Landvatter ’25, Kovack-Lesh present senior seminar, SOAR projects at psychology conference

Senior Max Landvatter and Professor of Psychology Kristine Kovack-Lesh presented Ladvatter’s senior seminar project and a Summer Opportunities for Advanced Research (SOAR) research project at the Midwestern Psychological Association Conference in Chicago April 10-12.

Landvatter’s senior seminar project, titled “They Decide Your Rights: The Effects of Election Stress on Minority-Status College Students,” was presented during the Psi Chi VIII Poster Session. Psi Chi is the International Honor Society for Psychology. Landvatter, a psychology major and chemistry minor, is Ripon’s Psi Chi chapter president this semester.

“I came up with the idea of studying how students from marginalized groups were coping with election stress from the large amount of stress I felt with the election looming,” Landvatter said. “I found many other people on campus at the start of the fall semester stressing over the election.”

Landvatter said that after hearing some people say that it did not matter who won, as “nothing would apparently change,” they decided to research how election stress disproportionately affects minority-status groups more than others and to show that election results matter.

“It was important to me to research how everyone is being affected to help show that no one marginalized group is alone in this struggle,” Landvatter said. “This is something that I have continued researching in my sociology senior seminar research on collective identity formation between different marginalized groups.”

Kovack-Lesh and Landvatter presented the SOAR research project “Emotional Contagion From Dogs to 8- to 12-year-olds & Undergraduates,” during the Clinical and Developmental Poster Session. Kovack-Lesh and Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Assessment Julia Manor worked with Landvatter and senior Becca Bogucke, who graduated in December 2024, as co-investigators on the project.

According to the poster description, “Little is known about emotional contagion from dogs to humans. Based on self-report and physiological measures, children and undergraduates responded to images and sounds of dogs expressing emotions. All participants matched reported emotional states with the dog, but not physiologically. This suggests emotional contagion can occur from dogs to humans.”

More children and undergraduates are being recruited to participate with new SOAR students in continued research.

“Children, early adolescents and undergraduates have been tested in our protocols across multiple summers thus far and several students have been involved in this project at various points,” Kovack-Lesh said. “We are continuing to work on this project more this semester and summer with additional students.”

Kovack-Lesh said working with students on research projects is a great way for them to gain more experience and develop useful skills, and that presenting this work is a great way to showcase these skills.

“Presenting the projects at conferences with students is a great opportunity,” Kovack-Lesh said. “It is always wonderful to watch our students interact with the broader psychology community at research conferences and talk about our collaborative work.”

Landvatter said this was the first academic conference they had been to and it was rewarding, both academically and personally, discussing the research.

“When I first started at Ripon, I would not have imagined that I would be presenting research that I designed and implemented or that I would be presenting with a professor,” Landvatter said. “This has been an amazing opportunity, and I am very excited to continue this research in a qualitative setting, something that would not have happened without the support of many, many people on campus.”