{"id":84407,"date":"2023-03-23T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2023-03-23T16:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=84407"},"modified":"2023-03-23T16:30:22","modified_gmt":"2023-03-23T20:30:22","slug":"chancellors-chair-for-research-excellence-awarded-to-caitlin-mahy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2023\/03\/chancellors-chair-for-research-excellence-awarded-to-caitlin-mahy\/","title":{"rendered":"Chancellor\u2019s Chair for Research Excellence awarded to Caitlin Mahy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>During the COVID-19 pandemic, Caitlin Mahy noticed that her young children dragged their feet when it came to cleaning up their messes, going to bed and brushing their teeth.<\/p>\n<p>At around the same time, the Associate Professor of Psychology was guiding her then-Honours thesis student Melissa Alunni, who wanted to study procrastination.<\/p>\n<p>Mahy\u2019s expertise is in the way children think about the future, particularly how they \u2018remember\u2019 to do things they\u2019re supposed to do, like brush their teeth at bedtime.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen we started talking, we thought, oh, procrastination really fits into children thinking about the future and children\u2019s self-control, which are two areas that my lab is very interested in,\u201d says Mahy.<\/p>\n<p>The proverbial lightbulb went off. Mahy and her <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brockdmclab.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Developing Memory and Cognition Lab<\/a> embraced this new line of inquiry, creating a research plan that was eventually awarded the 2022 Chancellor\u2019s Chair for Research Excellence (CCRE).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDr. Mahy and her team are breaking new ground by investigating the little-studied area of young children\u2019s procrastination and how that relates to other areas such as memory development,\u201d says Brock Vice-President, Research Tim Kenyon.<\/p>\n<p>Mahy has laid the groundwork for her CCRE research through a <a href=\"https:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/fulltext\/2023-30640-001.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">recent research paper<\/a> in which she, Alunni (BA \u201921) and student researchers Taissa Fuke (MA \u201922) and Ege Kamber explored the topic of procrastination in early childhood.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2023\/03\/brock-researchers-find-early-emergence-of-procrastination-in-children\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Their study showed<\/a> that procrastination, which the researchers define as being \u201cthe tendency to postpone undesirable but necessary tasks,\u201d starts to appear in three-year-olds, increases over time, and is related to poor future thinking and self-control.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers also found three- and four-year-olds tend to procrastinate on tidying up messes and follow routines during meals and at bedtime, whereas five- and six-year-olds delay doing homework or household chores.<\/p>\n<p>Using the same data from that study, she and her team have written a second paper examining the role children\u2019s personality as well as parenting styles and family socioeconomic factors such as parental education and family income have on children\u2019s procrastination. That paper is currently under review, she says.<\/p>\n<p>Key findings from that study include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Highly conscientious children procrastinate less.<\/li>\n<li>Children who experience many negative emotions procrastinate more.<\/li>\n<li>Procrastination occurs less frequently when parents involve children in family decision making and give children more control over their day-to-day lives.<\/li>\n<li>Children of higher socio-economic status tend to procrastinate less.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Mahy\u2019s CCRE research plan involves three studies involving children ages three to six.<\/p>\n<p>The first study will investigate whether acting in a timely manner, remembering, and complying with instructions or requests are separate, independent factors or if they represent a single, common ability, says Mahy.<\/p>\n<p>The goal is to separate procrastination \u2014 delaying tasks that need to be done \u2014 from behaviours that involve avoiding the task altogether or forgetting that the task needs to be done.<\/p>\n<p>The second study aims to develop ways to measure young children\u2019s procrastination behaviours, she says.<\/p>\n<p>The third study will determine whether children\u2019s future thinking can be used to decrease procrastination rates. Mahy says children who imagine completing the boring task in the future might be more likely to decide to do it right away compared to children who are not asked to imagine how they will feel doing the boring task in the future.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis CCRE research program will increase our knowledge of young children\u2019s procrastination and how it differs from related activities, expand the ways in which we measure procrastination with the development of new child-appropriate behavioural tasks, and investigate future simulation as a strategy to reduce children\u2019s procrastination behaviour,\u201d says Mahy.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/research-at-brock\/office-of-research-services\/#chancellors-chair\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chancellor\u2019s Chair for Research Excellence<\/a>, open solely to Brock University tenured and tenure-track faculty, recognizes the excellent scholarship of Brock\u2019s faculty members. Chair holders are active scholars nominated by their peers who have demonstrated excellence and who will continue to make significant contributions to the advancement of their field.<\/p>\n<p>Recipients can undertake a specific three-year program of research leading to a significant development in their scholarship, including a scholarly monograph or a state-of-the-art review that might lead to a seminal series of scholarly lectures.\u00a0Each awardee will give at least one public lecture on their research to the Brock community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During the COVID-19 pandemic, Caitlin Mahy noticed that her young children dragged their feet when it came to cleaning up their messes, going to bed and brushing their teeth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":84410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,1,4,5,38],"tags":[3437,5876,2149,546,7488,11578,12539,12540,3325],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84407"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84426,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84407\/revisions\/84426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}