By Yosef Scher, Senior Science and Technology Editor
Yosef Scher (YS): Hi Ma’ayan (MT). Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. Let’s start by getting to know you.
MT: Hi! I’m Ma’ayan Tzur from North Miami Beach, Florida. I’m a senior at Stern, probably majoring in Biology, but I may decide to study psychology because I love psychology too.
YS: How did you get involved in this research?
MT: I heard great things from everyone last year, and it sounded like a great opportunity to get to be in Israel, get hands-on research experience, and get to learn.
YS: Whose lab do you work in, and what do you study?
MT: I worked in Professor Eva Gilboa-Shechtman’s lab, which dealt with depression and emotional congruence. We were basically trying to see if the severity of depression is correlated with more or less synchrony between a person’s facial expressions, tone of voice, and what they are speaking about and if emotional congruence can affect treatment outcomes. We also helped with a project to see if social anxiety is associated with agency (meaning with traits of power, skill, and status) or with communion (meaning with traits of connection and morality). Additionally, we conducted a sort of literature review about sense of agency––the power a person feels they have over their actions and the consequences of those actions––and sense of agency’s involvement in different mental illnesses.
YS: What did you hope to gain from this research experience?
MT: I hoped to learn more about the research process and what it’s like to do real-life research that’s not for a lab class or anything.
YS: What role do you play in this lab?
MT: First, we mainly muted the parts of the therapist talking in the intake videos of participants diagnosed with depression so that they can be run through GeMaps, a software that measures arousal and valence of voice. Arousal is how strong an emotion is, and valence is how positive or negative an emotion is. We also read a lot about sense of agency and a newer way of measuring it called intentional binding. We then tried to find articles relating to sense of agency, depression, and other mental illnesses as preliminary research for one of the Ph.D. students. We switched from muting the videos to watching them and rating each five-minute segment for congruence between either facial expression and voice, facial expression and content (what the person was saying), or voice and content. I focused on rating the congruence between the participant’s facial expressions and what they were saying, which was interesting because I also got to hear what the assessors asked and how people have different responses to situations they were sharing about. (It was also great for my Hebrew!).
YS: Is there anything you encountered that was especially difficult during the research?
MT: Yes. First, it was hard sometimes to sit and watch videos for so long (although we did make it fun!), and it was also really hard to hear so many people share difficult things they were feeling, terrible things people did to them, or sad things that happened to them. However, it was nice to be able to discuss it with others in our lab afterward, so we weren’t alone in it.
YS: What did you find most interesting about your research?
MT: Rating the congruence of the videos was definitely intriguing, but for the social anxiety and agency vs. communion project, we were tasked with rating words that people used to describe themselves as words of agency or communion, and I really enjoyed getting to see how people described themselves and to participate in group discussions about how the words should be categorized. (It sometimes got a little intense and was pretty funny).
YS: Lastly, do you have any advice for students interested in lab positions?
MT: Go on the Bar-Ilan program!! Stam, there are probably other great lab positions, too, but I definitely would recommend the Bar Ilan program. I would say to try to find a lab with a PI that really cares about you, be able to devote time to your lab when you work there, as it is important to be able to focus on what you’re doing when you’re there, and to be able to put effort into it. Also, try to find something that interests you. That being said, I understand that research isn’t always so exciting, but to be happy with the process and contribute to the mesora/treasure trove of knowledge in that particular field is an incredible feeling.