The URECA website regularly features students’ perspectives on research and/or creative activities. This month’s student is Christine Spaulding, an Honors College junior majoring in psychology, and a member of the Department of Psychology’s honors thesis program. Since August 2913 she has been a member of the Social Competence and Treatment Laboratory of Matthew Lerner, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.
In April 2014 Spaulding presented a poster for the first time at URECA’s campus-wide Undergraduate Research Celebration. Titled “Wanting It Too Much: the Unexpected Effect of Social Motivation on Emotion Recognition,” her poster presented quantitative data on facial emotion recognition in children with autism spectrum disorders. Just three weeks after this event, Spaulding had the opportunity to co-present the poster and project with her graduate student mentor, Heather Garman, at the 2014 International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta, Georgia, with support from a URECA travel grant.
In the coming year she will be completing an honors thesis on “Trends in School-based Services and Symptoms in Children with ASDs and Other Clinical Disorders,” which will be supervised by Lerner and Kenneth Gadow, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and also director of clinical research at the Cody Center for Developmental Disabilities. The project will analyze data obtained from the Cody Center.
This summer Spaulding is participating in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute Summer Scholars Program, where she is evaluating peer bullying intervention programs in urban schools. She plans to apply to child clinical psychology PhD programs to continue research in autism spectrum disorders.
Click here to read the full interview.
Click here for past Researchers of the Month.
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