Social media in recent decades has grown to become an essential part of everyday life. The rise of new social media platforms, such as TikTok, has brought many concerns in how excessive usage may or may not affect other areas of life. While prior research has been aimed toward older social media platforms, this study is more focused on the growing impacts of current popular apps, like TikTok, that have yet to be thoroughly researched. This study aims to understand the relationship between social media and health habits such as sleep, body image, and attention span, specifically within college students. Data was collected through a self-assessed survey of 269 Psychology 101 students. Data analysis revealed gender differences in body dissatisfaction associated with social media, so we ran correlations separately for men and women. In women the only significant correlation was social media body dissatisfaction. However in men social media body dissatisfaction correlated with body dissatisfaction and self control. In addition, men's attention span correlated with sleep quality. We are currently coding the responses to our qualitative question that asked about the relation between social media use and attention span. Because late adolescence and early adulthood are crucial developmental periods in an individual’s life, findings from this study can benefit in understanding the role that social media plays during these stages. As well as a better understanding of human behavior, cognition, and social influences.

Neurodevelopmental disorders, such as ADHD, affect cognitive processes including attention, organization, and self-regulation, while psychiatric conditions often impact emotional regulation and behavior. Nowadays, diagnosis of both conditions have increased across the United States, though notable disparities exist between counties. These geographic differences may reflect deeper social, economic, and environmental influences (Bhugra & Ventriglio, 2023). This study will investigate how prevalence of mental health conditions, including depression/anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, vary at the county level across states. We will examine how key factors such as income, education, health coverage, ethnicity, gender, marital status, healthcare access, and population density relate to these patterns. The geographical information will be analyzed using existing demographic and diagnostic data between 2020 and 2025. Variables will be standardized using z-scores to ensure comparability across regions. The compiled data will be used to map regional differences in diagnosis rates and explore how environmental and demographic factors contribute to disparities between the two conditions. Rural regions are hypothesized to have higher mental health diagnosis rates due to increased social isolation and stigma, whereas urban areas may exhibit higher rates of neurological condition diagnoses because of greater access to health care resources. This research highlights the need for region-specific mental health resources and supports efforts to ensure equitable access to care and implementing targeted interventions to address local disparities.

Auditory cognition encapsulates the intermediary between low-level frequency input and high-level language processing. This lesser-studied area in psychology likely supports first and second language learning and may help researchers explain general, nonspecific deficits in hearing, such as central auditory processing disorders or dyslexia. Two individuals with the same degree of hearing loss may experience different levels of impairments due to differences in auditory cognition. Similarly, two individuals with similar etiologies may show differences when utilizing and adapting to hearing aids or cochlear implants due to auditory cognition. This study aims to explore how auditory cognition determines task performance as measured by pupillometry. In order to do this, three auditory tasks have been developed: the Paced Auditory Serial Addition task, which requires participants to constantly encode, update, sum, and report auditorily presented numbers; the Digit Span (forward and backward), which measures encoding, memory, and task monitoring of increasing strings of numbers; and the Speech in Noise task, where participants must recall the last word of each sentence under difficult listening conditions. Additionally, pupil dilation is a measure of neurocognitive processing and effort, and a custom-made pupillometer will allow us to measure pupil dilation as accurately as possible. A better understanding of how auditory cognition affects hearing levels can be obtained by comparing pupil dilation patterns of a diverse sample of participants across correct and incorrect trials. We hope to use these results to help increase hearing health awareness and to help decrease the stigma in the hearing impairment and loss communities.

This project investigates relationships between parental attitudes toward classic hallucinogens (i.e., LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline) during adolescence, frequency of personal hallucinogen use, and current attitudes toward hallucinogens from the perspective of recreational psychedelic users. Previous literature highlights self-reported benefits, spiritual experiences, and less harm in comparison to other substances when reporting on recreational classic hallucinogen use. However, the associations of parental communication and level of familial religious affiliation with current relationships involving hallucinogens has seldom been investigated. 128 participants took a web-based survey on Qualtrics regarding the parental communication involving classic hallucinogens during adolescence, first age of use, current frequency of use, and personal attitudes toward legality, medical value, and safety of hallucinogenic substances. In comparison with infrequent hallucinogen users, it is predicted that frequent hallucinogen users will indicate significantly higher scores of agreement for the Legal Use of Psychedelics, Effects of Psychedelics, and Openness to Psychedelics portions of the survey. It is inferred that participants who indicate a very religious Christian familial identity will demonstrate significantly higher scores of parental disapproval in the Parental Attitudes portion of the survey. Additionally, the relationship between parental attitudes regarding hallucinogen use and age of the participant during first use will be investigated. The research aim is to explore potential differences between parental communication and the current relationships recreational users have with psychedelics. This is integral in understanding how healthy/unhealthy usage of classic hallucinogens (regarding age during first use and frequency of use) are informed by familial upbringing.

I will use a novel continuous-tracking technique that will allow us to measure participants' responses to humorous things (e.g., video clips) in real-time, without interrupting their attention to the stimuli. which of course causes participants to reflect on the entire humorous event or sequence of events and then cognitively map that to a number or written answer. This project will serve as a method to quantify humor in real-time, to see if there is a way to learn what is “funnier” through measured language use, joke structure, and humor style (R. A. Martin, 2007; R. Martin & Kuiper, 2016). Participants will use cursor-tracking software to indicate how funny they believe the humorous stimuli are. This research will utilize innovative techniques such as mouse-tracking to assess participants’ responses to various stimuli. (Fahim et al., 2024; Meyer et al., 2023; Potamianou & Bryce, 2024) Through our preliminary research, we have been able to see some promising results that show there is a cognitive process being measured in real-time. We still need to see the correlation between humor and the decision-making process itself, yet this will be an incredible feat for social science researchers. In the current field we work in, there is more and more utilization of computer tasks in research. What we’ve learned so far is that there is a slight difference in data-collection methods, as computer simulation has improved, so has our data-collection. (Rosenbusch & Visser, 2023).

The motivation to form and maintain close interpersonal relationships is an essential psychological need for well-being and survival (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated issues of loneliness and isolation among emerging adults at university (Hamza et al., 2021). Furthermore, emerging adults from socio-demographic minority groups in the U.S. may experience unique challenges with social support compared to those who do not identify as socio-demographic minorities (Dubar et al., 2024). The goal of the present study was to explore how emerging adults from socio-demographic minority groups (e.g., racial-ethnic minority, LGBTQ+) experienced belonging at a Predominantly White Institution during the pandemic. Participants (N = 14) were part of a larger longitudinal qualitative study on university adjustment and responded to the following interview question: “Since starting at Wesleyan University, how well do you feel like you fit in as part of the Wesleyan community?” Results of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) indicated 8 key themes: i) "This is Wesleyan": An Inclusive Community; ii) I Don’t Fit the Mold: Barriers to Fitting In; iii) I Fit the Mold: I am Wesleyan; iv) Prioritizing Academic and Establishing Personal Boundaries; v) Finding Community via Shared Identity and Interests; vi) Implications of Social Media; and vii) In Flux Perceptions. These results shed light on how both internal (e.g., identity) and external (e.g., university context) factors contribute to opportunities and challenges for interpersonal connections, and highlight the need for university administration to attend to the unique interpersonal needs of students from diverse socio-demographic groups.