I wrote this piece to showcase how a medical condition like hair loss is often viewed only as a cosmetic problem, not accounting how it affects a person’s identity, mental health, and daily routine. I chose hair loss because of how common it is among young adults in college and how much indirect impact it causes outside of physical symptoms. By sharing Tony’s experience, I wanted to highlight the emotional, psychological, social factors that are overlooked by clinicians.

Approximately 80% of child abuse victims report experiencing psychological distress and depression spurned by childhood maltreatment (Kothapalli et al., 2023). Child abuse affects children globally, it is estimated that one billion children aged 2-17 years have been abused in the past year (World Health Organization, 2022). Survivors of childhood sexual abuse are at high risk of developing disorganized attachment style.

I chose to write this piece as part of a final paper in my SOC 122 class to be able to showcase that apart from the direct victim of gender based violence, there are often other individuals such as children who also become indirect casualties of these situations. My hopes in writing and sharing this is to raise awareness of domestic violence and showcase the impact it has on children, their development and success of future relationships.

The ability to regulate emotions is a necessary skill to maintain one’s psychological well-being, but psychosis may interfere with this ability, as it is associated with abnormalities in emotion regulation (Ludwig et al., 2020). Psychosis consists of various symptoms that arise from experiencing a disconnection from reality (National Institute of Mental Health, 2023). The major symptoms of psychosis include, but are not limited to, delusions, hallucinations, and disordered thoughts and speech.

I am a UC Davis student majoring in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior, and have been an editor for this journal for three years now. I am passionate about neuroscience and psychology. Most particularly, studying the cognitive and physiological aspects of how memory develops. I wrote this article to highlight the neural mechanisms behind working memory and learn more about the specific neural activity that shapes how we encode and retrieve memory. 

I was involved with Dr. Charan Ranganath’s Dynamic Memory Lab since shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. I performed remote work since 2020 on multiple projects with the lab. I was very excited to begin working on my own project with the support of my mentor, James Antony, who has performed examinations on event segmentation in naturalistic contexts in the past.

I wrote this paper for my PSC 142: Social & Personality Development class with Dr. Paul Hastings. As a whole, in this article, I wanted to focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected marginalized communities throughout the U.S. in terms of mental and social-emotional health.