Bentley Bennett Headshot
Author: Bentley Bennet | Major: Psychology | Semester: Fall 2024
My name is Bentley Bennett, and I am in Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. I am a Psychology major with minors in Human Development and Family Sciences, Child Services, Gender Studies, and Medical Humanities. My research mentor is the amazing Dr. Jennifer Veilleux, in the department of Psychological Sciences. We started planning my research in the Spring 2024 semester and started research at the end of the semester into Summer 2024. This semester, Fall 2024, is my first semester receiving the Honors College Research Grant. In the future, I plan to attend graduate school to become a clinical mental health counselor.
My research focuses on the correlation between obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) and beliefs about how controllable the different components of emotion (physiology, expression, thoughts, and action urges) are. We are also researching how experiences with therapy, or lack thereof, correlate with OCS and beliefs about the controllability of emotions. This is relevant to understand how psychopathology and therapy relate to the beliefs people hold about emotions. This is important in our understanding of OCD and possible interventions.
I found my mentor by looking at the Psychology faculty on the University of Arkansas website. Dr. Veilleux’s lab, the TEMPT Lab, aligned closely with my interests, so I filled out an application and was able to do an interview with her. I loved her personality and loved everything she told me about the lab, so when she accepted me into the lab, I joined! I worked in Dr. Veilleux’s lab the Fall 2023 semester and then started meetings with her Spring 2024. During those meetings, we worked on getting a plan for my thesis and the studies we wanted to run. I picked my topic because obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is something I am very passionate about, and I would love to work with people who have OCD in the future after becoming a clinical mental health counselor. I also wanted to incorporate experiences with therapy, as that is the field I plan to go into. I am very interested in how OCD functions and was excited to explore how the components of emotion (specifically the thought and action urge components) correlate with OCS. Since the lab is focused on emotion, partly in the context of mental health issues, these topics related to the interests of the lab very well. We ran the first study into Summer 2024 and two slightly altered versions of Study 1 as well. We then worked on writing Study 1 up and planning Study 2. We started running Study 2 this semester (Fall 2024), and we now have almost 200 participants from Qualtrics!
This next semester, we will work on continuing to write and finalize my thesis. Dr. Veilleux has been a tremendous support and has taught me so much while walking me through the process of creating studies and analyzing them. I also applied to present a poster of my research at a conference, and I will hear back about my acceptance in January. Some aspects of research take some time to figure out, such as how to navigate creating surveys and analyzing data. However, with the help of my research mentor and patience, I have been able to learn a lot, and it has been an extremely exciting and rewarding experience so far. As I mentioned before, I will be finishing my thesis next semester and graduating, and I plan to attend graduate school after that!