Author: Willow Holt | Major: Psychology, Sociology | Semester: Fall 2023

Willow Holt is an honor’s college student in Fulbright college, studying Psychology and Sociology. She is a research assistant in the Cognition of Depression and Anxiety (CODA) lab, where she works with her mentor Dr. Judah and other students to further understanding of depression and anxiety. She aims to become a clinical mental health counselor, supporting and guiding individuals with disorders such as anxiety and depression.

During the Fall 2023 semester, I began my honor’s research project, “Social Anxiety and Interpretation Bias in Text Messages”. During this semester, I learned how to take one of my ideas and turn it into research that can improve the lives of other people. I knew that many college students experience social anxiety, and I also knew that social anxiety is associated with  a negative interpretation bias, a tendency to perceive ambiguous social information as negative. I also knew from my experience and the experience of other college students that text messaging can be an especially ambiguous form of communication, because it lacks facial cues, body language, and vocal cues that are present in face-to-face communication. I was curious to find out how social anxiety affects text message communication, but discovered that psychology research has largely focused on interpretation biases in in-person social interactions. By researching this topic, we can better understand how individuals with social anxiety interpret text messages, and mental health professionals can use this knowledge to help clients with social anxiety navigate our online social world, reducing their distress in social interactions and helping them build healthy social relationships.

I began by presenting my topic idea to Dr. Judah, the director of the Cognition of Depression and Anxiety (CODA) lab in which I had been working as a research assistant. Dr. Judah was able to help me expand on my idea, and provided guidance throughout the research process. Dr. Judah and I decided to also include major depressive disorder (MDD) and intolerance of uncertainty as variables in my research study. MDD commonly co-occurs with social anxiety, and could also be implicated in text message interpretation because it is associated with supporting negative interpretations and rejecting positive interpretations. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) was another factor we considered to be potentially important for the interpretation of text messages, because intolerance of uncertainty is a disposition that regards uncertainty as negative, so individuals high in this trait may more readily accept negative interpretations to avoid uncertainty.

With my topic solidified, during the summer prior to the Fall 2023 semester we began drafting my research proposal. I learned all the components that go into writing a research paper: reviewing current literature, creating an abstract, designing a study, getting approval from the Institutional Review Board, and applying to research grants. The process was challenging, it was intimidating to sift through hundreds of scientific papers to decide which best supported my topic, and I had never before written a paper synthesizing current research and my own ideas. Fortunately, my mentor and fellow research assistants provided essential support through sharing their own research experiences and tips. By the beginning of the Fall semester, my topic was approved and we could begin building my study. I used the program Qualtrics to build my study, which consists of an online survey containing empirically supported measures to measure my variables.

The study contains questions about the participants’ demographics and relevant measures of social anxiety, depression, intolerance of uncertainty, and interpretation of ambiguous text message scenarios. We found one study that used ambiguous text message vignettes describing common text message conversations, which had high ratings of realism and construct validity, so we used this to measure interpretation bias in text messaging as well as to test the reliability of this measure through replication.

Once the study was built, we spent the entire semester gathering data from over two hundred general psychology students who took the survey through SONA systems for course credit. The next steps of this project, which will be conducted during the Spring 2024 semester, will be to analyze the data results, write a report on the results, and to present and defend my research findings. The honors college research grant has allowed me to take all that I’ve learned in my undergraduate studies and use it to contribute to our knowledge of mental health, a topic that I’m passionate about. My experience has helped me grow as a student and as a budding researcher, and I look forward to continuing my work on this project.