The Tri-State Psychology Conference presented research collected throughout the year Friday as seven schools gathered at the event.
Psychology Awareness Week led up to the conference with speakers presenting on different topics.
Tiffany Paynter, Marshall University student on the conference planning committee, discussed the importance of the conference for the student community.
“It brings a lot of awareness,” Paynter said. “Especially with the keynote speaker talking about racism, talking about attitudes behaviors, I feel like in rural communities people have a little bit more implicit biases that they may not know about and explicit biases as well that they don’t want to recognize. This helps to bring a lot of awareness to people that otherwise wouldn’t get the education for it.”
The conference was set up for visiting students and local psychology students to present the research they have gathered throughout the semester.
“Right now it’s geared toward psych students just because its an opportunity for them to present their research work,” Paynter said. “We’re trying to incorporate more things like the Take Action Project so we can have students that aren’t just doing research, doing quantitative work, they can bring in people who are doing qualitative work and stuff that they are doing in the community. Things that are actually going to have an impact and take further than just doing research in school.”
Michael Olson, associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, the keynote speaker presented “The MODE model: Multiple routes from attitudes to behavior.”
“It is a model of how our attitudes predict behavior,” Olson said. “When they do and when they don’t. Attitudes are just positive and negative reactions to things and if they are extremely strong, that is more automatic, highly accessible and more likely to guide how we think of the object, see the object and approach and avoid the object. We often will go with that spontaneous route unless we have both the motivation and the opportunity to do something else.”
She said the importance of “The MODE model” is knowing how it can be used in various situations in different occupations.
The conference lasted from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a variety of speakers and sessions throughout the day.
“I’m just really excited,” Paynter said. “I think we did an excellent job, and we had a lot more people here than I expected, and we had a really awesome keynote speaker.”
Kelsey Lively can be contacted at [email protected].