Research Statement Shaan Shahabuddin

The search for the mysterious letter

Most people would claim to have a favorite color or a favorite number, but not many would admit that
they have a favorite letter. I have been on the search for a specific letter ever since I was first exposed to
the field of psychology. Similar to most students who take an introductory psychology course, I assumed
I would learn about the letter n (analyze), but instead, I was taught about x (experimentation). It
was the fact that psychology was focused heavily on experimentation that led me to working as an
undergraduate researcher in the cognition laboratory where I studied m (memory).

M" (Memory)
During my senior year, I worked on an honors thesis where my mentor and I designed a study to test for
the effects related context-dependent recognition memory, which is whether individuals are able to
recognize stimuli when the background environment is either same as when the stimuli was first
presented or whether it is different. Participants viewed a movie that contained a series of short video
clips, each one with a different word superimposed. For the memory test, participants viewed another
movie that was very similar to the first, but they reported whether the background movie scene and the
superimposed word was the same as the original video. Our study found that previously viewed movie
scenes assisted individuals in discriminating between new and old words, but reinstating old words
resulted in participants believing that both the new and old movie scenes had been previously presented.
We called this the asymmetric reinstatement effect in recognition (Shahabuddin & Smith, 2016)
because our results showed an inverse effect: recognition of an old word was enhanced by reinstatement
of an old video scene but recognition of an old video scene was not enhanced by reinstatement of an old
word.

E (Emotion)
As I entered graduate school, I was still searching for the mysterious letter that I had not yet found.
During my transition, I studied under a new mentor who also had an interest in m but was even more
interested in e (emotion). We designed a series of studies that tested for anticipation and emotion.
My new mentor and I conducted our first study to test our buffer hypothesis, which states that current
negative events appear less negative when individuals are expecting a future positive event. Essentially,
people can cope with negative experiences as long as they are expecting a future positive event. For the
design of our study, we induced participants into an anticipation state by telling them that they would
watch a video at the end of the study that would make them feel very good (positive anticipation), make
them feel very bad (negative anticipation), or we merely made mentioned the video but did not explain
how it would make them feel (neutral anticipation). All of our participants then viewed a set of pictures
(either positive, negative, or neutral) while they were anticipating their video. In contrast to our initially
stated hypothesis, and much to our surprise, we found that participants who were expecting either a
positive or a negative video rated negative pictures as more negative. It seemed that any type of
expectation results in viewing negative events as more negative.
For my Masters thesis, I further explored this question by inducing participants into an anticipation
state and having them judge neutral pictures. According to the desirability bias (Weinstein, 1980),
individuals judge the probability of them experiencing positive events as more often compared to the
average person and judge the probability of them experiencing negative events as less often compared to
the average person. However, Lench (2009) found that it was possible to subliminally prime participants
in a positive mood while having them view neutral images. In doing so, participants judged neutral
events as more likely to occur. My study was similar to Lench (2009) but used anticipation rather than
experienced emotion. Unfortunately, however, my thesis did not find a significant difference on the
judgment of likelihood when anticipating positive or negative anticipation.

UR (Undergraduate Research)
It was a wonderful opportunity to learn that the Psychology Department at my college was beginning its
first research group with undergraduate students, so I decided to volunteer as a mentor for ur
(undergraduate research). The students and I explored the concept of Grit, which is referred to as the
perseverance and passion for long-term goals (Duckworth et al., 2007: 1087), on our sample of
community college students. A team of our five undergraduate students collected data from classrooms
of Professors who were willing to sacrifice their time so that these students would be able to experience
research first-hand. Our team presented a research poster of the findings at the Southwestern
Psychological Association Conference as well as at the inaugural research conference held at our
college. A few of our students went above and beyond and wrote a research paper on their findings of
the study to submit to a national paper competition. One of the students from our team won two awards
for her submitted paper and was offered an all-exclusive travel grant to present her research at the
American Psychological Association Conference. As we begin a new semester, three of our team
members have successfully transferred to the four-year university of their choice while two previous
members will continue to work in our lab on a new project.

The unsolved mystery

Throughout my journey of searching for this mysterious letter, I have widened my knowledge and
learned more about the science of psychology than I had ever planned. As an undergraduate research
assistant in a m (memory) lab, I could have never imagined that I would eventually continue to
grasp knowledge of e (emotion), and ur (undergraduate research).

The mysterious letter that I have been chasing for the past seven years has been y (why). I have
always wanted to know why is it that humans are very alike in our appearances, languages, and gestures
but we think differently. I have wanted to explore why some individuals have better memory, take
certain risks, allow specific emotions to govern behavior, and allow leadership role and power to
influence decisions.
After trying to solve this mystery, I have realized that this is a never-ending question. As an academic
and scholar, I will learn more about human behavior with every research I conduct but my search for y
will continue to progress. It is not the destination that I have been chasing throughout these years, but
the journey I have been on that has led me to great advances in my knowledge.

Future Research
I would like to conduct research on the areas that I have studied in the past, specifically emotion,
anticipation and risk. I have recently gained interest in the field of consumer behavior and social media.
At Blinn College, I have started working with undergraduate students on a project studying the influence
of personality on social media use. The students are interested in finding whether the trending phone
application Snapchat results in different behaviors compared to other social media tools (there have been
less than 10 studies published on Snapchat, although the website states that it has more than 100 million
active users). Recent research (Pittman & Reich, 2016) has found that image-based applications (e.g.,
Snapchat and Instagram) have resulted in an increase in happiness and satisfaction with life and a
decrease in loneliness while text-based applications (e.g, Twitter, Yik-Yak) have no effect on these
variables. A future line of my research would include the effect of social media and consumer behavior
on anticipation and memory.
 References

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Lench, H.C. (2009). Automatic optimism: The affective basis of judgments about the likelihood of
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Pittman, M., & Reich, B. (2016). Social media nad loneliness: Why an Instagram picture may be worth
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Shahabuddin, S. S., & Smith, S. M. (2016). Asymmetric reinstatement effects in recognition. The
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