Whether it’s large crowds or air travel, most of us avoid the source of our fears like the plague. We’ll pass up the chance to see our favorite musician play a packed concert venue or we’ll opt to drive cross-country rather than hop on a plane. But should we do the opposite? Fear experts Michael Telch, a psychologist at the University of Texas, and Kerry Ressler, a psychiatrist at Emory University, explain how facing our fears can retrain the brain.
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Feeling panic is an adaptive response to danger. The related increase in breathing rate and blood flow provides what’s needed to fight off — or escape from — the threat. But feeling panic can be a problem when there is no threat. Heide Klumpp, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago explains what can happen when an unexpected panic attack comes out of the blue.
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Fear of heights, spiders, crowds, flying, and small spaces are just a few typical examples that cause anxiety for many people, but when do those feelings produce the extreme reactions that become a phobia? Barbara Rothbaum, professor of psychiatry and associate vice chair of clinical research at the Emory University, explains.
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“I’m not scared to apply any more,” Dr. Brandy Piña-Watson says, after having completed a coaching group session with the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN). Piña-Watson is an assistant professor of counseling in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University. There she studies how the psychological and sociological factors that impact depression among Latinx adolescents and emerging adults, with an emphasis among Mexican Americans.
Until entering the NRMN STAR (NRMN Steps Towards Academic Research Fellowship Program) coaching group, she had minimal exposure on writing an NIH grant. She hadn’t received training on how to write an NIH grant application at Texas A&M University, where she received her Ph.D. in counseling psychology. The focus there was on how to obtain tenure, not how to write a grant, Piña-Watson says. And at Texas Tech there was a dearth of researchers winning NIH grants, leaving no one to mentor her on the process.
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As a psychologist, Denise Dillard has made a career of providing mental health care to the Alaskan community she comes from. She teaches the subject as an adjunct at Alaska Pacific University and heads the research department at Southcentral Foundation, a health and wellness provider for Alaska Native and American Indian people living in Anchorage, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, and nearby villages. But she has seen too few fellow Alaskan Native STEM professionals — she is of Inupiaq heritage — so she jumped at the chance to be a coach for the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) when her long-time mentors and GUMSHOE directors Dedra Buchwald and Spero Manson asked. The GUMSHOE program (or Grantwriting Uncovered: Maximizing Strategies, Help, Opportunities, Experiences) is one of four NRMN models that teach groups of postdocs and early career researchers how to write competitive grants.
