UCA psychology students Maranda Leonard, Anthony Thompson, and Brandon Wolfe recently received Regional Research Awards worth $300 from Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology for their paper entitled, “Relationship Between Political Orientation and Defensiveness.” The trio found that politically liberal individuals used a level of psychological defense that directly paralleled the magnitude of a reported breach in the U.S. criminal justice system. Conservatives, in contrast, showed the same high levels of defensiveness regardless of the level of threat.
On an independent project that also examined political orientation and psychological defensiveness, April Drinkwater, M. Garrett Steele, and Katie Short won a Third Place award worth $100 dollars in the Undergraduate Research Competition sponsored by the Southwestern Psychological Association (SWPA). The Psi Chi and SWPA meetings were held jointly, April 5-7, in Ft. Worth, Texas.
