PURC is the Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference hosted by UCLA. Four of our outstanding research assistants presented posters at the 2019 annual conference. More information on PURC can be found here.
Zoey’s research explored the differential effects of early caregiving adversity on parental warmth and child anxiety symptoms. She found that while children exposed to early life stress exhibited elevated levels of anxiety, parental warmth did not differ between the two groups.
Zoey Dew
Ciara and Sakina explored the effects of early life stress on eating behaviors. They found that restrictive eating behaviors were correlated with height-to-waist ratio, such that smaller ratios were correlated with more restrained eating patterns. This relationship was stronger for previously institutionalized than comparison youth. Additionally, they found that comparison youths scored higher on external eating behavior, perhaps indicating a decreased sensitivity to rewarding food cues among previously institutionalized youths.
Ciara Mandich and Sakina Qadir
Claire Waller, presented a talk which examined anxiety and capacity for emotion regulation in previously institutionalized and comparison youth. She found that previously institutionalized youth to have significantly higher anxiety, but no significant group differences in capacity. She also found that while anxiety did not predict capacity in a linear manner, anxiety did predict capacity such that those with very high or low anxiety appeared to have the highest capacity.
Claire Waller, Sakina Qadir, Zoey Dew, and Ciara Mandich
Excellent work and congratulations to all our up-and-coming scholars!