In early March, CORE Lab’s Joan Kim (2nd year doctoral student) and Ezgi Uygan (4th year undergraduate and former co-op Research Coordinator) presented their work at the 2023 conference of the Eastern Psychological Association (EPA) held at the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston. Their poster, titled Perceptions of Wildlife Images: Feeling Connected to Nature through Photos, explored how participants’ perceptions of wildlife images varied by context. The contexts studied included animal images that were close up, far away, in a human context, and animals with pollution. The valence of images (how positively or negatively the image was perceived) were rated similarly across context. Participants rated their “connectedness to nature” as lower for the images including pollution than other types of images, and images in the other contexts had similar, higher connectedness-to-nature ratings. This project is in collaboration with researchers in the CORE Lab, Northeastern Marine and Environmental Sciences, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, including Christina Semonella, Julia Keogh, Keith Ellenbogen, Brian Helmuth, and CORE Lab’s own Joan Kim, Ezgi Uygan, and John Coley.
