Transcript
The Psychology of Happiness
Happiness is something we have to actively practice. Biologically, our brains are wired to focus on threats because that's what helped humans survive. But thriving requires something different. Dr. Jennifer Trevitt from the Department of Psychology at Cal State Fullerton explains why our brains naturally lean toward negativity and how we can intentionally cultivate more happiness in our everyday lives.
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email hssdeansoffice@fullerton.edu with any questions.
Jessica Stern
Today we’re talking about something we all want more of: happiness. But what exactly is it? How do we study it? And how do we get more of it?
Today we’re talking with Professor and Chair of Psychology Jen Trevitt, who’s going to help us make it make sense. I hope.
Jennifer Trevitt
[Laughs] Thank you for having me.
Jessica Stern
Let’s start with even this concept of happiness. Is that one big thing? Are there different types of happiness?
Jennifer Trevitt
I think there’s a good argument that there are different kinds of happiness. Happiness as a word is not super specific, right?
I think we can all recall times that we would describe ourselves as being happy, but we kind of felt very different.
There’s the kind of happiness where you had a good, productive day and maybe a good dinner, and now you’re getting ready for bed. It’s just that feeling of contentment, like, “Okay, this is good. I’m happy.”
And then there’s today. I was excited about coming here and having this conversation. That’s another kind of happiness. If someone said, “How are you feeling?” I’d be like, “I’m happy. I’m excited.”
So I think when we say “happy,” we can actually mean slightly different things. They’re all positive, usually, but they can be different flavors of positive.
Jessica Stern
And what is happening in our bodies, in our brains, when we are feeling that positive feeling?
Jennifer Trevitt
Lots of things. The TL;DR version is we have lots of neurochemicals moving around all the time.
The ones that are most strongly associated with happiness and different states of happiness are serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins — a little bit of norepinephrine for spice sometimes.
Then we have the other chemicals that are associated with not-happiness. Cortisol, for example. When those are very high, especially for long periods of time, usually that is not a happy time for us.
Jessica Stern
Are there other types of emotions that usually go with happiness?
Jennifer Trevitt
Excitement can be one of them. You can be excited and maybe not happy, but you can also be excited and happy.
You can be relaxed and happy. I don’t know if relaxed is technically an emotion, but you know, chill. That can be associated with happiness as well.
In general, it’s just kind of a positive state of being.
Jessica Stern
Some of us are watching that Netflix show Vladimir.
Jennifer Trevitt
Which I have not seen yet.
Jessica Stern
Yeah. Different opinions.
But with the female character, happiness is coming with a new relationship. It’s coming with energy and creativity.
Jennifer Trevitt
Yes. If you really want to break it down into easy categories, I could say maybe there’s energetic happiness, which is the happiness of a new relationship or a new project — that anticipatory, excited feeling.
That’s dopamine-heavy happiness, where there’s novelty, challenge and anticipation.
And then there’s the more relaxed happiness, which is maybe more like contentment, where we feel satisfied.
Jessica Stern
What are the things people can do to inspire feelings of happiness in their brains if they don’t automatically feel it?
Jennifer Trevitt
Most people don’t. Biologically, we’re kind of born pessimists because that makes sense in terms of survival.
When we walk into a new space, or anything new, the first thing we’re doing is scanning for threats. We are looking for the flies in the ointment. We are looking for the problems because that may determine whether or not we live for another 10 seconds.
We’re an amazing species, but we’re kind of like lizards with a few more bells and whistles.
[Laughs]
Especially that emotional part of our brain, the limbic system — this is an ancient system. This predates us by so much. So we’re really running on a very old operating system most of the time.
That “lizard brain” is why we lived beyond being lizards: because we’re really good at identifying threats and problems and paying attention to them. They capture our attention like nothing else.
You see this in news stories and social media posts and algorithms. The things that grab our eyes are, “They don’t want you to know this,” or, “Are you doing this thing that might kill you?” And you’re like, “Ah!”
[Laughs]
Advertisers know this. We’re kind of hardwired to detect the yuck.
It’s not that we don’t notice the good stuff, but we do need to cultivate it a little bit more. We need to put a little more energy into noticing the things that are good, that are beneficial to us, that are going to make us not just survive, but thrive.
That’s what I teach in my classes. Know who you are. You are operating according to this program that has kept you alive.
But if we want to move beyond that, if we want to encourage happiness and good feelings, then we need to put a little more effort into it. We need to pay attention. We need to seek out the goodness.
A class activity that I have my students do over the course of a couple of days is to give out three compliments per day.
It can be to anyone. It can be to random strangers. It can be to people you know and love. But they have to give out a compliment, write out what it was, how the person reacted to the compliment and how they felt after giving the compliment.
It’s so interesting because most people love getting compliments. I was walking down the hallway on my way here and someone said, “Nice skirt.” And I was like, “Thank you.” Of course that makes me feel good.
But the interesting thing they start seeing after a while is that it makes them feel good.
Because this is an assignment and they have to do it, they are looking for things to give compliments on. They are looking for the good things that they can say, “Hey, I like that.”
That makes them pay more attention to the good stuff, and that makes them happier.
I’ve had many students say this really changed their attitude and they were happier on the days they did this.
This is actually a practice people use to increase happiness: making it a practice to give out however many compliments per day.
Jessica Stern
That’s so interesting. My mom and I were just talking about how hard it is for us to take compliments.
If somebody compliments me, I always come up with an excuse. “Oh, I like that dress.” “Oh, really? I’ve had it since high school. I got it on sale.”
[Laughs]
But she has a new way of looking at it. It makes somebody else feel good to give a compliment. You need to receive that and accept it graciously instead.
Jennifer Trevitt
Yeah. Just a heartfelt “thank you” is enough.
When I give someone a compliment and they say thank you with a big smile on their face, that’s very gratifying to me because I feel like, “Oh, I made your day a little bit better.”
Jessica Stern
So that’s one tip: look around, find the goodness and focus on it.
Jennifer Trevitt
Really look at it and take a breath, take a beat. You don’t have to do a meditation or anything.
There are some very beautiful flowers right outside this window. They’re yellow and pretty in the sun. Just taking a moment to think, “Oh, that’s lovely.”
Our brains will immediately do that for the bad stuff. They’ll take care of that for us.
Jessica Stern
We have to train ourselves for this.
Jennifer Trevitt
Exactly.
Jessica Stern
I was hoping you could settle a debate between my husband and me.
Jennifer Trevitt
All righty.
Jessica Stern
I lost one debate this weekend, so I need to come back strong.
I have something he mocks me and calls the “stomach theory of happiness.” When my kids seem to be grumpy, my go-to is, “Have you eaten?”
So tell me: Is there a relationship between food, nutrition and happiness? Do me a solid here.
Jennifer Trevitt
One hundred percent. You are absolutely right.
We have this theory in psychology called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It was very popular back in the ’60s and ’70s. There are issues with it, but it’s still referenced quite a bit.
The basic premise is that it’s a pyramid. The stuff on the bottom is safety and having your basic needs met, and then you go up from there. The pinnacle is self-actualization, whatever that means.
Jessica Stern
Living your best life.
Jennifer Trevitt
[Laughs] The basic premise is that you cannot get to the top if the bottom is shaky. It’s layered, and these things have to be in place first.
When I teach about happiness, I often tell my students: Start at the bottom of the pyramid.
Number one, oftentimes it’s the stuff you actually have the most control over, so you can have more agency there.
Second, you can’t really do the top stuff unless that bottom is solid.
On the bottom are things like: Are we well hydrated? Are we fed well? Are we getting the nutrition we need? Are we safe?
For us, we are a social species, and so safety usually means having others around us who are interested in our well-being.
Do we have basic things like shelter? These are our must-haves. Usually it’s food, water, shelter, safety and sleep. Those are the big five.
If you can get those fairly well dialed in, it’s not necessarily going to make you happy, but what it will do is make it easier for you to become happy.
If I don’t know when I’m going to eat next, I don’t have the bandwidth to look at the flowers. I’m focusing more on survival mode.
When we’re in survival mode, we don’t have the time to pay attention to the things that make us thrive because that’s not where we are.
Nutrition in particular has a really big impact on how we feel and also how we think.
There’s a nervous system that basically controls the gut called the enteric nervous system. It’s incredibly complex. It’s often referred to as the “second brain” because there’s no neural system in the body that is as complex aside from the brain.
If we look at the kinds of cells contained in it, the supporting cells that are there and the kinds of neurochemicals being produced, it’s very close to the level of complexity that we see in the brain.
There are big connections between the brain and the gut.
The main connection is called the vagus nerve. We used to think this was how the brain controlled the gut and monitored digestion and nutrition.
Once we had the technology available to trace not only the connection but the direction in which the information was flowing, what was discovered was that most of that information is from the gut to the brain.
Like 80% of that information is the gut telling the brain, “Here’s what needs to happen. Here’s how we’re feeling. Here’s the priority.”
A lot of the chemicals we talked about — serotonin, for instance, which is very much associated with the more calm, content varieties of happiness — 95% of it is produced in your gut. Dopamine, like 50% of it, is produced in your gut.
So these neurochemicals associated with good moods and happiness, most of them are produced in the gut.
Jessica Stern
Wow. Okay. I’m loving my theory of happiness.
[Laughs]
Jennifer Trevitt
When you see things like depression or anxiety, almost every single time there are gut issues right alongside it.
Some studies — and this isn’t necessarily for all cases of depression and anxiety — have shown that at least in some cases, if you can get gut function back online through nutritional supplements, changes to diet and things like that, the emotional aspects, the depression and anxiety, will resolve on their own without directly targeting them.
If you can get the gut back online, lots of stuff resolves.
You also often see sleep problems. This is the triad: You see nutrition or gut problems, sleep problems and emotional problems. They usually go together.
Jessica Stern
How does exercise play into it? Because that’s another standard piece of advice given.
Jennifer Trevitt
It absolutely is, and this speaks to that bottom of the pyramid.
Moving our bodies is a huge part of maintaining our health.
There is a theory that the whole purpose of the brain, if we had to boil it down to one central thing that it does, is that it moves the body. That’s why we have it. It moves our bodies. It makes us more efficient so we can get the things we need, escape predation and navigate our environments more efficiently.
Moving the body is essentially a key component of brain health. If the brain exists to move the body and the body is not moving, the brain has no job.
Moving the body increases serotonin, dopamine and endorphins, depending on how much you’re moving it. So there’s a lot to be gained by just movement.
If you really want to hack it, you want to move outside in the sunshine — which we’re in the perfect climate for, so we’re lucky — and with other people that you care about.
Jessica Stern
Group exercise outdoors.
Jennifer Trevitt
Perfect.
Jessica Stern
Let’s start talking about how one even studies this. Happiness can seem so subjective. What are the different ways that it can be studied?
Jennifer Trevitt
There’s that huge subjective component where what makes me happy doesn’t necessarily make you happy.
When people are trying to study happiness from a biological perspective, what makes the subject happy is individual.
Usually, when a subject reports, “I am happy,” then we’re going to measure: What parts of your brain are active? What parts are quiet? What are your neurochemical levels, maybe in different parts of the brain?
Jessica Stern
Paint a picture. If you’re looking at brain activity, how does one study that?
Jennifer Trevitt
We have a wonderful technique called fMRI, which is functional magnetic resonance imaging.
MRIs are kind of like CT scans, where they tell you about the morphology of the brain, so you can get a picture inside the skull. It’s much more finely detailed than a CT or PET scan.
Functional MRI was really a game changer because it can show us activity levels in different parts of the brain over time.
We can have people doing activities. Obviously they’re in an fMRI machine, so it’s not like they can be running a marathon, but they can watch movies, and you can literally track their brain activity and map it onto what they were taking in from the movie at that time.
That’s where a lot of this information comes from about what parts of the brain are more active when we’re happy versus which parts are less active.
Jessica Stern
Do we have one of those?
Jennifer Trevitt
An fMRI? No.
Jessica Stern
Okay.
Jennifer Trevitt
There are actually very few of them. They’re very expensive. Most often you’re going to find them in medical settings because they’re used to detect things like brain damage.
Jessica Stern
How are we studying neurochemicals? Is it blood draws?
Jennifer Trevitt
You can do blood draws. They’re not as great because by the time it’s in your circulatory system, we can’t time-map it the same way.
All we can say is, “You were happy, and you had, in general, higher levels of serotonin.”
A lot of these chemicals, especially things like dopamine and serotonin, don’t really survive the circulatory system because there are enzymes in there that break them down fairly quickly.
A lot of what we know about relative levels of neurochemicals has come from more invasive studies. Oftentimes they’re done with animals, which again is very difficult when you’re studying happiness because we can’t ask a rat, “Are you happy as I sample your brain chemistry?”
[Laughs]
We can maybe guess based on behavior, but sampling brain fluid in real time is very difficult to do with humans.
Jessica Stern
What about the study you talked about where we are mapping the signals going back and forth between the gut and the brain?
Jennifer Trevitt
That is based on animal studies. That part of the nervous system is extremely well conserved in mammals.
This is why we use animals in a lot of research studies like this. These techniques are more invasive, and so you can’t necessarily do this with humans.
Jessica Stern
There are limits here.
Jennifer Trevitt
There are.
Jessica Stern
So it seems like surveys, qualitative data—
Jennifer Trevitt
Yeah. One of the things we can do is kind of piece it together.
Sunlight, for instance, increases serotonin. We know this from a variety of different sources, including animal studies.
Serotonin doesn’t survive in the circulatory system, but we can measure its metabolites. We can say, “Okay, you have more metabolites, so we would assume that means that at some point you had way more serotonin.”
Let’s say we know sitting in the sun increases serotonin. We can do a study where some people spend a certain amount of time in the sun for 14 days in a row and another group does not do that thing.
Then we can measure their relative happiness, their subjective happiness, after that time.
Depending on how well-designed our experiment is, ideally the only thing that’s different between these two groups is how much time they have spent in the sun.
If the sunlight group says, “Yeah, my mood is a lot better. I feel better. Things just don’t seem to upset me as much,” then we can conclude tentatively that increased serotonin, in this case via time in the sun, is associated with increased happiness.
That’s kind of how we get to it.
Jessica Stern
Fascinating.
What is the long-term impact of living a happier life?
Jennifer Trevitt
Great question.
Like I said, you kind of have to put in a little more effort. There is a cost, in a way. But there are real benefits to being happier if you can do it.
One is you live longer. People who report higher levels of happiness have lower levels of mortality from all causes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s disease or accident or whatever. They just live longer.
Do we understand exactly why? No, we don’t. But that is a correlation that’s been demonstrated repeatedly in all sorts of different populations. Happier people tend to live longer.
The other thing that I would argue is that we are better thinkers when we are happy, which is important, especially in times where things are very uncertain and everything seems overwhelming.
When we are fearful, we tend to make fear-based decisions.
When we activate our sympathetic nervous system to a really high degree — that’s our fight-or-flight system — one of the things that goes along with that is we shut down our frontal lobes.
When you’re afraid, that part of your brain that is really clutch for helping you see the big picture and make a decision that’s going to be beneficial in the short term and the long term, that part of our brain shuts down.
We are in emergency mode. We are only thinking about the next five minutes. Tomorrow is tomorrow’s problem.
That’s not exactly a healthy way to make good decisions.
Fear and happiness do not coexist well. If you’re afraid, you’re probably not happy. And if you’re happy, you’re probably not terribly afraid.
I would argue that particularly in stressful times, really trying to increase your personal happiness is actually kind of a political statement.
It’s saying, “I am not going to be controlled by fear. I’m not going to allow this fearmongering to make my decisions different.”
And it’s hard. It’s a really big ask because it’s tough to be happy sometimes these days.
But I think about it as: This is my form of resistance. This is the way that I resist. I will be happy, and I will try to spread that happiness to other people and do my best to push back against that idea that it’s all ending, it’s all terrible.
Jessica Stern
I think that’s such a good point because sometimes guilt comes with happiness.
Jennifer Trevitt
It does. I’ve experienced that. People are like, “You don’t even care.” And I’m like, “No, no, no. I absolutely do care. This is me caring.”
I’ll explain it to them and hopefully it makes a little more sense.
My husband, for instance, is much more the news reader. But I’m like, okay, number one, not useful because someone needs to make dinner tonight. Come on, man.
But also, this is my personal line of resistance. This is how I’m going to resist it.
Think about it: When everything is terrible and you feel terrible, it saps your motivation to do anything. It’s learned helplessness.
If the whole world is a dumpster fire and nothing is ever going to get better, why am I getting up today? Why am I doing my job today? Why am I making dinner for my kids today?
You’ve got to have that hope.
I do think that a lot of communities who maybe have been marginalized or have suffered through these periods for a long time — when you read their stories, you see that spark, at least within their own communities and their communities of safety.
There is joy, there is happiness, there is dancing and there is feasting. And that is important because without that, there is no point in all of this.
I think celebrating that is really important.
Jessica Stern
Love it.
How did you become a psychology professor?
Jennifer Trevitt
I’m an alum. I was an undergrad here, and I was in the grad program for a while. I worked with a wonderful professor named Dr. Margaret White. She was kind of my mentor throughout my graduate studies. I was her TA when I was here, and she was the biopsychology professor.
That was the course I took in the spring of the year I was going to graduate. I was like, “Where has this been my whole life?”
My mind was absolutely blown by this realization that everything is a chemical reaction. It changed the way I thought about everything.
I was so enthusiastic and thrilled, and she was awesome. I would go to her office hours and just say, “Let’s talk about this thing for an hour.” Now that I’m a professor, I’m like, “Oh my goodness, you were so patient with me.”
[Laughs]
She encouraged me. I wanted to go on into neuroscience, and I realized I did not have any of the hard-science background that I would need to be competitive.
She said, “Okay, how about this? Why don’t you do a master’s degree, and while you’re doing that, pick up all of the bio, chem, biochem, anatomy, neurophysiology and all the things you need?”
I said, “Okay, excellent.”
That’s what I did. Ultimately, I went on to a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She was the person I called at 2:00 in the morning when I was like, “I hate this. Why am I doing this?”
She was awesome.
Then I ended up getting a postdoc at UCI. I went to school at the University of Connecticut, so I came back across the country to do my postdoc at UCI.
While I was there, she made the decision to retire. She said, “They’re doing a search for my replacement, and I really, really think that you should apply.”
I had just gotten this grant from the NIH. I was in year one of a three-year grant. I loved the research I was doing. I said, “I don’t know. I’m happy. I’m not looking for a job.”
And she said, “Okay, but you will be one day. If anything, this is good practice, so get it together and apply.”
I was like, “Yes, Mom.”
[Laughs]
So I did, and ultimately I ended up getting the job.
It really wasn’t on my radar. I wasn’t planning to go into academics. I was planning to go into pharma because my degree was neuroscience with an emphasis in pharmacology.
I loved laboratory science, bench science. I was in my happy place at the bench.
I thought, well, I’ll try it and we’ll see.
And then I just fell in love with it.
This is why I know the universe delights in me, because it gives me things that I don’t even know I want until I get them. Then I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I can’t imagine my life not being an educator.”
It has been the best career I could have ever hoped for.
Jessica Stern
It really shows the power of good mentorship.
Jennifer Trevitt
It really does.
It’s been an inspiration to me throughout my career to be that mentor, to be that person for other people.
Jessica Stern
Do we still offer that course, biopsychology?
Jennifer Trevitt
I teach that course. That is what I do.
This is where I talk about happiness and the pyramid and all the things.
Jessica Stern
Are there related courses, too?
Jennifer Trevitt
We have a cognitive neuroscience class. That’s looking more specifically at how people think and what the physiological underpinnings of cognition are.
I teach a psychopharmacology course, which is looking at different types of drugs — prescription drugs like antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, but also illicit drugs like cocaine and heroin — and looking at what the impact is on the brain and how that changes the way people think and feel.
Jessica Stern
Actually, I think that raises a good question. Can I ask you another happiness question?
I think it’s common for people to turn to drugs and alcohol to try to get to a happy place. What are the costs and benefits of that decision?
Jennifer Trevitt
We have a bunch of different antidepressants that do slightly different things, and I think for a lot of people these are game changers.
They do come with side effects. That’s what I teach in my class: Nothing is free. There’s always going to be a cost to taking a drug, whether it’s an actual financial cost or some other cost.
Some of the most common and popular antidepressants are SSRIs, which stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Their main function is to increase levels of serotonin in the brain, and that usually increases people’s contentment and happiness.
A huge side effect of those drugs, and one of the reasons a lot of people decide not to take them or discontinue them, is decreased libido. It decreases sexual appetite, which makes total sense when you understand what serotonin does.
Serotonin is contentment. Serotonin is like, “No, I’m good.”
[Laughs]
“I don’t need to eat more. I don’t need to have more sex. I don’t need more of this.”
Dopamine is the molecule of more. Dopamine is the “Yes, please.”
We do have other antidepressants known as tricyclics, and they increase serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.
The problem with those drugs is that they can have some pretty serious cardiac effects because both dopamine and norepinephrine are also involved in cardiac function.
But the good news, if you’re going that route, is that the menu is large and deep. You can search for the one that works for your specific physiology.
It’s not that everyone who takes a tricyclic is going to have heart problems. It’s just that we see it more than with other kinds of drugs in people who maybe have a vulnerability to that.
If you don’t, then that may be the choice for you, and that may work really well for you.
The other thing I was going to say is that if we understand the physiology of depression and the neurochemical balance of depression versus happiness, there are a lot of things we can do that don’t involve taking drugs.
We can move our bodies more. We can spend more time in the sunshine. We can spend more time with our friends and people we love and feel safe with. We can feed ourselves better food. We can make sure we stay hydrated.
All of these little things, when you add them up, can have really powerful impacts on how we feel.
For myself and people in my circle who ask me about these things, that’s always my advice: Let’s just start with the basics. Let’s get the basics online and see if that makes a difference.
If that doesn’t make a difference, or not enough of a difference, then we absolutely are going to go to the next step.
I’m not going to say it’s easier because it requires lifestyle changes, and those can be hard. But there are more variables in your control down here, and you can adjust it the way you want.
Oftentimes, there really aren’t side effects. It’s not going to crush your sex drive. It’s not going to make you thirsty. It’s not going to keep you up at night.
The common side effects that we see with medications that make people not want to take them, you don’t see that with these types of lifestyle changes.
But they are hard. I don’t want to make it sound like, “Oh, this is an easy fix.” It’s not. Changing your diet — dude, that is tough.
But my real message is that it can really be worth it.
Jessica Stern
Let’s talk about the Psychology Department. You are the chair of the department. I have the honor of representing the Psychology Department. What are you most excited about?
Jennifer Trevitt
We have such a large and varied faculty. I love that we have so many people doing so many interesting things across the board.
I love that we can offer so much to our students. We can offer expertise in so many different areas.
I have children who are in college right now, and they’re in places where they have smaller departments. We’ve been talking about the pros and cons of a large department versus a small department.
With a large department, sometimes it’s easy to feel lost. You might not have the same professor for multiple classes. You might have different professors for every class you take.
But the benefit is that it means you’ve got a lot of different expertise there. You have a lot of different people you can talk to about things and a lot of different things to get involved in.
With faculty research programs, you’re not limited to a handful. We’ve got around 30 people with really interesting research programs that you can become a part of.
I think that is really exciting.
Jessica Stern
What advice do you give to psychology majors about how to best take advantage of their time here? What should they be doing?
Jennifer Trevitt
I think it’s always good to get to know your professors if you can.
I tell my own kids the goal is that within the first two weeks, you have gone to the office hours of every single professor you have and just introduced yourself, so they know who you are.
It is easy to get lost. Sometimes I know students feel shy about it. They’re like, “I don’t even know them.”
It’s okay. It’s our job. It is our job to welcome you and talk to you. Honestly, oftentimes I sit in my office alone during office hours, and I would love to have a chat with you.
Don’t feel shy. Come on in.
Try to get to know your professors. But I would also say try to make connections within the department with your peers.
In a class, get to know someone and exchange information so that if one of you misses class, you can get notes, or you can form a study group.
If you can join a club, join a club and participate, at least a little bit.
I know we are all super busy and we do not have time. If I am on this campus, it’s because I’m going to class. I’m not just hanging out with time to spare.
But this is one of those places where I think a little bit of investment can really pay off in ways that will surprise you.
That feeling of connection, getting involved in things and learning about things you may not have learned about otherwise can have a really positive impact not only on your future, but on your present time at this institution.
So I would encourage involvement.
I would also encourage really good time-management skills.
I’m 57 now, and I still struggle with that. So don’t feel bad if you’re 22 and you’re still like, “Ah!”
It’s okay. We get it. But that is something to work on.
Jessica Stern
One thing that makes Psychology distinct in the college — I’m running through and making sure of this — I don’t think any other department has as many faculty actively involved in and inviting student research through labs.
Can you tell us: What is a psychology lab? How could a student learn about them and join them?
Jennifer Trevitt
I think a lot of students come into psychology with the idea that they want to be on the practitioner side.
That’s applied psychology. It’s taking all this information and then applying it to maybe change human behavior in one way or another.
That is a noble pursuit, but it also usually requires a great deal of additional schooling — a graduate degree of some kind, maybe a master’s degree, maybe a Ph.D. or Psy.D.
Not everybody really wants to do that, especially after they’ve been in school for four or five years. The idea of, “Oh, I’m going to keep going for another four to six years” can be a lot.
I think sometimes what students don’t necessarily recognize — and no shame, because why would they? — is that the popular conception of psychology is that we are all therapists.
But the truth is that the study of psychology, which is what the department is focused on, is a field of research.
We are the evidence behind evidence-based practice. We are the ones gathering the data, analyzing the data, asking the questions and creating the evidence that people are then going to take out into the community and apply.
That’s really our focus at the undergraduate level: the generation of evidence.
We’re teaching you how to develop a hypothesis, how to design research to test that hypothesis, how to gather data that will be useful for testing it, how to do statistics, and how to present that information in oral as well as written form.
Our focus at the undergraduate level is teaching you how to be scientists.
I think that’s actually a real strength of our major because the skills you’re going to learn — data analysis, research design, communication skills, critical-thinking skills — are highly transferable skills.
You can take those anywhere.
If something catches your fancy and you say, “I want to go into early childhood education,” or, “I want to go into human resources,” you can take the skills you’ve learned and put them right into that.
You are going to be a sought-after candidate. Those are skills employers are looking for.
We have around 30 faculty who have independent research programs, and they are all over the place.
We have people looking at differences in education in different communities. We have people looking at how we process language. We have people looking at sleeping behavior. We have people looking at nutrition. We have people looking at how cognition changes as we age and get older.
We have people looking at eyewitness testimony and how that is affected by what they saw, when they saw it and the questions they’re being asked.
It’s really interesting, fascinating stuff.
Interested students can find that on our webpage. If they go to the faculty page and look at the full-time faculty, there’s a place where you can click on “Research.”
We’re in the process of updating our webpage, so bear with us. Hopefully, it will have a description of that faculty member’s research, qualifications they may be looking for in student assistants, as well as whether or not they are currently taking students into their labs.
Jessica Stern
Wow. So our students potentially have the opportunity to do research with faculty.
Jennifer Trevitt
We encourage that. We absolutely encourage student involvement. We value it very, very highly in our department.
If you are doing work without students, we’re kind of like, “Why are you not including students?”
This is one of the things we ask all of our job candidates: How do you plan to include students in your research? Tell us exactly what they’ll be doing.
They can do all sorts of things. There’s standard data-entry stuff, but in the research group that I work with, we study fibromyalgia and chronic pain in older adults, and we do conferences.
Our student groups are instrumental in arranging and putting on those conferences. They give presentations to the folks who attend about what our data is showing us. Usually these are the folks who participate in our studies.
We give them individual report cards so they can see where their data matches up to the averages. We do workshops, and these are all student-led.
Jessica Stern
Wow.
Jennifer Trevitt
They present our findings at conferences and on papers and things like that.
We really like to include students in our research because we think this is a great high-impact practice of mentorship and makes a huge difference.
Jessica Stern
What a great opportunity.
Well, thank you so much for being here and telling us about happiness, the chemical components, what we can do to elicit those chemical components in our lives and about the Psychology Department.
Jennifer Trevitt
Thank you for having me.
