Introductions
Could you tell us your major, what year you’re in and where you’re from?
I am a fourth-year psychology major doing directed studies. I’ve been to a lot of places but I’ll say Vancouver since I was born in India but lived here for most of my life.
What are your preferred pronouns?
she/her
Tell us one fun fact about yourself
I’m really bad at spelling. I’m a blogger but I can’t spell 🙂
Questions about the start of their research
Could you give us a short overview of your DS project? Starting off with your research topic?
I’m under supervision of Dr. Todd Handy. Basically, our research was examining the subjective experiences of cognition and wellbeing. It’s not well understood whether self-reported cognitive functions are susceptible to interventions targeting health behaviours, particularly for young adults. With our analysis we found that stress, sleep, and dietary habits were significantly predictive of SRCF (subjective ratings of cognitive performance), but physical activity was not. This relationship could be examined in greater depth, and our results suggested that interventions targeting health behaviours could improve SRCF.
We collected our data through the HSP pool – the grad student we worked with created a survey for HSP and everyone did self-reported measures of their physical activity, stress, sleep and dietary habits.
The PI already had this project going. It was our job to put it together and bring it to life! We started working on this around May/June, 2020 until around April.
Could you give us an example of the kinds of questions you asked?
One was, “how many hours of intensive physical activity did you do in the last two weeks?”. “How many hours of sleep did you get in the last two weeks?”
It’s a self-reported measure trying to assess subjective experiences of cognitive functioning.
What sparked your interest in your research topic and how did you build your hypothesis?
The topic and hypothesis was already made by the grad student. Due to COVID-19, we didn’t get to develop a hypothesis ourselves. We worked with what he had already. I was really interested in the idea that there’s a relationship between health and cognition because in my personal life I’ve noticed it as well. I think that’s what attracted me to it – it’s that this is something that’s so important, especially for our demographic because we tend to neglect our own health, especially nowadays with exams ongoing and we don’t realize how important it is for our cognitive wellbeing. This is what was so interesting about this topic. This is what attracted me to cognitive psychology in general. I can totally relate to this, sitting in front of my computer everyday for hours! This is very relevant to university students these days!
What made you feel like this was an important topic to research, and was there anyone who inspired you to look into this topic?
I took PSYC 309 with Dr. Handy and I fell in love with cognitive psychology. It’s so interesting to learn about why we do things the way we do them. I loved all the research on neuroscience. I’m also very involved with mental health organizations on campus – I used to be a part of Campus LightBox and the Mental Health Network. This aligned with my personal interests as well because there’s a big correlation between sleep and mental wellbeing and that can be further investigated with physical activity and sleep as well.
Mid-research
What was your favourite part of the process?
I think it was really interesting. I know this is this may be an unpopular opinion. But I really liked reading the other papers on a similar topic and comparing it to ours. For example, if you take a look at the discussions portion, I mentioned this webcam paper, where researchers found that sleep quality was associated with well being. So it was just interesting to compare a well being with SRCF, which I thought was pretty cool.
If they have managed to find conclusions already – Akshara
Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe?
The most interesting thing is that what was it again, physical activity had less of a significance. That was pretty interesting because like I mentioned earlier with the Wycombe paper that physical activity had a great effect with mental health and well being. But for our purposes, that was not the case. So I think that was pretty surprising.
What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
I actually already presented that I presented to Merck and I will be presenting at now cam, which is a neuroscience conference. So that’s pretty fun! It’s gonna be happening in University of Victoria.
Future questions
How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
Interventions can be created for better cognitive functioning particularly for undergrad students. I would say that in the realm of stress and diet as well. I think future health interventions can be applied particularly in the university setting
If you could do your study again, what would you do differently and why?
I, personally, think we should have focused more on mental health because I think that is more relevant than ever, especially because this study took place in 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic). I think that should have been factored in when examining outcomes because people with mental health concerns aren’t always able to exercise, they’re not always able to sleep properly, or meet their dietary needs – I think that could have been applied.
Would you reformulate some of the questions or something you would factor in?
We could have added questions assessing, for example, the criteria of depression. Such as, “do you find it hard to get out of bed sometimes?” I think that could control for mental health. I guess adding on to the survey would be helpful.
If you were to modify the survey for COVID-19, what would you add?
Based on my memory of the survey, I don’t think the questions accounted for at home workouts – that could be interesting. A lot of people may have interpreted working out as physical workouts at the gym. AT home workouts, dance workouts – that could be interesting, especially since gyms were closed for a long time during the pandemic
So it would be rewording things to accommodate for a pandemic?
Yes, I think that would be good. Maybe asking “before, COVID, what were your stress levels” “because of COVID, how are your stress levels now?”
Other research-related questions
What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?
PSYC 309 – it was a lot of fun! It is one of the few classes where I had a good time reading the papers and I still remember some of them because I really liked them! This course was a lot more focused on why we think certain ways. There were a lot of papers on disabilities, such as Autism Spectrum DIsorder, Asperger’s Syndrome and aphasias, which were interesting to study.
How has managing your project helped you grow, both personally and professionally?
I think it’s taught me how much I really like research. I know some people find the process slow, which is far. I learned how to prioritize things that I like doing and it allowed be to separate school psychology from more applied psychology and it taught me that this was what I wanted to move forward with after undergrad.
Personal Questions
What was the most challenging part about doing an honours project? What was most rewarding?
I was kind of sad that I couldn’t do much data collection, so not really challenging but definitely a regret from doing this project. I was really looking forward to going in Kenny sitting in like that those room was running studies. But I think it was pretty challenging to put posters together when you couldn’t physically be there and seeing everything that was happening.
I guess the most rewarding thing was just learning how the opinions and results of students could make such a big difference for our study. And I think that was really rewarding. It’s just learning how much importance there is in physical activity and cognition as well.
How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
I also a writer for humans of UBC Psychology! I’ve met some of the the most interesting people through this position and I just stayed in touch with them. I meet lots of other cool people mostly on campus organizations, the mental health clubs I was in is where I really network with people and then then came direct studies.
What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? 10 years time?
I really liked cognitive psychology, especially with adolescents and undergrads. Then I took PSYC 302 and learned about a field of cognitive psychology with babies and toddlers and I thought that was so cool! Sally-Anne test, Theory of Mind – I fell in love with that . I would like to pursue that for grad school.
Is there anything important you’d like to say that I haven’t asked you about?
For researchers: everyone’s going through a time when research is tough and managing interpersonal relationships can get difficult, so try to be kind to others!