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Author: Katelynn Kallodaychsak | Major: Psychology

My name is Katelynn Kallodaychsak, and I am a senior undergraduate student in the Fullbright College of Arts and Sciences. My major is Psychology, my minor is Criminology, and I have a concentration in pre-med prerequisites. My mentor is Dr. Grant Shields, and he is in the department of Psychological Science. During the spring of 2021, my junior year, I started my position in Dr. Shields’ A SCAN lab, and I began collecting data for my honors thesis in the fall of 2021, during my senior year. Data collection for my project is nearly finished, but data collection will continue for a small portion of spring 2022.

My thesis aims to eliminate the gap in understanding the relations among depression, stress, and moral decision-making. I thought this would be an important relationship to investigate considering we make moral decisions every day, and stress and depression are quite prevalent in today’s society. In this study, participants come to the lab, report their depressive symptoms (using the Beck Depression Inventory-II), and are exposed to either a stress induction (the Trier Social Stress Test) or a control task before finally completing a moral decision-making task. Participants provide saliva samples both before and after the stress or control task to permit measurement of their biological stress reactivity. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) is used to evaluate participants’ emotional stress reactivity, and their moral decision-making is measured using the Everyday Moral Conflict Situations (EMCS) Scale. Drawing on prior theoretical work, I hypothesize that, relative to individuals low in depressive symptoms or individuals in the control condition, individuals who score higher in depression and are exposed to acute stress will choose non-utilitarian judgments. I found Dr. Shields on the UA faculty website, and I was lucky enough for him to agree to be my mentor.

Over the summer, the IRB for my study was approved, so we were able to start collecting data during the beginning of the semester. Dr. Shields spent a lot of time during the summer and the semester before designing the study and getting the research room ready. Our postgraduate and lab-manager, Elleona Trudell, created the time slots for the study and assigned the slots to the lab research assistants. There is a group of undergraduate research assistants, and even though some are not in the honors program, they still provided an immense amount of help in running study time slots. Conducting the Trier Social Stress Test proved to be challenging because it can be a very stressful task for some individuals, but I had to remain in character and not show emotion. Another challenge was that some participants did not want to continue on with study during the stress task, so we had to dismiss them and were not able to use their data. I learned and gained so much experience through this opportunity provided by the grant funding. This Honors College grant has enabled me to run my study because assaying the saliva samples is very expensive, and saliva samples are necessary for running a stress study. Conducting this study has given me valuable research experience that will contribute to my career goals in the field of medicine, and the funding enabled me to run this study. In this coming spring semester of 2022, I will be focusing on analyzing these data and writing my thesis. At the end of the semester, I will defend my thesis to my committee members and presumably graduate with honors.