Real Talk: Relationships event

By: Ashley Austin
Department of Psychology

With the holiday season approaching, finals drawing near, and roommate tensions on the rise, the Psychology Learning Community (PLC) hosted Real Talk: Relationships as part of their Introductory Psychology course taught by Jessica Irons. Irons assigns a Mental Health Awareness Project in the course for which the students must identify an area of mental health about which they would like to raise awareness on campus. The students must devise a strategy to raise awareness, execute the strategy, and collect data to determine if awareness was indeed raised as intended. The PLC students were tasked with using psychological principles to inform their decisions throughout the process. The Real Talk: Relationships event was held to raise awareness about promoting and maintaining healthy relationships. During this stressful time of the year, students may face difficulty managing relationships of all kinds, their grades, and their own well-being. Real Talk: Relationships provided students with the opportunity to examine healthy versus toxic friend, roommate, familial, and romantic relationships. The PLC recognized that while many students may have learned about healthy versus toxic romantic relationships, they may not know as much about other kinds of healthy relationships that impact students’ lives on a daily basis. For example, most individuals have been exposed to warning signs of toxic romantic relationships, but there is little experience with the warning signs of toxic friendships or parental relationships. The PLC’s wholistic focus on relationships made their program distinct and an educational experience for everyone involved. Real Talk: Relationships aimed to educate in a unique and fun manner, incorporating games such as a prize wheel, corn hole, and Kahoot! into their program. By answering questions correctly, participants could enter drawings to win prizes (donated by Chik-fil-A, Moe’s, and McCallister’s). While students waited to see if they were a lucky winner, they were able to enjoy sweet treats and capture the moment in a photo booth (donated by www.boxybooth.com). Attendees were asked to complete questionnaires about their knowledge of healthy relationships and the PLC plans to analyze the data in the spring semester as part of their Psychological Statistics course.