Ashley Howell, a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology, was awarded the Donald Clippinger Graduate Fellowship for the 2015-16 school year.
Ashley Howell
Her project is on “Testing anxiety-related mechanisms of threat interpretation bias and Pavlovian-conditioned fear generalization under conditions of logical ambiguity: A de novo stimulus discrimination paradigm.”
How are we able to quickly infer whether new stimuli are safe or threatening? One explanation involves fear generalization (e.g., fearfully responding to an unfamiliar animal that looks highly similar to another animal that you know is dangerous). For individuals with anxiety disorders, however, fear and avoidance tend to be over -generalized to stimuli that are only superficially related to threat—leading to persistent anxiety and life interference. For the current project, participants will first be conditioned to “safe” and “dangerous” stimuli. A computerized program was designed to then assess how degree of fear generalization to novel, but visually-related, stimuli is related to severity of anxiety symptoms. It is believed that studies such as this may inform cognitive mechanisms underlying anxiety disorders. The Donald Clippinger Fellowship will enable me to focus on conducting my current research and to disseminate results from other studies I have completed during my time as an Ohio University graduate student.
Four other Ohio University graduate students also received Named Fellowships: Maggie Messitt, an English doctoral student in the Creative Writing non-fiction program, the John Cady Fellowship; Melissa Riggs, School of Visual Communication; Justin J. Rudnick, School of Communication Studies; Tyler JC Whidden, School of Theater.
Each student was awarded a fellowship of $15,000, plus a full tuition scholarship for fall and spring semesters.
Schools and departments may nominate one graduate student for the competitive program, which is managed by the Ohio University Graduate College. The program features the John Cady Fellowship, the Donald Clippinger Graduate Fellowship, the Claude Kantner Graduate Fellowship, the Anthony Trisolini Graduate Fellowship, and the Graduate College Fellowship. Nominations for the 2016-17 cycle are due in February 2016. Full guidelines and forms are available online.
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