Stephanie Brown ’20

Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab, UC San Francisco, San Francisco, CA

Me standing outside of our lab building, called Butler at the Parnassus Campus at UCSF.
Me standing outside of our lab building, called Butler at the Parnassus Campus at UCSF.

Spending this summer working as a research assistant in the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab at University of California San Francisco Medical Hospital under the guidance of Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes was one of the most informative experiences of my life. While there were a variety of ongoing studies occurring this summer under the direction of a few different post-doctoral students, I was mainly focused on our Relationships and Sleep Deprivation study (RAD), our Puberty, Empathy, and Parent Interaction study (PEPSI), and our Psychophysiology in Intergroup Interaction study (PIGI).

In the Relationships and Sleep Deprivation Study, we examined the effect of having one partner limit their sleep to half its normal time for two days on a variety of individual and tasks. While we have not yet analyzed the data as the study is still ongoing, I noticed that partners who were sleep deprived were less responsive and empathetic in their interactions.

The PEPSI study, which is under development, will look at how feeling close to a parent affects child empathy for that parent. By taking these children to a lab and doing either a neutral interaction or a personal story and then subjecting the parent to a stress test, the group that shared a personal story is anticipated to show a greater empathetic response.

For the PIGI study, we brought two strangers into a lab who were similar in many ways aside from their socio-economic status and examined the phenomenon of physiological linkage where one person leads or influences the other person’s physiological state. Previous findings have demonstrated that an individual of higher status often leads a lower status individual’s physiological state and so in this study we investigated whether this extended to socio-economic status. The data is still being collected and is under analysis.

My work ranged widely within and between these studies. With both RAD and PIGI, I often helped run the studies themselves, which involved interacting with participants as a researcher along with applying different physiological sensors to the participants as well. These sensors included impedance tape, ECG sensors, and blood pressure cuffs. With these studies I also inputted, organized, and analyzed questionnaire data, and made scheduling phone calls with participants. PEPSI was a new study our lab had just started running, and my contribution was helping pilot the study along with giving constructive feedback and recommendations on how the study could be improved. A small group of interns from the lab got together once a week along with the study’s principal investigator, and we would run through the study and find places where it could be improved to run more smoothly and efficiently. For example, when a study was intended to be done with children, we helped simplify the language used to make the study more clear.

Me and another intern from Penn State demonstrating how our hidden cameras in the lab work.
Me and another intern from Penn State demonstrating how our hidden cameras in the lab work.

The last study I helped work on was our Writing Intervention Tasks study (WIT), which was meant to see if optimism could be induced through a writing-based intervention. My role in WIT was calling participants as part of this optimism intervention, during which I would ask them questions over the phone like, “What do you value the most in your life?” While this was not only an integral part of the larger WIT study, it was also personally meaningful to me to hear first-hand what people cared about 
most, with family, significant others, and faith often being top choices. One moment that stuck out to 
me particularly was when I asked a woman what she felt when thinking about her partner. Her response 
was, “The opposite of loneliness,” and I was struck at just how wonderful a description that was.

There are a few different routes in how I believe these studies and this kind of research can impact the world in a positive way. Looking at how our physiological responses can affect our actions, such as in RAD where sleep deprivation impacts couple interaction, this knowledge can then be used to promote better relationships because it highlights the impact that sleep deprivation can have on interactions. While people understand that it impacts cognitive processes and physical actions such as test taking or driving, exploring the other more subtle damaging aspects of sleep deprivation such as relationship quality and satisfaction, this knowledge can then be used to inform policies that limit sleep deprivation in the workforce and to better inform people who have partners who are sleep deprived to make better overall decisions for their health and wellbeing. Studies looking at how higher status individuals can directly influence lower status individuals’ physiological state can help both lower and higher status individuals understand how their physiological state can be influenced and give them control over how they can control—or be controlled by—others. For example, a person of higher status in a workplace, such as a supervisor, can utilize this information to understand how their anxiety can cause physiological stress reactions among their subordinates. If a lower status individual understands that they are likely to have their feelings influenced by how a higher status individual feels, they can counteract that effect and take back agency over how they are feeling.

Me and two other summer interns in the control room, which is where we would examine physiological data.
Me and two other summer interns in the control room, which is where we would examine physiological data.

All of the people I worked with at the EHP Lab were truly incredible. In particular, Wendy Berry Mendes, who was the head of our lab, not only had an incredibly interesting past (including being Miss California and working for the FBI) but was extremely kind, approachable and thoughtful in her critique and assessment of our performance. I had the best time getting to know the other eighteen summer research assistants, who came from universities all over America. Working in a large lab with five post-docs also made it easy for me to see how many different types of personalities can fit into this space in academia, and allowed me to talk to different people about my varying interests in psychology, whether it was developmental or social. Twice a week, each post-doc would give an hour and a half seminar on either their work, or their past academic experiences, and how it lead them to working in the EHP lab now.

Psychophysiology was personally fascinating as to me as a hopeful one-day psychiatrist. I’m a psychology and philosophy double major and where I find these two fields often overlap in an accessible way is in the mind-body connection, which I study specifically with my concentration in cognitive science. However, as the connection between the mind and the body is still a budding science, studying it can be challenging and theorizing about it brings question of its legitimacy. Learning about psychophysiology has allowed me to study the mind-body connection in a quantitative way that I had never learned about before. It was fascinating! Even the small things, like watching a participant’s heart-rate double from just nervousness about giving a speech in the lab, really demonstrated to me in a way different from before how strong this connection is. Now, I plan to do my thesis using psychophysiology. This spring I’m planning on taking Intro to Physiology, and hope to start my senior thesis research next summer, so I can have my data analyzed by my senior spring. Overall understanding of how our mood affects our bodies and how our bodies impact our mood can only lead to better health outcomes.

Thank you to the Class of 1972 for making it possible for me to experience this summer. Without this 
grant I would not have been able to go to California to work in this lab, or to explore psychophysiology—
which has now become a possible career path.