My Imitation of My Participants Taking the Study (Minus the EEG Cap)

Author: Wesley Vaught | Major: Biochemistry and Biology | Semester: Fall 2023

Arkansas continues to have a higher prevalence of citizens with frequent mental distress than any state in the U.S., likely due to a disproportionate number of stressors such as financial hardship and lack of social support relative to the rest of the country (America’s Health Rankings, 2022). The high incidence of mental illness and chronic stress in Arkansas demonstrates the need for research to understand mechanisms of common psychological problems resulting from stress, such as generalized anxiety disorder. Such research is crucial not only to better support and inform Arkansans, but also to address the high burden of stress and mental illness across the rest of the country. The college population is a relevant sample because of the rigorous academic, social, and financial demands of attending college as a young adult and the unfortunate reality of mental health crises leading to severe or lethal injury. This is the plan that we sought out to study, and it continues into 2024.

Most of the studies exploring stress and cognition adopt reaction time (RT), performance and accuracy, and spatial neuroimaging (think MRI or fMRI). We decided to use RTs but not in the context of a neurocognitive task: are the participants avoiding the stimuli presented? When I developed this study with Dr. Judah and Hannah Hamrick, I did not realize that I was hypothesizing how real life can have a mediating, casual pathway for psychopathology like generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) such that it is adaptive. As someone who has been through many flavors of stress, I thought worrying – a distinct diagnostic criterion for GAD – was natural to upkeep the pace of work and living in general. That is why we tested two hypotheses: (1) chronically stressed participants had quicker reaction times to negative stimuli than positive or neutral stimuli and (2) problem solving worriers will more likely have higher scores on the measure for GAD, the GAD-7. Now that the project has been running for two semesters, I can say that 20-year-old me did have a decent conceptualization of attention, and this project continues to fit into my research narrative of how consciousness and tangential states and their biochemical correlates like “worried,” “depressed,” and “stressed” are interweaved.

Not all workings of this project, however, are tied into a pretty bow. During our first semester of running the study, we ran seventy-three participants. This is not a terrible number, but it is deceiving. Often with online studies, participants will zoom through the surveys, and because my component of this story is the cognitive task, they need to be paying attention to complete the attentional bias measure. There will be many participants whose data we cannot utilize to reach conclusions about our hypotheses. This grievance continued during this semester. Forty-six participants completed the task. That gives the study a total of 119. A typical survey study needs at least 200 participants to have enough statistical power to evaluate our claims. Luckily for both my lab mate and me, we will be at the University for one more semester. If we are vigilant in getting it up on SONA, the reward system to award “credit” to participants, perhaps we can take advantage of the overachiever zeal of general psychology students who want to complete their research requirement early and, after some data processing, evaluate our hypotheses.

As I continue this project and to read other studies and literatures, I think I will eventually tweak some of the stimuli that I am presenting to participants to be more specific and add a temporal measurement such as electrophysiology (EEG and EKG) and eye tracking. My current theory about attention is it is biased by relevant stimuli to us and our self-definitions of ourselves and the world around us. Given that there is a significant difference between highly chronically stress participants’ reaction time to negative images and neutral images, adding electrophysiological data alongside reaction times could achieve many wins for psychiatry, medicine, and general care. For example, a potential difference in reaction times up in the wave signal in EEG could serve to medicalize (although there are pros and cons to doing so) stress and its effect on our cognition and physiology. And these electrophysiological differences are known not to be innate or static. If a treatment comes along to target the physiology or cognition of stress or the patient is able to resolve the stressful situation, EEG could be a way to see treatment success e.g. wave normalization (not a difference between negative and neutral stimuli).