Avery Machuk, senior and undergraduate research assistant, recently presented her Honors thesis research and collaborated with the lab to finalize the study. The current study looks into how humiliation impacts change in social anxiety levels.
Avery hypothesized that (1) Participants who seek either social support, peer support, or self-support will experience a decrease in social anxiety after completing the cognitive task while those who do not seek support of any kind will experience an increase in social anxiety and (2) Participants who initially rate their humiliation as higher after reading the humiliating scenario will experience an increase in anxiety.
To test these hypotheses, Avery worked on an online survey for participants to complete. The survey required participants to read a scenario to induce humiliation, rate their level of anxiety, rate their level of emotions (humiliation, shame, anger, etc.), respond by imagining a scenario to change anxiety, indicate direction of change (more or less anxiety), rate their level of anxiety and emotions again, and recall their initial levels of anxiety.
To analyze this data, Avery will be running a T-Test for Dependent Means as well as a Qualitative Analysis. After seeing these preliminary stages of the research come to fruition, we are so excited to see the results and findings that Avery comes across.
FF-TIP LAB 