Heather Kissel: Using your senses to make sense of the world

The following story was written in April 2019 by Kathleen Scarrone in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.

This head-and-shoulders photo shows a young white woman with long blond hair, a big smile, and a white blouse with green and blue flowery print on it. — Heather Kissel (photo courtesy of Heather Kissel)

Heather Kissel is driven by her desire to help and work with people. At first that desire had her working toward becoming a psychiatrist, but her love of research and teaching is what led her to Virginia Tech to pursue her PhD in biological psychology. After studying psychology and pre-med for her undergraduate degree, Kissel was interested in many different psychology-based research topics. She had originally thought she wanted to be a psychiatrist, but then changed her mind, guided by her love of research and teaching. Virginia Tech’s psychology department has extensive access to work with humans, instead of animal models, which is what originally attracted Kissel to its graduate program. The other schools that Kissel had applied to mainly used rat models, which seemed distant from her desire to help and work with people as she would have had the opportunity to do in medical training.

Kissel is both on research teams and conducting her own independent research. She has a lot of freedom in conducting her research, which pushes her to remain very self-motivated. Kissel is currently working on her master's thesis project, for which she is collecting data. This project looks at the communication of emotion via touch.

Kissel knows that touch can be difficult to measure, as it can often be subjective. To get a more objective measure of touch, Kissel will use the methods set forth by her subdiscipline within biological psychology, namely, psychophysiology. Kissel’s lab, the Mind-Body Lab directed by Dr. Bruce Friedman, is a psychophysiology lab that uses standard psychophysiological methods to measure research participants’ physiological responses to various stimuli.

This photo shows six people standing in a line with their arms around each other's shoulders. In the background is a white picket fence and trees. Also visible are the corners of two houses. The people include two men and four women, five whites and one African American, most young adults and one middle-aged person. — Kissel (second from right) with advisor Dr. Bruce Friedman (in white shirt) and other researchers. (Photo courtesy of the Mind-Body Lab at VT)

Everything that is used in classic lie detection (polygraphy, which just means “many graphs”--psychophysiologists look at a lot of graphs!) is measuring psychophysiological responses, so Kissel often uses lie detection tests as an example to give people an idea of the kind of methods used in her lab’s research. In her thesis project, Kissel places electrodes on the skin to measure the functioning of the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system affects things such as your heart (for example, heart rate), as well as the eccrine sweat glands of the hands (sweating increases in response to external stressors).

Kissel is also on a team called the Physiology of Stress and Trauma (POST) as well as two collaborations with the local autism community in Blacksburg and Christiansburg. The POST project looks at physiological responses that put people at an elevated risk to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Kissel admits there are environmental factors and past history that can contribute to participants having this elevated risk. But the different physiological response patterns humans have make them respond differently to various tasks and stressors.

“Everyone has a heart, but people have diverse heart rate variability, which indicates differences in vagal or parasympathetic control of the heart,” explains Kissel. “The way that your body responds to different stimuli” in particular stressors “can determine your health outcomes.”

The way Kissel and her team can determine whether you will be more susceptible to things like PTSD is by determining whether your body follows the normal trajectory that other humans follow when encountering stressors.

To do this, they are using Pavlovian classical conditioning, referencing the phenomena of Pavlov’s dog studies. In their experiment, there are shapes that come across the computer screen that participants view. If there is a black star coming across the screen paired with certain other shapes then that individual will get an air puff to the larynx. This does not harm the participant, Kissel says, but it is uncomfortable.

This aversive air puff should act as a stressor for the participant. Visually, and bodily as indicated by their physiological signals, the participant will become anxious because they have been conditioned to “fear” the black star.

The researchers also have an option in which the black star is presented with a pink triangle, signaling that the participant is safe from the puff of air. People are sometimes very good at learning those “safety” signals and knowing that when they see the pink triangle they will be spared. Others never truly identify the warning signs, so they are constantly stressed. The people that do not identify the pink triangle as protective are at higher risk for things like PTSD or other psychopathology.

This photo shows a young white woman wearing earphones and a maroon t-shirt seated in front of a computer with an alarmed looking face on the screen. On the woman's face are electrodes with white wires attached. — Heather Kissel using electrodes on her face in her lab. (Photo courtesy of the Mind-Body Lab at VT).

Another way the team assesses risk for psychopathology in this study is by measuring the blink reflex by putting electrodes around the participant’s eyes. With these devices, researchers can measure how hard the participant blinks. If you are looking at something scary, or you are nervous or anxious, your blinks are harder. This type of research is vital, Kissel explains, because it can measure neurological responses in participants without paying immense amounts of money for brain-scanning devices.

With fewer than thirty participants so far, Kissel states that they do not have a large enough sample size to determine whether or not there is a significant variation between sexes. They do know from previous research that women are at higher risk in general to develop PTSD and other pathologies.

Kissel is most excited about her master's thesis research concerning touch. She is trying to figure out whether psychological linkage is the reason humans can communicate emotion via touch. If people are especially susceptible to link up with other individuals via touch then therapists could incorporate it into therapy. However, Kissel acknowledges that touch therapy is often considered taboo in the clinical world. Nevertheless, if it is going to positively impact patients then she believes it is worth pursuing.

While Kissel begins to collect the initial data for her master’s thesis, she continues to help on the other research teams she is involved in. Kissel’s main goal post graduation is to take her talents back to her alma mater, combining her love of research and teaching by starting a research program specifically for undergraduates at Bellarmine University.