APS 2012 Spotlight- Caregiving as a Function of Religiosity and Paternity Certainty

Another project presented at APS 2012 was worked on by students in our Personal Research group and presented at APS by Tommy Curtis, an April 2012 grad, and Zack Dupaix, a senior this year.  

Zack Dupaix presents at APS.

Caregiving as a Function of Religiosity and Paternity Certainty

Alexa R. R. Tuita
Thomas D. Curtis
Zacharias P. Dupaix
Ronald M. Miller
Boyd Timothy

This project, nicknamed the “Grandparents” project, was completed in the Psychology Department’s Personal Research group under the direction of Dr. Miller and Dr. Timothy.

Zack summarized the project as finding that as females were more religious they received more caregiving or gifts from parents and grandparents, and as males were less religious they received more caregiving or gifts from parents and grandparents. The explanation of this phenomenon can be found in evolutionary psychology, which views behavior as being motivated by the probability of passing on genes. In this frame, parents or grandparents would reward males for being more promiscuous, and thereby spreading their genes, but females would be rewarded for being less promiscuous because this helps to ensure paternity certainty.

Zack’s involvement of the project centered on helping do the statistical analysis, writing the results section and contributing to the justification of the theory.

As Zack presented this project at APS, he noticed that most people just wanted a quick explanation of the project. Those who he encountered during the poster session asked about the project basics, if it worked or didn’t work, and what some methodological flaws were. Zack commented that unless someone is seriously questioning a research project, most people don’t critique or thoroughly question presenters of posters. One common question asked of Zack and Tommy was about the scores on the religiosity scale, because they don’t go below moderate. For the study to be more complete and thorough, we would want people in all ranges of religiosity, including those on the low and very low levels, but we did not have those types of people on our religious campus.  Zack explained that to remedy this, the group has been looking at collaborating with researchers at other universities to have a more complete range of data.

On his experience at APS, Zack recounted that it was a fun and exciting learning experience. The conference gave him the opportunity to talk with a few professors that he is interested in working with at graduate schools he has looked into attending. He was pleased to have a chance to attend very interesting seminars given by top researchers in their respective fields. His overall experience was very positive, and he says that he hopes to have another chance to attend the upcoming APS conference in May 2013.

See the full poster here.