Breadcrumb
Achievements
Publications and achievements submitted by our faculty, staff, and students.
Chris Aberson, Amber Gaffney, Humboldt Students
Psychology
Chris Aberson and Amber Gaffney served as co-chairs of the Western Psychological Association’s (WPA) 2022 Conference. The conference theme was Diversity, Equity, and Sustainability. At WPA, seven faculty and 37 students authored presentations. Chris Aberson gave the WPA Outstanding Teaching Award Address and Academic Research M.A. student Joseph Pang won the American Psychological Association Division for International Psychology’s student poster contest.
Chris Aberson, Josue Rodriguez, Danielle Siegel
Psychology
Chris Aberson, along with Psychology Academic Research M.A. alums Josue Rodriguez (′19) and Danielle Siegel (′21) recently published an article titled Power Analysis for Regression Coefficients: The Role of Multiple Predictors and Power to Detect all Coefficients Simultaneously in The Quantitative Methods for Psychology. The work provides researchers tools to improve sample size planning for complex research designs. Both Mr. Rodriquez and Ms. Siegel are currently enrolled in U. C. Davis’ Quantitative Psychology Ph.D. program.
Chris Aberson
Psychology
Chris Aberson recently published two papers as part of a multinational team including over 400 researchers. The first article, titled A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared in Nature Human Behaviour (NHB). A second article, In COVID-19 health messaging, loss framing increases anxiety with little-to-no concomitant benefits: Experimental evidence from 84 countries, is in press at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). PNAS and NHB are highly influential outlets, boasting huge impact factors over 12.0. The team presently has an additional manuscript under review and another in preparation.
Meenal Rana
Child Development
Meenal Rana will be representing the department of Child Development on April 19th, 2022, as a keynote speaker for the 2022 Higher Colleges of Technology Education Student Research Virtual Conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE (Conference theme: "Educating the Whole Child in a Post-Pandemic World"). Rana presents her keynote on "Importance of Trauma-Informed Teaching in Post-Pandemic Classrooms".
Chris Aberson
Psychology
Chris Aberson, Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department, recently joined the editorial advisory board of Meta-Psychology. Meta-Psychology is an open access outlet focused on meta science and quantitative methodology. Dr. Aberson is presently the editor-in-chief of Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy as well as an associate editor at Collabra Psychology. He also serves on the editorial boards of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, and Basic and Applied Social Psychology.
Amber Gaffney
Psychology
Dr. Amber Gaffney, Associate Professor of Psychology, along with colleague Michael Hogg from The Claremont Graduate University, recently published a chapter in the book The Psychology of Sociability (2022, Routledge). The chapter, titled A Social Identity Analysis of Sociability, focuses on how needs for affiliation with groups and examines both positive (e.g., better mental and physical health) and negative aspects (e.g., polarization, authoritarianism) of group identification and sociability.
Humnath Panta
Business
Dr. Panta presented a paper entitled "Political Favoritism and Value of Corporate Cash Holdings " at the Southwestern Finance Association Annual conference held in New Orleans on March 3rd, 2022. This paper examines the impact of political favoritism on the value of corporate cash holdings and finds cash holding, on average, is less valuable for politically favored firms than their counterparts. In other words, this study shows that political favoritism is associated with a decrease of $0.44 in value for a $1.00 in cash holding. The authors define the stock ownership by the member of the US Congress as a measure of political favoritism to a firm.
Chris Walmsley
Psychology
Chris Walmsley, Assistant Professor of Psychology, recently gave an invited talk titled “Points of Contact and Departure Between Behavioral Gerontology and ABA With Younger Populations” at the annual California Association of Applied Behavior Analysis (CalABA). CalABA’s mission is to promote the science and theory of behavior analysis through the support of research, education, and practice. Their convention is the top regional conference on behavior analysis in the United States and regularly features well-known researchers and clinicians from throughout the United States.
Chris Aberson
Psychology
Chris Aberson, Professor and of the Chair Department of Psychology, recently published an R package called "BetterReg for Calculation of Useful Statistics for Linear and Logistic regression.” The package was accepted to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), the primary repository for R packages. Previously Dr. Aberson published several versions of a package called pwr2ppl that provides numerous functions for statistical power analysis. pwr2ppl has been downloaded nearly 15,000 times since it’s initial publication in 2019 and is widely recognized as having one of the most clever R package names.
Amber Gaffney and Academic Research M.A. Graduate Students
Psychology
Cal Poly Humboldt Psychology faculty and numerous students presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Convention in San Francisco this last weekend. Lead presenters included Academic Research M.A. students Matthew Burt, Crane Cosno, Jacob Crocker, Jeff Frederick, Samantha Gardener, Jordan McDowell, and Joseph Pang. Amber Gaffney co-chaired the Group Processes and Intergroup Relations Pre-Conference. Chris Aberson also presented. Demonstrating the Psychology department’s commitment to hands-on learning, 12 graduate students and alum were authors on presentations. SPSP is the world’s largest organization of social and personality psychologists with over 7500 members.