Erica Masi ’09 is researching how friends really do make things better
By Buff Lindau
Photo by Brian MacDonald

Friends help us during life’s toughest times. We don’t need a scientist to tell us that.

But the research Erica Masi ’09 is conducting seeks to find out just how much our friends help us. The biology/psychology double major recently received a $1,500 research grant from the national psychology honors society Psi Chi to fund her research that examines whether having a friend along alleviates symptoms in stressful situations. (Psi Chi gives only 12 to 16 of these highly competitive grants each semester to students across the country, and those primarily at large universities.)

Her project, titled “The Impact of Different Types of Friend Support During Psychological Stress on Cardiac Reactivity and Salivary Cortisol Levels,” enlists student volunteers to be tested to see if having a friend with them, either in the room, outside the room, or absent, affects their stress level. Assistant professor of psychology Melissa VanderKaay Tomasulo is her adviser on the senior honors thesis project.

Each volunteer subject (she hopes to test 60 in all) is given a cognitive task that lasts eight minutes, then have blood pressure and saliva content monitored at specific intervals. All data is recorded into categories of male and female, with or without a friend in the room, a friend nearby or no friend present.

Masi and her four research assistants, Anna Campbell ’11, Jenny Pietroski ’10, Elizabeth Couser ’09 and Erika Johnson ’10 are carrying out the study in a psychology department lab that allows the researcher to observe the subject, who cannot see the observers.

The study mimics a real health setting, Masi explained. She hopes to publish the results of her work at the end of the study. “Since biology didn’t encompass everything I was interested in,” Masi said, “I added another major in psychology, so that way I could better explore how the body works.”