🧠👃 Longer vid than usual, but stay with us bc we’re diving into some sci comm! Ever notice how a whiff of something can bring back a major sense of déja vu? That’s because smell is directly wired to our brain’s emotion & memory centers—and research suggests it might even help protect cognitive health as we age! 🌱💭 Inspired by Dr. Michael Leon’s work, we’re putting our understanding of olfactory enrichment to use with a “sniffy walk.” Can actively smelling more scents each day boost mood & memory? Watch to find out! #emotions #research #psych #science #psychology #gradschool #sciencecomm #scicomm #scent #smell #brain

Meet our new research assistants and graduate students! We did the candy salad trend 🍬🍪🍭 Shoutout to @shayybray for the favorite emoji idea! Comment your favorite emoji and candy below!

This may be a stretchhhhh content-wise, but go with me here: diff ppl associate diff facial expressions (and vocal expressions) with the same feeling. Kind of like how you can ask one person to make a face with ONE sound in mind, and someone else may have a whole other sound instead. Other times, those imagined sounds might converge. It's interesting to think about how we all have a shared concept of "anger" or "sadness" even if we might have different ideas of how those feelings manifest. #research #psychology #emotions

I love my team, but how well do I know them?? 🤔💝 We're working hard to keep the content going–let us know if you have any ideas for us to try!

Our lab's most recent data collection effort spanned 8 months. In that time, our team of 4+ grad students and 8+ RAs recruited 97 participants, but were only able to collect data from 54 due to attrition 🫠 Thus, in planning for my dissertation project (with a target N of 80), there was some concern as to whether I'd be able to finish data collection before March (at which point it'd be a race to finish analyses and write up the dissertation manuscript for a June graduation date) 🥵 In response, my team and I set our minds to it and hustled HARD 😤 and it paid off because last night we FINISHED data collection! 🎉🎉 For those unfamiliar with human subjects research (especially with children), here's some context: In order to have visits, you need to find participants–we call this "recruitment." To schedule 96 participants (we had 9 no shows/cancellations), we made just about 500 phone calls ☎️ Then, each visit takes up on average 2-2.5 hours of our time (and each one requires me to be present with one of my research assistants). In terms of staffed hours,that's at least 350 hours of time 😮‍💨 (mostly on evenings and weekends too, bc child participants' schedules are heavily constrained by…going to school SCHOOL😅) So, even though our first visit was on July 5th, we lost about a month and a half of availability for scheduling participants bc of international travel, me being out sick with COVID, and holidays. Still, in the equivalent just about 120 days, we managed to run 87 participants. In fact, in September, we had 28 visits in one month (with multiple weekends where we had 3 appointments in one day)😳 Add THAT to the fact that my RAs have also been simultaneously processing data amidst data collection. Because of this, all of our participants' heart rate data have been cleaned, processed, and are ready for analyses! Our video and transcription processing are not far behind😎 We're SO ready for this winter break because it's time to take a well deserved rest😴 But we're also VERY ready to come back in the new year and hitthe ground running with the rest of data processing while I start to analyze the data and write things up!

Grad school is full of fun side quests! This time, Shannon was so fortunate as to be invited to participate with Across The Cline–brought to you by the SciComm club at UCR (@scicommucr) Jessica and Catherine bring together experts from different fields to find the overlaps in their work–Shannon (a child developmental researcher focusing on how children learn about emotions and emotion regulation) was paired with Joseph Sullivan (from the University of Washington studying robotics, control theory, and deep learning). Together, they discussed the ways our environments/input can shape our responses over time, through many machine-related analogies that can be used to describe human behavior, and the way that dynamic systems theories are used in both the psychology and electrical engineering fields! #scicomm #gradschool #gradstudents #science #research