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Graduate students win NSF research fellowships

Three Washington State University College of Arts and Sciences students have been chosen for National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships. The prestigious awards have trained generations of American scientists and engineers, including Nobel laureates.

The College of Arts and Sciences’ honorees are:

Avery Anne Lane, an anthropology student from Tucson, Ariz., who is working on a master’s in Courtney Meehan’s biocultural anthropology lab.

Shawn Trojahn, a biology master’s student from Virginia Beach, Va., who is looking at the global decline in biodiversity in the vulnerable mangrove forest, a habitat affected by logging and water pollution.

Lindsey Marie Lavaysse, a psychology master’s student from San Francisco, is focusing on occupational health and safety threats to vulnerable populations like pregnant and minority workers.

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WSU News

Sahlin awards honor outreach, teaching, leadership, research

Two members of the College of Arts and Sciences are among the four WSU faculty to receive the 2016-17 Sahlin awards at the Showcase Celebrating Excellence Recognition Banquet on March 31.

Julie Kmec
Kmec
Craig Parks
Parks

Julie Kmec, Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Sociology, will receive the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction; and Craig Parks, professor of psychology and assistant vice provost, will receive the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Leadership. » More …

John Wick Suffers Extreme Workplace Rage, Psychologist Says

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and movie character John Wick has an ice cold touch. In both Keanu Reeves revenge films, Wick keeps getting pulled back into an underground world of organized crime despite his desires to live a normal life. This internal tug of war is at the core of Wick’s convictions, but it’s also at the root of the people who seek different kinds of revenge every day.

Thomas Tripp
Tripp

“People want to teach somebody a lesson,” Thomas Tripp, a professor in the department of psychology at Washington State University, told Inverse. “If we don’t believe we’ve taught someone a lesson, we don’t enjoy the revenge, and it’s extremely difficult for other people to learn lessons.”

Tripp’s research deals with workplace revenge. Though Reeves’s hitman problems in John Wick probably seems like the furthest thing from white-collar squabbles, Tripp’s research and the overblown action-adventure have a surprising amount in common.

Tripp broke down revenge-seeking into three main categories. One is simple goal obstruction, or when someone gets in your way when you’re trying to achieve something. The second is when we don’t like people who break the rules and get away with it. The last is that people seek revenge when they feel their reputation is sullied. Wick’s relationship to revenge leans particularly into the latter categories throughout both films.

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Inverse Entertainment

How you perceive intelligence could affect your confidence

Joyce Ehrlinger
Joyce Ehrlinger

What do you think about your own intelligence? Can you make yourself smarter over time, or are you stuck with the smarts you were born with? Your answer could reflect a key personality trait — namely, self-confidence — and whether you might want to help yourself to a big slice of humble pie.

It turns out, if you view your brainpower as a fixed, innate capacity, you’re also more likely to be … overconfident. This was suggested in a recent three-part study led by Joyce Ehrlinger of Washington State University. It found that students with a so-called “fixed mind-set” were more likely to overestimate their performance on a test than those with a “growth mind-set” (a belief that intelligence can change over time).

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Ozy Magazine

Online psychology degree ranks among nation’s best

Washington State University recently was recognized for excellence in psychology education among colleges and universities nationwide.

Affordable Colleges Online (ACO) ranked WSU’s online degree program in psychology among the 12 “Best Online Psychology Degrees for 2016.” Only one other Pac-12 school made the list of 50 top programs among the thousands of colleges offering online psychology degrees.

Lee Daffin
Daffin

“I am especially proud of the ranking because it reinforces for our students that they are in one of the premier programs in the nation, getting a quality education at an affordable price,” said Lee Daffin, clinical assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences and the program’s director for WSU Global Campus.

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WSU News