Psychology & Social Behavior graduate students receive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships
Marina White (2009)
Impact of Exercise on Stress Response Both With & Without Psychological & Physical Stress
Alaine Kalder (2010)
Adolescents' False Confessions: The Roles of Child Maltreatment and Cortisol Reactivity
Jennie Williams (2010)
Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Associations between Neighborhood Income and Daily Stressors
Christopher Marshburn (2010)
Examining Interpersonal Interactions
Read the UCI Graduate Division report
Read the OC Register article
Read the Fellows' project descriptions by clicking "Read More" below
Alaine Kalder will examine whether maltreatment status predicts false confession in an experimental setting, using a population of juvenile offenders. This sample is ideal as they are likely to have high rates of victimization and have more opportunity to make false confessions. She will also measure salivary cortisol as a possible mediator of risk for false confession. Chris Marshburn will examine how people react when discussing difficult topics in interpersonal interactions. He is specifically investigating how threats to people's attitudes about social issues influence fluctuations in identity. Marina White was awarded the fellowship in 2009 and has already begun her research. The topic is how exercise behavior may mitigate the stress response, specifically, how the physiological responses of a group that underwent a stressful situation while exercising compared with a group that was not exercising while being stressed. Her theory is that exercise, despite being a stressor, utilizes stress hormones, so therefore those who are exercising & undergoing stress would show less of a stress response than those who were doing the two separately. Jennie Williams' topic will involve the study of neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics, such as median income and education, crime rates, and social capital, and their influence on individual indexes of physical, emotional, and cognitive health. The social ecological approach of her research program enables exploration of one’s broader context in the search for factors creating and maintaining existing health disparities, as well as those that protect our health from the adverse effects of living in disadvantaged neighborhoods.