Have you ever wondered how to get financial support for your research? APA maintains a directory with hundreds of opportunities for funding psychological research. Today, we take a closer look at one particular grant for graduate students and the amazing projects that will be getting a $1,000 boost.

Every year, APAGS sponsors the Psychological Science Research Grant (PSRG) to provide support for several graduate students conducting psychology research, with additional funding reserved specifically for diversity-focused studies. This $1,000 grant is used to fund innovative psychological science research projects. Graduate students in all fields of psychology and neuroscience (who are also APA student affiliates) are eligible.

PSRG netted a very competitive applicant pool this year. After careful review, 14 applicants were selected to receive funding. These students span several universities and research areas, including social, cognitive, clinical, community, evolutionary, and moral psychology. Seven of these proposed research projects specifically related to diversity, as defined by APA’s 2017 Multicultural Guidelines.

Here’s a brief peek of the 2017 winning projects:

• Steven Hobaica (Washington State University) will be studying transgender individuals in cisnormative sex education. Steven aims to understand how exclusive educational experiences may affect transgender individuals’ physical and mental health outcomes, self-conceptions, and relationships.
• Laura Werner (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) will be studying the aging of working memory. Laura plans to investigate whether processing speed and inhibition account for different aspects of working memory performance and age-related decline in working memory.
• Amanda Sanchez (Florida International University) will be studying whether cultural formulation improves satisfaction, treatment engagement, and clinical outcomes among traditionally underserved children. As part of a dissertation, Amanda plans to augment assessment procedures for child behavior problems with a brief cultural assessment, as well as assess the effects of barriers to care on this augmentation.
• Alyssa De Vito (Louisiana State University) will be studying the predictive utility of intraindividual cognitive variability measures as an early marker of cognitive decline. Alyssa will be working with individuals with mild cognitive impairment and analyzing intraindividual variability in executive functioning, memory, and timed performance tasks.
• Erica Page (University of Cincinnati) will be developing and testing a causal framework between microaggressions and negative health outcomes. Erica aims to determine if microaggressions elicit physiological stress responses and lead to declines in working memory performance.
• Amy Wing-Lam Chong (Cornell University) will be examining the extent to which age-related performance differences on the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) can be explained by reductions in exploration preferences and learning, and differences in risk preferences.
• Julia Briskin (Wayne State University) will be studying the effect smartphone usage during in-person interactions with romantic partners has on romantic relationships. Julia’s research will provide and empirically test a theoretical framework to understand this effect, and identify potential ways to mitigate it.
• Kyle Simon (University of Kentucky) will be developing a scale for conceptual future parenthood grief in LGBTQ+ individuals. Kyle plans to assess the reliability and validity of a newly created measure that gauges the level of grief that LGBTQ+ people experience about potentially never achieving a parenting identity.
• Haley Bell (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) will be developing a multidimensional measure of gender dysphoria. Haley aims to develop, validate, and assess the reliability of the Gender Dysphoria Measure.
• Megan Williams (University of Pennsylvania) will be studying body odors’ influence on mate quality estimation. Megan is interested in the mechanism by which body odors inform mate quality assessment, specifically sexual disgust and sexual attraction.
• Megan Goldring (Columbia University) will be studying morality, social conformity, and blame attributions. Megan’s research on moral decision making will investigate the extent to which attributions of blame and praise depend on social conformity factors, agency, and intent, for judgements of commonplace and severe moral transgressions.
• Sarah Arango (University of Texas at Austin) will be studying the ways that Syrian refugee youth living in Jordan develop resilience and cope with trauma and chronic stress. As a dissertation study, Sarah aims to examine the link between daily stressors, traumatic events, coping flexibility, well-being, and psychological distress in this population.
• Hanan Hashem (University of Texas at Austin) will study solo status, religious identity, and ethnic identity as predictors of psychological distress and discrimination of American Muslim women.
• Rachel Sweenie (University of Florida) will study the associations between stable and fluctuating psychosocial variables and inhaled corticosteroid treatment adherence, using ecological momentary assessment.

Congratulations to all our winners. We are excited to see whose name will be on the list next year. We hope it is yours! Be sure to send in your application before the deadline in early December for the 2018 PSRG.

The APAGS Science Committee would like to thank and acknowledge the help and support we received in reviewing applications this year. This includes members of the APAGS CARED and CSOGD Committees, as well as our Ad Hoc Reviewers: Emily Bernstein, Harvard University; Joshua Goodman , UC Santa Barbara; Danielle Krusemark, Florida State University; Brittany Lang, University of South Florida; and Danielle Taylor, Oklahoma State University.

Written by:

Brielle James (BS), Member, APAGS Science Committee                                                       Renee Cloutier (MS), Chair, APAGS Science Committee