MSU-Texas Social Cognition and Personality Lab

09/08/2020

Students' class research project from my personality course last year got a shout out in this new article on Psychology Today!

"NFD could present problems in work settings since those high in it could bully others or engage in damaging office gossip. Some might share disinformation and conspiracy theories, as a research project completed by Frankowski’s students found."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202008/always-the-victim

08/13/2020

Newly published research from the Social Cognition and Personality Lab! First author, James Lue, is a 2019 graduate of our Master's program.

We found that people who have a high need for drama may interpret their manipulative and impulsive behaviors as self-efficacy, which in turn may buffer them from stress.

PDF | This research explores the relationships between need for drama (NFD), self-efficacy, and self-esteem. People who have dramatic tendencies tend to... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

04/23/2020

Brian Lang has been working on research for the MSU-Texas honor's program and my Writing in Psychology Course. Brian is following up on research from my personality class last semester in which he is investigating personality predictors of academic success and engagement. This semester we're gathering data from highly engaged students (in many clubs, take on leadership roles, extra-curricular activities, etc. ) and students who are not highly engaged in extra-curricular activities. We predict that conscientiousness (being thoughtful and organized) will predict good grades, but we are testing whether those who are highly engaged will show more of the personality trait of grit (passion + perseverance). There are debates in personality psychology whether grit actually predicts outcomes beyond conscientiousness, so we are trying to discriminate between grit and conscientiousness and trying to find where grit may predict outcomes beyond conscientiousness. We think that grit may actually predict passion and perseverance, but rarely does that translate to passion and perseverance for academic-related activities. We're still collecting data on this study so the presentation is mostly pilot data from last semester.

You can view Brian's presentation here:

Symposium by ForagerOne is a virtual forum to curate and share research and creative projects with your community as well as facilitate discussion. In the process, it builds a central repository of work for your organization.

04/23/2020

Yasmeen, Elissa, Georgia, and Rachel did a fun study for my research methods class that they presented for this year's Virtual Celebration of Scholarship. They followed up on research that Yasmeen and Elissa did last semester in which they investigated moral foundation predictors of attitudes toward disability. For this semester, they hypothesized if people believed they had more positive attitudes toward disability in interpersonal contexts, they would feel they have a moral license to have more discriminatory attitudes toward disabilty in the workplace. They randomly assigned people to receive a message telling them that, based on their scores on an interpersonal attitudes toward disability measure, they had more positive attitudes toward people with disabilities. In a control condition, no message was given. Hypotheses weren't supported, but they built theoretically on their previous research -- they figure that people who hold caring for others as a moral virtue are not easily swayed from such convictions. Great work!

You can view their poster here: https://symposium.foragerone.com/mwsu/project/1355

04/23/2020

Because the Celebration of Scholarship moved online this semester, poster presentations included a short video upload in which the presenters present an overview of their poster. Carl, Mariea, and Carley presented a poster of the research they did as part of my Research Methods course. They investigated the correlations between dark triad traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) and different incentives people would choose to complete undesirable work-related tasks (e.g. being tasked with laying off a work force). Interesting, with room for follow-up!

You can see thier poster here: https://symposium.foragerone.com/mwsu/project/584

Congrats on the presentation, and congrats to Carl Alfert who was recently accepted into the Cognitive Neuroscience Ph.D. program at Texas Tech in Fall 2020!

04/23/2020

Due to the pandemic, the Celebration of Scholarship went online this semester. Despite the circumstances, we still got done as much research as was feasible. Mallory LeDoux is a senior psych major with a minor in non-profit managment. She is graduating in May and as soon as it's safe she'll be heading to Ethiopia with the Peace Corps. She plans to pursue graduate studies after her Peace Corps assignment. She took on a project to test implicit attitudes toward visible and invisible disabilities. Due to the transition to online education, this became strictly a measurement design project for this semester. We found a number of problems with current implicit measures of attitudes toward disability so we took a systematic approach to designing a new implicit association test to measure people's attitudes toward disability. Mallory pilot tested a list of 50+ disability and ability related words and used a principle components analysis to reduce the list down to 20 words that neatly fit into four different categories (visible disability, visible ability, invisible disability, invisible ability). As soon as it is safe to have people come into the lab, we will be collecting data from the Wichita Falls community to test personality predictors of negative biases toward disability. Great work, Mallory!

03/09/2020

Equipment purchase just arrived! The response pads and E-Prime software will allow the Lab to collect millisecond accurate response times in our social-cognitive experiments. These are about 10-20x more accurate than using a computer keyboard.

We currently have two experiments that will use these:
1. A student funded through the Midwestern State Undergraduate Research Office is conducting an experiment to determine automatic biases toward visible and invisible disability.

2. We are conducting research on musicians' cognitive abilities (I can't say much more on this one at the moment because we are currently recruiting participants in the community!)

Thank you to the Midwestern State University Research Committee for funding this purchase!

11/22/2019

Congrats to all the students in Dr. Frankowski's Personality course, and those working on EURECA funded projects. Psychology was well represented this semester! I heard tonight that there was a three-way tie among the presenters! Everyone did a fantastic job! Update your CVs!

11/14/2019

We’ll have many of our students and friends of the SCAP Lab presenting! Keep an eye out for coverage of the presentations 💁‍♀️📈🙋‍♂️

11/06/2019

Congrats, James Lue, on your successful thesis defense today! James investigated how self-efficacy (believing you can take on and complete tasks) and moral neutralization (rationalizing behaviors) affect self-reported college cheating. He hypothesized that people with more self-efficacy would be less likely to cheat and those who cheat would likely morally neutralize their behaviors. He found neutralizing attitudes predicted cheating, but self-efficacy did not. James is currently applying to Ph.D. clinical psychology programs and we're confident he'll get into a top tier program! Well done.