Stress, social cognition and health studies

Position Status: Open
Level: Undergraduate
Year in Program 3rd
Semesters Recruiting 

• Fall
• Spring
• Summer

Year: 

• Junior
• Senior

Campus(es): Queens
Position Title: Research Fellow
Hours per Week: 5
Type of Position: Unpaid

Project Summary: 

St. John’s University (STJ) and Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, Department of Family
Medicine (JHMC) collaborate on a research training program – The Collaborative Health
Integration Research Program (CHIRP). The overall goal of CHIRP is to reduce health
disparities by generating new knowledge and providing research training in health disparities.
CHIRP trainees conduct mechanistic research investigating the role of psychosocial factors in
the development and management of chronic disease in high risk populations. The projects are
designed to provide information that can guide the formulation of provider, patient, and system-
based interventions to improve health outcomes.

CHIRP trainees include JHMC Family Medicine Residents and STJ undergraduate students in
psychology and biology, and masters and doctoral-level graduate students in psychology. This
year the program also includes a high school student from the Bronx High School of Science. All
trainees work together on behavioral medicine research projects; and in the process, learn to
become competent researchers.

The aim of CHIRP is to provide students with practical training in the conceptualization and
implementation of research in behavioral medicine, with a focus on health disparities. The research
projects focus on basic mechanistic research but are designed to maximize the degree to which the
findings have direct implications for understanding clinical problems. Trainees will gain practical
experience in conducting research in behavioral health science. You will learn to conceptualize the
ways in which the social environment may influence psychophysiological and behavioral processes that have effects on health status and health behavior. You will learn how to measure important constructs in behavioral health research, including schemas, adherence, health practices, and social relationships, including patient-provider interactions. You will learn to design and implement basic research studies, collect and analyze data, address ethical issues in conducting research, write presentations and manuscripts and prepare proposals for funding. You will learn these skills by working on one project as a group.

This semester the St. John’s students are mostly focused on two projects:

THE RACISM PROJECTS: Students can serve as collaborators on the Stress, Working Memory
and Health Studies. We are conducting two studies now. The aim of these studies is to understand
possible mediators of the relationship of racism to depression and blood pressure reactivity in daily
life. In this study, we will test the hypothesis that racism is associated with changes in social cognition, including changes to schemas (related to the self, and others including the in-group and out-group, and the world at large) and cognitive control processes. Schemas are mental structures that consist of constellations of affects, attitudes, and beliefs. Stereotype threat concerns could be considered a relational schema, a schema about the ways in which others perceive us or we perceive others. Cognitive control processes include aspects of executive function that facilitate shifting attention and planning. We hypothesize that racism increases negative schemas about others and decreases cognitive control. In turn, we expect these changes in social cognition to be associated with negative mood during the day and more negative social interactions with others. These daily experiences are hypothesized to increase the risk for depression. We will measure these variables 5 times over an 8-month period in a longitudinal study. We test hypotheses about these schemas using explicit surveys and implicit association tests. 

We have tested the hypothesis that schemas influence our daily mood and responses to routine social interactions using electronic diaries and ecological momentary assessment methodology. Preliminary data confirm these effects, but we still need to add more participants.

During previous semesters, we have continued to develop the literature review and the
protocol for the “Stress, Mood and Social Interactions” study, and obtained IRB approval for this
project and another set of pilot projects which developed the materials for this one. We obtained a
seed grant from St. John’s to conduct a longitudinal study testing the hypothesis that acute exposure to racism activates relational schemas (schemas about our relationships with others) and that this activation produces changes in mood and social interactions, which if uninterrupted, produce changes in depression. (So one question we must answer is what could buffer these effects on a daily basis?). 

Last semester we completed data collection for the longitudinal study. This study was funded by a Seed Grant from St. John’s University. We tested our participants, college students, five times.

These data provide pilot data for an application to NHLBI and the data for all conference proposals.
Advanced statistical analyses including bootstrapping methods for testing mediation and structural
equation modeling will be employed to test the overall hypothesis that the relationship of racism to
depression is mediated through changes in non-conscious schemas about the self and others and the effects of these schemas on daily mood and social interactions. We will be preparing conference
papers based on these data for the Spring. Additional analyses on these data will be conducted during the Spring semester and form a portion of the curriculum.

This term we are engaged in collecting data for the project funded by the Richard and Camille
Sinatra Endowment. This is a cross-sectional study of the relations among individual and neighborhood stress, working memory and depression. Data collection occurs at Jamaica Hospital.
Data collection for this project starts right at the beginning of the term. CHIRP trainees serve as
research assistants on this project. Every CHIRP fellow must participate in data collection, entry,
analysis, and the preparation and presentation of scientific presentations.

All fellows will be trained in the protocols for the study. Students will be expected to test
participants alongside more experienced CHIRP fellows. They are expected to take responsibility for
mastering each part of the process and participating in the study.

Over the summer and next semester, CHIRP fellows will be primarily working on data analyses from our longitudinal and community studies, as well as grant writing. 

Leadership roles (available to experienced CHIRP fellows)
a. Participant tracking and reporting
b. Participant contact
c. Testing leaders – surveys, ipad, IAT, diary, interview
d. Data entry tracking and reporting
e. Budget and paperwork
f. IRB
g. Scheduling and logistics
h. Fellow hours tracking
i. Poster #1 leader
j. Poster #2 leader

Qualifications: 

Pre-requisites are 1000C, 2030, 2040 (although 2040 can be a co-requisite). Graduate students must have completed an undergraduate research methods course. They must be enrolled in one statistics course on the graduate level.

Required Courses apply to all applicants unless majoring in a discipline other than
Psychology.

Job Responsibilities: 

CHIRP fellow roles:

Undergraduates will serve as research assistants, masters and doctoral students will serve as research coordinators for one of these teams. The Family medicine residents work in teams and serve as project leaders and collaborators on research. Each research project can contain multiple subprojects to give every student an opportunity to write their own paper. Together students will develop projects, collect data, and analyze the data, and report the findings.

The projects are in different stages (i.e., conceptualization and design, data collection, data analysis,
write up), as noted. Therefore, all students will be required to collect data on projects which are still in the data collection phase to ensure they will have some experience in data collection and interactions with human participants. All students must serve as an author or coauthor on an abstract submitted to a conference at least once during the year.

The St. John’s University laboratory meetings are held with Dr. Brondolo once per week on
Wednesdays from 10:30-12:30. The JHMC meetings are held with Dr. Brondolo on Mondays from 12-
1. In addition to the lab meetings, CHIRP fellows are all required to attend a one-hour weekly recitation section with one of the lab instructors each week. The JHMC residents have recitation sections with Dr. Brondolo when they work on their individual projects.

CHIRP undergraduates and graduate students spend 3 hours per week in class (2 in the lab meetings on Wednesday and 1 in recitation.) In addition, they must spend a total of 30 hours per semester in practical activities, either data collection, data entry, or protocol and presentation development. These hours must be logged in the red log book. (If it is not logged, it didn’t happen). These hours are part of the grade for the course, but they also are necessary data when Dr. Brondolo writes recommendation letters for you, so she can say how much training you have had in each area. This information is also useful for you as you assemble a record of your experience to apply for jobs and graduate school.

Attendance. This is a professional development program. Therefore, students are required to attend
all meetings or otherwise inform their recitation leader.

On a practical level, you will learn administrative, interpersonal, and technical skills in applied research. You will learn to implement a complex protocol and will be recruiting and testing participants. You will learn ethical principles of conducting research with humans and will put these principles into practice. You will participate in data analysis and preparation of conference papers from the data.