Westminster Psychology Club Attends Eastern Psychological Association Meeting

Eleven members of the Psychology Club at Westminster College and their faculty adviser attended the Eastern Psychological Association meeting in Boston.

"I chaired a session including five presentations on various cognitive neuropsychology topics including the relationships between processing speed, reaction time, and long-term memory; masked cross-modal repetition priming using even related potentials; neural correlates of indirect semantic priming using event-related potentials; electrophysiological evidence for plausibility effects in sentence comprehension; and anaphor resolution using event-related potentials," said Dr. Kirk Lunnen, adviser to the club and assistant professor of psychology.  "As the chair, I served as the moderator for discussion of each topic."

Two of the club members, Brooke Arens and David Eberle, presented their research papers at the meeting.

"A Multiperspective Evaluation of Desirability, Importance and Frequency of Theapist Self-Disclosure" was presented by Arens, a senior psychology major from Erie.  Her research showed that therapists tend to undervalue the importance of the information they reveal about themselves and that psychotherapy clients themselves value therapist self-disclosure.

"A Comparison of Ocular Activity between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Symptomatic and Non-Symptomatic Subjects in Response to Disgusting Visual Stimuli" was presented by Eberle, a senior psychology major from Moon Township.  His research found that OCD symptomatic subjects exhibit fewer horizontal and vertical eye movements than non-symptomatic control subjects when exposed to a disgusting picture.

Contact Lunnen at (724) 947-7203 or e-mail lunnenkm@westminster.edu for more information.

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