. Ms. Gale is a member of Pomona's residence hall staff and is a campaign coordinator for Teach For America. After graduation, she hopes to return to Harvard to earn an EdD in human development and psychology. In her free time, Ms. Gale enjoys long walks on the beach, movies, music, running amok with her friends, and spending quality time with her three utterly adorable younger siblings.

Gendered Managerial Stereotypes: A Meta-Analysis of the "Think Manager--Think Male" Phenomenon
Tiina Irene Ristikari
Rhode Island College

A meta-analysis was conducted to investigate the extent to which leader or manager stereotypes are gender-stereotypical. Specifically, we included data in 2 separate paradigms--one started by V. Schein (1973) and the other by G. Powell and D. A. Butterfield (1979) as well as by E. Shinar (1975). Studies in the Schein paradigm correlate stereotypic ratings of managers or leaders with stereotypic ratings of men and women. The correlations with men and women are compared to determine the extent to which stereotypical leaders are more like stereotypical men or women. The second paradigm includes studies by Powell and Butterfield in which participants rate leaders or managers in general, or a subtype of leaders, on scales that assess gender stereotypes. Ratings on the masculine and feminine subscales of the stereotype measure are compared to describe the leader or manager stereotype. The data will be analyzed by comparing findings produced by male and female research participants as well as studies conducted in differing time periods and varying cultures and subcultures.

Tiina Irene Ristikari is a senior psychology major at Rhode Island College. She moved from Oulu, Finland, where she was born, to Rhode Island three years ago to attend Rhode Island College. Since she moved to Rhode Island, she has been involved in research at Rhode Island College, Harvard University, and, most recently, at Northwestern University. Ms. Ristikari has presented her research at the New England Psychological Association's meetings and at the Rhode Island College Undergraduate Conference. She is also a recipient of several research grants and awards, including the Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Grant, Rhode Island College Honors program student grant, New England Psychological Association's Young Scholar Award, and Finnish Psychology Teachers' Associations Award for a top five score in the matricular exam. Ms. Ristikari has also been involved in several activities on her school campus and has served as the president of the Rhode Island College Psi Chi Chapter. Currently she is working on her senior honors project, titled "Status Discrepant Dyad Interaction, African American and European American Men." She is applying to PhD programs in social psychology and hopes to begin doctoral studies in the fall of 2003.

Parental Stress as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Exposure to Community Violence and PTSD Symptoms in Urban Youth
Rebecca Ann Schrier
The College of William & Mary (VA)

Researchers have begun to take a multicontextual approach to understanding the impact of exposure to community violence (ECV) on child mental health. Family processes are being studied as mediators and moderators of the relationship between ECV and child functioning. For example, Linares et al. (2001) found that maternal stress mediated the relationship between ECV and child behavior problems in their sample of 35-year-olds. The current study examines the role parental stress plays within an older sample of children exposed to community violence.
    Participants included 58 African American 5th-grade students attending 2 urban public schools. ECV was assessed using a modified version of the child report measure "Things I Have Seen and Heard" (Overstreet et al., 1999). Total ECV was calculated by summing frequency scores across all items. The Checklist of Childrens' Distress Symptoms (CCDS; Richters & Martinez, 1990) was used to assess posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Students rated the frequency of symptoms on a Likert scale, and responses were recoded as 1 or 0 indicating the presence (a lot of the time, most of the time) or absence (never, once in a while) of a symptom, respectively. Parent-reported stress was assessed using the Parent Distress subscale of the Parenting Stress Index Short Form (Burke & Abidin, 1980). Raw scores were converted to percentile rankings based on normative data.
    Correlation analyses indicated a significant relationship between ECV and PTSD symptoms, but not between ECV and parental stress, thus ruling out parental stress as a mediator of ECV and PTSD symptoms. A regression analysis was conducted to determine whether parental stress moderated the relationship between ECV and PTSD symptoms. ECV and parental stress were entered in the 1st step, followed by the interaction term in the 2nd step. The overall model was significant, R² = .27, F(3, 56) = 6.58, p < .01, and the interaction term resulted in a significant change in R², DR² = .14, ß = .39, p < .01. A plot of the interaction indicated a stronger relationship between ECV and PTSD symptoms under conditions of high parental stress as opposed to low stress.
    The observed increase in child vulnerability to ECV when parents are under stress may be related to reduced consistency in parental support and structure (Foy et al., 1996). As children get older, parental stress may function as a moderator rather than a mediator for various reasons. First, the cowitnessing of violence is less likely to occur. In situations of shared ECV, parents' own exposure may account for the relation between ECV and parental stress. For school-aged children, parents may have limited knowledge of children's ECV, reducing the relation between ECV and parental stress (Hill & Jones, 1997). Second, parents act as primary models for coping in younger children, especially when present during the trauma. However, older children possess a range of coping models, so the link between parent stress and child coping becomes less direct. Our findings highlight the need to examine how family processes operate across different stages of development so that intervention efforts account for the subtleties and differences present throughout child development.

Rebecca Ann Schrier is currently a senior at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. She will be graduating in May 2003 with honors in psychology and a minor in religion focused on Asian studies. Ms. Schrier's honors thesis will expand the research she conducted this summer at Tulane University. She intends to begin graduate school next fall, pursuing a degree in clinical psychology. Her current research interests center around childhood bereavement and the ability to cope with grief at a young age. After having focused on this subject in both a high school senior research project ("A Child's Heart: Stories of a Parent's Death from a Child's Perspective"), and in an independent study last semester ("A Child's Conception of Death as a Factor of Cognitive Development and as Informed by Children's Literature"), Ms. Schrier looks forward to furthering her work with greater academic resolve.

The Relationship Between Posttraumatic Stress Symptomatology and Hartmann's Personality Dimension of Boundaries in the Mind in Inner City Adolescent Girls
Roxanne L. Thrush
Wheaton College (IL)

The purpose of this research was to examine whether certain personality variables correlated with severity of posttraumatic stress symptomatology in a sample of 24 adolescent girls aged 13-18 living in a violent inner city community. The Boundaries Questionnaire (BQ; Hartmann, 1991) was used to measure the relative separation or integration of the construct of "boundaries in the mind" which separate an individual's various cognitive, emotional, and semantic processes as well as states of awareness, senses of self and self in relation, ideas about group penetrability, and conceptions of absolute versus relative standards of abstract concepts of ethics and aesthetics. Severity of posttraumatic stress symptomatology was assessed with Briere's (1989) Child Version of the Traumatic Stress Checklist (TSC-C), which includes subscales of anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress, dissociation, sexual concerns, and anger. It was expected that higher scores on the TSC-C would be positively correlated with thinness of personal boundaries, but that world boundaries would be relatively thick compared to the adolescent population on which the questionnaire was normed. Both of these hypotheses were supported: higher TSC-C scores were significantly correlated (p < .0001) with thinness of personal boundaries, particularly relating to boundaries of primary process thinking. This sample endorsed thicker world boundaries than the comparison group (p < .05), indicating that they perceive other groups as less penetrable, organizations as most effective when individuals maintain distinct roles, and standards of truth and beauty as more absolute. The older subjects in this sample (ages 16-18) scored significantly higher (p < .05) on the World Total than the younger subjects (ages 13-15), suggesting that cognitive development may lead to a thinning of world boundaries.

Roxanne L. Thrush is currently a senior at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., and plans to graduate in May 2003 with a psychology major and mathematics minor. Honors that she has received in the past include being named valedictorian of her high school class and receiving a National Merit Scholarship. Before graduating from Wheaton, she expects to finish her senior honors thesis, titled "Relationships Among Gender, Personal Epistemological Preferences, Boundary Structures, and Choices of College Major." This year Ms. Thrush is serving as the president of the Wheaton College Psi Chi Chapter, and is also a member of Phi Sigma Tau, the national honor society in philosophy. She is a student affiliate member of both the American Psychological Association and the Sleep Research Society. One of her personal interests is long-distance running, and she is currently training for her second Chicago Marathon.
    Ms. Thrush is interested in pursuing a career in research, and has interned and is currently employed in the Psychology Department of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. She has been serving as a research assistant to Dr. Rosalind Cartwright on her study of the sleep and dreams of recently divorced depressed subjects. It was through this work experience that Ms. Thrush was able to publish her own abstract in the journal SLEEP and present this research at the annual Associated Professional Sleep Societies convention this past June. In the future, she anticipates focusing on studying the area of personality; she is interested in both biological and social forces that possibly contribute to personality development as well as the effects of individuals' personality variables on their experiences of, and in, the world. Ms. Thrush would like to explore questions of what it means to be human and how humans can and do experience wholeness.