National Science Award

By Alejandra Navarro

When we're young, we tend to see the glass as half empty. By the time we've lived through five or six decades, our perspective changes and we begin to see the glass as half full. That's the crux of the socio-emotional selectivity theory in psychology: younger adults focus on the negative, while older adults focus on the positive. Melissa Wright '06, in her honors thesis "Emotional Bias in Source Attributions for Younger and Older Adults," found evidence that not only reinforces this theory, but also shows that people must make an effort to be selective. In addition, they are frequently able to recall the source of the information they are drawn to.

Wright's honors thesis was completed as a requirement of the Honors Program under the guidance of Dr. Linda Henkel, associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, who served as Wright's advisor on the research project. Dr. Henkel describes Wright's honors thesis as complex and remarkable.

"This level of a project is more like a master's thesis than a senior thesis," says Dr. Henkel, an expert on cognitive aging. "It was not just something done for the sake of learning, but a project that is making a contribution to the field."

So much so that professionals in the field took notice of Wright's work. In May 2006, the American Psychological Association's Division on Adult Development and Aging named Wright the first-place winner of the prestigious Division 20 Research Award. Funded by the Retirement Research Foundation, a division of the National Institutes of Health, the award is given to one undergraduate and one graduate student in the nation each year and comes with a $500 prize. This is the first time a Fairfield University student has received the honor.

"I was really surprised," says Wright, who graduated with a degree in psychology and received the Rev. Thomas A. McGrath, S.J., Psychology Award for superior academic achievement. "It was exciting receiving a national award and being recognized by the American Psychological Association."

For her senior thesis, Wright tested 48 college-age students and 42 older adults in the summer and fall of 2005. Each participant was shown a series of words (identified as positive, negative, or neutral) and a photo of the person who said the word. Each was asked to recall the words and the source. Older adults were more accurate in remembering the source of positive words, while younger adults were more accurate in remembering the source of negative words. Some participants had their attention divided by a listening task; in those cases, they recalled the opposite of what they had remembered when paying full attention.

"What we really learned is that it's an effortful process," Wright explains. "You need all of your resources to make that bias. For older adults, if your attention is divided, you aren't going to be able to focus on that positive information."

In April, Wright presented her research at the Fairfield University Sigma Xi poster presentation and Dr. Henkel presented it at the Cognitive Aging Conference in Atlanta, Ga. "Melissa is what you like to see in students," Dr. Henkel says. "She brings great insight to the table."

Wright's experience illustrates Fairfield's dynamic learning environment, which offers rich educational opportunities beyond the traditional classroom. "I definitely learned more than I expected," says Wright, who is currently enrolled at the University of Connecticut in preparation for its speech-language pathology program.

"It was an eye-opening experience to execute a whole experiment from beginning to end," she says. "I'm very thankful that I had the opportunity to conduct this research, and I'm especially grateful to Dr. Henkel for her guidance and support throughout my time at Fairfield. She influenced every aspect of the study, and nothing that I've accomplished would have been possible without her."