Undergraduate student: Psychology
Biography:
My name is Ana Cecilia, but everyone calls me Ceci. I am from San Juan, Puerto Rico and I currently study Psychology at the University Park campus. I am an ambitious and determined student, and after my undergraduate studies, I plan to attend Med School and become a Psychiatrist. I am passionate about art, fishing, and language. As an English-Spanish bilingual, I have a personal interest and curiosity about bilingualism and emotionality. As a proficient code-switcher, I often ask myself if our emotions code-switch or work separately, and how can I feel and express my feelings in my second language as deeply as in my native language. I am passionate about learning and gaining new experiences, I believe knowledge is power. We should always use our brains and capacities to our advantage and learn as much as we can because there is nothing more enriching than being knowledgeable and cultured.
The PIRE project I will be working on in Nijmegen, Netherlands is a further investigation into the past PIRE project from the summer of 2023 by Adriana Miller and Gabby Stokes. This research is based on Dutch-English bilinguals and how they identify emotions through pseudo-sentences in Dutch, English, and two foreign languages Arabic and Hindi. This study will be carried out in two conditions, noise and quiet. The noise condition will simulate real-life situations, which will help investigate how the presence of noise affects the recognition of emotion in speech. The project studies how listeners identify emotions in speech when the speaker is surrounded by noise produced by other speakers. Most previous studies have listeners listen to sentences presented in quiet conditions, which is not representative of the real world because everyday communication mostly happens in noisier situations. By embedding the speaker into a multi-talker babble, my research project better mimics everyday communication.