FIT Grad Student Earns SIOP Scholarship Award

By  //  February 25, 2013

One Of Two National Recipients

BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA –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.

Florida Tech grad student Katrina Piccone has received a 2013 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Foundation Graduate Student Scholarship award of $3,000. (Image courtesy of Florida Tech)

Katrina Piccone 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 effect on decisions to allocate resources (e.g., effort and time) to competing goals over time. Specifically, this research focuses on the activation dimension of affect, which has yet to be studied in a competing goal context.

“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,” she said. “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.”

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.