Psychology Doctoral Student Earns National Foundation Scholarship Award

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Katrina Piccone, a Florida Institute of Technology industrial/organization (I/O) psychology doctoral student, has received a 2013 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Foundation Graduate Student Scholarship award of $3,000. She was one of only two who received the honor.

The award recognizes achievement in a graduate career. It is intended to assist with costs for doctoral students in the field of industrial and organizational psychology in carrying out their dissertation work. The award is also based on the potential of the recipient’s dissertation to make significant theoretical and applied contributions to the field.

Piccone’s dissertation explores the effects of the task-relevant affect on decisions to allocate resources (e.g., effort and time) to competing goals over time. Specifically, this research focuses on the activation dimension ofaffect, which has yet to be studied in a competing goal context.

She explains: “Ultimately, I’m proposing that individuals may be more likely to be drawn to goals that are related to activated affective states, such as anxiety or excitement, than goals that are related to diffuse or deactivated affective states, such as calmness or gloominess. So, if you’re feeling anxious about your pursuit of goal “A” and feeling calm about your pursuit of competing goal “B”, you may be more likely to pursue goal “A” because anxiety is higher in activation than calmness,” explained Piccone.

Patrick Converse, Ph.D., associate professor, College of Psychology and Liberal Arts, is Piccone’s advisor. Piccone earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from University at Albany, State University of New York, in 2006. She graduated from Arlington High School in LaGrangeville, N.Y. in 2003.