Olivia participated in a symposium titled “Social Psychology in Policy Domains”, presenting findings on the relationships between social class, mental health and social integration in first year university students. Stephanie delivered a talk on the effects of leader gender and equality message framing on mobilising men and women for gender equality. Matylda discussed her findings on the effects of applicable emotions on use of stereotypes.
The conference served as an excellent opportunity for us to start communicating our work, build collaborative networks, and gain feedback early on in our PhDs. It allowed us to communicate exciting new findings in a targeted fashion to a key Australian (and international) forum for social psychology, and proved to be both awe-inspiring and intimidating. Meeting established academics whose names were riddled throughout our Honours theses was an incredible privilege.
Given SASP is characterised by a strong postgraduate student representation, it offered a unique atmosphere compared to typical academic conferences, in that it allowed us to network with both our peers and senior academics. The postgraduate workshops in particular were extremely useful – outlining how we as social psychologists have a responsibility to take our research to the world, and how we might go about doing so. We look forward to attending next year’s conference in Melbourne.
