Matt Smith '06 knows all about how confidence can equate to better play in athletics. One of the most versatile athletes at Hamilton, Smith is a player on the rugby team and also participates in intramural soccer, basketball, football, ice hockey and softball. Smith's versatility and broad interests led him to question the powers of self-evaluative thoughts. "I wanted to look at the concept that thoughts affect performance and how it is applicable to many situations," says Smith. This summer, that's exactly what he is investigating.
With Becka Grome '06 and his advisors, Associate Professor of Psychology Greg Pierce and Associate Professor of Psychology Penny Yee, Smith is studying how self-evaluative intrusive thoughts and performance are related. Smith and Grome are evaluating mock job interviews recorded by the Career Center. The center staff interviewed students, who afterwards completed a CIQ (Cognitive Interference Questionnaire) to measure the frequency of self-evaluative thoughts. Smith and Grome analyze each recorded interview, looking for speech errors, response length, eye contact and quality of response to questions. They then look for a relationship between performance and the types of self-evaluative thoughts. For instance they evaluate whether negative thoughts yield a poor interview and if positive thoughts correspond with a good interview.
Smith and Grome had initial problems "developing the coding system to rate each performance" before they made a grading scale that both gave specific values to certain behaviors (i.e. stuttering, lack of eye contact) and their frequency. The two students also developed inter-coded reliability in grading the interviews the same way over time, which is crucial for accurate results. Smith finds the study interesting because the concept that "thoughts affect performance is applicable to many situations, whether it be sports, a job interview, or even taking a test." After watching 40 interviews, five times each, and studying human behavior for each of them, Smith jokes that not only is he conducting experiments in psychology this summer, but now he's "more prepared than ever for a job interview." Those skills will be useful in the future, as Smith hopes to go to graduate school for clinical psychology and eventually have his own practice or become a professor.
| Summer Research 2004 |
When asked why he became a summer research student, Smith emphatically replied, "You get to know Hamilton a lot better. It's a great opportunity that a lot of kids at other schools don't get: to be a rising junior and work with professors within my major." He also appreciates that he is able to "use what I've learned during the school year and actually apply it, and learn more just by working." In addition, Smith saw his psychology professors and advisors in a whole new light. "Greg (Pierce) and Penny (Yee) give us lunch. We go to their house and cook. They've opened their house and brought us into their family," says Smith. When Smith's family visited to watch him run the Utica Boilermaker road race, they met Pierce and Yee and ended up staying at their house for the night. "You form a relationship, not as student-professor but as another friend who is here to support you," says Smith.
Matt Smith is a rising junior from Yardley, Pennsylvania, who is majoring in psychology. Besides participating in five intramural sports, Smith also is a member of the Finance Club and the Brothers Organization, and he is the secretary and treasurer for Hamilton's chapter of Psi Chi (Psychology National Honor Society). He also volunteers for the Big Brother, Big Sister program and the VCP Center for autistic children.
-- by Jason Ruback '05
