Hanqing Zhu ’20

Social and Affective Neuroscience Research Lab, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA

This summer I worked as a research assistant in the social and affective neuroscience lab directed by Professor Brown in VCU. The mission of the lab is to understand the underlying mechanism of mindfulness meditation and how consciousness can support wellbeing.

Certification from the MBSR course I took with Professor Brown.
Certification from the MBSR course I took with Professor Brown.

I immediately felt welcomed by Professor Brown, his graduate students Hadley and Nabila, and the other five RAs. The lab is small so over the course of time we get to know each other very well. Hadley is a social psychology student and Nabila a clinical psychology student. These are two subfields of psychology which I am interested in yet unsure which to pursue. While social psychology students are research-focused, clinical psychology students are engaged in both research and therapy work. Witnessing their class schedule and coursework provided me with invaluable information on what life looks like for a graduate student and the different emphasis of each subfield.

One of the research projects is a stress reduction study that aims to investigate the effectiveness of two training programs on the brain. One program involves mindfulness meditation training and the other program, which serves as the control group, involves problem-focused coping training. In particular, the study is interested in how the programs change neural and behavioral indicators of anger, conflict, and aggression, which are common outcomes of stress. My job as a research assistant involves recruiting and screening participants, monitoring data collection, accompanying participants during their MRI scans, and debriefing participants. I learned innovative tools researchers are employing to collect data. For instance, EMA (ecological momentary assessment) was used in this study to better capture the moment-to-moment transitory nature of human experience, which has considerable advantages compared to more traditional methods. Participants are signaled three times per day at random time to answer questions of their current mood and state of mind. I also learned to use the software E-prime to design experiments. Since I am minoring in neuroscience, it was exciting for me to see the high-resolution image of the brain while participants were in the MRI scanner. I realized what a long process carrying out a research project entails: from the initial study design, to manuscript writing, to applying for funds and submission to the IRB committee for approval, to data collection, to data analyses, to the final publishing of paper. I witnessed the dedication and patience required for successfully conducting a research project. As someone with no prior research experience, I am fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in every stage of this study. This allows me to gain a comprehensive picture of the nuts and bolts of research and to better assess whether or not I am suited for a research career.

I also participated in the eight-week MBSR (Mindfulness-based stress reduction) course taught by Professor Brown. MBSR, designed by Professor John Kabat-Zinn, teaches people how to incorporate mindfulness into their daily lives and has been supported by scientific research for its benefits on psychological well-being, physical health, and enhanced personal relationship. This course is open to the general public so people from all walks of life get to participate in it, from those with chronic illness and physical pain, social workers, entrepreneurs, to stay-at-home moms. This was a special experience for me because I get to witness the collective striving for inner peace and happiness. My passion for mindfulness stems from a conviction of its ever-increasing importance in our modern-day society, and this summer reaffirmed my belief. In an era where our standard of living has undergone huge improvements, it is important to reflect on the alarming problems that are lurking beneath the surface. If we look deeply, our society is filled with anger, fear, greed, and hatred. In the face of information overload, we are distracted in ways that leave us with a perpetuating feeling of emptiness. A lot of people feel stressed, anxious, and isolated. In the face of their troubling emotions and thoughts, they either hide, suppress, or run away from them. Mindfulness teaches us a counterintuitive way to gently meet everything where they are, with equanimity, awareness, and compassion. It enables us to see things deeply as they are and to let go of our own ideas and preconceptions. It was inspiring to witness how people’s relation to their own inner turmoil could be transformed through an eight-week immersion program. By dwelling in the present moment, cultivating mindfulness, and embracing their emotions and thoughts, they started to be aware of their own maladaptive patterns and gradually learned to react in ways that are wiser and more adaptive. I felt lucky to witness Professor Brown as both a mindfulness meditation teacher sensitive to the daily struggles of ordinary people and a researcher determined to carry out rigorous and impactful scientific research. I get to see how mindfulness works in both a subpersonal/neural level and an experiential level, and this allows me to have a bigger picture in mind.

Professor Brown warmly invited me to join him and his graduate students on a weekly discussion of the book “The Embodied Mind.” This classic book seeks to bridge human experience and cognitive science and introduces a new form of cognitive science named “enaction.” The brain and the mind have always been subjects that fascinate me. My experience with meditation, besides being hugely transformative, offers a reliable way to directly observe the intricate dynamics of the mind. The “Consciousness and Embodiment” course I took in the previous spring semester further sparked my interest in human awareness and made me realize the ever increasing need to embrace an interdisciplinary approach towards our understanding of the brain and the mind. A common theme between this book and the course I took in Williams is the pressing need for science to come back to human experience and how meditation and phenomenology can contribute to this ongoing dialogue. The discussion was very educational and provided me with important food for thought.

I decide to join a lab to see if a research career will be a right fit for me. This summer made me question whether or not I will pursue a Ph.D. in psychology. I witnessed how time-consuming carrying out a research project was. One of the qualities that I noticed from Professor Brown and his graduate students was a deep appreciation of science, and hence a willingness to tolerate the sometimes tedious process that research involves. For me, I’ve always felt this constant struggle to reconcile between treating human beings as embodied and organic and the impersonal, objective, “disembodied” side of scientific research. I realized that my reservation about science may stem from my own narrow and limited point of view. Thus, in terms of future course selection, I hope I will be able to keep an open mind towards science and investigate this resistance mindfully. I will also try to explore other career options that are more geared towards directly helping people, such as therapy and social work.

I want to express my sincere gratitude for the Class of 1972 and the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for sponsoring me. Without their support, it would not have been possible for me to have this invaluable experience. Thank you for providing me with this freedom to explore!