Being part of a lab — Week 4

Hi everyone, it’s Janice! I’m currently interning at the Grisham OCD Lab, working closely with Associate Professor Jessica Grisham and PhD candidate Keong Yap. Together we will be looking at how minimal social interactions can affect symptoms of hoarding disorder. Hoarding disorder is often characterised by a combination of an excessive acquisition of items and inability to discard these possessions, leading to huge amounts of clutter in homes affecting an individual’s daily functioning. (Search up ‘hoarding disorder’ images on Google to see just how bad it can get sometimes!)

It has been previously shown that these acquisition and discarding behaviours may arise from turning to objects for a sense of social connectedness or closeness when these needs aren’t met by the people around us. Since a lot of past research has been correlational or cross-sectional, we will be taking an experimental approach (participants will be either in a positive social interaction condition or neutral condition before beginning discarding and acquisition tasks) to explore more deeply into hoarding symptoms!

Since this research internship is one of the first opportunities I’ve had to be part of a experimental research team, I thought I would reflect on what has happened and all that I’ve learnt so far in terms of being part of a lab!

Despite being mistaken for a SONA participant when I got to Level 13 ready for a meeting with Jessica (I blame it on how clueless I still look when I walk into the lab!), my meeting last week went really well. We talked through the procedure of the study again, and finished off the ethics application with the addition of an extra questionnaire at the very last minute! It’s been super interesting to see the process of writing up a proposal for ethics and experiencing first-hand just how much work needs to go into a project before beginning the recruitment of participants.

As so many of the other interns have mentioned before, this change of perspective from being a first-year just trying to get course credit for SONA to being a SONA researcher has really opened my eyes to what Honours, and a potential future career in research, would be like! Since my supervisor’s area of research falls within clinical psychology, I’m so grateful to be able to experience what it is like to be researching things that could later on be incorporated into screening or treatment for Hoarding Disorder. So cool!

During the meeting, Jessica mentioned that I would need to get set up with all the SONA things and have access to the lab testing rooms, and this is when it started to feel so surreal that I was going to be running my own participants in a couple of weeks! Within our experiment, I will be in charge of implementing the two different social interaction conditions — 1) Positive: where I chat to the participant for a couple of minutes in a friendly manner and 2) Neutral: where the participant sits alone in the room and just waits. Not going to lie, I’m a little bit nervous about being in charge of the main manipulation in the study since I’m usually a pretty shy person when it comes to meeting strangers! But I’m telling myself to take everything in this course as a learning experience, so I’m also looking forward to the challenge!

Since our ethics application has finally been approved after requiring a small revision, I’ll be meeting up with another research assistant from the lab in the coming week who will be teaching me how to set up questionnaires on SONA through Qualtrics. I can’t believe it’s all starting to come together now!

There’s also a lab meeting coming up in a couple of weeks which I’m hoping to attend so I can meet more of the people who are part of the lab! I think someone will be practicing a presentation during the meeting, so fingers crossed I can pick up some good tips to help me out with the final presentation that we all need to do later on this semester!

More updates to come soon! In the meantime, I better get started on writing for my research proposal (looking forward to reading a few more articles on hoarding disorder and re-trying the writing exercises we did in the Week 4 workshop!)

— Janice :)