ABOUT
Bailey L.
Welcome to my signature page! I am currently a junior at Emma Willard School in Troy, NY. I am interested in all things STEM, and I've designed my signature project around these interests. Growing up my favorite subjects in school have always been science and math, and I particularly love getting to apply the skills I've learned in those classes. Having two researchers for parents, I've been surrounded by the world of research from a young age, and this showed me how interesting research can be. My project specifically dives into the relationship between our minds and our physiology, an aspect of biology that interests me a lot. It amazes me how much of an effect psychology can have on our bodily state, and the experiment I will be helping out with will explore this. A couple fun facts about me, I love playing sports (particularly soccer, basketball, and crew), and I participate on my school's teams for these sports. I also am interested in the government, especially regarding social justice in policy, and in doing my signature project I will also get to learn about ways that institutions ensure safety within research projects through different policies. Thanks for visiting my page, I hope you enjoy looking around at all the various aspects of my project!
Annotated Bibliography
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (1979, April 18). The Belmont Report.
The Belmont Report is a document produced by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that outlines key guidelines for ethical human subjects research. The report, published in 1979, is structured around three main topics: Respect for Persons, Beneficence, and Justice. I reviewed this document and the ways it is applied to complete my Institutional Review Board Certification, and because I am helping with research on human subjects, these guidelines are very relevant. This report was one of the first sets of general guidelines regarding human subjects research, and many new or more specific guidelines are often written with attention to this report, making understanding the Belmont Report essential to understanding current policies regarding research. The only downside to this report is that it was published in 1979, so some aspects may be outdated. However, current policies that are based off of this report certainly take this downside into account.
Levine, M. E. (2005). Sickness and Satiety: Physiological Mechanisms Underlying Perceptions of Nausea and Stomach Fullness. Current Gastroenterology Reports.
This article was written by the professor I am working in the lab with, Dr. Max Levine. The article covers a general overview of the different physiological changes that occur when people experience nausea, and how these can be applied when researching and treating nausea. The three main physiological systems that have been correlated with nausea through research are gastric dysrhythmias, the autonomic nervous system, and the endocrine system. Gastric dysrhythmias are abnormal stomach movements, and there have been many studies looking at the connection between gastric dysrhythmias and nausea. Gastric activity can be measured by an electrogastrogram (EGG), which monitors the cycles per minute of the stomach. Studies have shown that when participants of an experiment have reported nausea, their EGGs have also shown increased cycles per minute, suggesting a connection between gastric dysrhythmias and nausea, whether causal or otherwise. Connections between the nervous system and nausea and the endocrine system and nausea have also been associated with nausea, but there has not been sufficient research in this area to make concrete conclusions regarding these possible factors of nausea. This article was important for me to read and understand because it provides good background information for the study I will be helping with, and it also provided information pertaining to my first essential question of how the body and mind interact, and how that is shown physiologically.
Levine, M. E., Stern, R. M., & Koch, K. L. (2014, August). Enhanced perceptions of control and predictability reduce motion-induced nausea and gastric dysrhythmia. Experimental Brain Research, 232(8).
This article was also written by the professor I am doing research with. It is a research article that outlines and discusses a study done by Dr. Levine, Dr. Robert M. Stern, and Dr. Kenneth L. Koch, and was published in 2014. The study looked into the relationship between predictability and perceived control and nausea. Participants were either provided with high or low levels of control and either high or low levels of predictability when seated in the rotating optokinetic drum. The researchers measured subjective nausea ratings and electrograstromgrams. They found that nausea levels were lower in the groups with higher predictability and in the groups with higher control, suggesting that having control and knowing what you’re going to experience can lead to lower nausea levels. However, an interesting find from the study was that estimates of gastric dysrhythmias, taken from the EGGs, were only decreased by high levels of control when high levels of predictability were also provided. This study is very relevant to my project, since it is a prime example of what the end result of the research process looks like, and because it looks into the effect psychological factors can have on physiological symptoms.