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This summer, I had the great opportunity to receive an ARIA award, which gave me the chance to learn more about the research process in psychology. During my internship, I worked on a research project exploring Affective Social Competence (ASC) under the supervision of Dr. Melanie Dirks. This project explored how empathic accuracy—an individual’s ability to accurately infer others’ emotions—as well as expressive accuracy—an individual’s ability to accurately display emotions in accordance with their subjective feelings—contribute to competent communication of emotions between friends. During the summer, I helped recruit research participants for an active study on ASC. I also helped in entering already collected data numerically for this same study. Moreover, I contributed to a systematic review of the literature on empathic accuracy. Finally, I worked on a project that explored the association between nonverbal behaviors and expressive accuracy during supportive interactions between friends.

I was interested in an ARIA project because, during the past year, I volunteered as a Research Assistant and completed my first Honours thesis, which gave me a taste of what it is like to do research in psychology. During this time, my enthusiasm and respect for research has only grown. Through this internship, I wanted to expand my research skills and continue exploring research subjects that I am passionate about. I was interested in how this internship could give me the opportunity to work on several different tasks and learn more about the research process on a daily basis. My learning objectives going into the summer were to expand my skillset, especially in data analysis and academic writing. I was also hoping to continue working on the recruitment process of a study as well as to test research participants. I wanted to get a sense of the different steps of the research process and to witness some daily challenges and highlights associated with being a researcher. 

Laurence Jette during her ARIA internship, having to chance to work both on campus and at home outside.

One highlight of my internship was how I got to work on many different tasks. My days never exactly looked the same since I got to experience many different aspects of the research process. For example, on some days, I could be working on recruiting participants or managing data, and on some other days, I could be working on a systematic review and my thesis on nonverbal behaviors. This made my internship full of different experiences.

Another highlight was to continue working on my Honours thesis. Indeed, even though I worked on many new tasks during the summer, I really enjoyed doing more work on the project I spent the past year working on. I feel very proud of seeing this project to the end during the summer.

One challenge I encountered during the summer was working on the systematic review. Indeed, this review was a new project and many adjustments needed to be made along the way to fix the issues that kept coming up. One way that my internship supervisor and I overcame this challenge was by meeting more often together to work on the review together. These meetings helped us to find solutions together, to encourage each other and to make sure we were on the same page while working on the review. Another challenge I encountered was recruiting research participants. In fact, I had some trouble finding any research participants for the study my internship supervisor was conducting. To try and solve this challenge, I tried to find new ways to recruit participants. I hung up posters around the city in strategic places to try to find new participants. Overall, I found great value in witnessing what kinds of everyday challenges can come up while doing research and how you can attempt to solve them.

I think ARIA has shaped my future career by encouraging me to continue being curious, to ask questions and to do more research. In my final year of my bachelor’s degree, I have the opportunity of working on another Honours thesis, and this internship has convinced me fully that I should do it. I started my degree not really interested in doing research, but this past year, with the help of ARIA, I have discovered how I could be interested in integrating some research in my future career.

To conclude, I wanted to express my gratitude to Dr. Joan Eakin and Christopher Hoffmann for this wonderful opportunity. I am very grateful for this donation, which helped me learn so much and grow as a student in research. Once again, thank you!