1. Present while Presenting: an exploration of present moment process observations
Victoria Boudoin
Sandoz Lab
We generally study topics related to a psychological school of thought called contextual behavioral science, and the main therapeutic outcome of this approach which is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
So, what is ACT?
Victoria Boudoin
Emmie Hebert
Emmy Lebleu
Emily Sandoz, Ph. D.

2. ACT is a 3rd wave Behavioral approach to therapy.
One of the main tenants of ACT is that experiential avoidance, or the human tendency to avoid painful experiences, both the experiences we have within our skin (like thoughts and feelings) AND the experiences we have outside of our skin (like five-sense experiences) is the main cause of most, if not all psychological struggles.

3. ACT is geared towards facilitating the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior when doing so serves valued ends. Basically the main goal of ACT is to teach skills that allow a human being to more frequently engage in behaviors that go towards meaning instead of running from pain. This is what we call psychological flexibility.

4. ACT has identified six processes that work together to produce or increase psychological flexibility, one of which is contact with the present moment.

5. Not being in the present moment is essentially when you're in the flow of things, on autopilot, or the moments just prior to you suddenly awakening to your surroundings. The opposite of this seems rather intuitive – being in contact with the present moment would be fully engaged.

6. Bivariate Fit of Average Presence By SR presence
SR – self reported presence – STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT
Self reported presence highly positively correlated to observer reported levels of presence WHICH MEANS that if they thought they were present then other people were likely to report them as being present. The implications of this finding are that observers may the ability to detect presence.

7. Bivariate Fit of Average Presence By Average Knowledge
STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT
Observer reported presence score was positively correlated with observer reported know legibility of their topic. This means that it seems that the more the audience felt the presenter knew the material, the more the audience felt they were present or possibly vise versa. Directionality cannot be determined by this one finding. SO a few implications of this data are that either the more present a presenter is, the more they may seem to know the material; the better they know the material the more present they may seem; or knowing the material may make it easier for them to actually be present.

8. Since our findings suggestion that it could be possibly for our observers to determine when someone is present or not, our next step would be determining what cues or identifiers let observers judge when someone is being present.
Maybe determining the directionality of our knowlegibility via presence finding could be our next step.