Contest honors budding psychologists

Four high school students' psychology projects make the final cut in a prestigious science talent search.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

Angela Burgess, 17, always wondered how a father's absence from the home affects a daughter's values and social outlook. Having grown up without a father present, she decided to explore the topic in a science project at the Bronx High School of Science.

When she checked the research literature, she found plenty had been written on absent fathers. But what hadn't been studied much was the effects of present fathers on their daughters. So, she did what every good scientist does: She set out to fill in the research gap, calling on a senior researcher in the field, Fordham psychology professor, Ann Higgins-D'Alessandro, PhD, to mentor her along the way.

She never expected that her project would grow to involve sophisticated survey instruments and a sample size of almost 150 adolescent daughters. Or that her work would reach the final top 40 out of 300 semifinalists in the nationwide Intel Corporation-sponsored 58th Annual Science Talent Search (formerly the Westinghouse Science Talent Search).

In fact, 1999 was a big year for psychology entries in the prestigious competition, with three other psychology-related projects making the final cut along with Burgess's. These included:

* An investigation of how serotonin withdrawal affects crayfish behavior, by Constance Joanne Wang, 17, of Hanford High School in Richland, Wash.

* A study of the Stroop Effect and automaticity in learning by Shana Traci Lippel, 17, of Lawrence High School in Cedarhurst, N.Y.

* An analysis of gender-biased language by Lauren Cooper, 18, of Roslyn High School in Roslyn, N.Y.

Intel paid for the students' travel to Washington, D.C., where they attended a reception with members of Congress, met eminent scientists, displayed their projects at the National Academy of Sciences and attended a black-tie awards dinner.

Each also received $3,000 in scholarship funds, and students whose projects placed in the top 10 received even higher amounts. All four psychology contestants have been galvanized by the accolades and most plan to continue conducting research in college. Burgess, for one, intends to expand her project.

"Next I want to look at the dad side of this," says Burgess, who's considering research opportunities in the pre-med program at Emory University in Atlanta. "There's room for improvement in the father-daughter relationship. Fathers must be more involved in their daughters' lives because they affect so many factors."

Fathers' influence

For her Intel project, Burgess restricted her focus to daughters' perceptions of the amount their fathers support them and the quality of their father-daughter relationships.

She also considered how a number of variables, including daughters' ages and fathers' education levels, affected daughters' perceptions. Fathers with more education, she found, had stronger relationships with their daughters, regardless of age or ethnicity.

Their daughters more easily felt and expressed love. Overall, however, Burgess found that many daughters wish they could have closer ties with their fathers.

She says she owes much of her research success to the mentoring from Higgins-D'Alessandro, who supervised her literature search, helped her clarify her hypotheses and directed her factor analyses. But Higgins-D'Alessandro says the project's success wouldn't have been possible without Burgess's patience and investment in it.

Depressed crayfish

Wang's project also started with a kernel of personal interest and ended up a rigorous scientific undertaking. Wang wondered if people taking serotonin-based medications would experience severe relapse if they stopped taking the drugs.

She grew even more worried when she saw little in the research literature about relapse. Thus, she decided to explore the matter for her chemistry class project.

"I wanted to do an actual research project besides the common ones like 'How well does soap wash your hands?' and 'What toothpaste is best?'" she says of her decision.

To carry out the project, overseen by several biologists at Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Wang submerged groups of dominant or submissive crayfish in water containing varying levels of serotonin. She found, somewhat surprisingly, that serotonin made aggressive crayfish more combative, while it made subordinate crayfish more submissive.

But what most interested her was the fact that, upon withdrawal from serotonin, subordinate crayfish became more aggressive, indicating severe relapse. The serotonin-withdrawal behavior of the dominant crayfish changed unremarkably.

The results could have important implications for serotonin's use with people, says Wang.

"The results help explain why people will relapse differently with serotonin withdrawal," she says. "But they also bring up more questions. A lot more research is needed before we can extrapolate this directly to human treatment."

Words and colors

By comparison, Lippel's project, supervised from afar by neurologist Peter Brugger, PhD, of Zurich, Switzerland, and cognitive psychologist John Towse, PhD, of London, seeks to provide more direct and immediate help to people, in terms of learning.

She drew her idea from a journal article about the Stroop Effect--the mental confusion or challenge people encounter when they read a word for a color that is printed in a different color than the word indicates (the word "red" printed in blue ink, for example).

The article, by Brugger, concerned a relationship between Stroop color-word interference and another automatic mental task--sequential counting.

To further study the relationship, Lippel asked 100 students, ages 14 to 18, to first perform the Stroop task and then take another test in which they rapidly named the first 66 numbers they thought of, as if they were rolling a dice in their heads.

Lippel found that students who struggle hardest to perform the Stroop task are more likely to name numbers sequentially than randomly, confirming a link between automatic counting and reading.

Pronouns and politics

Also word-related is Cooper's study, which was supervised by her social studies teacher and stemmed from her observation that the U.S. Constitution exclusively uses the gender-specific pronouns "he" and "him" to describe the U.S. president.

She worried that the male-oriented pronouns might subconsciously deter girls from aspiring to political positions and boys from supporting female candidates. In an attempt to find out, she asked 165 sixth-graders to read a description of the president's job in either gender specific (he or she) or gender neutral (he/she) language. Participants then evaluated a male or female candidate for the position.

Overwhelmingly, girls and boys rated the female candidate highest when they read the gender-neutral language. Cooper, however, dislikes the cumbersome construction he/she. She says her findings suggest a need to seek a new, gender-neutral pronoun.

"The project shows there really is a connection between language and thought, and that language is important," says Cooper. "We need to use it to eliminate stereotypes, not to reinforce them."

Cooper hopes to raise awareness of language's effects as she continues investigating them in the psychology program at Duke University. The most enlightening aspect of her Intel project, she says, is her realization that "I'd love to do more research on this area."

For more information about the Intel Science Talent Search, visit either Intel's web site atchannel.intel.com/education/sts, or the web site of Science Service, which administers the competition, at www.sciserv.org/sts. Intel took over the competition from its former sponsor, Westinghouse, this year.



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