Along with PhD student Suzannah who designed the study, I used several different tasks to investigate attention bias and interpretation bias in young children aged 4-8 years who were highly anxious. Upon entering our “space lab”, the child participants began “astronaut training” which allowed the research to be a fun experience for both the participants and I. It has enabled me to learn many things, for example, how to use facial electromyography (fEMG) equipment to record the children’s “smiley” and “angry” muscles (real names are the zygomaticus and the corrugator if you’re interested) and how to use the eye tracking computer “Tobii”.

Before we were able to collect our data we needed to find participants. This was one of my main jobs. I have lost count of the amount of flyers and posters that I have printed and distributed to libraries, museums, soft play centres and various other places we thought parents and children might appear over the summer holidays. I then liaised with parents who showed interest and invited them in to the department if their child matched our pre-screening criteria.

Another main part of my placement was data input which I surprisingly really enjoyed. Keeping things organised and being productive is something I love to do, so scoring and coding questionnaire inputs and demographic information into numerous excel spreadsheets and SPSS worksheets wasn’t as mundane as you’d expect.

I feel that this UROP placement has been such an amazing opportunity and has enabled me to fully understand the research process which involves many more stages than I first expected. I definitely improved my problem solving skills during the piloting stages of the study as things often didn’t go to plan, and as a consequence, my team working skills have also developed as I have been working closely with Suzannah to make the experiment run as successfully as possible. The main thing I will take away from this is that it has helped me consolidate my beliefs and hopes to pursue a career with children in a clinical setting in the future as working with young, anxious participants was really rewarding.

Vicky Milner