Author: Ashley Keith Majors: Biology and Psychology
Writing away!
My name is Ashley Keith and I graduated Summa Cum Laude in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Science with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Art in Psychology in the Spring of 2021. My mentor for my Honors thesis was Dr. Darya Zabelina in the Department of Psychology. My semester of research was the Spring of 2021. Since I have graduated, this past semester was my final semester of research as an undergraduate.
Over the course of the 2021 Spring semester, I have worked alongside my honors mentor, Dr. Darya Zabelina, to write and defend my Honors thesis which focused on investigating whether individuals with higher levels of trait social anxiety have a memory bias towards negative social stimuli. With a double major in Biology and Psychology, I joined Dr. Zabelina’s cognitive psychology research lab because it was the perfect mix of my two majors for me. After debating what to focus my thesis on, I chose to study anxiety because it is a disorder that affects many of the people around me, including many college students. I hoped that this research project, and others like it, could be used to help continue the development of effective treatments for anxiety disorders.
Though there are many different types of anxiety disorder, I chose to focus on social anxiety. Those diagnosed with social anxiety disorder (SAD) may suffer from a persistent hyperawareness of social threats and an irrational fear of possible scrutiny in social situations. Knowing this, I decided to investigate how an attention bias to social stimuli, such as emotional faces, might affect memory in more socially-anxious people, or in other words, those with higher trait social anxiety. In order to do this, I created a two-part task; for the first part of the task, participants saw a series of overlapped faces and houses and were asked to make a judgement about either the face or the house, depending on the cue. Fifty percent of the faces expressed the emotion “anger,” and the other fifty percent were neutral in nature. While viewing each overlapped image, participants were cued to focus on one stimulus or the other, based on which question they were asked. Whichever image was asked about was the task-relevant stimuli, and therefore the other became task-irrelevant. Afterwards, unbeknownst to the participants, they were asked to complete a surprise memory task, indicating whether or not, and to which degree, they remembered each face and house. Participants also completed several measures of trait social anxiety and generalized anxiety.
After spending the previous semester recruiting participants and administering the study virtually, in January we began to analyze the data. We found that participants with higher social anxiety remembered significantly fewer angry faces than neutral faces when these faces were irrelevant to the task. This suggests that higher social anxiety is associated with worse memory for angry task-irrelevant faces than neutral task-irrelevant faces. This correlation was also only significant for the measure of social anxiety, but not for the measure of generalized anxiety, so it appears then that this effect was specific to individuals with elevated social anxiety.
Once we had the results, I began writing the thesis and preparing for my defense. Due to the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, my defense was conducted virtually. My fellow lab members helped me prepare by graciously listening to me practice my presentation and providing really helpful feedback. This allowed me to feel prepared when the day of my defense arrived. I was really excited to share the project that I had been working on for so long with my committee and hearing that I passed made all of the hard work worth every second.
The Fulbright Honors College helped me realize my passion for research. After graduating, I have accepted a position on a clinical research team at a company that makes medical diagnostic equipment and I hope to attend graduate school in the future.