Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Mark Wood. This season Sagecast we'll be talking to current and former Pomona faculty about the personal, professional, and intellectual journeys that brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today we're talking with Assistant Professor of Psychological Science, Sara Masland, whose research involves personality disorders, and in particular, what's known as borderline personality disorder. Mark Wood: Hi, Sara. So welcome to social distancing Sagecast. Sara Masland: Thank you. Mark Wood: It's good to have you with us, but not really with us. Sara Masland: Yes, it's good to see people, even if it's via Zoom. So thank you for having me. Mark Wood: So let's start with how you first got interested in psychology. Can you trace it back to any particular point in your life? Sara Masland: So I anticipated that you would ask me about this and I've been thinking about it. So I didn't actually know that psychology was really a field, something that you studied, until college. And I actually went to college thinking that I would major in chemistry or biology. And I just never took a chemistry class at college. Sara Masland: So I went to a small liberal arts college, a lot like Pomona. I went to Bowdoin College. And what got me into psychology was actually, I think, an amazing professor. So I had this professor my sophomore year. I took personality psychology with her, my first psychology class. And that's actually a class that I teach now. And I just loved the material. I loved the way that she taught it. She was hilarious and engaging, and she really made me think. And sometimes I wonder, actually, if she had been an English professor and I had stumbled into her class, would I be an English professor now? Mark Wood: It's so often the case. Sara Masland: Right. Mark Wood: What really sets you off is somebody who is passionate about something and you catch it. Sara Masland: Exactly. And so this professor is actually someone that I still am in contact with. So when I'm back in Maine, I'm actually from Maine so I'm there occasionally, we have lunch. She's retired now. It's really nice to keep up with her. And I think that having her as a professor was not only formative for me in terms of my field of study, but I think it's also probably why I am a professor. I think that my time at Bowdoin College was so formative for me as a first generation college student, that I never wanted to leave. And so I joke that I set myself up so that I never had to leave. Pomona's a lot like Bowdoin in a lot of ways, a lot different in some ways too. Mark Wood: Isn't that what professors are? They're professional students, right? Sara Masland: Exactly. And I feel very comfortable in that role. But I think, sorry, will you pause for a second my cat just actually attacked me. Mark Wood: Sure. No actually we'll keep that in. Your cat attacked you? Really? Sara Masland: You're welcome to keep it in. My cat was [crosstalk 00:03:07] in my lap. Patty Vest: Now there's a story. Sara Masland: For some reason she hates when I talk on Zoom, so she gets very agitated. Patty Vest: You're not paying attention to her. Sara Masland: But I can pick up the thread. Sara Masland: I told you that I've been thinking about my response to this question and I started to think back about before college. And I grew up in a family where we never talked about mental health. And I think part of that was that we certainly didn't have access to mental healthcare. It wasn't something that was on the radar at all. So it wasn't something that I was thinking about professionally certainly, but I think that in many ways I had an opportunity to observe people just generally. I grew up in Maine and there wasn't always a whole lot to do except maybe observe what people were doing and actually observe what animals were doing too. And the siblings that I grew up with were 8 and 10 years older than me, so I kind of was always interested in what they were doing, and how they were thinking, and how they were working. So maybe there's some origins in my interest in how humans think and tick earlier on, but it really was about my college experience, I think. Patty Vest: So walk us through, Sara, a little bit about how you found your interest in psychology, or were introduced to psychology, didn't even know that it existed as an academic field. How did you find your way to Pomona? Sara Masland: I told you that I went to Bowdoin College and that was right formative for me. And I think that I realized pretty early on that if I could do something like teach at a place like that, that it would be really meaningful for me. I think that it had been so meaningful for me to have the opportunity to receive that kind of education, that I realized that the ability to contribute to that for other students would be something that would be really good for me. And so I majored in psychology at Bowdoin and at the time the way that the psychology department was structured there, there weren't a whole lot of research opportunities. And I'll say just kind of as an aside, that's kind of why I really care now about getting students involved in research opportunities at Pomona. Sara Masland: So I knew that I actually needed more research experience if I was going to continue on to get a PhD in psychology. And so I applied to research assistant positions and the one that I got was working in Boston on treatment, a team that studies treatments for kids with depression and anxiety. And one of the fun things was that I was working in Boston but actually one of the studies we were doing, we were working with kids in the child welfare population in Maine. So I was assessing kids over the phone from my home state and that was really neat. And learning a lot more about the treatment scene for kids and adolescents. Sara Masland: And so I started graduate school actually working in that area. So again, studying the development of treatments for depression and anxiety. And at some point I realized that treatment research wasn't really what was as exciting to me. Certainly as a clinical psychologist, I care a lot about treatment research and treatment development. But I started to become interested in family dynamics that I had heard the kids reporting about over the phone, or talking about over the phone, that I had talked with the parents about. Sara Masland: And so I started to study this construct called expressed emotion, which is a measure of the family environment that picks up on basically how warm, hostile, and critical family members are to one another. And it turns out that those things matter a whole lot for mental health, both for kids and adults. And so I started to study that. And in my second year of graduate school I switched labs. So I switched into a lab with the advisor that I had when I finished, Dr. Jill Hooley who was another person who was incredibly formative, I think, in my decision to do what I do. And she studied expressed emotion, but she studied an array of other things in adults. Sara Masland: And I became interested, then, in borderline personality disorder, both because she was studying it, but because at that point I had started my clinical placements. So, when you do a PhD in clinical psychology, you're doing a lot of research, but you're also doing clinical placements because you're learning to be a psychologist. And one of my experiences was working in a residential unit for women with borderline personality disorder. So they were there for a minimum of eight weeks and that was an intensive treatment program. And it was that clinical experience that got me really interested in the research on BPD. And I guess the rest is history. Sara Masland: But I will say also that I am realizing as I talk about these things that I have a lot of people to thank. So I told you about my professor, Professor Held at Bowdoin who was really formative for me. Then my advisor in graduate school, Jill Hooley was really formative for me. And then my supervisor at the Gunderson Residence, that residential treatment program, Lois Choi-Kain was also an amazing mentor for me. These are three really strong women who really influenced who I am today and what I do. And I'm really thankful, actually that I still get to talk with them all and work with them actually on collaborations too. Mark Wood: Let's talk about the word personality. I'm interested in how a psychologist defines that word and why do we see certain types of personalities as disordered? Sara Masland: Those are tough questions. So I think that a good kind of general definition for personality is the characteristic patterns of thought and motion and behavior that we bring to different situations. So how are you the same on this call and maybe when you are interacting with someone at the bank? So what are the patterns that we bring across those different contexts? Also, recognizing that those contexts will change a little bit how we act, regardless of what is stable across those. And so we think about this in terms of behavior pretty easily, right, because it's what we can see. So how people are acting might be kind of consistent across situations. But the same is true also for emotions and thoughts. So it might be that some people are more prone to feel some aggression across contexts, or anxiety across contexts. Or to have thoughts about how they're understanding the contexts that contribute to those emotions across those situations. Sara Masland: And that's pretty broad. There's lots of theories of personality. I think that that is one that is pretty atheoretical for the most part, but I'm sure someone out there would disagree with me. Mark Wood: I'm sure. Sara Masland: And then in terms of disorder personality, I think this is also an area where there's some controversy. But I think that the easiest way to think about it is that sometimes those characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior might cause us problems. So if we have a characteristic pattern where we do kind of interpret things with like a hostile attribution bias, right? So when someone kind of cuts in front of me on the highway, I immediately think they're trying to make me angry. Rather than oh they were just not paying attention. And then maybe I react aggressively with a good degree of road rage. If I'm doing that consistently, that probably will eventually cause me some difficulties. So we can start to think about this as when those patterns cause problems. Sara Masland: Another way that we can think about this is that those patterns usually cause problems when we have certain personality traits that are magnified or really significant for us. So the biggest trait model of psychology right now is the five factor model, which suggests that when we think about our personalities we can really think about these five traits as summarizing all of the human variation across those patterns. And those are neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. I already said neuroticism. So those five traits, and there's facets within those, so more specific kinds of traits under each of those umbrellas. The idea is that if you're really high on neuroticism or really low on neuroticism, maybe that causes problems for you. Or really high on conscientiousness, that might cause you problems similar to being really low on conscientiousness. That's a simplified account, I will say. It's not always extreme trait manifestation that causes the problems, but that's one way to understand it. Patty Vest: Sara, you have a particular focus in recent years on borderline personality disorder, or BPD. Can you tell us what it is and what attracted you to it? Sara Masland: Sure. So borderline personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of instability across a number of different domains. So when we think about emotion, we see people with rapidly shifting emotions over the course of even like a minute to an hour. And usually those rapidly shifting emotions might go from kind of feeling okay to maybe feeling really angry, or potentially despairing. And what typically causes that shift is something in the interpersonal context. So maybe someone says something to you that makes you feel like they're rejecting you, for example, and that might cause a shift in emotion. Sara Masland: We also see instability in behavior where there's a lot of impulsive behavior. So things like reckless driving, or shoplifting, or value discordant unsafe sex practices, things like that. We also see instability in identity. So people with BPD will have a lot of difficulty kind of building a cohesive sense of self, who they are. Sometimes they'll feel like they're all evil, and there's a lot of kind of self loathing that goes along with that too. And then there's also instability in interpersonal relationships where people with BPD will go from kind of idealizing other people thinking they're all great to the opposite, so devaluing them, thinking that they're all bad. Sara Masland: I became interested in BPD really through my clinical work. So I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm not currently practicing right now, although I am licensed in California. And I will probably practice again. It's one of the things on my list maybe to start up during my [inaudible 00:14:28] leave sabbatical this coming year. Sara Masland: So I had a clinical experience where I was working with people with BPD, and I really became interested in understanding how to better help them. And rather than approach that from the treatment perspective, I started to think about kind of how they were processing information. And then also I started to get interested in why there wasn't more research on BPD. If we look at the dollars that are spent on research for things like depression or schizophrenia, the disparity here is really significant. BPD is just so under studied relative to those disorders, despite the fact that there is a really high level of significant rate of suicide in people with BPD. So it is something that we really need to understand. I think that just knowing that something needed more research kind of attracted me to that area, too. But mostly it was actually just working with people that I really cared about and wanted to be able to help better. Mark Wood: So how do you go about studying something like BPD, and why is it under studied? Sara Masland: So one reason that it's under studied has to do with how we have classified disorders historically. So in the United States we use this manual called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. And internationally, actually the World Health Organization uses a different manual, so this is something that's put out just the United States. And for years and years, personality disorders, there's 10 in the DSM right now, they were relegated to kind of a secondary status. They were put in a different section of the DSM with the idea that they were not treatable and that they were things that just happened in the background when you were treating someone for something else. So you should be aware of them but they're not the central focus of treatment because they're not treatable. Sara Masland: The idea that they're not treatable is totally wrong. The problem is actually that no one was trying to treat them appropriately. And so we learned first that BPD was treatable, actually, when Marsha Linehan out of the University of Washington developed a treatment called dialectical behavior therapy. And that revolutionized our understanding of treating personality disorders. I will also note that Marsha Linehan disclosed in 2011 that she has borderline personality disorder. So it's a really cool story actually. And the field is really indebted to her for her work on that. Sara Masland: And since then we've started to think about treating other personality disorders as well but we are really lagging behind. And it's really about the legacy of this classification system and just a completely wrong belief that we had about personality disorders. And really a stigmatizing one too, honestly. Mark Wood: Does the stigma attached to it also tie in to why it wasn't studied? How do clinicians feel about people who have BPD? Sara Masland: I think the stigma is a reality here. So this is actually something that I've studied directly as well, is kind of how we might think about mitigating the stigma that still exists. So BPD is, I would argue, the most highly stigmatized mental health condition amongst mental health clinicians. And it really does come from this misunderstanding that it's untreatable. It also comes from the original use of the term borderline, which is, it's a term that originated in kind of psychoanalytics, psychodynamic systems of thought. And the idea was that the disorder exists at the borderline of psychosis and neurosis. That's well and fine, that's not really how we think about BPD now. But the problem is that when the term first came into use, it wasn't articulated really well. Sara Masland: And so it started to get used in a way that didn't really make any sense or have a coherent reasoning behind it. And actually for years, it was just applied to people who were difficult to work with. I'll put difficult in scare quotes. Clinicians would actually apply this as a literal stigma to people that they didn't want to work with. And some of those people probably have what we now call borderline personality disorder, but many didn't. It was just a term that was used to mark people, really. Sara Masland: And that changed, actually, in the 1980s when John Gunderson, another really fantastic mentor of mine who passed away just recently, about a year ago now, a little over a year. He actually formally articulated the disorder with a set of criteria. And so then we had a definition for what it was. And so that started to change, but we're still seeing the legacy of that history. So clinicians still have some of these beliefs about BPD. And I also think because we don't have enough research and understanding about the behaviors in BPD, that clinicians don't themselves always fully understand why people are acting the way that they are. And without understanding, that's where stigma loves to propagate. Patty Vest: So how is this disorder normally treated? And it seems like it's constantly evolving because it's under studied and there's adding to research to it but obviously is still lagging. How is it normally treated and how have you seen an evolution since you've studied these years? Sara Masland: So what's often referred to as the gold standard treatment for BPD is dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. And this is the one that Marsha Linehan developed. This is a treatment that uses cognitive behavioral techniques and also blends in mindfulness and meditation and some of those practices as well. And it actually works with people across four domains. So interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and mindfulness. And it's an intensive treatment where you have both individual therapy and group therapy. And you're working with the individual therapist to change behavioral patterns. And you're working in group therapy, actually, to develop skills to help with things like emotion regulation. To help with the things that actually might breed some of that instability that we see in BPD. Sara Masland: Now, in terms of what has changed since I started working with people with BPD is that we've seen other treatments gain a lot of evidence as well. So in addition to DBT now, there's a whole slew of other kind of alphabet soup, basically, all the other treatments: MBT, TSP, GPM, CAT. You could just list all these silly acronyms. But the idea actually is that now there's other treatments that also seem to be effective. Sara Masland: And one thing that I've been involved with is this initiative to develop and disseminate good psychiatric management. So I'm a trainer for this particular treatment. And the idea here behind GPM is that we need to be able to get treatment to more people. So if we look at the number of people who have BPD in the United States and we look at the number of people who are trained in dialectical behavior therapy, we see that there's a really big problem. The vast majority of people with this disorder do not have access to DBT. And that's in part because DBT is expensive, actually, for the clinician to get trained in. And intensive. It takes a long time to learn DBT. Sara Masland: So GPM was actually developed as something that we could implement more easily to increase access for underserved populations. And the training is free. And so it's been disseminated now all around the United States and also all around the world at this point, too. So I think there's been trainings in the Dominican Republic, in Italy, and Sweden, and Greece. I believe maybe Brazil. The idea is just that we need pared down treatments that we can get to more people. Mark Wood: As a clinician you've said you actually like working with people with borderline personality disorder more than some other types of clients. Why is that? Sara Masland: That's a good question. When you're training as a clinical psychologist, it takes some time to kind of find where you feel like you're most effective, I think. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Sara Masland: I really enjoy working with people not just with BPD. So I also have specialized in treating people with PTSD. And also I really enjoy treating people with obsessive compulsive disorder and other anxiety disorders. And the common thread, actually, across all of these is that I take a pretty behavioral approach. So thinking about things like exposure treatments and thinking about the things that help us change our behaviors. I find that when I take that approach, I feel most effective. And I think that's actually a piece of it, it's just that type of approach probably clicks with something in me too. I think it's what I would seek out in treatment. And so that's part of it. Sara Masland: Now in terms of working with people with BPD specifically, I think that sometimes people with BPD, when I've been working with them, they always keep me on my toes. Sometimes there's a good amount of anger present in BPD. One of the criteria is inappropriate expressions of anger. And certainly that's something that comes through in the therapy room. And for some reason, something about my personality maybe, I can handle that. That's something that feels like it gives me some traction to work with someone that I can really lean into. I have a harder time with kind of maybe a different presentation. I still treat people with mood disorders. So things like depression and certainly a lot of people with BPD have depression too, but for some reason there's something about the energy of working with someone with maybe a more angry presentation that works really well for me. And just as an aside, I think that one thing I reflect on sometimes too is that, sometimes the angry presentation comes through in this really fun kind of snarkiness. A really fun style of humor that I really enjoy, actually. Patty Vest: What are some of the lessons or understandings that you hope clinicians take from your work on BPD? Sara Masland: So I want clinicians to understand that how they talk about BPD matters. I think sometimes there's this pernicious clinical locker room kind of icky talk that happens where people throw the term borderline around in a pejorative way. And I think that a lot of those people are actually really well meaning. And they actually care about the people that they're working with. It's not that they really have truly negative ideas about their clients, and sometimes they're venting, but I still want them to understand that that kind of language and talk actually perpetuates stigma that we know from research makes care less effective. That we know makes people less likely to seek treatment. That we know makes clinicians less likely to accept clients with BPD. So I want people to actually pause and think about how they're talking about these things. Sara Masland: I also really want clinicians to take from my work that we do have treatments for BPD that are effective. And they can learn them and they can feel confident applying them. I think one thing that contributes to stigma sometimes is feeling like you're not effective. And worrying that you don't have the capability to help someone. I think that tends to kind of cause you to put someone at a distance rather than seek to draw them in and understand. And I want clinicians to know that they can learn the tools. And when they do learn the tools that I think they will find themselves really helpful and effective for people with BPD. They can make a real difference. Mark Wood: Sara you've argued in something I read that clinicians need to move beyond the old diagnostic categories to a more empirical approach. Can you explain what you mean by that? Sara Masland: Sure. So there's a lot of controversy right now about how we classify personality disorders. So we have 10 categories within the DSM. And these are categories, like borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. There's schizoid and schizotypal personality disorders, anti-social personality disorders, and so on and so forth. All of these categories have lists of criteria that vary in the degree to which they are based on good solid science. Sara Masland: So there's been a push to revisit the criteria, but also to revisit this idea that personality disorders are separate from normal personality in some way. So right now if you read the list of criteria, it doesn't look like, the criteria don't look like how we understand personality. So I told you there were these five traits that we understand personality through often. For example, neuroticism, extroversion, so on and so forth. Those words are not in the descriptions of these personality disorders. You see symptoms that don't really look like personality. So there's been this push to better understand how personality disorders might be manifestations of these normal personality traits. And to understand them through that lens instead. Sara Masland: And so this would actually revolutionize things because not only does it suggest that there's not just clear categories, you have a disorder or you don't? But it also suggests that personality disorders are really akin to normal personality, which I think is something that will be de stigmatizing too. Because if we can think about these things through the lens of how we understand everyone, then that's a little bit less othering. You have this other category of things, which is what we say now- Mark Wood: So it's a matter of degree rather than of difference. Sara Masland: Exactly. It's about quantity rather than kind, exactly. So there is a new model, actually, now within the DSM. There's an alternative model for personality disorders that will probably, I think, become the main model some day. And it is focused more on these normal personality traits. Patty Vest: Sara, let's talk about your lab, about your research lab. So you call your lab The MIND Lab. Tell us about why you chose that name, and tell us a bit about your lab and your research assistants? Sara Masland: So I didn't actually choose that name. I had my students choose that name. I knew when I came to Pomona I wanted a lab name. Some people just use their last names so it would be like The Masland Lab, but I wanted to be more descriptive. So I started to think about the words to include in the lab. So personality, psychopathology, relationships. I thought maybe I could combine those to be like The Pepper Lab. Then I tried that out and it wasn't really working. And then I tried to reorganize the letters and I came up with things like The Perp Lab which was not going to work at all. Purple, I tried purple for a while. That didn't really seem to work. Sara Masland: So finally I was just like, you know what, I asked my students, "Think about what might be a good name for our lab. Think about all these words and how you could combine them." And they came up with The MIND Lab. And you have to be a little bit liberal with how you apply the acronym because some of the letters get dropped out and some get magnified. But it's The Mental health and INdividual Differences Lab. And I like that name a lot because we study mental health pretty broadly. So I'm focused on personality disorders but I'm interested in other disorders too. And individual differences, which is basically kind of another name for the study of personality. So I think that it's a nice kind of broad lab name that doesn't really limit our focus. And I'm really happy that students came up with it too. Mark Wood: You said earlier that your students are really integral to your research. Tell us about them. Tell us about the work they're doing. Sara Masland: Sure. So right now I have a number of students in the lab. The student that has been in the lab longest is Kaylee. And so she came into the lab basically the day that I landed at Pomona she was in contact with me wanting to get involved. So she was really integral, actually, to starting up the lab and to thinking about how the research program would start and progress at Pomona. And so she's a senior now and she actually is, she'll be starting a research assistant position at McLean Harvard Medical School in June. So really excited for her for that. And I think that she'll go on to a PhD in clinical psychology which is great. Sara Masland: But she's been involved in lots of different projects. So she did a summer undergraduate research program position, a SURP, where she stayed on campus and helped me with some work on stigma and BPD. And we're currently working to develop that into a manuscript on which she'll be a co-author. She has been involved in some collaborations with me with folks at McLean Hospital and also at Harvard where she's been involved in working on some other manuscripts with me. Sara Masland: And right now she's working on a really fantastic thesis. So last summer she did another SURP, and the beauty about SURP is that you can use SURP funding to work both in labs at Pomona, but you can also use it to work in labs outside of Pomona. And so she went to work with a collaborator of mine at Yale Medical School. And she was working there on a ketamine trial for people with BPD. So they were looking at the effect of ketamine on BPD symptoms and suicidality, which is really cool work. And so she took some data back from that lab and she continued the collaboration. And she's looking to apply a computational model right now to some of the data to help improve our prediction of suicidality. So really complex work, really important work, and really exciting work, too. Sara Masland: So I'm really proud of her. I think that this is kind of an example. She exemplifies all of the things that I want students to do in my lab. I want them to get involved with research projects from the get-go and see them through. I want them to go out and get other research experiences. And I want them to participate in these collaborations in ways that are beneficial for them, but that also help me with my collaborations. The beauty of Pomona students is that I can trust them to do that. So I don't worry when I send them out to work with collaborators. I know that the collaborators will love them. That's just uniformly been the case. Sara Masland: Another student who graduated, Evan, who has been working with a collaborator of mine at McLean in a full time research position for a couple of years. And my collaborator there, who I mentioned before, actually a previous supervisor of mine, Lois Choi-Kain, she raves about him. She loves having him there. She wants more Pomona students. It's really lovely. Sara Masland: I have other students in my lab right now too. Tanya, Janelle, Chloe, Ananya. And they're all doing similar fantastic things. I love working with them. Patty Vest: You mentioned that Kaylee joined your lab, or started when you started. So, you don't have to have a background in psychology, tell us a little bit about the background or the experience that you're looking for in a research assistant. Sara Masland: So now I have a requirement for the lab, that students have taken either psychological disorders, which at many colleges is called abnormal psychology, or personality psychology. I have the requirement in part because I get a lot inquiries for the lab and I just can't take everyone in. It would dilute the mentorship experience too much, I think. I also have that requirement because we're working oftentimes with people who are struggling. And I think it's important that students have some background in understanding that before they come into the lab. Although, sometimes I make exceptions. I didn't have that requirement, actually, when I first started the lab because I was just kind of eager to hit the ground running and accept whoever was interested. But fortunately, Kaylee actually when she joined the lab, she was concurrently enrolled in my class, Psychological Disorders. So she was getting that information there too. Like I said, I do sometimes make exceptions because sometimes a student will come to me so excited about the work and so clearly ready to learn and to be thoughtful that I just can't turn them away. Mark Wood: Can you tell us a little bit about the classes you're teaching this spring? Sara Masland: So this spring I am doing something a little bit different. I'm teaching a class on personality disorders, actually. It's a seminar class. So there's eight students. And this is a class, actually, that I taught a couple of times at Bates College, but in a different format. So it was a larger class then. Smaller class now so we can get into a little bit more depth. And it's been really fun. Sara Masland: And then the other class that I'm teaching is our senior thesis seminar. So every student in psych science at Pomona completes a year long empirical thesis, which means that they're working with data. So they're seeing a project through from start to finish. And the senior thesis seminar is meant to be a chance to provide them support in doing that and also to encourage community in doing that. Because science is hard and science is a team sport for sure. And so it's a change for everyone to get together and problem solve, and collaborate, and support one another. It's been nice, actually. My favorite part of that is that I know all of the seniors now in the department, which will make it all the more bittersweet when they're gone. But I'm glad to know them. Patty Vest: Related to that, how are you and your students coping to the move of online teaching? Sara Masland: So far I have been really impressed with how flexible my students have been. It's hard, I think, the transition. I think that the transition to online teaching actually maybe isn't even the hardest part of it. I think it's just the transition to being at home when you were expecting to being on campus. And all of the anxieties that we all have right now. I think that those are the things that make all of this maybe the most difficult. But fortunately the switch to online teaching, I think it's gone pretty smoothly. I used to teach online classes through Harvard Extension School, so I wasn't too worried about the switch. Although to take something that was really designed for in-person and to move it online creates its own set of challenges. But I think that it's going well. And actually I'm really grateful for the technology that we have now to be able to see my students and to interact with them in a way that feels semi-normal at least. I can't imagine what this would've been like before things like Zoom. Mark Wood: So as a clinician, do you have any advice for listeners out there who are struggling with some of those same anxieties and difficulties of staying home and being separated from loved ones and so on? Sara Masland: I think maybe the main point of advice, and this is something that I've said to my students too, is to be gentle to yourself. To recognize that this is an unprecedented time for us. And that things will be different and that that's okay. And when I say that that's okay, I mean that it's okay if there are times when you're having difficulty focusing. And it's okay to react to this in a way that you need to react to this, to process your emotions around this. Generally I'm someone who, I really like acceptance and commitment therapy, which is this treatment that's kind of about embracing all of our emotional experiences and still moving in the direction of our values and our goals. And I think that this is a time when we do need to pause and kind of allow ourselves to feel. And at the same time, keep moving forward. And that's a tough balance. But I think the key is actually being gentle to yourself and kind of not beating yourself up for having reactions to all of this. Mark Wood: So on that encouraging note, we're going to wrap this up. We've been talking with Sara Masland, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science. Thanks, Sara. This was fun. Sara Masland: Thank you so much. Patty Vest: Thank you, Sara. Sara Masland: Thank you. Patty Vest: And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Stay safe, and until next time.