Overview

Many of our students go on to graduate study in psychology and a major factor in graduate admissions is demonstrated skill in designing and conducting original scientific research. Psychology students at Centenary have the opportunity to participate in research in their courses, as a collaborator in ongoing faculty research projects, and through an Independent Study Honors Project.

Psychology majors will design research studies, collect data, prepare analyses, and present their work in oral and/or written forms in the classwork for Research Methods, Psychology of Design, Brain & Language, Senior Seminar, and other psychology classes. In these structured experiences, students will complete an entire research project in a single semester, producing a high-quality study that could be the first step to a collaborative or independent project.

Centenary psychology faculty members have ongoing research projects with opportunities for student collaboration. Student research assistants help to plan studies, collect data, run statistical analyses, and prepare posters and papers.

Students who want to embark on an in-depth research project in their area of interest can complete an Independent Study Honors Thesis. This project will begin in the second semester of the student’s junior year with a planning process to design a project and set up an Independent Study (and Honors committee if necessary). The student will write a literature review and collect data in their senior year, resulting in a senior thesis paper reporting their literature review and research findings.

 

Faculty Research 

Dr. Alexander is currently engaged in speech perception projects examining perceptual learning and memory for accented speech, acoustical analyses and perceptual ratings of vocal fry, and acoustical correlates of intelligibility and accentedness in English across first language groups. She is also interested in working on questions of the role of auditory imagery of spoken language in reading, sound symbolism and cross-modal mappings of speech sounds, and other questions of how the sounds of language interact with the communicative message.

Dr. Hammond is working on research projects examining the cognitive and emotional development of college-age populations, especially with regards to the college environment. Her current projects examine how immersive experiences (such as May intercultural immersion classes) may affect student development, how students benefit from other kinds of class-related experiences and service-learning, and how development relates to issues of academic dishonesty.

Dr. Zunick has several ongoing research projects. In one project, he uses a writing intervention to encourage people to revise their self-beliefs upward following a success. In another, he uses a visual judgment task to produce visual estimates of how people view their own faces, and then examines what factors bias those images. And in a third project, he explores how people’s attitudes toward various topics (e.g., political issues, products, other people) are tied to their self-concepts and identities, and what the consequences of this self-attitude connection might be.

 

Recent Student Projects

 

Julianna Malloy ‘26
For her Honor’s Thesis, Julianna Malloy investigated the effects of Black skin-tone anatomical models as identity safety cues for students of color in Biology classrooms, testing whether these more diverse models influence Black students’ belonging, self-efficacy, motivation, and other related variables. Julianna and Dr. Zunick received a student-faculty research award, which supported Julianna’s work over the summer and helped pay for online data collection. She will present her work at the annual campus-wide Research Conference as well as the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s annual convention in Chicago.

Mackenzie Olinger '25
Can we get better at understanding very young children? Mackenzie Olinger investigated whether we can readily adapt to and generalize our learning to the speech of young children. Our speech perception system readily adapts to new speakers who have different accents or speech differences, but there's only limited evidence that we can quickly adapt to toddler speech. Mackenzie used a database of speech from 2 and 3 year olds to train listeners. She found some evidence of learning to better understand 3-year olds, but that learning didn't generalize to new kids. Mackenzie presented her research at the on-campus Research Conference in April of 2025, and Dr. Alexander presented her research as a paper presentation at the 2025 annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Denver. Mackenzie is working toward becoming a Speech-Language Pathologist.

Gracie Napier '24
Gracie worked on research in the psychology department for multiple years, starting in a one credit hour research class helping faculty members with research tasks. Then Gracie designed her own Honor's Thesis project that was a replication and extension of a 2014 study on how the use of vocal fry impacts listener perceptions of men's and women's speech. Gracie and Dr. Alexander received a student-faculty research grant, and collected data from 600 participants for the project. Gracie presented her work at the annual campus Research Conference.

Mackenzie Williams '24
For her Honor's Thesis project, Mackenzie Williams designed a replication and extension of a study of the impact on memory of final-word violations in sentences (e.g., We brought a tent to go bacon.). Mackenzie investigated whether words that violated gender stereotypes showed the same kind of memory disruptions as semantic violations. She designed a clever methodology to answer her questions and showed a disconnect between processing of semantic and pragmatic violations. Mackenzie presented her research at the on-campus Research Conference in April of 2024, and Dr. Alexander presented her research as a paper presentation at the 2024 annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New York. Mackenzie is continuing her research into the psychology and neuroscience of memory as a graduate student at LSU in Baton Rouge.

 

Mallarie Mixon ‘22
Mallarie Mixon’s Honor’s Thesis investigated attitudinal factors predicting whether bystanders confront prejudiced remarks. She focused on the extent to which participants’ race and gender attitudes were self-defining, that is, connected to their identity and sense of self. Mallarie hypothesized that this connection to the self would predict participants’ confrontation intentions over and above their overall evaluations of race and gender equality. Her results confirmed this hypothesis: the more participants’ race and gender attitudes were connected to their sense of self, the more likely they were to report intending to confront the speaker of a racist or sexist remark. Mallarie presented her work at the Centenary Research Conference, and Dr. Zunick presented it at the 2023 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Atlanta.