Mentored Research Spotlight: Kayla Maloney

Kayla Maloney, soon-to-be third year, has been working on a research project with iART advisor Dr. Megan Chesin. We put the spotlight on Kayla to learn a little more about the important work that she is doing for the lab.

Can you share a bit about the current research project you’re working on with Dr. Chesin and your involvement?

This current research project focuses on utilizing the death/suicide Implicit Association Task (dsIAT) to predict near-term suicide behavior in high-risk Veterans. Specifically, this study investigates whether implicit associations with death/suicide contributed to the near-term prediction of suicide behavior within a critical 90-day window after suicide-related events (i.e., attempt or preparatory behavior toward a suicide attempt). This study also investigated whether the latent cognitive processes (i.e., decisional efficiency) that underlie performance on the dsIAT contribute to the prediction of near-term suicide behavior.

For this project, I primarily managed the references throughout the paper, and I assisted with ensuring that the cited sources were formatted correctly and managed them within management software (Mendeley). I was also tasked with providing additional literature to support the study. I searched for more literature to reinforce background information in this study, such as highlighting the need for further research on the subject.

What were the findings from the study?

This study found that the dsIAT has predictive utility for identifying suicide behavior within a 90-day window. The results also indicate that reduced decisional efficiency and increased non-decision time are significant predictors of suicide behavior. Additionally, on average, dsIAT d-scores over one-year follow-up among high-risk Veterans were negative, which indicates a faster response to Me-Life than Me-Death semantic stimuli. This suggests that an implicit bias toward life is usually present, even in a high suicide-risk group. The findings of this study suggest that the dsIAT may aid in identifying who among high suicide-risk patients shows an elevated probability of near-term suicide behavior.

What’s been the most surprising and challenging part of working on this project?

I think that the most surprising part of this project to me was that high-suicide risk Veterans maintained an implicit bias toward life (as indicated by the negative dsIAT scores) and that this was also indicated in previous literature examining high-risk groups.

The most challenging part was probably navigating a new reference management software. There were a few bugs with Mendeley (e.g., incorrect formatting, citations not inputting correctly) that required a lot of troubleshooting, but they were eventually worked out.

How do you think that this experience has impacted your professional development?

Working on this project has helped me gain a deeper understanding of the research process. This project gave me more insight into how academic research evolves from conceptualization to submission. A major part of that process was interdisciplinary collaboration, which has broadened my perspective on how insight from various professionals contributes to the production of academic work.

This experience has strengthened my technical research skills and my attention to detail and has both prepared and inspired me to continue pursuing research in the future.