Questions about the start of their research
Could you tell us what your research question and hypothesis were/are?
My research question is, “do mood and cognition impact out-of-home mobility in young adults?” In other words, does your thinking and feeling have an effect on how you move around outside of your home, in your community and in your activities space? For context, what that means is, today, I leave my room, I go out here in my living room, then I go to JJ bean, which is in my neighbourhood. After that, I would go to school, and work. All of those places are a part of my community or activity space. This made me curious about the relationship between how I’m thinking and feeling for a day (or over many days) is related to how much I am away from my house, or my community mobility. My hypothesis is that young adults, who have better, more elated moods, and more functional cognitive abilities are going to have a greater amount of out of home mobility relative to those who have less out of home mobility.
What sparked your interest in your research topic?
Back in 3rd year, when I declared psychology as my major, I was playing catch-up in a lot of introductory courses. I think I took an unconventional path into psychology because I somehow got into some 300 level courses without taking PSYC 101, 102, 217, 218. In particular, I took Personality Psychology (PSYC 309) with Professor David King. I also took a Contemporary Topics in Psychology course (PSYC 208) with Professor David Worling, which was about autism. Those courses are what made me decide to declare psychology. But then I was doing PSYC 101, 102, 217 all at the same time, which was awful – seriously, I would not recommend that. But that semester, I also took PSYC 309a (Cognitive Processes) with Professor Todd Handy, and I just loved that course. I also enjoyed Dr. Handy’s teaching style – I felt that my learning was highly stimulated. So, then I took PSYC 409 (Cognitive Neuropsychology) the following semester with him too, which is what inspired my research. If it weren’t for that course, my research wouldn’t exist.
The central idea of PSYC 409 is that usually, we think about the brain from the inside and we think about the brain as the organ of the mind. Let’s say the heart’s primary function is pumping blood, and the lungs’ primary function is to breathe air, and then when people usually think about the brain, they might infer that the brain has the job to think or to communicate with other parts of the body. But Dr. Handy challenged that view – you can argue that the brain is the organ of movement as well. So, one of the brain’s jobs could be argued to be what guides your body throughout your activity space and around your home, or wherever else you go. That was my introduction to the idea behind my research. A couple years after taking this course, I reached out to Dr. Handy again because I started working in his lab very briefly. He had a new master’s student, Melanie, and she wanted to do this research looking at mobility patterns, mood and cognition in a younger population. She took me on and here I am. I wouldn’t be here without her research either, so I have to give my biggest thank you to both Melanie for wanting to dive deeper into these topics, and Dr. Handy for sharing us with these ideas in the first place.
How did you build your hypothesis?
To give some more background, a lot of the research that adopts this perspective: the brain has the job of moving our body around. Most of the research that has been done has looked at older adults. What happens is, say an older person is ageing, and it’s natural that they aren’t able to walk around as much. And further, there’s a correlation between cognitive decline and decreasing mobility. One way I chose to illustrate this in my presentations at MURC and PURC was telling my grandpa’s life story. As he got older, he was able to leave his home less. He wasn’t able to walk much all while his cognition was going downhill. And then the other part of that background research is when older folks have a fall their cognitive decline exacerbates even more. That’s the starting point for us – if we can look at older adults and their mobility patterns, then we can relate that to their cognition, and thus their mood. And then we thought okay – if you do this with older adults, and their cognition is really poor, then we can also do it with younger adults when cognition is at a more optimal state. And then we can see if mobility patterns are a tool to understand mood and cognition and tackle that gap in the research by addressing these younger populations.
What made you feel like this was an important topic to research?
I think this addresses the perspective of how neuroscience, and thinking about the brain from the inside, is the way we always construe the brain. The idea that my brain can be thought about from the outside really struck a chord with me. In PSYC 409, I wrote a paper about a pair of shoes I owned. I discussed how this pair of shoes defined my mobility patterns, how their design was utilitarian, and I related it to a couple of papers that we read. First of all, I was surprised that I was able to write about sneakers in psychology – I never thought I would be doing that, unless I was trying to sell them to someone. This is really important, because I can understand something about my mood and cognition through a pair of shoes I own, which sounds strange. So that was the first thing. And then, when my grandpa did have a fall, it was very clear how his cognition changed – he really couldn’t keep track of anything. If you asked him anything, he would get overwhelmed, saying “I don’t know” to a lot of things or “I can’t remember.” Shortly after that he passed away. So I think that really hit me as well, and that was much more personal of course. I thought that if we can incorporate this work with a younger population, then there’s a lot of implications for mental health interventions in a new way that I never thought about before.
Did you have to make any adjustments to your project due to COVID? Did the transition from in-person studies to online studies disrupt your research findings? How did you and your team overcome it?
When I first started in the lab, I wasn’t doing this stuff at all. I feel fortunate that the work I was intiallity doing with EEG was at least a way to get introduced to the lab. Some of the work the EEG grad students focus on is misokinesia – the hatred of fidgeting, which is definitely something that needs to be looked into more. In fact, Dr. Handy’s PhD student, Sumeet, is really the misokinesia expert. I wasn’t involved for a long time before the lab shut down, because they couldn’t do EEG with COVID. Yet, I kept in touch with the lab. By the time we started this mobility stuff, we weren’t too affected, because the grad student I am working with, Melanie, was just starting her Master’s. A lot of the work done last semester was just background reading and ethics. And now we’re only about a pilot actually, this week. Our research is different from a lot of things done in the lab, as a big part of it is ecological validity. What we’re going to be doing is tracking people’s location and distance and other elements of their mobility through Google Maps. And the only thing they come into the lab to do is some baseline surveys on mood and cognition. The majority of the data is collected in real-time, in their own ecological context. So that’s why it’s different from other psychology experiments. We aren’t really affected by COVID in comparison to other projects. Still, I think we would be able to do this online if we were more restricted again and the findings could be pretty interesting. If someone was locked down, and they’re stuck in their room they don’t have much mobility at all. I would be curious how that plays a role in their thinking and feeling.
How do you track them? How long is it for?
We’re doing that pilot soon and we’ll track for a week, which will be shorter than the future studies that track for two weeks. Lots of the research that does exist is looking at younger adults over two week time periods. That stuff is more focused on clinical disorders such as bipolar, or social anxiety. I’ve seen agoraphobia, schizophrenia and depression as well – again, mostly mood on the disorder side of things. We use a similar methodology. Over the two weeks we want to look at everyday mood more as opposed to those clinical situations. And we also are more interested in cognition – since a great deal of the papers don’t really look at cognition.
What was your favourite part of the process?
I like working on the experimental design. I underestimated how much I would enjoy that.
I’m lucky because a lot of undergrad RAs only get to collect or input data, which I consider to be tasks that don’t really pique creativity. Not to say that it’s not important – it’s just not the most interesting thing to do all the time. I am definitely fortunate that when I started working with Melanie, she was at the early stages of her research, and she and Dr. Handy took me on – they knew me and they knew I was capable. I came up with certain ideas through background reading, or sometimes on the spot when we were discussing the design. It’s important to understand the process of how you can make a design that is intelligent. It’s very foundational, but you recognize how critical that is and there’s a certain kind of satisfaction when you know you’re doing it yourself.
Yes, one thing some people might not realize is how much creativity goes into designing research methods – it’s almost like creating a play.
Yes, when I was little, I wanted to be an inventor, and I realized this semester that I’m kind of an inventor right now, which is pretty cool.
Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe? What was the most surprising observation from your study?
It’s kind of frustrating because we don’t have data. So I can’t speak too much about that. But I can talk about people’s reactions to the experimental ideas. I don’t want to give anything away before we even have data nor do I want to assume we’re going to find something because we could find no effect, you know? I think we’ll find something, I just don’t know exactly what it’ll look like. Of course, that’s why we have a hypothesis. One of the bigger implications, from an array of these papers, is to do with digital psychiatry – the idea that we can use our phones and other devices as a way to measure mental health constructs. That’s a very broad definition. To narrow that notion to our context, I could use my phone to track my mobility using Google Maps over two weeks and then I can see when there are problems with my mood or cognition that I need to address. Based on that, there’s a way to get help with my mental health.
To give an example from the research may be a helpful way to contextualize this: one of my favourite papers is by Maria Faurholt-Jepsen and colleagues, in 2014. She also had a follow up one in 2021, with different collaborators. What she did is use out-of-home mobility to track the mood of individuals with bipolar. Her measures were cell phone tower switches, as well as calling and texting data. So, the cell phone tower switches were her mobility measure instead of using something like Google Maps. What she found is that when people with bipolar disorder are in a lower depressed mood state, they move between fewer cell phone towers relative to their manic states. And I thought it was really cool because you could understand the symptomology of a clinical disorder using this method, and then based on that, we can further understand how we need to intervene. It’s about using a tool that is in your pocket, and that tool that we carry everywhere with us becomes a way to figure out something important about your mental wellbeing.
What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
I’ll be presenting at PURC, but then I’m not sure. Although I’m graduating this spring, I’ll be working on this throughout the summer. In the future, I would like to study different kinds of groups. Right now, the main goal is seeing if there’s an effect in a younger population. Yet, there’s a lot of implications for different groups of people. For example, determining whether someone who has attention deficit disorder (ADD) has a particular kind of mobility pattern or if there’s a pattern in a cluster of individuals with ADD. Perhaps we may be able to study whether we can help people with their attention deficits through mobility. Another example is studying whether someone who’s more extraverted has different mobility patterns relative to introverts. There’s many ways you could go forward with this line of research. I would be curious to see how we can bring some of those parts of psychology that are untapped with this research into the picture with mobility patterns.
Future questions
If you could do your study again, what would you do differently and why?
I don’t think I would change too much. To be honest, I feel like one thing I learned is that research is slow. Ethics is slow, data collection is slow, right? All of these things take time. And I don’t think I was impatient with that. I just understood as it happened, that that’s the reality. I feel like the way that it panned out for me made sense. I liked how I didn’t force myself into a kind of research or lab that I didn’t feel comfortable with, or that I didn’t enjoy.
If I don’t like who I’m working with, or I don’t like what I’m working on, why am I doing it?
I honestly feel satisfied. And I just want to keep going.
How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
Again, thinking about digital psychiatry for example, I think that eventually, we’ll be able to identify certain mood or cognitive issues with specific movement paths, or at least in a very general sense – such as knowing how a smaller daily spatiality is related to how I’m thinking and feeling today. I would say, down the road, there could definitely be some sort of app for this where you get a notification that tells you: “hey, you should go for a walk and get out of your room!” Ideally it would also measure your mood and cognition, and then based on that, it could tell you when an optimal time to leave the house or move around more – just as a little nudge or encouragement. That type of notification could make a big difference for a range of people with mood and cognition problems.
Other research-related questions
What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?
I wouldn’t be doing this without PSYC 409. The project just wouldn’t exist without it. I also got lucky that Melanie was in my class, and that she remembered me because there was a lot of discussion in that class. That’s one thing that was so good about 409 – hearing what other people think about how this kind of science applies to their own life. You know, maybe there’s a guy in the class who gets super anxious, and he just goes on a drive. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he knows he’s leaving the house and it’ll be good for him. When I contributed in class, I would bring up my mobility plans in the kitchen. Say I’m working right now and it is a rainy Sunday, and the pizza place I’m working at is not going to be as busy compared to Canada Day – one of the the sunniest, busiest days of the season. Those kinds of factors are going to affect how I’m moving around. So, I think it was really that course. We got to hear about how other people think about applying this way of thinking, and then thinking about it with my own life, my own community space and how that changes.
If I take a multiple-choice test, and I get a 100% – that’s great, but it doesn’t mean I can actually apply those things to real life. I’m interested in how I can actually think about what I’m learning in my own life. This helped me further understand myself and others around me. I’m not talking about psychoanalysis, because I’m not in a position to do that. I’m not qualified for that. I’m just talking about the things I learned and I notice them when they happen. My brain tells me that I know about this because of what I learned in school – that is a feeling every student deserves to get, but oftentimes, students don’t get that feeling.
How has managing your project helped you grow, both personally and professionally?
When I first took the course, it just reminded me how important exercise is for your cognition. And how I need to get more involved, again, with soccer, or going on a run or working out. I was too focused on school alone, to the extent that I didn’t make time for anything else. I assumed that I only had time for studying. If you understand what exercise can do, and how it can benefit your “academic performance,” then you start to question why you haven’t been exercising even though it is very good for you, and your brain. I actually never saw myself as working in a lab. I always thought that there are two very general routes with psychology, counselling or research in the lab. For the longest time, I planned to go into counselling. However, I realized that I could help with the problems in the mental health domain through research in this way, and it didn’t have to be so direct through something like counselling.
I started to understand that there are other ways to help with those issues. And I know right now, this is the best place I can be in to contribute towards that. I have a very insatiable personality when it comes to education – I’m always thinking of how I can do better and I do more. I have this drive to learn that doesn’t run out.
Personal Questions
Tell us about how you stay organized and manage your time while doing an honours/DS project. How do you prioritize and motivate yourself?
Lucky for me, I’m very self-motivated. I’m gravitated toward learning and education, in a classroom setting. It’s hard to put into words – it’s just something I can’t leave alone. My grandpa was an avid student, so sometimes I wonder if it came from him. When I was younger, I was extremely anxious and I really struggled in school. I think it’s important to be transparent with that. When I was a little kid, it was not easy for me – I got upset in school and everything was overwhelming. Due to my anxious tendencies, I didn’t do well in school, and I felt dumb because I couldn’t keep up – I just couldn’t handle everything. It took me a while before I was able to turn that around. I can’t really explain why, but I started doing very well in school. I eventually ended up studying psychology at UBC because I’m curious about learning, how the brain works and how those things can relate to mental health overall.
As for managing time and prioritizing, it’s so cliché – you have to balance everything. You really do. And, you have to figure out what that means to you[a][b]. For me, balance might mean that I’m studying 2 hours a day, working out an hour a day and then going to work. Balance for someone else might mean studying 10 hours a day then, say, doing yoga. You have to know what balance is to you, and no one can define that for you. It takes a lot of time to figure that out, especially going from high school to university, for example, and you have to decide what you’re going to focus on.
For me, when I’m in school, school always comes first – this is not to say I dismiss my physical health and mental health. I think they’re one and the same – if you’re excelling in those other areas with yourself, it’s only going to contribute to how you do in the classroom too because your brain is going to be functioning better. I actually like to be extremely busy.
I like to go to school full time, I’ve always had a part time job while I’m in school, volunteered, and made time for exercise of course.
With school, I used to study about 2 weeks before midterm… I changed my study habits probably around the time I went into psychology. What I do now is studying what I learned the day I learned it, and I make sure I know it the day I learned it. Then by the time I get to the test, say just two days before the test, I’m only focusing on what I learned the past couple of days, because everything else is organized in my brain already. I remember in high school, I had this one teacher who always said that if you cram, it’s like you have a closet of toys, and you’re throwing all the toys into the closet. For example, if you have to go find your favourite Lego set, you don’t know where it is and you can’t find it when you really need it. But if you study ahead of time, you go into the closet, you see all your toys exactly where you think they are, and you can go grab whichever toy you want because you know where it is. That really came back to me. I realized that I can study smarter, not harder.
What was the most challenging part about doing an honours/DS project, and what did you learn from the challenge that you can apply to future research/life?
I’m just waiting to be more involved. It’s just kind of the anticipation. And then the voice in the back of your head saying, “Oh, what if there isn’t any room for me to contribute? What if they don’t need me because someone else took my place? Or there just isn’t work?” Because sometimes it’s that simple, right? There isn’t work being done, and considering how COVID slows everything down, it is harder to get these kinds of opportunities. So I was just playing that waiting game. No one knew what was gonna happen in the world, there was so much uncertainty. I emailed Dr. Handy after over a year since we had last spoken. He responded by confirming that there is nothing to do in his lab. Then, a few days later Melanie emailed me, informing me that I could help and I was extremely relieved. Again, with research, there is that slowness, there is this uncertainty, and you have to be able to appraise that as a positive thing. You can’t tell yourself that everything is going to be for sure. You have to accept that things might not work out and if they don’t, you look somewhere else to find another opportunity. Accepting that and understanding that when I do get a chance to do something, I need to make the most of it.
What was the most rewarding and what did you like the most during the process?
I think only recently, all of it came together for me with my MURC presentation – telling my grandpa’s story and talking about his life because he only passed away about a year ago. It was special to use his story to explain the research, not only when he was older, but talking about his experiences in life. At conferences, a lot of people might do a standard presentation, for example, consisting of an intro, hypothesis, method, results, conclusion. And, of course, you need that, but it doesn’t necessarily excite people about the research. I wanted to do something that was memorable and that can show this research matters because it had a very real impact in my own life, and on someone in my family. That being said, I talked about my grandpa when he was younger. He was in WWII, he was an engineer, he did some work in Saudi Arabia, he was with the Department of National Defence – he did all of these things. He was a big thinker, he moved around a lot, and I saw how that changed when he got older. When I presented that yesterday, my dad and brother were there, and seeing them react to that…seeing them understand my grandpa in this way, and how the work I’m doing can be personalized through him – I think that was the most rewarding thing. Even one of the judges came up to me to say they really liked that I included my grandpa in my presentation. They said it made them think about their own grandparents and what they’re going through. To have someone have that reaction, have them think about someone in their family who’s important to them and have the research be applied in that way, that was highly rewarding.
How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
It comes down to whose class you really enjoy, where you feel like you might have something in common. And what kind of research you actually enjoy – don’t force yourself into a kind of research or a certain kind of person in charge of it when you don’t enjoy it.
What are your other interests outside of Psychology? Are you a part of any clubs or teams?
When I first started UBC, a lot of my social life was within my collegia. It was really helpful as a commuting first year to have a place to go and make friends. I still have a couple of good friends from there. Then I got involved with CiTR radio at UBC.I was in charge of a group of people – we talked about music – and I did lots of interviews. I got to meet some pretty interesting people in the music scene. This was something that offset all the schoolwork I was doing. I could end my week with that and socialize, which was fun. Shaoling Kung-Fu is a newer thing that I started in the past year or so, since the COVID-19 pandemic started. That’s something that I try to incorporate into everything else I do.
What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years’ time? 10 years’ time?
I would like to be somewhere outside of Vancouver for sure, in the next two or three years, and see what these kinds of projects would be like in different parts of the world. I know for a fact that something to do with mental health will be a part of my career. I’m not completely sure which way I’m going to go. I could be a professor for sure, some of my friends tease me saying that I’ll be getting my PhD in no time. I like presenting, I like talking in front of people, and I want to hear what new students have to think about all of this. At the same time, I could see myself being a counsellor, and being that person that people come to talk to when they need help. I’d really like to stress the importance of men’s mental health. It is something I will always advocate for, because there are many guys who don’t want to speak up for various reasons – it’s more complicated than it seems. And I think “society” doesn’t encourage that – that’s very obvious. As someone who identifies as a man, and didn’t speak up for a long time, who went through his own mental health journey, I always love to see other men realizing that it’s okay to talk, it is okay to get help.
Is there anything important you’d like to say that I haven’t asked you about?
I’d just say, in general, that if you’re a student, especially at a school like UBC, there’s so much pressure on you. Despite this, you always need to give yourself a chance to step back and recognize that we don’t have it so bad. We’re very lucky to be at an outstanding school, Never be afraid to cut yourself some slack – don’t be too hard on yourself. And, if you need help, then get help. That’s okay, seriously. There are too many people who drive themselves crazy over their grades, or through something else to do with school. There are ways to find solutions to that. I cannot stress that enough. I’m near the end of an undergraduate degree…I know how hard it can get, I know how much uncertainty there is. There are a lot of challenges, and it’s different for each student. But if you need support, it’s there.
Would you be okay with answering any questions that other students may have for you after reading this interview? This would be done in a Q&A style where we would list the questions and your answers at the end of your post or in a separate follow-up post.
Yes!!!