Tag: Poster 114

A Regional Approach to Climate Communications

Presenter(s): Hannah Lewman − Advertising

Faculty Mentor(s): Kim Sheehan

Poster 114

Research Area: Strategic Communications

Funding: Clark Honors College Thesis Research Grant

The disconnect between scientific certainty in the existence and causes of climate change and public belief in climate change shows the need for better communication to the American public. While this type of communication is a rich area of study for social scientists who study everything from how the distance of an event impacts how people think about climate change to the word-level significance of phrases like “climate change” and “global warming,” many communicators are not social scientists. They’re professional creatives. My thesis will combine social science research on framing and identity with advertising techniques to show how agencies can create tailored campaigns for different regions of the United States. I will also test if this regionally-segmented approach to climate communications is more effective than trying to target the entire United States with one campaign. Testing the potential of regionally-targeted campaigns opens the door to future research that fine-tunes messages for each area of the country.

Observing Responsive Caregiving and Action Monitoring (ORCA)

Presenter(s): Nisha Sridhar

Co Presenter(s): Camille Sullivan

Faculty Mentor(s): Tyson Barker

Poster 114

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

Although parenting is a naturally rewarding activity, excess stressors such as food and housing insecurity impact a caregiver’s interactions with their children. Existing literature suggests that a caregiver’s reaction to their child’s social-communicative signals — known as responsive caregiving — is a strong predictor of positive child outcomes; however, the degree to which each parent engages in this practice varies greatly. Thus, to maximize responsive caregiving and consequently support child development, it is important to identify the mechanisms by which stress impacts parenting. Our goal is to determine the presence of a neurobiological indicator of caregiver reward that can provide insight on how stress impacts responsive caregiving, which would provide a quantitative way to measure the effectiveness of parenting interventions.

To examine these mechanisms, we recruited mothers with children ages 3-6 to observe their children complete simple computer tasks. During the tasks, the mother and child wear electroencephalogram (EEG) caps, which monitors the brain’s electrical activity, measuring observational reward positivity (observational RP) — the extent to which the mother responds positively when the computer rewards her child. While other studies have examined neurobiological components of caregiving via fMRI, the EEG can be operated in a social setting that mimics real-life caregiver-child interactions.

The expected outcome includes the identification of a proposed neurological mechanism that demonstrates the reduction of responsive caregiving as a result of parental stress. With the collected EEG data, survey information, and coded observed interactions, we intend to analyze the extent of the correlation between caregiving reward and observational RP. We additionally intend to examine the correlation between responsive caregiving and observational RP.