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Vanessa Voss (Integrative Biology major)
"Does Social Status Impact Mental Health?"
Sponsor: Darlene Francis, Psychology
Project Description
The goal of this project is to expand our understanding of the role social status plays in the etiology of depression. In humans, there is a strong inverse relationship between social status and depression. Those at the top of their social hierarchy experience less depression compared to those at the bottom. Our laboratory has developed a basic animal model which will allow us to explore the causal relationships between social status and depression. Vanessa will be tracking rats before, during and after hierarchy formation to determine which comes first, the social rank or the depression profiles. Her work will culminate in a psychology senior honors thesis and significantly advance our understanding of the complex nature of social status and mental health.
Scholar's Photo
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Vanessa doing an ELISA to measure testosterone levels in rat plasma |
Scholar's Journal
Research is often a process that adheres to the old saying "two steps forward, one step back" and this project has been no exception! I originally planned to follow a cohort of animals for a 6-month longitudinal study to look at the causal relationships between social status and depression. Unfortunately, two months into the project our lab became infested with a detrimental virus and we had to put all of our animals down. The lab had to be shut down for a month to clean and sanitize the rooms. It was a big step back and for a week I felt pretty hopeless. Luckily, about the same time I was invited to attend a scientific conference organized by the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology (ISPNE) in San Francisco and Haas Scholars Program agreed to pay for it. I had never attended a scientific conference before and this one had many speakers whose work I had followed for years. Understandably, I was very excited. I didn't know it at the time, but it was one big step forward.
The morning of the conference I was nervous, but I arrived and realized it was full of researchers just like me. The agenda was incredible: Four full days of listening to presentations by investigators from around the world and reading posters of projects ranging from maternal care effects on anxiety to genetic determinants of waking cortisol levels. There were people doing research at every level, from genetics to animal studies to human epidemiology. At one point, a speaker described an ideal parallel experiment to his study that was exactly the project I have been working on this past year! It was so exciting to see how my work fit into the whole and attending the conference gave me new understanding of the big picture of scientific research and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Returning home to the lab was sad, knowing it would not be possible to complete my project, but the conference had sparked new ideas and I developed a new plan. There were large amounts of data from a project I had been working on for the past year that was just sitting on my computer, set aside to make time for the new project. I realized that this research needed to be communicated to others to fill in gaps in understanding and advance the field. With this goal in mind, I have decided to spend my remaining time analyzing, completing the needed tests and writing results into a manuscript that I will submit for publication at the end of the semester. Another big step forward!
I've been reviewing the information and many exciting patterns are coming out. I'm looking forward to learning about the process of manuscript publication and refining my data analysis and oral presentation skills over the course of the semester. I am amazed that a devastating disappointment could turn into such an opportunity, but I've leaned that the pattern in any difficult endeavor is two steps forward, one step back. Keep trying and you will succeed. This is a lesson from the Haas experience that I will carry for the rest of my life.
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