If you can, cast your mind back to high school. For some of us, it's been a little longer than others. You might think of the sound of chattering classmates in the hallway, or maybe of studying late for an important test. Adolescence is a particularly challenging time that comes with many difficult emotions, and it's never been easy to be a teenager.
But here at the University of Illinois, researchers have demonstrated that past experiences with bullying, friendlessness, and other forms of social exclusion directly impact teenage girls' perceptions of their self-worth. Beckman Institute researcher and Professor of Psychology Karen Rudolph and her team think this is a crucial first step in crafting intervention programs to improve teen mental health.
On this episode of the GradLIFE Podcast, Graduate College Communications Specialist John Moist chats with Haley Skymba, a doctoral student at UIUC and Beckman Institute researcher, to talk about her work on Dr. Rudolph's research team. Haley was gracious enough to come in and chat about her research, background, and where she plans to take her work from here.
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Show Notes:
The GradLIFE Podcast is a production of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois. Learn more about the GradLIFE Blog, Podcast, and Newsletter here.
To read more about this research, visit the Illini News Bureau and The Beckman Institute
The Beckman Institute's clip of Haley Skymba is kindly provided from this video.
Learn more about the Family Studies Lab
Check out The Beckman Institute
The research discussed in this podcast was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers MH105655 and MH68444. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and guests and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
If you can, cast your mind back to high school. For some of us, it's been a little longer than others. You might think of the sound of chattering classmates in the hallway, or maybe of studying late for an important test. Adolescence is a particularly challenging time that comes with many difficult emotions, and it's never been easy to be a teenager.
But here at the University of Illinois, researchers have demonstrated that past experiences with bullying, friendlessness, and other forms of social exclusion directly impact teenage girls' perceptions of their self-worth. Beckman Institute researcher and Professor of Psychology Karen Rudolph and her team think this is a crucial first step in crafting intervention programs to improve teen mental health.
On this episode of the GradLIFE Podcast, Graduate College Communications Specialist John Moist chats with Haley Skymba, a doctoral student at UIUC and Beckman Institute researcher, to talk about her work on Dr. Rudolph's research team. Haley was gracious enough to come in and chat about her research, background, and where she plans to take her work from here.
__
Show Notes:
The GradLIFE Podcast is a production of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois. Learn more about the GradLIFE Blog, Podcast, and Newsletter here.
To read more about this research, visit the Illini News Bureau and The Beckman Institute
The Beckman Institute's clip of Haley Skymba is kindly provided from this video.
Learn more about the Family Studies Lab
Check out The Beckman Institute
The research discussed in this podcast was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers MH105655 and MH68444. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and guests and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
John Moist 0:02
Hi, I'm John Moist. And you're listening to the GradLIFE podcast where we take a deep dive into topics related to graduate education at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. If you can, cast your mind back to high school. For some of us, it's been a little longer than others. You might think of the sound of chattering classmates in the hallway, or maybe of studying late for an important test. Adolescence is a particularly challenging time that comes with many difficult emotions, and it's never been easy to be a teenager. But here at the University of Illinois, researchers have demonstrated that past experiences with bullying, friendlessness, and other forms of social exclusion directly impact teenage girls' perceptions of their self worth. Beckman Institute researcher and Professor of Psychology Karen Rudolph and her team think that this is a crucial first step in crafting intervention programs to improve teen mental health. But wait, what's Beckman? Well, the Beckman Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute on our campus that's home to nearly 200 faculty members, 400 graduate students and 90 postdocs across 40 academic departments. Research at the Beckman Institute tackles topics like intelligence, molecules, and imaging, for scientific advances that couldn't occur any other way. Today, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with Haley Skymba, a doctoral student here at UIUC and Beckman Institute researcher, to talk about her work on Dr. Rudolph's research team. Here's Haley talking about her research in a clip from the Beckman Institute:
Haley Skymba 1:33
There are various things that can impact or put adolescents at risk for experiencing things like depression or anxiety. Some of those things might be, you know, genetic predispositions or things that come from the individual themselves. But there's also a lot of research that really looks at how social environment and negative experiences in the peer group can make adolescents, particularly sensitive to their social environment and put them at risk for things like depression or anxiety or other mental health problems.
John Moist 2:02
Haley was gracious enough to come in and chat about her research, her background, and where she plans to take her work from here. Stay tuned for a great conversation. Remember, you can always read more on our show notes, and at Grad.Illinois.edu/gradLIFE. Here's the interview: First of all, it's a pleasure to have you here. I really want to thank you for taking the time and coming in. It's great to have you here this morning. Why don't you tell us who you are and where you're from, and just a little bit about how your journey brought you to Illinois?
Haley Skymba 2:34
So I was born in Northeast Pennsylvania. So I've lived there for the majority of my life, went to a very small liberal arts private school, and then kind of got interested in research but wasn't quite sure exactly what I wanted to do. So I had a this option, essentially, to start grad school at that point right after undergrad or to kind of work for a little while and try to figure it out. And I chose to do that. So I moved from Pennsylvania to California, and worked as a research assistant for a couple of years, and then essentially applied to grad school and ended up coming here for
John Moist 3:07
Well, that's awesome figuring that out. So what did you do while you were a research assistant, were there any cool projects?
Haley Skymba 3:12
So I was interested in clinical psychology, but I did not know what I wanted to do with clinical psychology. So I just wanted to work with a clinical population. So I worked at UC Davis, and I was a coordinator for a grant and also a clinic coordinator. So I was working with an early psychosis population, and doing a lot of work with at risk individuals who did not have kind of a full blown psychosis yet, but people who were at risk for things like schizophrenia.
John Moist 3:37
Sure, absolutely. And probably working with populations like that informed your decision to go into graduate studies?
Haley Skymba 3:45
I tell my undergrads that I work with now that all the time of like, if you can get some on the ground experience of like the I like researcher, this is what I want to commit to for six years or five years, whatever it might be of your life, then it's good to have that knowledge going in that you actually like this to, to continue with it.
John Moist 4:01
I think that's wise advice, to get some experience doing the sort of day-in-day out work. Well, this is a fantastic transition you've handed me, because I've been interviewing folks and talking about what their day in day out life is like, as a graduate student, what's it like to work in this kind of project. So I'd love to hear before we move into anything more specific, I'd love to talk about your project. But first, what's your research specialty? What's your quick pitch when somebody says, "oh, what do you do?"
Haley Skymba 4:32
Yeah so I think throughout different experiences I've had with like clinical populations and more normative populations, especially youth who had experienced, like adversity of some kind, whether that's things like abuse or neglect on the more severe end of things, and kind of how that influences them in the long run. So what implications does that have for things like their mental health, or for how they might develop things like depression or anxiety and so I became really interested in that connection, because I worked for a little bit of time as a, an individual who worked with youth... who let me trace it back. I worked with youth who had experienced things like severe abuse, neglect, and they were in a residential center. And so working with those individuals really kind of got me to think about like, well, this connection seems to be there that these kids are very emotionally dysregulated. So why is that? And I didn't mention this earlier. But I had a neuroscience background. So I was a neuroscience major in my undergrad. And so I became very interested in looking at that from a brain perspective. So what's happening in the brain?
John Moist 5:34
Interesting, interesting. And the reason I am excited to be having this conversation with you, right, is I think the issues you study tend to be in the news a lot. I get that sort of knowing chuckle from you. Because yeah, I read a lot of articles about teen mental health. I see a lot of articles specifically about teen girls mental health, right. And it's tremendously interesting to hear in your research that folks are looking not just at social factors, or maybe not just at you know...to humans, but what's happening in the brain, when folks are experiencing, in your case, perhaps experiencing a lack of belonging, or maybe some social exclusion? It seems to me to be very interesting to want to take a look at the chemical changes in the brain as well.
Yeah, yeah. And there's a there's a ton of research out there, people kind of investigating this and kind of still trying to figure it out. I mean, neuroscience is a very evolving field, it's still it feels like it's been around a long time. But things like neuro imaging or like functional neuroimaging, those are pieces that I feel like as a field, we're still evolving and changing and making advancements with. So you're kind of doing this, like really exciting research in the context of advancing your tools as well.
Also, that's fascinating: not only in getting to work on research that might be socially applicable or current, in a way-- settle that in a different bucket. You also get to work in a way that pushes the field you're in forward. That's probably one of the benefits, I have to say it, probably one of the benefits of working at Illinois, right, where you have access to this kind of scale, this kind of research capacity. Well, let's move then into a general overview of what you do and how you do it. Let's talk about the project that you're here to talk about today. Do you want to give us a little overview of what you studied? And what you found?
Haley Skymba 7:19
Yeah, sure. So the data that we were using for this specific project, we were interested in how experiences like peer adversity, so things like being bullied or being excluded being victimized, how that can influence girls. Kind of in our, we call them interpersonal needs. So kind of this need to kind of belong with others, or this need to kind of get approval from others, or how that can motivate you in a way that influences how you feel about yourself. And part of the reason we became interested in this, especially with teenage girls is because we know, as they essentially come into adolescence and become a teenager, you start to separate from your parents, if your parents are kind of not as important to you as they once were as a child, right? You start to kind of associate with your peers more frequently, you become more invested in kind of what your peers think about you. But we know that as human beings, we all have this this desire or need to kind of belong with other people or be approved other people. But teenagers, and especially teenage girls feel that to a degree that you know, more than even adults do or children do. It's kind of like this, this developmental period where it appears become very salient.
John Moist 8:28
When you say that you study these things: I'm interested in your methodologies. How do you study them? And what kind of experiment design did you use? To look at what a lot of people...it's hard to express for sure. And if you say to me, how are our interpersonal needs formed? I'd go ohhh, I don't even know where to start! *Exhales* And I think it's... I'm very interested in the methods you use to tease that out.
Haley Skymba 8:55
Yeah, of course. So obviously, we came at it from this kind of question of like being interested in understanding interpersonal needs, and to understand them, you kind of have to have a way to study them as you're pointing to. And so we do that, actually, by creating measures that allow us to kind of get at some of these constructs. So the main ones that were interested in for this specific study, were something that we call this need to belong, which is exactly what it sounds like, of just kind of how, to what extent, to what extreme level I guess or to what I don't want to call it severity, but to what level do girls kind of feel this need to belong to other people? Like I said, we all know that we have these needs, but people vary in how strongly they feel them might need to belong, it's not gonna be the same as yours, or maybe somebody else's. They might be similar, but again, people kind of vary.
John Moist 9:40
Yeah, we're gonna have different things we value different things we write for. Yes. So you're measuring something at once universal, and very particular.
Haley Skymba 9:49
Yes. That's fascinating. Something that varies between people to some extent and like that's part of the reason to study it right is because in teenagers, this is something that (in teenage girls), we know that it is something that becomes more salient in the group universally, but individuals can feel this differently. So really the question for this specific study was, well, to what extent do those early experiences have like adversity bullying in the peer group or being victimized or not having friends? How does that relate to as a teenager, how I feel these kinds of interpersonal needs this need to belong? The other construct that we call is need for approval? So, which is essentially, to what extent do peers base their self worth on how their peers approve of them? And so the to get to your question going on a tangent here...
John Moist 10:35
Oh, absolutely. Circular routes are the best routes.
Haley Skymba 10:38
But essentially, we give them self report forms. So we give them kind of a scale that kind of we created, and that we've demonstrated based on previous research kind of captures this piece. So it might have some items on it, we ask them just to kind of fill it out based on certain statements, to what extent they agree or kind of disagree with those statements. So someone might say, a statement for like, the need for approval might be like, I feel like a bad person when my peers don't like me or something like that, until we get them to kind of rate, you know, to what extent do you feel that, it's how, how much do you kind of relate to that statement?
John Moist 11:15
Oh, yeah. Okay, so you're testing initially, "how much do you relate to this statement?" And then, where does it go from there?
Haley Skymba 11:22
Yeah. So then we kind of, well, we take a score of all of the different items on the measure and kind of get like what we call like a mean score, and kind of the stronger that that, I guess the higher that number, is that means we kind of encapture someone having a higher need to belong or need for approval. Sure. Versus if it's a lower number than we would say that that kind of interpersonal need is not quite as strong for that individual.
John Moist 11:45
Now, may I ask a question here? So this isn't in a sort of moral way, right? Like you're not saying one of these is better than the other like you're trying to find the one that works. You're not saying that?
Haley Skymba 11:58
No. It's really just a way of saying, so Dr. Rudolph, who is the PI for my lab has done a lot of previous work in this area in this construct a kind of need for approval, and basically sussing it out and basically creating a scale to allow us to measure it. And so we just kind of, we come at the project from being interested in these specific constructs. So really just trying to understand the question of like, does period versity relate to the specific things that we're trying to study? And so it's a matter of just basically looking for that association of like, if there's higher adversity, does that lead to a higher need to belong? Or a higher need for approval?
John Moist 12:36
Yeah. So tell me about, and this is the part I've been really looking forward to asking about, tell me about cyber ball.
Haley Skymba 12:42
Oh, sure. Yeah. So everything I'm describing to you so far, is really just to get it more of these like trait like attributes or kind of need the individuals might have. So that's just kind of asking them not in any specific situation, but just on the in general, rate, this statement for me of kind of like how much you agree or disagree with it. When it comes to cyber ball, we were interested in kind of like, well, to what extent might we kind of capture interpersonal needs in the context of something specific, some kind of stressor? So sarava has been around for a long time now. It's, it's, it started in social psychology research in a different realm. And people have adapted and played with it for quite some time. Okay. Yeah. But it's, it's meant to be kind of a model of social exclusion. So essentially, what it is, is meant to make somebody feel like they've been excluded. So someone does not know coming in, when you tell them, You're gonna play a virtual game with two other players. When we adapted this task, we had pictures on the screen, so they could kind of see these two other people that they thought they were playing with. And they were kind of deceived to believe that those people are also here for kind of a lab study, and that they were going to be playing with you.
John Moist 13:51
Sure, when in reality, they are not here.
Haley Skymba 13:52
It's just a computer. In reality, they're just playing against a computer.
John Moist 13:57
They are not here!
Haley Skymba 13:57
And it's very simple. It's basically all you're doing is there's two different rounds of cyber ball and the first round, everybody's just tossing a ball to each other. So the participant that we're in for our study gets the ball as many times as anybody else does. And this is all on the computer, right? So it's just a virtual little figurine, they see their own hand, they toss it to someone else, that person may toss it back to them or someone else, and it just goes on like that. There's no rolls, they don't have to, they can do whatever they want with it. That's round one, when we call that kind of the inclusion round, so the person is included the entire time.
John Moist 14:30
Okay, they're experiencing playing cyber ball, and being included equally as much as everybody. Ok, ok.
Haley Skymba 14:36
Yeah. And then we do kind of a second round. So in the exclusion round, it's erxactly that. So they are included for a short period of time, but then they become excluded. So they just see two other people on the screen, essentially tossing the ball back and forth to each other. Okay, the rest of it,
John Moist 14:51
And they're deliberately excluded. Again, they don't know they've been deliberately excluded. They just think the two people they're playing the game was kind of don't care for whatever reason. *laughter* Yeah, and for whatever reason they're being in your terms socially excluded. Exactly, yeah. Okay. Okay. And then what do you measure? Are you measuring something after they play cyber ball? That second time?
Haley Skymba 15:10
Both before and after. So kind of I was talking about those, these interpersonal needs is the best time we're gonna keep coming up with. But essentially, we're studying that kind of as a trait light thing in the context of cyber ball we're looking at in a more like, situation specific kind of way. So we asked them to fill out kind of like in this exact moment, right now, answer some of these questions for me, to what extent do you feel disconnected from other people right now. And we have them do that before cyber ball after cyber ball. And then probably 20, minutes or something after that.
John Moist 15:43
Sure, So you want to test their opinion, right after playing it. And then a little bit later.
Haley Skymba 15:47
Exactly, yeah. So kind of just to see how to what extent do these situations specific needs, how do they variable before, after and then after a little bit of a delay of playing this game? Yeah. And so we related that piece of looking at both before and after and after the delay to some of those experiences of adversity. Okay, so kind of, basically looking at the connection between how severe somebody's adversity is in terms of the peer domain, and how that relates to those in the moment needs of feeling disconnected around other people. And what we see is, even before they played the game, girls who had really higher levels of adversity, were feeling more disconnected or having some of those pieces of a threatening kind of interpersonal needs even before playing the game.
John Moist 16:36
Oh, okay. So having some pre existing, you know, emotions, maybe running around your head, right? Then you play cyber ball, play exclusion cyber ball, if you will. And that amplifies those feelings, so that you're more receptive to them.
Haley Skymba 16:52
And that's what we expect to happen kind of across everybody, right? Like, we expect kind of this is going to be a general thing where you're trying to figure out, gosh, these people just excluded me. And I have no idea why. So yeah, I'm gonna feel like there's a threat to my belonging needs in this moment. Yeah, I don't feel like I belong, I do feel disconnected from other people. So we did see that in our entire sample, this little blurb, where everybody kind of goes up of having a threat to these needs. But then the people who have more of the peer adversity, they kind of stay in that elevated state where there are for a longer duration of time. If we measure it again, those people are having more of those threats to their needs, even longer than everybody else. Everybody else might come back down to feeling less threatened, but they're still kind of like feeling activated, elevated from it.
John Moist 17:32
So knowing what you found and hearing some things about it. I would love to know just a bit of background about the project. How did you get involved in this because this is, as I understand, you work with the Beckman Institute, the Family Studies Lab at the Beckman Institute.
Haley Skymba 17:48
So yeah, yeah, we're so we're housed in psychology. But Karen, Dr. Rudolph, is a Beckman affiliate. So she has a lot of connections through previous work, and then through current work that we're doing now. So actually, all of the data and everything I've described thus far, when I got involved in the project, it was all retroactive data that had already been collected from a different longitudinal study that was ongoing. So we were kind of picking up pieces of it to kind of examine the things that we were interested in, all the data had been collected, and we were just kind of looking at it. And actually, when they were doing the cyber ball task, although we didn't look at it for this specific project, They were in the scanner as they were doing it. So we were looking at the brain activation at the same time
John Moist 18:29
When you say the scanner, I'm assuming you mean MRI.
Haley Skymba 18:32
Yes. MRI scanner.
John Moist 18:32
Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's fascinating. So while they're playing cyber ball, you even have the ability to look inside their head as it were.
Haley Skymba 18:39
...and just kind of see Yeah, If we compare that exclusion round to this inclusion round, what do we see in terms of brain regions that might be activated or kind of what's going on?
John Moist 18:48
Yeah, that's fascinating. So we've talked about your background leading up to coming to Illinois. But let's How did you, for example, we have talked about Dr. Rudolph, how did you meet Dr. Rudolph and get involved in the project to begin with?
Haley Skymba 19:02
Yeah, so I, I came in knowing I was very interested. And part of the reason I came to UIUC see was because I knew that one of the grants that I've been working on throughout grad school was going to be focused on these things that I'm interested in to kind of look at the connection between experiences of adversity both in the peer and family domain, and looking at their connection to things like depression, anxiety and mental health in general from like a neural perspective. So I knew some of the ongoing work that Dr. Rudolph has in connection with Dr. Wendy Heller, they kind of are both on a grant together that's kind of been examining that. And so I essentially just came into grad school being interested to work with with Dr. Heller and then kind of expanded out as part of this grant to working with Dr. Rudolph and she has been amazing, which is kind of having these longitudinal datasets that took her a lot of time and effort to collect and then wanting people to kind of continue working with the data in different ways to explore different time questions and things like that.
John Moist 20:01
Yeah, that's awesome. So it seems like coming to Illinois didn't just afford you the ability to study what you want to study, but also access to some folks who were awesome and able to connect you to some really great research projects. Yeah. That's amazing. So I'm interested in asking you specifically, as we talk about this, now, we've sort of gone through your background with the project and how you got there. The last sort of thing I really want to ask you a question about: you're doing this, right?? So you're sitting with me, you're sitting with people... I've seen videos you've been in, talking about this project:
Haley Skymba 20:29
Yeah.
John Moist 20:29
First of all, the two of you do a fantastic job. Wonderful at talking about your research. I want to ask you about that. What's it like to go from, oh, I think we might have seen, let's look at some data. Let's see what's happening here. And then to go all the way to communicating that research in public right to sitting in rooms like this, and saying, Well, here's what we did. And here's how it felt like, yeah, what's that like? Has that been an interesting journey for you as a graduate student?
Haley Skymba 20:54
I think so. Yeah, I think it's something that you don't, you know, it's important, and you kind of came into grad school, knowing that I want to translate this and I want to communicate my findings, right, to a scientific community that I'm involved in. But also how do I communicate this to a general community, people who are not scientists, people who are not researchers? How do I communicate these findings in a way that is not going to be you know, is going to be taken accurately, something that's not going to be taken and portrayed in a light that isn't true to what I would say? And also, how do I say it in a way that's understandable? And kind of translates easily? Because even as I'm talking now, when Karen and I kind of were thinking about, okay, how do we translate some of the findings? How do we put it out there in the media or whatever way? We kind of actually, we're avoiding the use of the term like interpersonal needs, like what is that? How are people going to understand what interpersonal needs are, like, we we've been thinking and talking about them, obviously, in this scientific context, but we don't frequently use those terms in everyday language with other people, right?
John Moist 21:53
Sure-- I'm not frequently walking in and out of my co workers' office and saying "does anybody have any interpersonal needs I can meet today? Just wondering if anybody here is feeling particularly excluded"... although maybe that's something I should do.
Haley Skymba 22:03
And I think if you if you're able to have like a conversation, you know, where you sit down and kind of explain it, and then it becomes it's a common language between both of us, we've used it several times in this setting. Yes. But it takes some of that kind of getting on the same, you know, level and to understand what we're both talking about to to use it kind of frequently,
John Moist 22:19
I find that is the challenge with talking about research. Yeah, is that it is both a monumental challenge in terms of-- I picture like a highway, we're getting on the on ramp, right? You have to on ramp somebody, you have to say, okay, when I say interpersonal needs, I mean this, exclusion, I mean this, when I say cyber ball, right, right, right. And you also have the ability, or [know] the importance of the ability to take what is a big concept and do this boiling down? Right, like leaving leaving the leaving the food on the stove till it reduces a little bit. And you've got that two sentence, kernel, right, of "what the research is." But it's it's interesting, because I think, the true challenge of this and something I think you're navigating well, is being able to tap back and forth between the two, to say, oh, this is a matter of who my audience is. Yeah, I think it's interesting to watch these projects go from nascent ideas to Oh, yeah, we did an interview about it, and this is what we came up with saying, so thank you for talking to me about that. That's really interesting. I have a quick wrap up question for you that I can't resist asking. So you've done this project? Long term, what questions and conversations would you like to be participating in? What drives you? What do you want to do with the rest of your career as an academic researching this kind of stuff?
Haley Skymba 23:36
Yeah, that's a... such a fabulous question. I think I so I have been in a clinical psychology program. So I have envisioned my career as being positioned in a place where I'm doing both clinical work of, you know, providing direct kind of assessment or intervention services to individuals, but also being in a position where I'm continuing a program of research. And really, I think there's so much to uncover. My specific line of research is really interested in how, like I said, experiences of adversity relate to different types of skills, both. And you know, I think, I think a lot of the work that we're doing now is a lot of really helpful context for understanding studying adolescence. So to understand kind of these pieces of like, well, these different experiences that they may have, as children or kind of early in their life, look at the impact that I can have on how they are as teenagers in terms of how they navigate their social world, how they interpret the world, how they see other people viewing them, how those things influence things like their self worth, how does that kind of connect to things like mental health, depression, anxiety, to what extent can that lead to some of those different adverse outcomes that we want to try and prevent? And I think for me, I kind of take all of this is kind of helpful context, because in my specific research interests, I'm really interested in how experiences of adversity impact emotion regulation skills, so the ability for for girls or teenagers in general also be able to sit with their emotions in a way that's going to be helpful for them. So to be able to use some of these adaptive skills, these pieces that we know are really useful to be able to reframe a situation to reinterpret it to kind of, maybe I did they play cyber ball, but I'm able to kind of think about this that like, oh, maybe they knew each other, and they just don't know me. So being able to reframe some of these difficult situations in a way that influences our emotional health in a positive way. And that's what I'm really interested in is kind of looking at, to what extent does adversity impact those higher level or more complex kinds of emotion regulation skills? But also how do we understand that from like, a neural perspective? So if I look in the brain, if I can kind of understand some of the circuitry that's going on? How does that get interrupted by adversity? Or how does that look different for somebody who has adversity? And what implications does that have for treatment or intervention or prevention? So I think a lot of my research is it's not going to, obviously, directly solve any of these problems. But I think it's going to be like a little piece of the puzzle that's going to help us kind of move in the right direction to, to essentially build some of these prevention pieces be really informed in what we do in terms of prevention or intervention for you.
John Moist 26:11
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting how you say, I don't think this is a solution, because I think the solution is a lot of stuff like this.
Haley Skymba 26:18
Yeah. I think it's a part of a solution, yeah.
John Moist 26:21
I think there's a brick in the wall aspect here, if you'll pardon the Pink Floyd. I think there's a, yeah, this and many other things. I think that's a really positive way of looking at it, right? We're trying to not just say, We're gonna see if we're gonna find the thing. Yeah. But you're also saying, what we're gonna do is we're gonna see if we can build skills, we're gonna see if we can identify things. There's ways to build capacity here.
Haley Skymba 26:43
Right. And I think when you're talking about kind of translating these findings, one of the biggest things that came away from this specific project was like, well, now we kind of we have some evidence that kind of points to the fact that these difficult experiences early in life do impact youth in ways that can be you know, detrimental, potentially, if like, if I'm really basing all of my self worth on what my peers think about me or kind of how they interpret me. And if someone doesn't like me, well, that makes me feel really awful about myself, well, how do we teach you ways to not do that? And maybe to kind of build up some of that self esteem, that self worth based on factors that are outside of what other people think about them? Yeah. So it kind of like how a lot of this research really is just an informative piece to kind of think about, well, how do we intervene with some of these things? Or how do we, how do we gain this knowledge to help us move in the right direction?
John Moist 27:30
Yeah, yeah. It's been wonderful talking to you. I'm really, rea lly happy you took the time to come in today and talk.
Haley Skymba 27:36
Oh thank you so much. It was wonderful to be here.
John Moist 27:39
GradLIFE is a production of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois. If you want to learn more about the GradLIFE podcast, blog, newsletter, or anything else Graduate College related, Visit us at grad.illinois.edu for more information. Until next time, I'm John Moist, and this has been the GradLIFE podcast.
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