My name is W. Allen Lambert, and I am from Texarkana, Texas. In May of 2021 I graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arkansas with a Bachelors of Arts in Biology and Psychology. During my time at the university I was a three year Fulbright College Honors Program Peer Mentor, an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Anastasia Makhanova’s Spark Lab and an active member of the University of Arkansas’ Global Brigades Chapter. I have just recently moved to St. Louis and I am serving as a member of the AmeriCorps St. Louis Emergency Response Team.
In Dr. Makhanova’s Spark Lab, we use biological means to inform social psychological processes. For my thesis I am specifically interested in psychological processes that help people avoid illness, called the behavioral immune system. The behavioral immune system monitors and evaluates threats of disease and elicits an avoidance response to these threats to keep people healthy without having to use the costly physiological immune system. However, the behavioral immune system is not perfect. The avoidance response that is used to protect people from disease threats is oversensitive and can be activated in the presence of cues that are only perceived to be associated with diseases but are really not indicative of a contagious threat. Research shows that this oversensitivity can induce greater prejudice towards out-groups who possess these cues as well as increase their preference for individuals who have symmetrical features, are perceived to be healthy, and who are in their in-group. One way to measure the activation of a person’s behavioral immune system is to examine the emotion of disgust. What we found interesting, however, is that levels of disgust have been shown to be lower for individuals who pursue a career in healthcare and have also been shown to decrease after consistent exposure to disgusting stimuli. With this information we formed our hypothesis that behavioral immune system activation will be lower for healthcare professionals compared to the general population, and we are curious to see if medical professionals demonstrate the same documented correlation between behavioral immune system activation and out-group prejudice.
This journey has been a long one, and there have been many challenges along the way. Through this process, I learned that defending an honors thesis is not a straight line. I came into college expecting to do my thesis in chemistry, but after falling in love with psychology my plans shifted. I changed my major and my goals, but then was tasked with finding a psychology lab that was willing to take on a new thesis student. I searched high and low and applied to many different labs, but could not find my fit. That is until one of my professors, Dr. Veilleux, informed me of the newly hired psychology professor, Dr. Makhanova. Dr. Veilleux told me it may be a long shot because a lot of new professors won’t take thesis students in their first semester. I first contacted Dr. Makhanova before she arrived at the University of Arkansas, but she was happy to inform me of her research, and in the fall of 2019 she welcomed me and two other undergraduate research assistants into her lab.
Dr. Makhanova was ready to get started on some projects right away, but there was some necessary construction she needed done on her lab before we could run participants. This gave us an opportunity to dive into the literature and hold thought-provoking discussions about the behavioral immune system research. During this time my knowledge of the subject increased tremendously and it allowed me to ponder unique perspectives of the behavioral immune system. By the next semester, Spring 2020, it felt like we were finally starting to get the ball rolling. By late February I had decided on a topic for my thesis and we were ready to start applying for grants and start work on our data collection. But then COVID hit.
This initially threw another kink into our plan, but we persevered. Dr. Makhanova helped my partner, Ryan Blanchard, and I apply for the Honors Research Team Grant, and by the end of the semester we were informed that we had been awarded the funds! In the summer, we began developing the questionnaires that we planned to send out for data collection and received IRB approval to conduct the study, but our challenges were not over. I had initially planned to study the link between the behavioral immune system and preference for symmetrical faces, but before starting the actual study, Dr. Makhanova encouraged us to conduct a pilot study. The results of the pilot showed that my dependent variable had no variability (everyone preferred the symmetrical faces!) and this was not good news. I had to develop a different research approach for my thesis. After going back to the literature, I decided to instead examine prejudice against people who are elderly. We updated our survey and began data collection.Unfortunately, within the first few days we ran into the problem we are dealing with currently, bots. Since our survey is completely online, it is vulnerable to being attacked by people who create bots or scripts to mine the $10 reward for completing our survey. Luckily, Dr. Makhanova has been able to identify the fraudulent bots but it has drastically slowed down our process of data collection. However, we have not given up! Instead, we are facing this challenge like we have the rest and are using different methods of recruitment.
This road has been a winding one and I can promise I have seen my fair share of surprising problems along the way, but I have not given up. Sometimes that seemed like the easy way out when I was having trouble finding a lab, creating a novel hypotheses, or collecting data but with the help of my research advisor, Dr. Makhanova, and my partner, Ryan Blanchard, we have found a way to persevere and I know it will be worth it in the end.