On many predominantly white campuses, the majority of diversity comes from student athletes. Past research has shown that sense of belonging is a basic human need and that demographics such as women, white, and non-revenue student-athletes, report greater senses of belonging than men, minorities, and revenue-sport student-athletes (Gayles, 2018). Other researchers have also found that the motivation to succeed academically suffers when there is a low sense of belonging (Booker, 2016). The purpose of this research is to assess factors influencing current student athletes’ sense of belonging. In order to assess the student athletes’ belonging, we surveyed athletes' sense of belonging through the lenses of valued competence and social acceptance. Consistent with more general previous research, the findings revealed that demographic factors have an impact on student athletes’ sense of belonging. The implications of this will be discussed in the presentation.

The Own Age Bias (OAB) is a phenomenon where people better recognize faces of those in their own age group. Contact is considered to be one of the moderating factors in recognizing other age groups faces. Contact should improve other group recognition by improving holistic and configural processing of facial features, and makes out-group members a part of the in-group. We are developing a project in which participants will be shown a sequence of faces of both their own-age and other ages, perform a distractor task, and are then asked if they recognize a sequence of faces including previously seen and new faces. We hypothesize that there will be an OAB within younger and older age groups depending on the amount of contact they have with other age groups; the more contact with other age groups, the less OAB. We also suspect that there will be different neural components when measuring own and other-age group recognition using EEG. We suspect neural components will indicate the processes in the brain to show a difference between older and younger adults.

This study focused on exploring the topic of civic engagement among a non-representative sample of 30 people with a range of mental illnesses through an exploratory base lense. People with mental illnesses often experience problems connecting with their community and sharing their views. Oftentimes they feel discouraged and unmotivated to serve in their communities because they might feel uncomfort or negativity back from their communities. This study was conducted for the McNair Scholars Program, at Augsburg University in the Summer of 2022. The purpose of this study is to explore civic engagement activities and opinions toward civic engagement among people with mental illnesses. The researcher used an online survey including multiple-choice and open-ended questions to collect data on civic engagement among people with mental illnesses. The researchers constructed a qualitative survey to measure perceived structural barriers and major reasons that make it difficult for these individuals to participate in civic activities. Mental health systems and services are civically engaged with regard to other issues or organizations viewed within the community. Keywords: Civic Engagement, Mental Illness, Citizenship, Community Involvement

There are currently 424,000 children living in foster care within the United States, and individuals that have experienced foster care as current and former foster youth are an underserved community that carry a stigmatized identity as foster youth. Unfortunately, there is not a large breadth of research and literature currently available that explores the subject of stigma that persists within the foster care system. The types of stigma include courtesy stigma, internalized stigma, and generalized stigma. Stigma comes from the Greek word “stigmata”, which was a term used to describe a physical mark, or branding, given to members of society that were considered undesirable or dangerous. The marking was a way to easily identify these individuals within society as a means to avoid interaction, leading to these individuals being isolated and discriminated against from other members of society. In modern times, this branding has become synonymous with an invisible branding of being discredited, feared, or perceived as being dangerous or undesirable. This research explores the current gaps that exist when exploring the mechanisms and types of stigma that exist within the foster care system.