The Science of Positive Emotions

Maggie O’Haire ’08 is interested in a relatively new field—positive psychology, or the psychology of well being. Her URSI project with psychology professor Michele Tugade pioneered a new methodology to assess positive emotions.

Q. How did you begin working with Professor Tugade?
I had her first semester my freshman year—it was the first course she taught at Vassar and my first psychology course. And then I started working with her at the beginning of my junior year as part of her research lab team, and I’ve been working with her ever since. The summer after junior year I stayed at Vassar and did URSI with her, and I’m the lab coordinator for her lab this year. I also went with her to New Mexico to the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology where we submitted abstracts and posters on our research.

Q. Have you gotten to publish with her?
We’re working on a couple of publications right now based on the studies that we’ve done together, and that’s one thing I think is very unique to Vassar, that you can have that kind of relationship with a professor and opportunity to publish with them.

Q. What is the focus of the research you’re doing with her?
We look at positive emotions, psychological well-being. Some of the research we do has to do with measuring physiological responses to emotions—things like heart rate and blood pressure and galvanic skin response. The main study that I worked on during URSI was really exciting because it used a new methodology. Usually in studies of emotion, participants come into the lab and fill out a survey about their responses to certain events, or we hook them up to sensors and induce certain emotions and then measure their physiological reactions. But in this study, we used PDAs, personal digital assistants. Basically participants carried around the PDA for two weeks, and it would page them 5 times randomly throughout the day each day, and it would ask them a series of questions about how they were feeling. So, for example, on a scale of 1 to 5, how angry are you feeling? How happy, how grateful? And then after that set of questions, we would ask them about the activities they’d done since the last page. And at this point, we had two different conditions, so in one group, the questions were positive activity prompts, like, did you smile at someone, did you appreciate your surroundings, did you have a good conversation? Whereas in the other group, the questions were neutral activity prompts, such as, did you brush your teeth, did you walk to class?

Q. What did you find out?
What we found was that in the group that was prompted to focus on their positive daily activities, the participants showed increases in their personal growth, awareness of positive emotions, and most interestingly, they went from predominantly analytic thinking to more dialectical thinking. Basically, analytic thinking is where, if you have two opposing viewpoints, you need to pick one to feel comfortable. Dialectical thinking is where you can appreciate contrast and complexity and be more comfortable with it, and find a middle way. So just by focusing on the positive daily activities, the participants were broadening their cognitive abilities—after just two weeks! So that’s actually one of the studies that we’re working up to publish right now. And that was also the study that we presented at the conference in New Mexico.

Q. Wow—that’s exciting!
It is exciting. One of the things I like most about the work I’m doing here is that it’s so new. The methodology is new, and positive psychology itself is a newer field. For the most part psychology is focused on mental illness and the negatives and what’s going wrong, but recently we’re starting to focus more on what’s going right, and I think that’s an exciting direction to be going in.

Q. You’ve won a Fulbright to study in Australia next year! What are you going to be doing?
I didn’t go abroad while I was at Vassar because I love Vassar so much that I didn’t want to take a semester away. So now is my chance! I applied and was accepted for a Fulbright fellowship to Australia for 12 months. I’ll be working with a mentor there on a year-long project to study the benefits of animal-assisted therapy for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.

Q. How did you come up with that project?
I’m very interested in the benefits of human-animal interactions and how that can benefit your well-being and psychological health. In my junior and senior years, I did field work at the Green Chimneys School, which specializes in animal-assisted therapy and horticulture therapy for children with mental, behavioral, and emotional struggles. It’s in Brewster, which is about 45 minutes away, but the Field Work Office provides transportation, which is very helpful. I started working with the therapeutic riding program, getting hands on experience, and now this year I’m doing work there in the clinical department, helping clinical psychologists put together research projects to study the benefits of interacting with an animal on the children’s health and well-being.

Q. Do you see results?
I do. I’m only there once a week, so I don’t get to see too much, but what I do see is just amazing. I mean, you read these children’s case reports and see all the horrible things that they’ve had to encounter, and then you meet them, and they’re on the farm with the animals, and you can see that they’re motivated and inspired by the opportunity they have there. It’s so exciting. One of the programs is the ECAD Program, the East Coast Assistance Dog Program. The children train the dogs to become assistance dogs, starting from when they’re puppies. The kids are very focused and engaged because they have a sense of how important it is. The school also has a wildlife rehabilitation center, so all of these endangered species and wild birds that have been injured are kept there, and while the students are working on being rehabilitated and healing themselves, they work at the rehabilitation center for the wildlife and help the animals. It’s an amazing place.

Q. Have you done other internships as well?
Sophomore year I had two field work placements simultaneously. I worked at Sprout Creek Farm and also at Battered Women’s Services. At Battered Women’s Services, I got into sort of the counseling aspect of psychology because I would do one-on-one sessions with clients. I also worked as an advocate in the court for women who were victims of abuse and domestic violence, and I answered hotline calls. So that was very intense. And then also once a week I would go to the farm, and that kept me sane. Working at BWS was amazing as well. It takes a very strong, special person to do that day in and day out. It was great to learn about. One of my favorite things about Vassar is the field work program. You get academic credit, but it feels more like an extracurricular activity because you get to get off campus and apply everything you learn in the classroom to a real world situation.

Q. What’s the best class you’ve taken that wasn’t a science class?
I think it would be a sociology class I took on domestic violence. It was amazing. It really changed the way I think about things. And as a CARES counselor for victims of sexual assault and abuse, it really taught me a lot about the processes that go into relationship abuse and stalking and domestic violence. It’s so important—I think that everyone should take it.

Q. Are you involved in other extracurricular activities?
CARES is my main extracurricular, because it’s a big time commitment. I’m on call once a week for 24 hours. We meet every week, and we train new members. We put on events for sexual assault awareness week, and we’re always having speakouts and different events. In addition to that, I am also right now the research methods intern for Social Psychology Research Methods. And that’s been a really exciting experience, too, just meeting with different students in the class and helping them work through their ideas and assignments. Last year I also worked as an intern in the Office of Health Education. We put on the Harvest Health Fair, and we tried to come up with exciting and innovative ideas to get students on campus aware of different issues related to student health, and that was a really fun experience.

Q. What’s your long-term goal? I would love to work at a place like the Green Chimneys School. I definitely want to do something related to researching or promoting psychological well-being through interacting with animals and nature. After the Fulbright, I hope to apply to graduate school. I will hopefully get my master’s through the Fulbright program, and then I want to go for my doctorate after that.