Sacramento State’s third annual Psychological Research Conference brought together dozens of student and faculty’s ideas, theories and psychological research studies.

The psychology department put together Thursday’s event in order to share its members’ latest contributions to the psychological field through individual presentations in the University Union.

“The annual research conference is organized each year to highlight the many research accomplishments and achievements of our psychology students and faculty,” said Psychology Assistant Professor Phillip Akutsu.

Akutsu said the event in the past typically has 300 to 400 students and faculty attending the three-hour event. This year showed no sign of decreasing attendance numbers as the room was constantly filled with people.

“This year, we had almost 35 individual projects on display at the conference with the theme being, ‘Innovation through Research,'” Akutsu said.

For example, one study looked at how effective listener training can help autistic children to develop stronger skills in acquiring the names and categorization of day-to-day objects.

“Children with severe autism often do not develop a meaningful level of communication skills or basic levels of analogue reasoning and the question is whether early intervention of certain types with autistic children can help to facilitate or improve their ability to learn communication and reasoning skills so their lives can be improved for the future,” Akutsu said.

The Conference Committee of Akutsu, Ho Man Cheung, Ting Ting Lee, Rachel Altholz and Tyler Virden said they hope the campus community took the opportunity to discover and appreciate the research that was presented Thursday.

“I want to thank our outstanding students and faculty for their efforts that bring distinction to our department, college and university,” said Marya Endriga, the psychology department chair.

The event discussed a wide range of psychological research and development, while also appealing to many psychology major students and faculty.

“We hope that future celebrations of research and knowledge in our psychology department at Sac State will be as successful and ground-breaking,” the conference committee said.

Russell Preston can be reached at [email protected]