Recent Psychology Graduate
Author: Taylor Suneson | Major: Psychology | Semester: Spring 2023
Hi, I’m Taylor Suneson and I completed my thesis as a requirement for Psychology departmental honors for the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. During the fall of 2022, I began work on creating my psychology study with the help of Dr. William Levine. I chose Dr. Levine as my mentor after taking Statistics for Psychologists with him and working as a research assistant in his Language Processing Lab. In his lab, we read about and completed research examining the psychological effects that reading has on individuals. For my study, we were interested in researching the relationship that can be observed between verbatim memory and reading metaphoric phrases.
We hypothesized that when individuals read a phrase as a metaphor, they would demonstrate improved verbatim memory compared to when the exact phrase was read as a literal sentence. We predicted this because metaphors are considered to be foregrounded and previous research has shown that memory is improved for foregrounded texts. We created 30 target sentences that were either read as metaphors or as literal sentences. These sentences were placed at the end of a paragraph that provided context, forcing them to be read as either a metaphor or a literal sentence. For example in one context the phrase, The sharks gathered together, could be read as an actual group of sharks congregating (literal context), whereas the other context framed this phrase as a group of lawyers meeting together.
We began collecting data in the spring of 2023. We were able to collect data on 54 participants while we ran the study. Participants signed up for the study themselves via Sona as a fulfillment of a requirement for their General Psychology course. A research assistant led them into the lab and guided them to a computer. After reading and signing a brief consent form, the researchers asked participants to complete the ART task. The Author Recognition Test, or the ART, was developed by Stanovich & West in 1989 as a means of measuring print exposure. It included 100 names, half of which belong to well-known authors, and the other half of which don’t. Participants were asked to place a check next to each name they recognize, gaining a point for each correct answer and losing one for each incorrect. Print exposure was measured to test if it had a significant effect on our main hypothesis.
After completing the ART, a research assistant began the main study on the computer for each participant. The computer provided them with the remaining directions. The computer presented participants with a story that was either metaphoric in context or literal. Every sentence was five sentences in length and the computer presented the sentences one at a time. Participants advanced to the next sentence using the spacebar. After finishing reading 20 stories, participants were given a one-minute delay and then asked to complete a memory test. The memory test consisted of 60 items and participants were asked to identify if they had previously read a sentence or not. Half of the memory items were sentences that they had seen already and the other half they had not. Finally, after completing the memory test, participants were debriefed and thanked for their time.
Unfortunately, the results of our analyses did not align with our hypothesis. However, we don’t believe that this means our hypothesis should be rejected so quickly because there were a few key limitations to our study. Most importantly, participants only had a one-minute delay between reading stories and completing the memory task. Further iterations of our research should take this into consideration and implement a longer delay to truly understand the relationship between reading metaphors and memory. Despite our results not being significant, that doesn’t mean that this line of research is without real-world applications. Studying the relationship between memory and metaphor can have important implications in learning environments or for memory-impaired individuals.
Working with Dr. Levine made completing my honors thesis research a breeze. He was extremely informative and always available to answer any questions that I may have had. The biggest challenge that I faced was writing my literature review and truly putting the research into the research paper. It is definitely not something you can do overnight. Completing research takes time, effort, a close eye, and reading what seems like a million research papers. However, it is so rewarding to watch everything come together as you take notes and write up your own study. If there was ever a concept that I struggled to grasp, Dr. Levine was quick to help explain it.
Receiving this Honors College grant alleviated much of the financial stress of being a full-time student working on my thesis while also working a restaurant job in order to pay for school. I was able to cut back on the number of shifts that I work and instead pour myself into my research study. This was a tremendous blessing and truly made completing and defending my thesis not just a dream, but a reality! I look forward to taking my research experience with me as I pursue my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology next fall.