My Research

I love games. Growing up in a Sicilian household, card games (especially the highly competitive ones) were a way for my family to bond. As I grew older, that affinity expanded to board and video games. By the time I was 13, I was ready to create them myself. I downloaded Unreal Engine 4, watched countless YouTube tutorials, and began developing a skill set that I am still honing today.

In college, I had the opportunity to bring that background together with psychology. In a Psychology of Serious Games course taught by my mentor, Dr. Erica Kleinknecht, my colleague Micah Antick-Oslund and I developed The Mayor of Ironbrook, which later transformed into the Curse of Ironbrook.

After the course ended, I continued working with Dr. Kleinknecht and my colleagues to revise the board game and I led the development of the video game prototype in Unreal Engine.

Background

In Fall 2025, we designed the game around the premise that some strategies are fundamentally more adaptive than others; that is, players would cope with disasters through a menu of adaptive and maladaptive strategies. As the project progressed - and as we continued immersing ourselves in the literature - we realized that coping strategies could not be bifurcated into adaptive and maladaptive categories. We therefore introduced situation-dependent coping, where the usefulness of a strategy depended on the context of the disaster. Here, we drew on Bonanno and Burton's (2013) regulatory flexibility model. At the same time, we introduced more narrative and immersion to support game-based learning, which prompted the name change.

Over the summer, we worked through these changes. We had to map out every combination of coping strategies and disasters and consider when and why each strategy might be helpful, which made the game more psychologically grounded and created a richer experience for players.

Alongside these revisions, we spent weeks considering how to measure what players learned and developing our own content-based assessment battery. We had to consider whether our assessments reflected the experience players were having and if they were sensitive enough to change.

In Unreal Engine, I've translated these board-game components into a video game, requiring me to consider mechanic parity. In this work, I have collaborated with two consultants and worked alongside my colleagues to create an effective video-game prototype for our Spring 2027 between- and within-subjects study!

Presentations

• Cowherd, J., Castro, I., Casperson, S. (2026, October). From Tables to Screens: Transforming the Curse of Ironbrook. Poster presented at the Pacific University Undergraduate Research Conference. Advisor: Erica Kleinknecht, Ph.D. Forest Grove, OR.

• Casperson S., Castro, I., Cowherd, J. (2026, October). From Design to Impact: Creating and Assessing Serious Games. Poster presented at the Pacific University Undergraduate Research Conference. Advisor: Erica Kleinknecht, Ph.D. Forest Grove, OR.

• Cowherd, J. & Antick-Oslund, M. (2026, May). Practicing Emotional Resilience Through Play: A Serious Game Intervention for Adolescents. In E. Kleinknecht (Chair and Moderator): Education 2.0: Leveling up learning with effective informal-learning techniques. Symposium presented at the annual meetings of the Western Psychological Association, Tacoma WA.

• Cowherd, J., Antick-Oslund, M. (2025, October). Leveling up Emotional Resilience: Serious Gaming as a Tool for Change. Poster presented at the Pacific University Undergraduate Research Conference. Advisor: Erica Kleinknecht, Ph.D. Forest Grove, OR.

Overview

Admittedly, developing this study was a struggle: it was the first time my colleagues and I had conducted a full-cycle research project, and we chose a subject with immense debate surrounding its definition and measurement. We initially wanted to examine cognitive rigidity using behavioral measures, such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. However, as resource constraints became apparent, we recentered our aims on (a) psychological rigidity and (b) self-reports. Thereafter, we assembled a battery informed primarily by Morris and Mansell's (2018) discussion of rigidity through transdiagnostic processes (i.e., obsessive-compulsiveness, rumination, perfectionism, impulsivity, etc).

As we continued our work and developed the Situational Emotion-Regulation Scale (SERS), my understanding of constructs, phenomenology, and measurement expanded greatly. Our approach had many limitations, especially in using variability in coping as an indicator of flexibility (e.g., see Chen & Joormann, 2026). Nonetheless, developing the measure was a phenomenal learning experience, and working through these mistakes taught me a great deal.

Data analysis also involved programs I was still learning to use. As I was primarily responsible for the analyses, I had to develop my JASP skills and learn SPSS. There were challenges along the way, namely corrupted files and results that did not make sense, which required troubleshooting with support from our mentor. Finally, sharing our work meant translating it in an approachable way while also assessing how our findings supported or challenged our hypotheses.

Altogether, this study gave me my first real appreciation for how much work goes on behind a research project!

Presentations

• Castro, I., Cowherd, J., & Vasquez, Z. (2026, April). A New Perspective on Maladaptive Coping: The Role of Rigidity. Slideshow presented at the Annual Research Methods Symposium, Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR. Advisor: Heide Island, Ph.D.

Emotion regulation, resilience, coping, rigidity, flexibility, and perfectionism are all examples of words that seem intuitive but are immensely complicated to define when we ask what they actually mean to folks.

In this study, constructs frequently overlapped, and measurement was inconsistent across contemporary literature. It immediately became challenging to sift through vast seas of information, as nearly every author proposed a different theory. However, this process showed me how fundamental measurement is to our science. While methods and measures are often treated as a means to an end in psychology, I believe we have it backwards; that is, perhaps measurement is the filling in the sandwich, and even the best theoretical bread can only do so much for a hungry science. To that end, I believe that before we ask what something predicts or even how to change it through an intervention, we must first ask whether we have defined and measured it well.

In my career, I want to continue pursuing projects that allow me to grow my measurement skills, especially when capturing complex phenomenology, such as emotion regulation.

Overview

My time as a research assistant has been rich: I have helped contribute to study design and methodological development, written Python scripts, collected and analyzed psychology content across social media platforms, cleaned and organized datasets for analysis, written abstracts for conference submissions, and assisted with conference poster development! Through this work, I have grown both personally and professionally.

For example, in Spring 2026, I helped lead our "Team AI" group in gathering and organizing metadata to support the quantitative analysis of psychological representation on social media. This involved working closely with "Team Code," which conducted content analyses of the videos. Our responsibilities sometimes overlapped, meaning we had to coordinate on how information was collected and shared between the groups. This presented an opportunity for me to learn how to communicate across a research team, especially when a project depends on the coordination of its members!

Presentations

• Cowherd, J., Castro, I., Casperson, S. (2026, October). From Tables to Screens: Transforming the Curse of Ironbrook. Poster presented at the Pacific University Undergraduate Research Conference. Advisor: Erica Kleinknecht, Ph.D. Forest Grove, OR.

• Casperson S., Castro, I., Cowherd, J. (2026, October). From Design to Impact: Creating and Assessing Serious Games. Poster presented at the Pacific University Undergraduate Research Conference. Advisor: Erica Kleinknecht, Ph.D. Forest Grove, OR.

• Kleinknecht, E., Castro, I., Cowherd, J., Tsybina, D., Millier, T., & Antick-Oslund, M. (2026, May). Reality Curated: The Misrepresentation of Psychology in the Social Media Landscape. Poster presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Psychological Science, Barcelona, Spain.

• Castro, I., Cowherd, J., Tsybina, D., Millier, T., Antick-Oslund, M. (2025, October). Reality Curated: The [Mis-]Representation of Psychology in the Social Media Landscape. Poster presented at the Pacific University Undergraduate Research Conference by the Media Matters Lab. Advisor: Erica Kleinknecht, Ph.D. Forest Grove, OR.