(The essay can be viewed or downloaded below.)

Abstract
Some research literature have suggested that stories can influence the self-concept. We want to test whether a narrative does influence people’s notions of self in their memory or imagination. Our hypothesis is that being exposed to a story makes one reconstructs one’s self in one’s memory or imagination to be more aligned with the story’s main character. With an experiment, we exposed participants (n=129) to two conditions (control: report of facts; treatment: the facts in a story form), and then asked the Likert-scale questions to see whether they report selves in their memory or imagination that resemble the story’s main character. Using independent sample t-tests, we found no statistically significant results. Therefore, we failed to reject our Null hypothesis — there was not enough evidence to reject it.
Keywords: story, narrative, self-concept, mental time travel, memory reconstruction

Abstract
This is a planned study, despite its language. It was part of a class. In this proposed study, we examine the relation between vividness of one’s visual imagery and one’s recollection of autobiographical memories. Despite the thousands of citations of David Marks’ 1973 foundational paper of assessing one’s visual imagery vividness, only a few had looked directly at visual imagery in connection with autobiographical memories. This study seeks to fill that gap. We are the first to utilize both the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and the Autobiographical Recollection Test in a correlational study. We studied 100 college students (49 male, 48 female, 3 non-binary or prefer-not-to-say). We found that scores of VVIQ of Marks correlates to high scores of ART. Moreover, the correlation extends to all aspects of Autobiographical Recollection as modeled by Berntsen et al. T-tests confirm the findings by showing that the effect size is noteworthy: high scorers in VVIQ have higher means of ART scores — and all 7 of ART subscales — than low scorers of VVIQ. These findings suggest, inter alia, further possible explorations into the directionality of the relation of the two constructs, into  connection between the processes underlying the generation of vivid imageries and the recollection of autobiographical memories, and into the development of clinical treatments to improve wellbeing.
Keywords: visual imagery, autobiographical memory, vividness, memory recollection, narrative coherence, narrative relevance

Abstract
Inspired by prior groundbreaking studies on maximizing by Simon and other researchers, we sought to see whether the findings extend to lower-stakes decision-making. The particular lower-stakes context we chose to study is class selection by college students. We examined the relationships between maximizing tendency and four variables: information-seeking behavior, efforting behavior, regret affect, satisfaction affect. We had 130 different participants (64% female, 32% male, 4% other) from three semesters of a particular Pscyhology class at a university. The participants took an online questionnaire, which measured their maximizing tendency, behaviors, and affects related directly to our investigation. Through correlation tests, we found that maximizing was positively correlated with information-seeking (r = .34, p < .001), with efforting (r = .37, p < .001), and with regret (r = .23, p = .01); maximizing was negatively correlated on the outcome satisfaction variable (r = -.19, p = .03). With a Median Split and independent samples t-tests, we found that maximizers score higher in every area except on outcome satisfaction, where we did not find any result statistically significant. Our findings suggest there is a relationship between maximizing and the aforesaid behaviors and affects.
Keywords: maximizing, satisficing