Sarah Phillips, Psychology, BMC ’22

An Insight into the Research Assistant Experience: Project MIME

Faculty Advisor: Professor Ariana Orvell

Field Site: The Mood and Cognition Lab at Temple University

Field Supervisor: Marin Kautz and Daniel Moriarity

Description of Course:

This course provides a holistic overview of the research experience at the mood disorder lab housed in the clinical psychology area of the Psychology Department at Temple University. It not only aims to help the student reflect on the research experience and its various considerations such as consent but also allows a student to deep dive into the research question being studied in the lab through further research and literature review. This is within the purview of Project MIME (Motivation, Immunity, and Mood in Emerging Adults) at Dr.Lauren Alloy’s Mood and Cognition. At a broad level, this lab investigates how differences in motivation might be associated with the immune system and a variety of mental health issues such as depression. Keeping that in mind, the primary aim of Project MIME is to see whether rumination and reward sensitivity predict inflammatory reactivity and depressive symptoms.

Praxis Project:

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One thought on “Sarah Phillips, Psychology, BMC ’22”

  1. Michiko

    The reflections on consent and sampling piqued my interest here because these aren’t ideas that are usually placed at the forefront of consideration in many psychology studies, but it is an important subject. We live in a WEIRD society, and that trickles into our standards for testing in psychology, so it’s really cool to see that it was something that was brought up in thinking about how to approach participants of the study and the process of analysis. I’m curious if it affected your results in any way? Looking at the regressive analysis of the results with and without these factors of multicultural and educational backgrounds might be an interesting branch from this research. Beyond that though, this sounds like an interesting study and I’m curious what the stress tasks you used. Was there a control group, and if so, what task(s) were they given?

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