Anna Mangahas

This study was first developed with the saying “birds of a feather flock together” in mind. I thought that if people had certain traits, behaviors, thought processes in common, wouldn’t it make sense for them to like or prefer the same kinds of things as well? I chose color as the preference to focus on because of the different baseline levels of arousal given one’s level of Extraversion, and because there is the idea that different colors have different levels of arousal. 

As for the traits chosen, Sensation Seeking (SS) is a trait from a different model (the Zuckerman-Kuhlman-Aluja Personality Questionnaire) that has strong commonalities with Extraversion (E) and Openness to Experience (O) was added as... [Read more]

Sung Hee Hong

My master’s thesis emerged from a curiosity about how and why individuals experience and express anger differently, particularly within the context of interpersonal relationships. It is typically easy to observe, especially as one spends enough time, that some are more easily angered or express their anger more openly than others—often attributing to their personality or the specific situation they find themselves in. As a personality researcher, I sought to explore and understand these differences through a scholarly approach. Two key factors seemed to drive these differences in the anger experience: (1) The Agreeableness (A) trait and (2) the interpersonal context, depending on how the participant categorizes the other person as Hindi Ibang Tao... [Read more]

Vanessa Jones Enrera 

The idea for my graduate thesis, entitled “The Moderating Effect of Low Agreeableness on the Relationship between Experience of Psychological Distress and Attitudes towards Psychological Help-seeking”, was conceived primarily because of my interest in people who externalize maladaptive behaviors in response to stressors causing distress to those around them while also appearing to be in distress themselves, but who are also hesitant and/or against seeking professional psychological help. The initial hypothesis was that the personal qualities relating to mistrust, non-cooperation, defiance, and externalizing negative behaviors possibly relates to low levels of the... [Read more]

Bea Montenegro

One of the driving forces behind my MA thesis topic was a desire to prove that there was nothing wrong with being an ardent fan of something. There are certainly subsets of people that can easily be deemed obsessive, fueling negative stereotypes. But based on my personal experience, I believe that there are more people who enjoy their fandom and fanhood in healthy ways.

When I did some initial reading into the topic of parasocial relationships—one-sided relationships with media personae—the literature was not promising in terms of dispelling the aforementioned negative stereotype of fans. Neuroticism... [Read more]