Two students used summer grants to explore the psychological impact of stress
By Buff Lindau
How well do pilots navigate under stress? Are occasional smokers really affected by the few cigarettes they indulge in? Rachael Allen ’10 and Jenny Pietroski ’10 spent the summer carefully studying these questions in a controlled laboratory setting. Both received $3,500 summer grants, (one from NASA-Vermont Space Grant Consortium, the other through the Vice President for Academic Affairs grant program). Their research was similar in many ways—both studied stress’s impact on human subjects. They also shared an advisor, a lab and the experience of original research, although in the end their studies were quite different.
Allen, a psychology and journalism double major, received her grant funding to examine how pilots and astronauts perform under acute stress. Her study, “The Impact of Psychological Stress on Cardiovascular Reactivity and Neuroendicrine Responses in Virtual Navigation and Spatial Learning Tasks,” will be presented next spring at a NASA flight base.
Allen’s project was designed to “uncover mysteries of disorientation in piloting.” She recruited 40 subjects, placed them under stress and tested their stress levels as they performed a difficult timed task. As they navigated through various computerized paths, she measured their physiological responses to see if certain levels were elevated and whether that affected their ability to cope and navigate spatially and she discovered that she is alone in her approach to discover the impact of stress on navigational ability.
Pietroski, a psychology major and religious studies minor, studied “The Effects of Acute Psychological Stress on Neuroendicrine Response and Cardiovascular Reactivity in a Sample of Tobacco Chippers.” (“Chippers” are occasional, non-addicted smokers who smoke for social reasons a few times a week and a few cigarettes at a time.)
Allen had half of her research subjects wear a nicotine patch and the other half a placebo patch overnight. In the morning, the subjects took a difficult timed stress test When Allen tested the heart rate of the chippers who had worn the nicotine patch, they were shown to have higher levels of stress than those who didn’t smoke.
Both researchers will present their results at campus research seminars and expect to take their results to professional conferences—the meetings of the Society of Behaviorial Medicine or the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, and to a NASA flight base. They also both plan to go to graduate school, Pietroski in occupational therapy or clinical health psychology and Allen in law. Their professors, Anthony Richardson and Melissa Vanderkaay Tomusulo, say their work is “graduate level research” that is “very uncommon for undergraduates to be doing.”
