Author: Danielle Shaver | Majors: Psychology and Social Work

Writing an honors thesis is a bit like getting into your first high school relationship. You’ve watched so many adults do it, but when it is your turn, you realize you have no idea what you’re doing… Even more accurately, every “first” can feel clunky and awkward.

1. The first research question you come up with.
2. The first email you send to a potential advisor.
3. The first data analysis you try to look at.

It is all overwhelming, but that is also what makes it exciting.

This odd thesis-relationship comparison is especially relevant because of my honors thesis topic. I am studying relationships. More specifically, I am studying how emotion regulation strategies following relationship conflict vary depending on self-criticism and relationship context.

I know.

If I read that sentence when I was a freshman, I would have had to read it eight times to comprehend it. So please, instead, let me walk you through how I got to that topic.

…

My name is Danielle Shaver, and I am majoring in Psychological Science and Social Work, minoring in Substance Use Disorders. I joined Dr. Veilleux’s lab, my current honors advisor, when I was a sophomore, and she threw me into the pool of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation strategies are what we do, consciously or unconsciously, to manage our emotions. Sometimes, we use these strategies to help ourselves feel “better.” For example, have you ever sought out the advice from a friend when that exam grade comes back way worse than you expected? Even more interesting, we use some strategies that actually make the situation “worse.” After a breakup, have you ever thought about how your situation will never get better? After a fight with a friend, have you ever listed all the things you should have done differently? Or have you avoided having those hard conversations in the first place? We call these things “maladaptive emotion regulation strategies,” meaning the things we do to cope can draw out the hurtful emotion longer than we need.

With emotion regulation in the back of my head, I also began studying attachment theory in my psychology and social work courses. Put basically, this is the theory that the relationships we have with our caregivers and watch our caregivers have create patterns for how we behave in relationships throughout our lives. Since this theory is so large, Dr. Veilleux advised me to focus on a smaller part of it. Therefore, I wanted to examine if people high in self-criticism, a significant trait in anxious attachment, use more maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in different relationship contexts following relationship conflict.

Do self-critical people manage their emotions differently based on whether their conflict was in a romantic relationship or a friendship?

Does this difference exist for people with lower self-criticism too?

…

Whenever I read blogs about honors college research, the pages are usually dripping in intelligence, phrases I don’t understand, and scholarly confidence that says, “I already have 8 articles published.”

Instead, I want to normalize the journey of research for my people sitting in imposter syndrome right now.

I want to emphasize that research can be hard. It took me an entire semester to figure out the question I wanted to ask. Months of “brain dumps” and confused rants on Zoom produced the question I described above. After months of turning my brain into soup, I had the first step done.

I want to emphasize that research is messy. Time after time, I have drawn crazy-looking graphs trying to understand my own hypotheses. After my first study, the data revealed that there was not a difference in emotion regulation based on relationship context (friendship v. romantic relationship).

The data did not support our main hypothesis. Eek.

Now, let me be clear, research is also rewarding. It teaches you things you didn’t see coming. For instance, even though we could not support our main hypothesis in Study 1, we saw something interesting. We did see evidence that these strategies could differ based on how important or emotionally close our participants perceived that relationship. This called for a shift in our plans.

With the guidance of my mentor, Dr. Veilleux, we are currently collecting data for Study 2. We went where the data took us, and we are now defining relationship context a different way. We are examining perceived importance of relationship, closeness of the partner, emotional vulnerability, perceived destructiveness of the conflict, and other context variables.

Exciting stuff if I do say so myself.

My last semester of college is coming up, and my plate is piled high. I will be presenting Study 1 findings in San Francisco at a national conference (shout out to the honors college conference travel grant for making that possible); I will be writing up my thesis, hopefully dripping with the intelligence and scholarly confidence I mentioned earlier; and I will be defending my thesis in April 2022.

…

I look back on the freshman I was in 2018, filled with imposter syndrome, and I want to give her the same advice that I try to give myself now. It’s the same advice I want to give all those other freshmen that tense up whenever they try to define what the heck “research interest” means anyway.

    Stay patient with yourself.

    Give yourself time to learn.

    Try your best, and shift directions when you hit a dead end.

P.S. Find yourself a good thesis advisor that helps you navigate it all in the first place.

P.P.S. thanks Dr. V