By Jacqueline Campbell

Ricardo Wilhelm, a junior psychology major at Lee University, was recently awarded a Colonel Lee B. Ledford Scholarship from the Appalachian College Association (ACA).

The scholarship will provide funding for summer research on mixed emotions and facial recognition. The project will be supervised by Dr. Bryan Poole, assistant professor of psychology at Lee. Wilhelm is interested in learning how mixed emotions, such as simultaneous happiness and sadness, may influence the degree to which people can recognize faces of people of the opposite versus the same race.

“Psychology has always been the most interesting discipline to me,” said Wilhelm. “I think that studying the behavior and mental processes of people is something that is really important because it’s about us. In the recent years, much of my time and interests have been in psychological research.”

He will present his findings at the ACA Student Summit this October among over 300 Summit participants. Students who were awarded a Ledford Scholarship attend the Summit with their mentors, where they gain experience and are given an opportunity to learn more about professional development in their chosen fields of study.

The ACA Annual Summit is intended to make possible the kind of collegial exchange that supports and invigorates faculty and staff through networking during and between concurrent sessions. There are also plenary speakers at the event, which are intended to provide professional development.

The ACA is a non-profit organization of 35 private four-year liberal arts institutions spread across the central Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The ACA works to promote the cooperation and collaboration of its members in order to serve Appalachian people through higher education and related services.

Wilhelm was also awarded a Spring Undergraduate Research Grant from Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology. He intends to use his grant to purchase equipment that can be used for his ACA experiment as well as future psychology students’ research projects.

“Being the recipient of the ACA Colonel B. Ledford Scholarship and the Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Grant are really important to me because they are the reflection of hard work and my personal interests which can be presented to others,” said Wilhelm. “It is truly a great honor to be eligible to be a part of it all.”

Psi Chi is an honor society which was established in order to encourage, stimulate and maintain excellence in scholarship while advancing the science of psychology.

For more information about the ACA, the Annual Summit, or the Ledford Scholarship, visit www.acaweb.org.

For more information about Psi Chi, visit www.psichi.org.