behind enemy lines

you'll notice a drastic lack of sunny-ness in these tailgate pics compared with previous ones. i played football as much as i could to keep warm. it was super fun, though. kristin and erik hosted which meant that we were in the super-spacious non-student tailgating section (i.e. the hilton of the tailgate) AND further means that i have a fun tailgating picture with my advisor, although you probably can't pick her out from the restof us in the picture. if you need help, the above pic shows caroline, rachel, me, kristin, and lacey, respectively. this should also resolve two additional issues back at home, the first being that kara has only a scary image of kristin persisting from the night they first met at a halloween party and the second being that my dad was concerned that i never had a drink at any of the tailgates. both of them should feel better now (and daddy's girl should get bonus points for drinking from the correct beverage family, right? :)

even though it was cold, the night game did turn out to be super fun, unique experience. the stadium was packed with students dressed in their "white-out" gear. believe it or not, i was a part of the largest attendance in beaver stadium history. don't quote me, but i think they said attendance was 110,146. i tried really hard to remember, but it turns out a lot of numbers go by during a football game. go figure. and since i did a shout out to dad, i should probably shout out to mom as well that we were nice to the people from the other team. and it turns out that they were pretty nice as well. and that that guy hugging the pumpkin cracks me up every time (i bet people from u of florida are still wicked-mean, though...)

aside from the tailgate, last week was a pretty good breather after the week before (no midterm exams this week!!). friday was really busy with meetings, but all in all a good day and the late game on saturday meant that i actually spent a whole day away from the office, which felt fantastic. sheri and i have received a data set from another professor on campus that we'll be collaborating with (again looking at factors that are believed to be antecedents to early puberty) so i'm really hoping we'll be digging into that soon. i have heard nothing back about the application i submitted to our Internal Review Board about using the adoption data set, so that's disappointing. we've actually found a third data set that we'd be able to use because it is publicly available online (since it was funded through federal grant money that data becomes available for public use), but i've had some technical difficulties pulling a good data set together (the file requires you to sort through over 800 pages of variables and info about variables to find the 15 that we actually want and the system of then pulling only those 15 into a usable data set is what's been really tricky for me).


kristin and i have discussed yet another round of changes to the analyses for my thesis. this week i'm running models that look at how composites children's distress changes every minute within the tasks they perform in the lab (although the data i'm working with is from kristin's lab in wisconsin, so if you've heard me talk about our lab visits, these are a bit different). i'm also still training in the EEG lab. i can successfully apply the 128-channel neural net although i cannot successfully collect data. who knew thick hair and brain waves could make for such a complicated procedure? i keep warning potential visitors that i'll probably want to hook them up to the EEG. perhaps related, my number of visitors has begun to drop off :)


last week and this week have also brought the Human Developmental Neuroscience Initiative to some of us. since the department will be getting an MRI in the next year, there's an understandable push to start educating people on how MRI works, what the procedure looks like, how data collection will look, etc. supposedly, kids are nearly impossible to run in a magnet (we were told on friday that an 8mm head movement during data collection makes data unusable, so that pretty much rules out our squirmy 2 year-olds). it's been really informative, though, and i'm interested in what kinds of this friday will bring about...



this is getting really long, but because i told some of you about our creative halloween costumes, i'll include a pic. academia is full of pun-laden (i.e. inherently nerdy) costume ideas, and ours was no exception. in case you don't get it figured out, we were "ceiling fans. just mull it over in your head for a bit...

Don't Mess With IoTexConnYork-a

In case you're wondering, this is the image of our champion flip cup team. This was an interesting and fun weekend - I was completely unaware of just how much it was needed. There was about five minutes of friendly chit-chat upon arrivale at pictured tailgate and then Lacey and I "suggested" that some games be started. The teams were random, but my team (L->R: rachel, me, lacey, mike, james) took our opponents in a 2-1 series. it's really all you could expect from a team that holds two iowans, a texan, and a couple of new englanders who can really be competitve when needed. Honestly, it was just fun to be focused on something other than work. Something that gets started and completed in the same sitting. Well, and admittedly it's much more fun when that thing is something that you win :) I think it was later, while playing beanbags, that I yelled across to my partner, Lacey, "I really don't like to lose." To which she, of course, responded, "me either." Fear not, we came back from our deficit and went unbeaten in beanbags.

There should be no mistake, though, that it was football saturday and thus the main event of the day was the football game. Just as disappointing as last weekend was for teams I am a fan of, this weekend was full of pleasant surprises. A win for Penn State over Wisconsin and a win for Iowa over Illinois. This may or may not bode well for the big ten, but it's nice to see some love for my unranked teams. I believe that I also know several souls who would love to see Chicago get another shot at their - um - disappointing weekend last weekend. But I can really only ask for so much at once :)

Otherwise, it seems that the most strenuous part of my days are classes. Not because they are more work, necessarily, but because they are consistently representative of time that I am not spending doing other things. I am at that unavoidable point in the semester where it seems like numerous papers and presentations will not come out of me, but it also feels like there is an end (to the semester) in sight. In a month, it will be Thanksgiving. Four or five weeks after that, it will be Christmas and all of this will be done. Well, not ALL of this, but all of THIS - if that makes sense. And if I did get anything accomplished this week, it was almost completely reorganizing my schedule for next semester so that it will be equally as busy as this semester, but will officially be my last semester of classes. That will be wonderful.

And because I'm clearly in need of more and more things to do, I started to new projects this week. (perhaps I am masochistic in some way?) On Wednesday, I started my training for the EEG study I'll be doing with Kristin. For a while, I'll just be practicing being able to put the net on people in a manner that is both timely and accurate and, I suppose, nondestructive. So, if you've got any notions to visit in the next month or so, be prepared for me to ask you to do something that will result in you looking like this little girl (i'm certain her parent is a researcher). Now imagine all of the horrible things that my children will be guinea pigs for. :)

My other new event deals with changes in cardiac activity during social and non-social activities. Some of the literature suggests that increases in heart rates (or the parasympathetic component of decreases in heart rate, called RSA) are good for emotion regulation; others suggest that decreases in RSA are good for emotion regulation. People have recently been interested in the way that social context might help to explain the discrepancy. I'm hoping to be able too look at this along with some other variables that I think might be relevant in a data set that we have. For some reason, I'm not sure I adequately conveyed how excited I am about that, but I'll stop before I come off as completely nerdy.

This week should be a lot like the last, but without the football game and with a midterm in my statistics class. It's kind of that point in time where if I really buckle down, I will save myself some stress later on in the semester. Much easier said than done, though, as I'm sure you would assume. The real kicker would be if I finally figured out how to do everything at once. We all have to find the balance, though, at some point. Nobody will read this who is not busy. So, those who have already found it should shed some light for those of us who are still searching...

visitors = tangible happiness

wow, i got behind quickly, didn't i? i'll try to keep a more steady pace. i don't, unfortunately, have the electronic versions of pics with my family during last weekend's visit from my parents and my grandma. i may try to steal them off of my mom's camera at some point, but that will obviously necessitate me being home (i'm on the verge of starting a countdown for that as it is; having the holiday stuff out in stores is making me antsy).

so, having my family around was absolutely spectacular. i knew that i was looking forward to their visit, but i don't think that i was aware of just how much i would enjoy their company. i was exhausted at the end of the weekend (as, i'm sure, were they), but it was just everything i hoped it would be. i'd let them come back again :) we toured state college, penn state, bellefonte, and penn's cave. we really did take pictures - just not on my camera.

then this week robby was here for the iowa game, which was also a bunch of fun. it was also beautiful out - but super hot, hot, hot! we were the yellow and black in a sea of blue and white.

so, as you can imagine, the weeks in between were packed full of stuff to finish up before i could have days to play. somehow i managed to finish both proposals for icis posters and get them submitted by the deadline. we should hear back by the end of november with some idea of if our proposals were accepted or not. the plan for analyses for my thesis have been changed in some form or another yet again - i've lost count of how many times that makes. luckily, my committee thinks i have a good question and interesting idea, it's just tough to pin down the exact best way to go about things. the good, exciting things are always more complex aren't they?

the project sheri and i are doing on kids with early puberty has sort of ballooned into some bigger ideas, which is great. there are a few other data sets that we'll have the possibility of working with now. the good news is that those analyses should be pretty straightforward once we pin down our exact quest5ions. i've actually been working on the protocal that we'll give to the institutional review board (IRB) here at penn state. they're the body that has to approve all of the research projects that are done here to make sure they're in line with the standards and ethics set forward by the college, the field, etc. It sounds like and actually is a good idea, in theory, but always ends up being more complicated than it needs to be. sheri and i will be using an old data set - collected years ago by people in colorado - and it's really wierd to try to fill out a form explaining how we're recruiting participants when we're not recruiting any participants. it's weird stuff like that, you know? but hopefully the people i've talked to have all been the right people and told me the right things and i've done what i needed to do so that we can move forward. it's a pain to be tied up in the bureaucracy that i'm not even used to being a part of. i just ever wanted to be a scientist. i just want to do the research.

instead, i have a lot of articles that need to be read for classes this week :) ahh, the hurdles that need to be knocked down before you can really run... it's fine, though. i'm in an "i can do this" mode. so, watch me fly...

let's put another pic from the weekend up, just for good measure and just to make sure this is ended on a happy note! (this one with rachel, who some of you have met already)

"Life is a Horizontal Fall"

the leaves have started to turn and today feels like a real fall day. it looks and smells like fall. it makes me want to do fall things like hang clothes out on the line and carve pumpkins (and learn what are "fall things" to do). i took the long way home from brunch this morning because it was just too beautiful for shortcuts. tamar brought us each a flower at brunch this morning. surprisingly, mine's still alive.



this was another busy week again, but scattered with some really great things. for one, i got to see two music shows this week. on wednesday night, dar williams played here at the state theater. on thursday night, the same venue hosted oppenheimer and they might be giants. dar was as great as you would think she would be. she played neither of the two songs that i was hoping that she would, but stuill an overall terrific show. oppenheimer kind of stole the show the next night, in my opinion, although they were supposed to be "just" the opening band. but most of all, it was terrific just to be in the presence of live music again. i had almost forgotten, i think, the days when kara and i would go in search of live music at least twice a week.


i feel like the progress through my analyses for my master's thesis are moving at super-slow speed. i've been assured that that's what it's supposed to feel like, but that still doesn't make it feel good. creating and looking at groups. that's what i've been doing for a month now. you always think with research that you'll just end up with something that's right. instead, it's like moving through life and having no obvious answers, looking for the thing that's at least more right than everything else.


i brought an outline to my meeting with sheri on tuesday that was for the paper we're writing on early puberty. true to form, my outline included topics, citations, main ideas, etc., etc. admittedly almost all that you'd need to know to talk about the things we're going to talk about. during our meeting, sheri said that the journal we're hoping to publish in will want a manuscript that's something like 4 pages in length. my outline alone was 3 1/2. needless to say, i'm working on a shorter version of that to give to her on tuesday.


i will for sure have data for one of my proposals for icis. thank goodness. liz and i are working on a project that looks at how mothers may influence the attention paid by their child to a fearful stimulus. we know that kids who are high in fear seem unable to disengage from a fearful stimulus even if less-threatening objects are present. we're not sure how moms may or may not exacerbate or buffer that process and that's something we're planning to present in our poster.

this coming week will necesitate my spending some extra hours in the lab pulling things together for the other project. i think i've figured out what the data analyses will look like at this point...they're just a little tough to actually do with no data. that's another project on emotion regulation within the mother-child dyad. should i get everything worked out, there'll be more to come on that at a later date.


kristin got an e-mail this week saying that our paper in Infancy won't be out until february. i think she's disappointed that it won't have a 2006 date on it. i'm not sure if that really means anything for me or not. i'm pretty sure that once it's out, i should definitely be shooting to have a publication every year until i retire or die. number of publications is one of the standards by which you're judged in academia. so, of course...no pressure :)


there's also another exciting project in the works that will feed my love of the brain and behavior even more. nothings for sure, of course, but it's just fun to have stuff like that that you can be excited about. hoepfully, i'll soon be saying that i have a nerdy-but-fantastic training to attend.


despite the disappointing ia/ia state outcome, yesterday was a pretty successful football day here in happy valley. i keep searching for the highlight of the five minutes of the game where psu scored two unlikely touchdowns (although only getting the credit for one). i haven't seen a full episode of sports center yet, but did find norwood's touchdown highlighted in an online clip (http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/ivp/index?id=) if you can get it to play. you just won't get to see the amazing play that immediately preceeded it. and if you want to experience it as it felt in the stands, try this one: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5335978451168627514&q=penn+state+vs+buffalo&total=15&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4


cleaning my apartment should be on my list of to-do's this week, but is already in the runnings to take a backseat to work and sleep. i went to bed a 10:00 last night. it felt so wonderful it's not even sad to me at this point. 61 days until i'm on my way home for thanksgiving!!

Coasting along at a Positive Neutral

It was another busy but interesting week for the most part. It's been hot here - and very humid - and I'm not convinced the air conditioning works in our office. Monday was a "day off" so to speak because of Labor Day and I used it mostly to read. There doesn't ever seem to be enough time to read all that you'rea sked to for classes and still keep up on the literature so that you know where the rest of the field is in terms of the topics of your own research. So after 1 week of classes, I was using my extra day to catch up. That can't really be a good sign.



I've been coming along on the analyses for my thesis. Essentially, I've looked at my data to see what the best behavioral indicators are to create groups that will tell how well kids regulate their emotions. This basically uses all the behaviors that we coded, looks at how they co-occur, and then shows the most "natural" groupings of the data. For our meeting on Tuesday, Kristin wants me to look at "who's in the groups." I'm not going to lie...I'm not sure what that means. I can look to see if the groups differ in terms of the gender of the kids that make them up, but other than that, it's tough to become overly familiar with the data for 80 kids across a bajillion variables. So...I'm going to spend some time tomorrow trying to figure that out, I guess :)



I've been give two undergrads to help me with the projects that I'll be proposing to ICIS. I have a lot of data left to code, but I need to pull together what's done for my abstract. I'm really nervous that it's going to be too incomplete to make for a convincing abstract, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone will like it. It's just nice to have the help for now, though.



Sheri's charged me with creating an outline for the paper that we'll be putting together this month. Since this isn't the literature that I'm most familiar with, I'm a little nervous about it, but I've found a bunch of articles that I hope will be helpful for me. I'm thinking of asking Lacey if she wants to go on a "working date" with me to the coffee shop at Wegman's (our fancy-pants grocery store) since we'll both be working on pulling together outlines for meetings this week. I will say, though, that my meeting with Sheri this week left me feeling really good about things in general. I'm not sure if that means that in order to even out karma overall this week has to be bad, but I'm hoping that life can sort of subsist at positive neutral for me; it would be a better match for my optimism.



I think you'd be most interested in how CRAZY things were on campus just because this week was the week before the PSU - Notre Dame football game. Notre Dame, of course, being one of PSU's favorite rivals (although people seem to hate OSU and Michigan almost equally as much). Literally there were people camped out at the stadium on Tuesday night. I had traded my ticket to get an extra ticket to the Iowa game, so I babysat for Kristin's two boys, Will (8) and Charlie (3). We actually had a really great time and I was introduced to Wii sports, which was AWESOME. I can see my dad and I playing Wii golf and Wii baseball for hours. And I can see myself trying to challenge everyone else I know to a good game on the Wii. It's just too easy to be competitive with things that are that fun. I dare say it rivaled the tailgate...although that big-headed JoePa will always be one of the coolest things I've seen.

The only other excitement is that I've been having conversations with various people that appear to have real interests in making the trip out to Happy Valley. This, of course, makes me slightly nervous about times, but overall leaves me sublimely happy. There is nothing like having a little bit of home on the east coast, after all.

And I have to get a cavity filled in the morning. I don't remember the last time I had a cavity, so I don't remember if getting a filling hurts, but a little part of me thinks that it might - particularly since I'm kind of a baby about such things. I'll let you know.

Week One Down: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

This may or may not be a futile attempt to supplement the phone calls, cards, and e-mails that update on personal lives with actual information about what the heck I'm doing out here. I feel like I've done a really poor job of keeping everyone posted on such things. I just want to be clear that I wouldn't trade the personal info for anything, though. It always makes my day (and a lot of times my week) to hear from people back home - good or bad - happy or sad - for hours or just a few minutes. So please don't let those stop...

So, my third year of (this) graduate school has officially begun. It sounds pretty weak, but I actually felt like I needed a long weekend already. I'm tryin to acclimate to a full course load, my thesis work, and putting a significant number of hours in in two labs. Clearly, I should be investing right now in some Airborne because I'll be needing any and all not-get-sick tricks that Western Society has to offer.

The actual work has been more tedious than grueling. I've noticed that overall, this is the way that research tends to be, but that it is made totally worth it by the 15 seconds you sometimes get - once in a while - where you come across something really interesting and exciting. I'm getting ready for a variety of things that will hopefully come to a head this spring. There are two conferences that I'm hoping to attend. One will be the International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) hosted in Vancouver and the other is the Gender Development Research Conference in San Francisco. I'm submitting an application to present 2 posters at ICIS and 1 at the GDRC. Right now, I'm coding video tapes that will provide the preliminary data for my ICIS projects. Essentially, I need enough data to convince people that I'm asking interesting questions and have the information and ability to answer them. Submissions are due at the end of September and then I'll have until March to finish coding data, run analyses, and turn everything into an eye-catching and informative poster. I imagine things will run in much the same way for the GDRC. I'm just less worried about that right now because those submissions are not due until January.

In addition to that, I'm running the beginnings of my analyses for my master's thesis. Hopefully, I'll be defending that in the spring and start signing all my e-mails "Rebecca Brooker, M.A." or will I be an M.S.? I think M.A. I think it's maybe a bad sign that I don't know....

The goals I've set for myself this year are to improve my writing skills. Technical writing is really tricky, particularly when you have to work in enough details to be convincing and accurate, but not so many that you're dry and wordy. I've talked to both Kristin (my primary advisor, Dr. Kristin Buss) and Sheri (my secondary advisor, Dr. Sheri Berenbaum) about things I can do with them to make that happen. I've just got to continue to be very intentional about it, I think.

The other bit of good news is twofold. 1) we moved into our new office space. Amy (no, not my sister Amy, unfortunately) and I will still share an office, but it is much bigger and we both have nicer chairs. we now have a window. truth be told, it looks out into the hallway, but we've decided that we'll take what we can get. and 2) college football season has started and this makes me very happy. i've traded away my notre dame ticket, which i think is a cardinal sin here, but i would much rather see robby than charlie weis, so it seems like a good trade to me.

Okay, that seems like a lot for now considering that I'm not sure how this is going to work and I'm also not sure anyone will get all the way throught that post :)