This year, five students presented research at WPUPC hosted by Chatham College.
For those interested in seeing RMU students "in action" at a conference, please take a peek at
the PHOTO GALLERY!
The links below are to the pdf versions of the poster handouts. You will need a pdf viewer (e.g., Adobe Acrobat) in order
to view these files.
Vincent Salvino & Leah Garuccio: Managers can feel guilt
about assigning unwanted tasks to their employees. This guilt can affect the benefits or lack thereof that the manager can
utilize in the workplace. Undergraduates participated in a study that mimicked a management situation. The participants
were asked to assign an unknown task to a group of students. Feedback was given to the participants about how much the
group who performed the task enjoyed, did not enjoy, or were indifferent to the task. Based on this information the
students were instructed to allocate bonus points between themselves and the group of students. Our interest was whether
the negative feedback had an effect on the point allocation. Chelsey Cobb: Most would agree that the longer you know a
person, the better you should know that person. Research has shown that this is only true to a degree. One hypothesis is
that mistakes in predicting character occur because we assume other are more like us than they really are. Because parents
have known their children for the child's entire life, undergraduates and their parents completed personality surveys to
determine how accurately the parents would predict their child's responses. We predicted either: (1) parents would be
accurate in their predictions, (2) parents would not be accurate in their predictions, or (3) accuracy would vary with
gender (same/different) between parent and child. Andrew Russell & John S. Bielewicz: Students and
researchers often choose a graphing style for the display of data based on the style's aesthetic, rather than functional,
qualities. Three-dimensional graphs may look more professional, but use of this style may negatively influence the
accuracy of a reader's perception of the presented information. The purpose of this study is to test perceptual accuracy
of subjects when reading graphs rendered in a 2-dimensional versus a 3-dimensional graphing style. The test was given to
students via two mediums: paper and electronic. Results were analyzed to determine the degree to which accuracy is
affected based on the style of graph used and the medium in which it is presented.