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.