Jordan Sigler awarded Erickson Discovery Grant.

Jordan Sigler, an honor student beginning her senior year under the mentorship of Dr. Suzy Scherf, is majoring in Psychology with minors in Neuroscience and Kinesiology. During the spring of 2021, Jordan was awarded an Erickson Discovery Grant to fund an independent research project. Her project, “Face-to-Face with Depression: The Impact of Depression Severity on Emotion Perception,” focused on how major depression influences how we process and interpret facial expressions.

Jordan believes the Erickson Discovery Grant was very beneficial for her. Receiving the grant motivated her to get started early on her project, which gave her extra time to learn about the process of conducting research and how to operate various online research platforms. She now feels more confident in her research skills, which will help if she pursues graduate school.

For her project, Jordan was not only looking at how depression can affect emotional processing, but she also wanted to know how that affects social connection and belongingness. What she found to be most fascinating about the project is how applicable it is to the real world. She feels the findings of her study “will help further our understanding of how psychiatric disorders, such as Major Depressive Disorder, disrupts our cognitive abilities, thus, limiting our social well-being.”

Congratulations to Jordan!