Author: Caroline Geels          Major: Psychology

Caroline Geels

You’ve got me feeling emotions!

I am Caroline Geels. I just graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in Psychology from Fulbright College. I completed my honors thesis under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Veilleux within the Department of Psychological Science. My research study ran during the fall semester of 2020 and the spring semester of 2021.

At my core and despite the lack of an official label, I began my undergraduate career with the intention of getting as close to a “Pre-Med” degree as I could. I flip-flopped between Biology, Biochemistry, and Chemistry for a few semesters – but my watershed moment happened during my sophomore year while taking Abnormal Psychology. I tacked on a Psychology degree as it was a topic I greatly enjoyed during high school and took Abnormal with Dr. Jennifer Veilleux. Before I could blink twice, Dr. Veilleux had sucked me into her lab, TEMPT (Treating Emotional and Motivational Processes Transdiagnostically), and I was going to complete my honors thesis in Psychological Science.

During the fall of 2019, Dr. Veilleux and I began the arduous process of brainstorming a thesis topic, the only issue being I was interested in everything! When establishing my research question, I emphasized my desire for my topic to be applicable to the medical field, to which she laughed in response, as the TEMPT lab concerns emotional and motivational processes, all of which may be linked back to medicine. Accordingly, my thesis is “You’ve got me feeling emotions: Expression of emotion-related impulsivity through language.” We then proceeded to develop an experimental study to test my research question, which was thankfully always planned to be online. We began running in the fall of 2020 and will continue to gather participants in the spring of 2021.

There are many different features of impulsivity, such as acting without planning or considering the consequences. Emotion-related impulsivity is a subset of impulsivity, which involves people responding reflexively to their emotions resulting in both rash action (e.g., hitting someone in anger) and rash inaction (e.g. withdrawal when sad). Our understanding of emotion-related impulsivity is that it reflects stronger connections between emotional action urges and subsequent behavior, which should be expressed through the language that people use to discuss their emotions and subsequent actions, consistent with a justification-like connection. We expect that this justification-like connection should manifest as people with higher emotion-related impulsivity will display greater demonstration of affective processes, first-person language, inevitability, and conviction. By analyzing writing from people who vary in levels of emotion-related impulsivity, we can interpret how people’s thoughts (evident in their language) reflect their reflexivity and impulsivity to emotion.

Initially, we intended to recruit participants who were very low or very high in emotion-related impulsivity, measured with the Three-Factor Impulsivity Scale (TFIS) through a prescreening measure. However, due to changes in the general psychology course because of COVID-19, recruitment was low, and scores on the TFIS did not divide into two groups of low and high emotion-related impulsivity, instead, there was a full spectrum of scores. Thus, we abandoned the cutoff requirements and opened the study to all interested participants after n = 30.

The structure of our study had participants writing two narrative essays, one control essay, and one emotional essay, both a minimum of 1650 characters, approximately 300 words, assigned in random order. The control prompt asked, “Write about your morning routine on a specific day (i.e. yesterday) after you woke up until you got to your first appointment, class, etc.” and the emotional prompt, “Write about a time within the past week that you experienced a significantly stressful event.” These essays were analyzed through a linguistic analysis process, Linguistic Inquiry, and Word Count program (LIWC) through word categories designed to reflect different emotions, thinking styles, and social concerns.

The goal of our project was the establishment of potential language-based treatments for emotion-related impulsivity and subsequent psychopathology, as well as potentially uncovering a common ancestor amongst prevalent disorders, like depression, anxiety, and substance-abuse disorders. Dr. Veilleux has provided excellent mentorship for academic writing, statistics, grant writing, coding, and research, amongst many other things.

The Honors College Research Grant has allowed for many opportunities concerning my research project. Due to low recruitment, we need additional participants. With the grant, we were able to pay and recruit participants through Prolific to gain a larger research pool, a necessity for most research. The organization, dedication, and time commitment that this project has and will take has helped me to become a more well-rounded academic through writing, coding skills, analysis, and the development of a future publishable article in a peer-reviewed journal. I intend to continue working with Dr. Veilleux on this project after the thesis defense to prepare the research to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. In the coming fall of 2021, I will be attending the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to become a Doctor of Medicine.