Meet Dr. Vera Vine, a newcomer to the Queen’s Psychology Department whose lab explores the connections between your emotions, mind, and body. Dr. Vine’s lab the Emotion, Mind and Body Lab asks questions like What purpose do emotions serve? and Where do emotions come from?
Dr. Vine’s path to research in psychology was not linear–she started off as a History and Literature major at Harvard University! Deciding to challenge herself, Dr. Vine switched programs and started her journey as a psychological scientist. After struggling through statistics, achieving a Masters and PhD at Yale University, and completing a five-year post-doctoral fellowship in psychiatry at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. Vine landed her “dream job” here at Queen’s University.
I sat down with Dr. Vine to better understand what it is she does in the Em-Body Lab and what she wants students to know about research in psychology.
What is your research on introception, stress and adolescent suicide risk all about?
In terms of the kind of conceptual question that's at the heart of [my research], it's really about understanding disruptions in adolescence self awareness. These are experiences like dissociation or related difficulties with self perception. What is it when you have trouble identifying what you feel, or you have a kind of out of body experience, or you have trouble describing and putting your experience into words?
That is sort of what I mean by disruptions and self awareness. There's a kind of loosely related cluster of experiences like this, that all tend to be associated with higher risk for suicide. So primarily, the project is trying to understand and characterize what some of these disruptions to self awareness are that might be increasing risk for suicidal outcomes, [which] would include suicidal thoughts and suicidal behaviors.
There's some added questions there. We’re also trying to explore how these disruptions might be influenced by stressors in the adolescence environment, especially the parent-child relationship.
What’s a cool concept you study in the Em-Body Lab?
I'm really interested in this idea interoception. [Introception] has to do with the brain's perception of activity in the body. The way that I like to think about it is that your brain is kind of constantly scanning what's going on in the rest of your body, and it needs a real time, up-to-date, reading on what your body's doing so that your brain knows how to direct energy. That's how you start to form a conscious impression of how you feel, and kind of what is going on for you in a given moment. So that's what interoception is; it's the perception of the body.
There are some really neat ways to study [introception] that are relevant to emotion. In this particular project, we're going to be focusing on some brain measures. One is called the heartbeat evoked potential, which is a brain based measure of how loud and clear is the signal the brain is getting from the heart.
Why is understanding introception important?
In this particular case, I am really interested in [introception] because of what it can teach us about the basic nature of emotion, even though it's a hugely clinically important phenomenon. We need to understand and prevent youth suicide [which] is a major public health concern. That's definitely the long-term payoff of research like this.
I really get excited about all of this because it can teach us fundamentally what it means to be human. Where is it that our emotions come from? How is it that on some level, we're just biological animals–like all other animals–but somehow we have to explain our emotional experience using these basic biological ingredients that involve our anatomy?
What inspired your research?
The very first time I actually felt excited about psychology that was in my fourth-year as an undergrad. It was when I learned about the concept of emotional numbing that happens in PTSD. I just remember this light bulb going off, where I was suddenly fascinated by this idea that you could have this feeling of being separated from your own emotions or feeling numbed to them. So on some level, I think I've always been chasing related ideas to that in research.
How do you conduct your research for the introception, stress and adolescent suicide risk project?
It’s a pretty involved study. [Participants] start by doing some in depth clinical interviewing. I would have an advanced graduate student trainee spending 1 to 2 hours with them [and] with their caregiver also. With adolescents, we often get an outside perspective on clinical functioning by also interviewing a caregiver about the adolescent. I’ll get a pretty rich clinical picture from interviews. There will obviously be lots of questionnaires for everybody to fill out, for the adolescent and for their parent.
Then we'll have a series of tasks where they are actually hooked up to an EEG. So [they'll have] sensors on their brain, they'll also have all kinds of cardiovascular sensors attached to their torso. We’ll be getting these live readings of both heart activity and brain activity during a series of suicide relevant stressors and other kinds of lab based stressors so we can see and understand how the heartbeat connection responds to stress.
As an add on, we will be following up with them after 3 months, and after 6 months again, to monitor changes in suicidal thoughts and behaviors. We should be able to hopefully see–at least test some predictive models–how the interceptive activity that we can measure is maybe helping explain or predict changes in [suicidal thoughts].
What’s your favourite moment from the Em-Body Lab so far?
We’re a very new lab. We've really only have a couple months under our belt. I was super proud of the fact that we had submitted for projects to an international conference a couple of weeks ago, this is data from our lab that we've already managed to collect. I was lucky to have so many students working really collaboratively. We had a really kind of furiously fast collaboration on Google Docs, the comments, the edits, [they] were flying back and forth, and everybody was being so helpful to each other. It was super fun despite the time crunch.
I was just really proud of how hard everybody worked. [Our data] is already starting to get out into the world. [It’s] really preliminary results, but they are in some of the directions that we're expecting, so that's really cool.
Is there a message you want to share with Queen’s students?
I just want to underscore that I think there's no one right way to do a degree in psychology, or to have a future in psychology, or in a related field. There's no time pressure. I definitely took my time, I had a few kids along the way! You have to make your own path and do it on your own timetable. There's room even for us procrastinators in the professional world. You just have to be putting your energy somewhere that you really care about.
Check out more of Dr. Vine’s research here!
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