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Jolie Wormwood is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the Â鶹app. Below is our correspondence with Dr. Wormwood about her own research and her mentoring experiences with undergraduate students.     

What is your research focus? What interests you most about it? 

I am a social psychologist and peripheral psychophysiologist, and my research broadly concerns affect and emotion. My lab examines the ways in which our feelings are grounded in ongoing bodily needs and activity, how the mind makes meaning of external and internal sensations, and how emotions both emerge from and shape these processes. We also examine the downstream effects of affective and emotional feelings. For example, we examine how the way we feel can guide decision making and behavior and influence the ways we perceive others and the world around us. I think what interests me most about studying feelings is that they are ever-present throughout waking life and have the ability to shape so much of what we say and do, and yet we still understand so little about them.    

Did your undergraduate studies or an important mentor influence your research trajectory? 

Absolutely! I did my undergraduate work at Ithaca College. I was a double-major in mathematics and psychology, and I was struggling to decide which field I wanted to pursue a career in after graduation. In my junior year, I started working in Dr. Leigh-Ann Vaughn’s social psychology lab, and I fell in love with psychology research; it offered me a unique way to combine my passions in math and psychology. Dr. Vaughn was pivotal in encouraging me to go to graduate school, and she provided opportunities for me and other undergraduates in her lab to attend research conferences to present our findings and to contribute to research articles for publication. My undergraduate mathematics advisor, Dr. John Maceli, was also an amazing influence. In addition to single-handedly dragging me kicking and screaming through linear algebra, he also took several mathematics students to a conference to present our work, and he helped me apply to a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at Clemson University the summer before my senior year, where I learned programming and analytic basics that I still rely on in my work every day.  

In your time at UNH, you’ve mentored several students who received grants from the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research. What do you feel a student and mentor should each gain from the experience of working together on a project? 

Working on independent research projects, students gain technical and analytic skills necessary to conduct human subjects research in psychology, but more than that, these projects afford the opportunity for students to build confidence as independent thinkers and scholars. Grants from the Hamel Center have allowed me to mentor students through projects of their own design that align with their own personal and professional interests and goals, and it has been amazing to see how much students can accomplish and grow throughout the course of completing one of these research projects. As a mentor, I also benefit from these collaborative projects in a number of ways. Students often bring new and interesting perspectives to the phenomena we study, and this informs the approaches we take to studying them. In addition, their enthusiasm for science is contagious and helps remind me why I started doing research in the first place. 

Prior to becoming an assistant professor at UNH, you were a doctoral student and then a research scientist at Northeastern University. Are there any memorable mentoring experiences that stand out from that time, or since you’ve been at UNH?  

Yes, I was fortunate to work with many undergraduate students on research projects while at Northeastern, including as a doctoral student, post-doctoral fellow, and research scientist. We regularly mentored students through the process of making and presenting posters at RISE, Northeastern’s annual research conference (analogous to the Undergraduate Research Conference here at UNH). I had several groups of students who won awards for best poster at RISE over the years, and that was always exciting. I still have one of the medals and pictures from the awards ceremony in my office. A few of my mentees also went on to graduate school in clinical or research psychology and we run into each other at conferences now! 

I’ve also had many memorable mentoring experiences here at UNH. I’ve loved being able to supervise independent research projects supported by the Hamel Research Center (as noted above), such as Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships. Also, together with my graduate students, I’ve gotten to mentor groups through the process of applying for and presenting at both the UNH Undergraduate Research Conference as well as other professional psychology conferences, like the New England Psychological Association (NEPA) and the Eastern Psychological Association (EPA) conferences. Several of my undergraduate trainees have also received awards from the department, the University, and from professional societies, including the Carroll Award for Outstanding Senior Psychology Student, the Fuller Foundation Fellowship, the UNH Parent Association Award, the UNH Frederick Smyth Book Award, and the NEPA Honorary Undergraduate Scholar Award. Getting to see them shine and have their efforts recognized by others is always a high point of the academic year for me.  

What advice or tips would you give a faculty member new to undergraduate mentoring and/or for undergraduates seeking a mentor? 

My advice for faculty new to undergraduate mentoring would be to go for it. My lab and research have benefitted immensely from the contributions of undergraduate students, and I have had the opportunity to work with some truly outstanding students here at UNH. There is excellent support for undergraduate student research at UNH, including internal funding mechanisms and trainings (e.g., ethics training offered through the IRB) and opportunities for them to disseminate findings (e.g., at the URC conferences or in articles in Inquiry). I think the limited number of faculty mentors can be a rate-limiting step when it comes to providing hands-on research experiences to undergraduate students, so anyone considering it should jump in! 

I would encourage undergraduate students seeking a mentor to look up faculty members doing research in areas they are interested in, and to send them an email! We don’t bite! That said, mentoring students and conducting research can require big time commitments from both the faculty member and the student, so it is important that you are clear about the bandwidth you have to work on research and are serious about making the research experience a priority before you take that step.  

Please feel free to add anything else you would like to share with Inquiry’s audience. 

I’m thankful to the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research and Mr. Dana Hamel, as well as the team at Inquiry for making excellent research and research communication opportunities available to undergraduate students at UNH.