Psychology Students receive Barrie Frost Graduate Student Innovation Grants

Congratulations to Psychology Graduate Students Jessie Rowe, Neha Parvez, Eun Ju Son, and James Hillman on receiving the 2022-2023 Barrie Frost Graduate Student Innovation Grants. This award was available for the 2022-2023 academic year.
 
During his long career in the Queen’s University Psychology Department, Dr. Barrie Frost established himself as a pioneer and leader in the field of perceptual neuroscience. In his own work, Dr. Frost developed methodological innovations that allowed him to address questions of fundamental importance in the field in ways that no one else could. His enduring enthusiasm for understanding how the mind works spread to everyone in his orbit, especially those students who worked closely with him.
 
The 2022-2023 Barrie Frost Graduate Student Innovation Grant continued Barrie Frost’s legacy of supporting novel, creative and innovative graduate student research in any area of Psychology, including Clinical, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental, or Social.
 
The overarching goal of the Barrie Frost Graduate Student Innovation Grant was to provide substantive support for recipients’ creative inquiry. Supplemental to this aim, recipients will gain experience developing a convincing application for competitive funding – a skill that is valuable across many professional contexts. Recipients will also gain experience with aspects of administering an award in support of research.
 
As part of the research that Jessie Rowe will be conducting with the Barrie Frost funding, she will be examining what types of stressors in childhood put women most at risk for being sexually victimized in adulthood. She will also examine potential mechanisms that drive the relation between childhood trauma and revictimization. This contribution is novel and innovative in its multimodal and longitudinal design.
 
“The proposed research will lay the groundwork for identifying women most at risk for sexual victimization,” Jessie explains. “Moreover, it will identify specific, malleable targets for prevention and harm reduction at the neural, behavioural, and cognitive levels. Considering the tremendous economic, societal, and personal costs of sexual victimization across the lifespan, deepening our understanding of women’s risk for revictimization is a pressing priority.”
 
Neha Parvez’s research will use micro-longitudinal methods to investigate disruptions in the expression and suppression of emotion among adolescents who experience self-injurious thoughts and behaviours. Neha plans to use the funds to purchase the equipment needed to code moment-to-moment changes in emotional expression.
 
“My program of research focuses on how self-injurious and suicidal youth experience, express and regulate their emotions. Using behavioural observation methods that enable us to examine momentary changes in emotional expression generates a new frontier for my research. Specifically, I can more easily map real-time change in expression/suppression onto changes occurring at other time scales (e.g., within hours using experience sampling methods)”, Neha explains. “This type of methodological innovation will help me better understand how certain affective processes may drive the escalation of self-injurious thoughts and behaviours. I'm excited to dive into my planned research!”
 
Eun Ju Son’s research explores cultural differences in South Korea and Canada in how people respond when their opinions about someone clash with those of their close friends. This investigation aims to understand whether individuals are more likely to conform to or invalidate their friend's perspective, highlighting the dynamics of social influence in cross-cultural contexts.
 
“The Barrie Frost Graduate Student Innovation Grant's financial support enables me to conduct more comprehensive data collection in South Korea, contribute to the dissemination of research findings through conference presentations and publications, and strengthen my academic profile,” Eun Ju says. “I'm excited about the opportunities this award brings and the positive impact it will have on my future research pursuits.”
 
James Hillman’s research aims to assess differences in responses to social inconsistency across cultures. While some research suggests conformity is more common in collectivist cultures, little work has explored why.
 
“We are excited to be able to pursue this research. While we have access to a wealth of participants here in Canada, access to international populations can be quite difficult. With the local data collection complete, but no access to funds to recruit participants internationally, the progress of this study had been halted for several months,” James recalls. “However, with the funds provided by this grant we will be able to examine cultural differences between Canadian and Korean individuals, allowing us to explore research entirely novel avenues of research. For this support we are deeply grateful."