When Sydney Parkinson began her education at MacEwan University, she was sure of three things: she wanted to be in the Psychology Honours program, study anxiety disorders and work in Dr. Alexander Penney’s Worry and Health Anxiety Lab.

“When I initially decided that I wanted to be a therapist, I started looking into psychology and realized that there is also a whole field of science and research,” says the Bachelor of Arts, Psychology Honours student. 

So Parkinson didn’t waste any time building her own research portfolio. During her first year, Parkinson approached Dr. Penney and participated in a literature review of ways researchers induce anxiety in the lab to study different anxiety disorders. After a few more years of assisting with Dr. Penney’s research, it was time for Parkinson to design a study of her own.

Working with the same individuals over a period of time (a longitudinal study), she collected data about whether negative beliefs about worry – believing that if a person starts worrying, they won’t be able to stop worrying, and that worrying itself is dangerous – might predict whether a person would develop generalized anxiety disorder. 

“There's a lot of correlational research that suggests that these negative beliefs about worry are related to generalized anxiety disorder,” she explains. “But we're not sure whether those beliefs actually cause and maintain the disorder over time.” 

Parkinson’s research found that those negative beliefs did have a role to play in sustaining the unremitting, hard to control, excessive and distressing worry that defines generalized anxiety disorder. She also discovered that when negative beliefs about worry increase, so do generalized anxiety disorder symptoms. 

But one other finding, says Parksinson, completely blew her away. “In our sample of undergraduate psychology students who experienced high levels of worry, between 88 and 91 per cent were likely to meet the criteria for a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder.”

Parkinson plans to present all of her findings on Student Research Day on April 21. 

Ultimately, she hopes that her thesis will provide insight into which beliefs should be targeted in therapy in order to help people. It’s those clinical and treatment implications of her work that she is most excited about continuing as she prepares to begin graduate studies at McMaster University this fall.  

“The extensive research experience I have gained while at MacEwan has helped me develop a strong passion for research and desire to pursue clinical psychology where I can combine those research skills with clinical practice,” she says. 

For Parkinson, the work is also personal. “Seeing a psychologist when I was younger gave me the toolkit I needed to help me manage my own feelings of anxiety,” she explains. “ I want to be able to help other people in that same way.”