From Paper to Publication: Inside the COVID-19 Research of this PsyD Team
At the onset of pandemic-induced lockdown last Spring, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Dr. John Dimoff offered his Social Psychology students a choice: take the traditional final exam OR write a paper that applies social psychological theories to the COVID-19 pandemic. Three Doctor of Counseling Psychology (PsyD) students—Angela Dao, Jodie Mitchell, and Alexandra Olson—chose the latter, and as a result, their research was published in a paper entitled, “Live free and die: Expanding the terror management health model for pandemics to account for psychological reactance” in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass. In the following interview we discuss how social psychology theories can be applied to COVID-19 public health messaging, the benefits of faculty and student collaboration, and the impact this experience had on all involved. Check it out below—
Dr. John Dimoff
Angela Dao
Jodie Mitchell
Alexandra Olson
What motivated you to conduct this research and write this paper?
John Dimoff: I was teaching our doctoral level social psychology course, and all of my co-authors were students in that course. We, like everybody else, were thrown a real curveball with the pandemic. When I was looking at the final assignment for the course, I started to think, do students really want to be answering short answer questions about general course material right now? I decided that I would offer what I had initially promised which was an exam, but I also offered an alternative assignment where students could write a paper that applied three different social psychological perspectives to the pandemic. If students thought it would be helpful to process what was going on, they could, or if they didn't want to, they could do that as well. I think everybody made me the right decision for themselves. I was delighted that three of these students made the decision [to write the paper] because I was reading those papers thinking, This is good stuff, I think we could do something with this.
Alexandra Olson: When that assignment was posed, that was exactly what I wanted to be doing with my time: thinking about how to apply these different social psychology theories to something that was actively happening in the world. It's kind of a rare opportunity to do that in this acute way.
Jodie Mitchell: We had taken Health Psychology with John the semester before and so, it was also on my mind. We were talking about these concepts and theories and suddenly it was right there: there is this whole pandemic going on outside. Is there a possibility we can tie it together? I liked that John gave us the opportunity to do that because it was definitely on my mind.
Angela Dao: COVID happened so quickly, and there wasn't really an outlet to discuss it in a social psychological way which is what we were in that class to do. Here we were with this perfect opportunity that just fell together and then it became something!
Can you talk about the strategy behind writing this paper and what role you each performed?
JD: The first version of this paper that we submitted is actually quite different from the final version. The first version was a broad sampling of six different theories and we ended up focusing on two in the final version. I started to notice that the students were thinking about a couple of these theories in particular. I also did a search of a handbook of social psychological theories, I went to the table of contents and thought, Is there anything that I'm overlooking? I also thought about theories that had either been co-developed by some of my mentors from or that they were fluent in. We threw all of that into a blender.
One of the things that was important to decide up front was the order of authors. It's not uncommon for articles to be written with a disclaimer that says every author contributed equally. I felt that was probably not the best approach for us—this was a really busy summer for the students. They were preparing for comprehensive exams. They had internship applications on the horizon. There were a lot of good reasons for them to say no. In recognizing their time commitments, we opted to stick with a traditional first author does the most, then the second author, etc. The students decided among themselves what order they wanted. Because we knew that the original version was going to be divided into six sections plus an intro and a conclusion, we divvied up the work that way. I would give students a rough outline of what we needed and they would go work on it. We would meet and talk about it and eventually they would send me drafts. I would Frankenstein it together and send it back to the group. This approach is really predicated on people being able to meet deadlines and that is a strength of this group.
Can you offer any insight into why some people interpreted COVID safety restrictions as encroachment on their freedom while others interpreted them as necessary for the greater good?
JD: This speaks to the idea of psychological reactance. I encourage people to think about psychological reactance as the feeling manifested in the "Don't tread on me” snake. It's not necessarily something that is front and center on people's minds; it comes up when we perceive that we are having freedom taken away from us. There are a lot of unanswered questions about psychological reactance. There are questions about how much it exists within all of us, how much does it differ from person to person or culture to culture. Most of the work suggests that, it does exist in all of us to some degree, maybe for some more than others. It's easy to think of reactance as something that shows up in individualistic cultures, but there's work that suggests it can emerge in collectivistic cultures for different reasons.
I would think that part of what we saw with the differing reactions to mitigation efforts may be individual differences in the tendency to feel reactance. Fear can work with that too; sometimes when fear shows up, reactance shows up too. This has been looked at with graphic warnings about cigarette smoking, where it's almost as though the fearful component comes across as a heavy handed request. There were good reason to be afraid [of the pandemic], there continues to be reasons to be afraid, and I think one of the things that people felt fearful about was, If we do this, then what's next? When I talk about this, I'm not advocating or defending certain approaches to it, but I am hoping to suggest that there was more to it than just 'these were bad people, these were not smart people, these were not people that care about others.' I think that these motivational mechanisms are very complex and they can show up in ways that we may not agree with, but it doesn't mean that they were completely built on bad foundations.
Can you explain inoculation messages and restoration postscripts in layman's terms and why you recommend they be incorporated into public health messaging?
JD: This is coming from the literature on psychological reactance and how to effectively deliver public health messages in a way that doesn't get pushback. There is a thriving program of research right now where people have been looking at the pros and cons of putting a warning up front before you deliver an unpopular message. An example of an inoculation message would be something like, Look, what I'm about to say might not be popular. I realize you might want to push back a bit, and I want you to know upfront that that's what I'm going to say. The thinking there is that somebody hears that and thinks, this person at least has the awareness that they are requesting something I might not be thrilled about. The hope is that that might take some of the edge off. A restoration postscript would be making the public health recommendation and then saying something like, Only we can stop the spread, but ultimately the choice is yours. The thinking there is that it's a way of helping a person snap back and realize they still have the freedom to choose, and therefore they don't need to square up with the person who's making this request. One of the things that we saw when reading through these studies was that it seems to be talked about in an either or way where you either use an inoculation message or a restoration postscript. We saw this as an opportunity to say, why do you need to choose? Interestingly, we made a recommendation towards the end of this paper, that there should be research that tests these two head to head because they had not been brought into the same study before. Between the time that we submitted our second revision of this paper and the third revision of this paper, a study was published that did that.
AO: An analogy, perhaps, is the idea that there's a splinter in your finger. If you're not working to get it out, it's going to go deeper and get more painful. The way that I'm viewing inoculation messaging in particular is pointing it out. When we don't address the thing, it can feel very disempowering for the person experiencing the thing, whether that's a splinter or COVID-19 and their freedoms being restricted. If we're not addressing it or if we don't have the awareness to address it, it can manifest and get worse.
I know this quote didn't come from your research, but when I read it I was disturbed. It almost seems like all of the stuff that happened in the past year was foretold by this sentence: “Priming collectivism in countries with ongoing between group conflict may focus attention on boundaries not inclusion.” I was curious if you could talk a little bit about how this concept manifested with COVID.
John Dimoff: Our paper riffed off a paper that had taken a singular perspective on COVID-19 through the lens of terror management theory. One of the recommendations in that paper was to make an effort to prime this sense of collectivism with the perspective being that countries differ in terms of what their average level of individualism or collectivism is. In some countries where individualism is higher, you might need to do more to grease those wheels. It's a nice idea in a general sense, but there are some caveats to when that can actually work. One of what my favorite things to do if there's a claim in an article that doesn't make intuitive sense to me, is to go to the article that they cited to see. In this case, there was this important caveat about being careful with priming collectivism when there's a great divide that exists within the group that you're trying to prime collectivism in. You can look at the news and realize how tense and divided things are in this country and this was even before the murder of George Floyd.
We wanted to offer a bit of caution and suggest that, priming collectivism sounds good, and under the right conditions it is good, but we're not entirely sure that our country is in that place. To me, this idea is embodied in the phrase, We're in this together. In the very early days of the pandemic, that was a hopeful message. But as time went on, it became clear that we were not all in this together. Whether that was in terms of people's individual responses or in terms of how people were impacted. Saying we're in this together would be overlooking that the people most affected by the pandemic were folks who tend to be shortchanged in a lot of other areas. For minority groups, their experience of the pandemic was very different from what my experience was. There's probably still a way to call for unity, but I think it requires more than one sentence to let that idea breathe. If you go with something very superficial, people are smart, people realize that that doesn't quite capture reality.
“I didn’t even think that it was possible that a paper for a class could translate to a publication. I hadn’t thought about my classroom work being able to extend beyond the classroom in that way and so I really credit John for allowing us that opportunity. ”
For the students, what skills have you gained from this project?
JM: This was the first paper that I worked on, so for me it was very much about learning the process of how to co-author. If you're not working with a great team, it could get a little bit awkward to say I'm going to put myself as first author and then you might have less. I also learned the whole process of writing a draft, sending it in and then receiving feedback from the editors. As we're in this program training to be psychologists, typically we think of ourselves in our roles in the counseling room. But through John's class, and this process, it was important for me to think about how I can be influential outside of the counseling room setting. We have theories that were created by a psychologist to help the general public, and so it's considering, how can we use what we're learning to benefit people in not just a counseling way? Another skill that I gained from this experience was a greater understanding of human behavior and attitudes which helped me be more empathetic towards those who had different perspectives about the seriousness of COVID or which rules to follow.
AD: I enjoyed this team a lot. It was nice working with John on something other than class, as well as being able to gain from that the expertise and professionalism of how to co-author, and work on that team together. I've always had an interest in health psychology and physical health and being able to combine the two. This was a very relevant look at that, being able to apply psychological theories to something that is very physical, but also very socially impactful. I really enjoy working on relevant projects—things that are happening right now. My dissertation is about COVID.
AO: Being in the moment and writing something so pertinent was kind of surreal. I still remember sitting outside in the middle of lockdown, trying to think about how these theories apply to right now. That was a skill in and of itself, to be able to put words to such an unprecedented experience on so many levels. [I also appreciate] having guidance about how this process unfolds. It can be really daunting, but with this team, we got it out there. Having that beginning to end experience was really helpful.
For John, what are your strategies for mentoring student research?
JD: One of the things that is always on my mind is scaffolding. What is appropriate to assign that may be a little beyond where somebody is currently but not so far that it isn’t a useful learning experience? How do we make this a learning opportunity while also recognizing that this is a legitimate journal, this is something that we're doing for real? Along with that, it wasn't too long ago that I was on their side of this. I can think of times where I had contributed something to a paper, and it gets largely rewritten. I was trying to be mindful of that component, and recognizing that I can validate what was written while still saying, I think we're going to revise it for this reason. If we're writing that social factors matter, they probably matter when we're writing the paper.
Another mentorship thing I’m working on is thinking about how to be creative. In this case, we didn't have a budget to work with. The question was, how do you do good scholarship when there are a lot of constraints? So far I've seen that you can do really good stuff at Chatham, regardless of whether you've got a little money to pay people or not. If you have a good plan and a little resourcefulness, these opportunities are available. It's a source of pride that we were able to put this together, and to end up in a very visible journal in the social psychological literature.
Curious about doing your own research? Catch our piece on All the Ways to Do Research @ Chatham and if you’re interested in our Doctor of Counseling Psychology program, click here.
