Regulating her Career
When she discovered that she didn't enjoy being cooped up in a room, trying to write fiction, English major Amanda Gumble focused on her other classes. She discovered she particularly enjoyed her psychology classes, especially those that had to do with emotion. So it made sense that she found Pamela Cole and her DOTS project, which involves studying the development of emotion regulation in children.
“I knew I wanted to work on a real research project,” the senior from Honesdale, PA, says. “When I saw an ad on the psychology site requesting people to work with emotion issues, I pursued it right away.”
Gumble joined the study in her junior year, initially listening to audio tapes from researchers' home visits and recording emotion
 |
Amanda Gumble |
terms into a large database. After several months, she was trained for the emotion coding team. Part of that training was watching and gauging the responses—in particular, the emotional responses—of children who were given the same 30-minute task.
“We put a toy in a locked box and gave the kids the wrong keys,” she says. “Then we would watch facial expressions, posture, listen for vocal cues, look for signs of anger or sadness or anxiety, and then rate the variety of reactions and levels of intensity.”
The children, who have been in this study since 2001, have been doing a form of this experiment since they were 18 months old. The goal is to see how children regulate their emotions and to track changes in their emotional responses.
“There was a huge range,” says Gumble. “Some kids stayed very calm; others would get angry or sad. Some kids were creative—one little girl used keys from a cabinet to try to open the box.”
The children at this time were all four years old. At five years of age, the children were given a toy in a knotted sack, which they could not open. The other researchers were watching for signs indicating that as the children got older, they were managing their emotions better. Gumble said that one of the mothers told her how improved her son was from an earlier task. But not all the children improved.
“There are definitely children with problems,” she says. “One boy threw blocks all over the room because he was so angry. Some kids cry a lot.”
Cole's goal is to identify these children at an early age and try to intervene in hopes of solving problems before they become bigger. Gumble's experience in the lab was a big influence in her future plans.
“I want to practice clinical psychology but with an emphasis on emotion,” she says. “I'm making sure that there are faculty members at the graduate schools I'm applying to who are doing this type of research.”