My name is Letian Huang, and I’m a rising senior pursuing a dual degree in Psychology and Philosophy. Ever since I had my very first psychology class, Social Psychology, I have been passionate about research on social stigma, intimate relationships, and cognitive psychology. My current honors thesis project examines the relationship between perceived stigma and psychological well-being among the LGBTQ community. Perceived stigma is defined as the anticipation of rejection, discrimination, and violence because of one’s minority status. The main reason for me to focus on this topic is because while LGBTQ individuals are found to have an increased risk of developing mental health difficulties, there rarely exists any experimental studies that explore perceived stigma, one of the main minority stressors for LGBTQ individuals. It is rather important to determine the presence (or absence) of a causal relationship between perceived stigma and psychological well-being, as the results not only offers meaningful insight into the everyday experiences of LGBTQ persons, but can also be used to develop interventions to increase resilience in LGBTQ individuals.

My project has advanced quite smoothly with the assistance and mentorship from my advisor Dr. Helgeson. After delving into a lot of literature, we came up with the final experiment design and submitted this study for IRB approval. We just heard back today from IRB that the study got approved! By the end of summer, I will find 6 pilot participants to test out if the experimental design works and revise it based on their feedback. As for now, in the experiment, participants will be randomly assigned to be led to believe that they are interacting with a stranger who is anti-LGBTQ (experimental condition) or to be given no information about whether the stranger they are interacting with is anti-LGBTQ or not (control condition). After receiving this information, the participant will engage in a ten-minute interaction with the stranger. I hypothesize that participants in the experimental condition will be more withdrawn and less sociable during the interaction and report more psychological distress after the conversation compared to participants in the control condition. In addition to the questionnaires that will be given to participants before and after the interaction, we will also videotape the interaction and code participants’ behavior. I am really excited to see how the study will move forward and what the results will reveal about the effect of perceived stigma on minorities.

My name is Lilly Mcleod and I am an incoming senior studying psychology. For my thesis project I will be exploring the factors that predict the cessation of cannabis when developing Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS). Given the lack of literature and increasing popularity of cannabis, I wanted to focus on this field and explore clearer insights into the community.

I came up with this project, because as I ventured through daily life, I could not help but notice how socially acceptable consuming alcohol is. It is one of the most consumed drugs causing increase aggression, unruliness, fights, injuries, car accidents, liver problems and the list goes on. Yet, if a person smokes cannabis, which is mostly just associated with calmness and pain relief, people are arrested, shamed, and stigmatized. They are made to feel as if they are a criminal and are constantly made to feel stupid and unworthy. In reality, what many people do not understand is that the cannabis community is extremely diverse, and a lot of high-functioning people are a part of that. When your brain is going 100 miles an hour all the time, one just needs a break, a sense of relief from the stress inducing world. The image of cannabis consumers that a lot of people have in their head is a person that is just home all the time, is not doing anything with their life, and does not take anything seriously or care about anything. The reality is that that is mostly just the picture of one-time users or people whose bodies do not take well to cannabis. Though, humans are unique and therefore it needs to be made clear that not everyone is going to react the same to a drug. Hence, just because one person has a bad experience with cannabis, it does not mean that the next person could not have very beneficial experiences with it. Therefore, unbiased research on the topic needs to be conducted in order for people to not judge a book by its cover and understand that there is no true justification for judging a person who consumes cannabis when alcohol is so socially acceptable. Moreover, I am hoping this research will allow for a deeper understanding of people with cannabis dependence and people that have developed CHS, which I hope will be used to aid people who suffer with CHS to receive the adequate treatment. 

My background:

I developed a love of language at a young age, listening to my parents and grandparents switch fluently between English and their mother tongue. Though my Hungarian is limited to prayers and food, and the only phrase I can confidently say in Slovenian is “I don’t have your key,” these languages ignited my passion for linguistics and set the groundwork for what I hope to be a lifelong pursuit of understanding the many facets of language as a cognitive function. 

Project background:

I joined the CAOS lab last fall after taking a research methods class with my faculty advisor, Dr. Mahon. My primary job was assisting a Dietrich Honors Fellow from last year, Eliza Reedy, with her senior thesis project which focused on a modality specific lexical retrieval task. This meant that many afternoons were spent in the testing room listening to participants name objects from pictures, sounds, and definitions, leading to interesting observations like the common error of naming ‘snail’ in response to the definition, ‘a slow reptile with a shell on its back.’ This led to the question of how and where the deeper concepts tied to lexical forms like ‘snail’ are represented, and how semantic attributes like ‘is slow’ and ‘has a shell’ are organized to form those representations.  

Where we’re at:

When I began developing this project for my proposal, I was working with a prototype of semantic attribute questions which probed for six different categories of object knowledge, such as typical form, behavior, and location. Since then, I have revisited the questions, made revisions, and assembled pilot versions of the task which were then sent to MTurk workers for my first rounds of control data. Getting right into the data and navigating how to visualize and analyze everything has been a really valuable experience, and taught me some invaluable lessons, like the importance of saving your beautiful spreadsheet right away if your computer is old and prone to dying without warning. In addition to getting well acquainted with Excel and Psychopy, the platform used to run the study, I have spent the summer reading numerous papers and getting a deeper understanding of neural networks and their associated cognitive functions. 

Where I hope we go:

As I now have some preliminary data and the study design is being finalized, the immediate next step is to start running the task on patients with temporal lobe damage at UPMC Presbyterian. Because this aspect of the project is dependent on patient availability and coordination with the neurology department at the University of Pittsburgh, I am also working on next steps for the project as a whole. At this phase of my project, there are still many directions it can go, which has prompted lots of reading and thinking through the bigger picture goals. As of now, I am interested in exploring the overlaps in networks responsible for integrating attributes into conceptual representations and those transmitting information for socio-cognitive functions and word retrieval.

My name is Cheryl Zhang and I’m an incoming senior in BHA studying Humanities Analytics and Flute Performance with an additional major in French & Francophone Studies and a minor in Human Computer Interaction. My thesis project, Paris Mosaïque, will be an interactive map website that examines how the different diasporic communities of Paris make up the unique mosaic of the city as well as conceptions and beliefs about race in France today.

The idea for this project came from a class I took while studying abroad in Paris last fall, with Professor Christelle Taraud. In this class, also called Paris Mosaïque, Professor Taraud took us on sociological walks in different neighborhoods of Paris and taught us about the histories of the communities that live there. In getting to know the city and its inhabitants, I came to realize how many voices that are so important to the narrative are often neglected, which is also an effect of the color-blindness in French culture. I wanted to explore this idea more, in the form of a website that other people can access, so that they, too, can learn about the communities that are both integral to and “othered” from Paris as a city. In the past few weeks, I have been doing a lot of background reading about universalisme (the idea that one’s identity as a French citizen transcends race, ethnicity, gender and religion, on the experiences of these communities), France’s colonial history, and French political theory. In the upcoming weeks before I leave for Paris, I will be continuing my reading and writing as well as planning interviews and writing interview questions.

Hello,

My name is Steven Aceti. I am a rising senior studying International Relations and Politics at Carnegie Mellon University.

For my senior thesis, I wanted to look at the services offered to immigrants by the city of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, and see if I could identify areas where immigrants’ needs were not being met, or if certain immigrant groups were less likely to receive adequate services. I hoped to assess the most prominent needs of immigrants in the city and county, determine what was preventing their needs from being met, and provide concrete, actionable, recommendations to the city and county government to better meet the needs of immigrants. In doing so, I hope to find a gap in the current state of immigration research at the county level, and provide recommendations for future research.

When I was invited to complete a senior thesis as part of the Dean’s honor list for Dietrich College, I knew immigration was one of several topics I was interested in conducting research in. Immigration has always been close to my heart because my mother is an immigrant from Mexico, as are many of our friends growing up in Los Angeles. In developing my thesis proposal, my idea went from a comparative study on immigration systems in western democracies to see how they compared to the US in terms of efficiency, to a study on the incentives of undocumented immigrants to come to the US and cross the border despite the dangers they face on the way, to a study on immigrants in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. This last idea was a suggestion from my thesis advisor, who thought that my research could be made relevant to the university by focusing the issue on the area CMU is based in. An employee of The Center here at CMU was the one who suggested I could send my research to the mayor’s office to see if I can influence local immigration policies.

As of my last post, I planned to conduct a meta-analysis to clarify the strength and direction of alcohol’s acute effects on emotion recognition among community samples. This project is in collaboration with Dr. Kasey Creswell, my thesis advisor, and Lakshmi Kumar — a doctoral student of the Behavioral Health Research Lab of which the three of us are all a part of. However, since collecting articles and extracting data for the study, the project has faced some interesting challenges and undergone major changes.

The first step of the project was finding articles to include in the review. I conducted literature searches using the databases PubMed, psycINFO, and Google Scholar to identify relevant studies published since 1970, with search terms including [alcohol] AND [emotion recognition OR emotional expression OR facial expression recognition]. The latter terms were included to address the fact that the process of identifying emotions in others is referred to by different names across the literature. The searches were limited for two of the databases such that keywords had to appear in the title for Google Scholar searches and in the abstract for psycINFO searches. The reference lists of identified studies were also scanned, and reverse searches were generated and scanned for appropriate studies.

To be considered for the meta-analysis, studies were required to follow an experimental design that administered alcohol to non-clinical human samples and include at least one measure of emotion recognition as an outcome variable. Articles were excluded from the meta-analysis if at least one of the following were true: used non-human animals, published in a non-English language, was non-peer reviewed/unpublished, and/or sampled from clinical populations (e.g., those diagnosed with schizophrenia, alcohol dependent patients). In the end, a total of 10 articles were identified to meet all inclusion criteria.

The next step involved reading through the articles and extracting relevant data, of which the following variables were collected: sample type and size, demographics, definition(s) for emotion recognition, measure(s) for emotion recognition, dosage(s) of alcohol administered, and recognition outcomes across emotions based on alcoholic versus non-alcoholic (i.e., placebo and/or control) condition assignment.

After pulling out all variables of interest, we found that there was great variability across the studies– resulting in a complex dataset. For instance, studies used differing tasks to measure emotion recognition abilities in participants and collected very different outcome data. Additionally, studies varied based on design – including between- and within-person designs (i.e., different versus same participants used across all conditions), as well as repeated measures and independent group approaches (i.e., repeated versus single exposure to condition(s)).

The differences across papers posed a problem because meta-analyses are usually conducted on studies that are similar, and traditional statistical approaches for meta-analyses are often used on simple datasets. I spent much of my time reading articles for statistical recommendations to address such complex data (such as studies that include more than one treatment group or collect information on multiple outcomes) and discussed approaches with my project team.

We finally agreed that based on recommendations across the literature, our dataset was too complex and the studies were not similar enough to conduct a meaningful meta-analysis. Instead, we’ve decided to conduct a systematic review on the articles we found. This means that we will narratively review trends across studies to understand the acute alcoholic effects on emotion recognition among community samples, and we will still be the first team to review this relationship in the literature. While the project hit some bumps along the way, and the initial plan has changed, I am continuing to work with my research team to address the goal of better understanding how alcohol impacts recognition abilities for non-clinical persons.

Hi there, thanks for being on board with me during the summer! I have gone through a lot – readings, designing paradigms collecting data, analyzing them, and reflecting on what we have achieved. Even though this is just a start for my honor thesis, the experiences I have gained will surely be tremendously beneficial. To be very honest, there aren’t much physical progress being made in the past month due to my frequent traveling for family matters. It was, however, explaining what I am researching to family and friends that have prompted me to reflect on my study and gave me an angle of advantage when peeking forward.

I was working on my PhD application essays at the same time — yes, (hopefully) I will be in a grad school a year from now. It was in fact quite an illuminating experience to reflect on the journey that I have set sailed for a few years ago and eventually took me to where I stand right now, both intellectually and personally. I will be applying to a few top-tier marketing programs that do behavioral marketing — this mental accounting study is one example of which. I have had the fortune to receive tremendous amount of helps from prof. Gretchen Chapman, who has not only supervised my independent study, my honor thesis, but also my grad school application.

Thank you again for being on board with me during this journal! Now would be a great opportunity to share with all of you my 3MRT presentation, which is supposed to give everyone an easier understanding of my project! Hope you enjoy them!

My name is Bethany, a rising fourth year majoring in Psychology with a clinical concentration and a minor in Gender Studies. On top of my studies, I also have a love of working with children – which led me to find work at a local childcare center! These interests in psychology, social identities, and youth motivated me to pursue a career aimed at providing mental health services. I intend to aid others in their wellness journey and contribute to destigmatizing mental health for the next generation – especially for those who have been historically, and continue to be, neglected and ignored by our social systems. As a person with stigmatized (and jumbled) identities myself, such as a mix of Mexican and Russian-Jewish heritage, social and health disparities are particularly close to my heart and home.

Part of this journey I’ve dedicated myself to will involve improving upon the understanding of mental disorders in order to develop better diagnostic tools, education approaches, and interventions. In order to get involved in this process, I’ve worked in the Behavioral Research Lab with Dr. Kasey Creswell – my thesis advisor – for the past year. The focus of the lab centers addiction research; particularly, with the goals of understanding the underlying mechanisms, behaviors, and risk factors that contribute to the development and maintenance of addiction. Because addiction comes in many forms, and those who struggle with it are often stigmatized by society, I developed an interest in exploring this area of research.

My thesis project aims to clarify how alcohol consumption gives rise to alcohol-induced social outcomes. These outcomes can fall into two main categories: positive and negative. Positive and desirable outcomes, such as increased social bonding, may act to encourage alcohol use because of the social rewards gained – which may contribute to problematic drinking. On the other hand, alcohol intoxication has also been linked to negative and undesirable outcomes, such as increased aggression and interpersonal violence. However, the mechanisms that contribute to these positive and negative outcomes remain largely unknown.

Emotion recognition, your ability to identify emotions in other people, may contribute to the link between alcohol and the social outcomes discussed above. Emotion recognition has been associated with various aspects of social functioning, like contributing to the development and maintenance of relationships. Alcohol administration studies, which follow an experimental design where participants are randomly assigned to consume an alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage followed by completion of a task, are a common approach to studying the relation between alcohol and emotion recognition. And yet, the literature on this topic remains mixed and inconsistent; that is, the literature hasn’t been able to reliably establish how emotion recognition is impacted following alcohol consumption.

Meta-analyses, which follow a statistical approach to clarify the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables of interest across the literature, are a useful tool to study the relation between emotion recognition and alcohol. There are two known meta-analyses that analyzed these two variables and found impairment to emotion recognition following heavy and prolonged alcohol use; however, they focused on comparing persons diagnosed with alcohol use disorder (AUD) and/or other substance use disorders to healthy participants and relied on non-experimental data. How emotion recognition is causally affected following alcohol intoxication among nonclinical, community samples is unclear.

Thus, my project will be a meta-analysis focused on nonclinical samples that participated in experimental alcohol administration studies. Understanding how these alcohol-induced social outcomes arise among community samples has important implications – such as for improving alcohol education, policy-making, and intervention development.

Stay tuned for more updates!

This summer I am researching the religious debates that ensued after the publication of The Woman’s Bible, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s feminist commentary on the Bible. This research explores the relationship between Christianity and American political life in the late 19^thcentury.

I read several secondary sources in order to contextualize The Woman’s Bibleand narrow down my research question. I read Kathi Kern’s Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, which provided a background on Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s thoughts on religion and the public reception of The Woman’s Bible. I also read Elaine Weiss’ The Woman’s Hour, which chronicled the fight for Tennessee to ratify the 19^thamendment. Weiss’ book was relevant to my research because The Woman’s Biblewas utilized by the anti-suffragists to publicly bash the suffragists, claiming that the suffragists were against religion. While I was interested in how The Woman’s Bible was still used to discredit the suffragists over two decades after its publication, I ultimately decided to shift my focus to the religious arguments that ensued immediately after its release. While this work was not hugely influential on my final topic, it did inspire me to research more into the religious arguments antisuffragists made.

  I have also been searching online archives for historical newspapers. Kern’s work has been incredibly helpful for teaching me about the different religious newspapers that commented on The Woman’s Bible.Now, I am researching newspapers from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). As the name suggests, this organization was largely influenced by Christianity. I am interested to learn what the WCTU publicly said about The Woman’s Bible. To me, the WCTU represents the junction between Christianity and women’s rights. Stanton posited that Christianity and women’s rights are inherently opposed to each other, but the WCTU serves as an example of women who were devout Christians and also fought to advance rights for women.