Adjusting to college life can present academic, psychological, and interpersonal stressors that adversely affect students. This period may be particularly stressful for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), but BIPOC students’ experiences are understudied. We will recruit a group of 100 incoming UW-Madison freshmen; 50 of whom will be BIPOC and 50 of whom will be white. Before arriving on campus in the summer before freshman year, we will administer an online survey to assess stress and well-being. One month into the semester, we will assess engagement in extracurricular activities, use of campus resources, and their sense of belonging. At the end of the Fall semester, we will re-assess all baseline and one-month measures. We will also acquire end-of-year academic transcripts. Through random sampling of the BIPOC group, we will conduct three focus groups at post-testing; these focus groups will serve to contextualize quantitative data on college adjustment. This study will provide insight into how the college experience affects college freshmen in general, and BIPOC in particular, we will examine whether early engagement in extracurriculars and campus resources differentially mediate BIPOC healthy adjustment to college life.

Social exclusion (when an individual is ostracized or ignored by others) augments aggression. Previous research also links social exclusion with increases in social pain and social distress. The current study is the first to explore whether the impact of social exclusion on aggression is mediated by social pain and social distress. Participants engaged with fictitious players in a virtual ball-tossing task (viz. Cyberball) designed to end with participants either being included or excluded. Participants then completed measures of social pain and social distress. Finally, they aggressed against one of the other Cyberball participants by delivering a painful noise blast (viz. aggression measure). A serial mediation analysis indicated that social pain and social distress significantly mediated the relationship between social exclusion and aggression. Specifically, exclusion (compared to inclusion) was associated with more social pain which in turn augmented social distress and subsequent aggression. Reversing the mediators made the effect non-significant. Implications of these findings on violent behavior will be discussed.

Although creativity is a valued characteristic, it is generally defined through performance on specific tasks like problem-solving. However, there are other ways to define creativity, such as sociometric creativity, in which an individual is defined as creative by their peers. Sociometric creativity is closely associated with giftedness such that individuals are often identified as “gifted” by those around them. There are many factors that influence sociometric creativity, but this study considers traits and stereotypes that are commonly associated with creativity, such as independence or intensive reading. In previous literature, such as Hopp et al. (2019), sociometric creativity has influenced social engagement, especially in gifted populations such that peers perceived as creative experienced more positive social interaction (friendship) than negative interactions (dislike). However, these results were only collected from a sample of adolescents. The present study investigated whether results were similar for college students. Specifically, we hypothesized a positive relationship between sociometric creativity and the willingness to socially engage, where willingness to socially engage is to increase as individuals are perceived as creative. For this, we composed five vignettes describing five individuals. Two Likert scale items were then composed for assumed creativity and likeliness to interact with the described individuals. To measure giftedness, the Gifted Program Selection and Personality Questionnaire (Kim et al., 2009) was modified and included in a survey given to participants. This research intends to clarify how creative and gifted individuals are socially received so as a society, adjustments can be made that advance more positive social interactions.