At the 18th annual Undergraduate Findings Conference, students share their findings

The 18th annual Undergraduate Research Conference, which gives undergraduate students a chance to present their research and scholarship, was held on April 18–19 at Texas State University by the Honors College and IDEA Center.

During the conference, over 80 undergraduate students from several disciplines showcased their research through poster and panel sessions.

The recipients of the Scott Emerson Health Innovation Award for Stress Co-Regulation Among Romantically Involved Couples in Virtual Reality this year are junior psychology student Faith Swanson and graduate teaching assistant Taylor Himes, who co-presented the program. Their mentors include Chris Agnew, a professor at Purdue University’s Department of Psychological Sciences, and Rhonda Balzarini, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the psychology department at TXST.

According to Swanson, “the mechanism that occurs between romantic partners is stress co-regulation.” “Their neurological systems and physiological reactions will coordinate when they go through a difficult situation together, which can reduce stress. It has previously been assumed by this process that physical proximity is necessary for this to occur.

This is significant because long-distance relationships are growing in popularity as the globe becomes more interconnected and technology advances quickly. The question of whether this co-regulatory mechanism can operate in these newly developed virtual settings hasn’t truly been researched yet. In this study, we investigated whether virtual reality (VR) technology can lead to stress co-regulation.

The general category poster presentation honors went to the following student research projects:

First Place: Efforts for Change: Learning Assistants’ Perceptions of Supports and Barriers to Instructional Change, Hannah Castro, Tyler Atkinson, and Kylie Hedge Advisors, Eleanor Close and Alice Olmstead, Ph.D., Department of Physics.

Second Place: Ivan Ojeda-Ruiz, Ph.D., Department of Mathematics; Advisor: Abdullah Ibn Kamal and Michala Gardner; Comparative Analysis of Speaker Diarization Techniques utilizing Different Clustering Methods on CNN-Based Speaker Segmentation for Enhanced Precision and Recognition.

Third Place: Taylor Himes and Faith Swanson, Stress Co-Regulation Among Romantically Involved Couples in Virtual Reality; Department of Psychology Advisors: Rhonda Balzarini, Ph.D., and Chris Agnew.

Honorable Mention: Nico Schüler, Ph.D., School of Music Advisor; Kayla Jones, The Advertising Evolution of Beyoncé’s Albums.

Trinity Taylor, The Sarah Baartman Effect: The Black Body Under the Westernized Gaze, Department of History, advisor Casey D. Nichols, Ph.D., received an honorable mention.