RESEARCH
Love Styles and Attachment Styles in College Students
The core of HPU's Psychology major is the development of research skills, culminating with an independent research project in the Advanced Research Methods in Psychology course. For my project, I surveyed college students online through Qualtrics in order to examine relationships between Lee's love styles (1976) and attachment styles. I ultimately found significant positive correlation between anxious attachment and the mania love style, but no evidence of significant relationships between other love styles and attachment styles, likely due to low statistical power given limits to participant recruitment and low rates of questionnaire completion. In the future, I hope to replicate this study with a larger and more diverse sample.
"Play Ball": The Relationship between Gender Norms, Childhood Physical Activity, and Adult Athletic Development
The cornerstone of HPU's Honors Scholars Program is the Qualifying Signature Project, a year-long group research project focused on a central theme selected by the class.
For the Class of 2021's theme of "Play," we surveyed HPU students on their athletic experiences in elementary school, middle school, high school, and the present day, as well as the perceived impact of gender norms on these experiences. We found that while people who participated in sports in elementary school considered themselves more physically active in adulthood, women found their sports experiences negatively impacted by gender norms in high school and college.
Mutation Density in "Blondy" Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus)
In my Honors Scientific Reasoning course, Domestication Syndrome, we worked in groups to sequence the DNA of okra samples exposed to ethyl methanesulfate, a known mutagen, to look for genetic mutations that could be related to physical changes in the amount of slime in okra fruits. This research was aimed toward the end goal of eventually producing a new, more palatable okra cultivar that could be grown as a highly nutritious crop in
high-hunger regions of the world. After completing the course, my group presented our work at the 2019 High Point University Research and Creativity Symposium (High-PURCS).
In Living Color: The Influence of Perception on Emotion in Lois Lowry's The Giver
Each Honors Scholar takes two "Scholar Seminars," research-based courses centered on a special interest topic. (Neuro)Science Fiction is one such course focused on evaluating science fiction literature and films through the lens of neuroscience and psychology, including a scholarly review paper applying these concepts to one of the novels read in class. For my scholarly review, I researched the role of color perception on emotional states, as well as neuroanatomy associated with the visual processing of color, to argue that the general population’s monochromatic vision in Lois Lowry’s The Giver is not a side effect of the community’s suppression of emotions, but rather a key causal factor in maintaining the institution of Sameness.