Emily Bunch

Author: Emily Bunch | Major: Psychology, Biology | Semester: Spring 2025

Emily Bunch is a student from Little Rock studying Psychology and Biology in the Fulbright College. She will be attending medical school in the Fall to fulfill her dreams of becoming a physician. Emily conducted psychology research under Dr. Brenda McDaniel in the Spring of 2025.

My research journey began sophomore year. I was on the pre-med track and read online that I should engage in some type of research for medical school. Anxious about my ability to do research, I reached out to one of my favorite instructors. I had her for Psychopathology and Developmental Psychology, and we had talked about her research a couple of times in class. She researches Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which are potentially traumatic events that happen as a child. ACEs have been around since the 1990s, and can have pretty staggering effects on your health as an adult. These include things like abuse and household dysfunction, and are associated with chronic diseases in adulthood, such as ischemic heart disease, emphysema, and even cancer. It’s really interesting and says a lot about the mind-body relationship!

I emailed Dr. McDaniel and asked if she was accepting honors students, and she said yes! As a psychology and biology major, I wanted my research to be a blend of the two. In addition, being pre-med, I wanted my research to be applicable to American health. ACEs are surprisingly common across the U.S. (I encourage you to look up the ACE-IQ questionnaire yourself) and are tied to a wide range of physical health conditions by ways of chronic stress. The topic was perfect.

One of the hardest parts of completing my thesis was actually narrowing down what we wanted to study. Dr. McDaniel encouraged me to delve into ACE research and come up with potential research questions based on my own interests. Simply stated, I had too many interests. ACEs are deeply woven into our stress tolerance and adult health, making it hard to single out one specific question. However, after lots of reading, I found that self-compassion is a relatively new field in psychology. Little work has been done on the relationship between self-compassion and ACEs, and it’s easy to imagine they would be tightly connected. Thus, our research question was born: how does self-compassion change the outcomes of ACEs on adult health?

After receiving an Honors College Research Grant, we created a paid survey to distribute among American adults (also, who knew how tedious it is to create surveys??). We asked about their childhoods and self-compassion, and threw in questionnaires about their physical health, mental health, and how much they engage in risky behaviors. The results were shocking. People with higher ACEs generally had worse adulthood health and engaged in more risky behaviors, but self-compassion actually mediated those effects. In other words, people with more ACEs were less likely to exhibit self-compassion, but if they did, it reduced the chance of those bad health outcomes. This is a huge deal! It shows that our own criticisms of ourselves can carry over to our physical health. We live in a society full of pressure to succeed. No one wants to be “average,” and we often don’t cut ourselves near enough slack. Over time, that stress builds up and becomes chronic, contributing to a wide array of health problems years later.

I am incredibly thankful for the Honors College Research Grant for the opportunity to have completed this thesis. For the first half of college, I was unsure of my ability or desire to do research. Now, I whole-heartedly believe everyone should. It’s not always an easy road, but my thesis prepared me for medical school in more ways than I expected. Academia is hard, but my thesis gave me consistent exposure to learn how to read research. It taught me what conclusions can be drawn (and can’t be drawn!) from studies. I find myself using this a lot when I read news articles because I can go straight to the source. This has greatly prepared me for medical school and made me a more well-rounded individual. I hope this research teaches people to be kinder to themselves and not overly-criticize their shortcomings. Ultimately, I also hope to share this information with my patients to reduce chronic stress.