The EPIC Lab

When I first started my psychology major, I was incredibly apprehensive about the idea of doing research. Research connoted images of lab coats and complicated chemicals or rats and mazes. Of course, these sorts of labs are incredibly important! They are just not my “thing.” Working in the EPIC lab this past year has come with several little perks, and since I am graduating in a couple days (!) I thought I’d reflect on a couple of them.

You get to present data – I drove to UVA a couple weeks ago with some other students in the lab, where we all presented posters of different independent projects we’d been working on in the lab at their undergraduate research in psychology conference (the L. Starling Reid Conference). In addition to the big school project the lab is currently working on, the professors always encourage side projects if we have particular interests or just want some practice designing research projects! Meeting students from other schools, from UVA, Yale and CNU, who had similar interests within the field of psychology was a really exciting experience!

Sidenote – while at the UVA conference, I ran into a W&M alum that had been in the same service organization as me – she had stopped by the conference since she now attends UVA and is working toward a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology. Small world!

You get to meet the participants – The students we work with are great – some are a little apprehensive at first but most warm to the interviewers pretty quickly. It really reminds you that there is a huge developmental and social difference between a second grader and a fifth grader, and on top of that, sometimes the participants will say the most insightful things.

You get to exchange notes – A lot of the seniors in the lab applied to graduate programs for counseling, clinical and school psychology, or interviewed for jobs as full-time research assistants. The application process can be incredibly stressful and a little murky to students going through it for the first time, but being around others interested in similar programs and jobs made it easier – we could compare notes and thoughts about how to write a personal statement, how to survive a graduate school interview, and how to ask for letters of recommendation. And now that we all have places to go next year (I’ll be working toward a Counseling Psychology Ph.D. at the University of Louisville), we can talk about the exciting details – like the best way to find a roommate in a new city!

Hello!

My name is Stephanie, I am a graduating senior at the College. I will have a double major in psychology and history, and have spent a lot of time over the past year doing various research projects in Dr. Dallaire and Dr. Zeman’s developmental psychology laboratory.

Right now, the focus of the professors and the research assistants (at the doctoral, masters and undergraduate levels) is on a project examining the prosocial behavior and emotion regulation of children in high-risk environments. A high-risk environment might include low levels of financial income for the family or separation from a parent, especially due to parental incarceration.

Working on this project is especially interesting because of the opportunity to participate in data collection. As a research assistant in this lab, I spent 2-3 mornings per week going to an elementary school in Newport News to conduct interviews with students in grades 2-5. In these one-on-one interviews, we would ask the students about their experiences at home and school with their peers, as well as questions about how they regulate negative emotions (anger, sadness and worry). Most interesting are the behavioral measures – in addition to reading participants questionnaires about the above topics, the research assistants measure each participant’s prosocial behavior. The researcher will “accidentally” drop pencils on the floor, and “slam” their hand in a briefcase and then vocalize pain. The child’s response is then coded (for example, if the child picks up the pencils, or if they ask if the researcher is ok). At the very end of the interview, the research assistants will offer the participant two choices of prizes to take as a thank you for participating in the study. One of the prizes is “good” (a fun activity book and a decorative pencil) and one of the prizes is “bad” (a plain notebook and a plain pencil). We tell each child that there is another participant to interview after them, and that whatever prize they do not pick will go to the other child, and see if they choose the “bad” toy in order to share with their classmate. After coding their choice, we offer both sets of prizes to the participant and assure them that we have more time to get prizes before the next child arrives.

Research like this is a great experience to have, since it gets the research assistants out of the lab room to interact with participants and to see first-hand how variables such as parental separation or a high-risk environment may relate to emotion dysregulation or helping behavior. Interviewing these participants is incredibly insightful into relevant and pressing matters like high-risk neighborhoods and poverty, and also serves as an interesting reminder of how children develop emotionally and socially between second and fifth grade.