Dr. Robert Melara is a Psychology professor at the City College of New York. He received his bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the SUNY Stony Brook institution, and his PH. D in Psychology from the New School for Social Research institution. Dr. Melara has thirty years of experience doing research, evaluating the processes of different forms of distractions in humans, and teaching Psychology at universities. The reason he was inspired to get involved in the field of psychology is because he agrees that many of us come from families that are very complex and there are a lot of emotional issues going on and we see psychologists in a way that they would understand the emotional issues that emerge from our complex families. He says that because of this, he started taking courses, and got more interested in the material. When he graduated from his PH. D program, he was considering becoming a clinical psychologist. However, he decided to become a teacher because one of his friends told him that there was a school that needed professors to teach the course, so he tried teaching and he became passionate about becoming a professor in psychology.

Dr. Melara’s research’s main focus is to analyze what causes people to get distracted and why people have trouble concentrating. Since he began to study the causes of people’s distractions, he started to examine specifically PTSD because he wanted to help traumatized people function in daily life. His work is important because he is bringing awareness to PTSD and how people are affected by it. Additionally, his work can potentially help advancement in the treatment of PTSD.

This can be seen in one of his research papers titled “Regulation of threat in post- traumatic stress disorder: Associations between inhibitory control and dissociative symptoms.” In his research, he measured patients who were diagnosed with PTSD, compared with people who faced a trauma in their lifetime but were not diagnosed with PTSD. He measured the attention for both groups. One of the ways to measure their attention was by showing the participants threatening images. People with PTSD reacted very differently when showed the threatening images. This caused for the posterior cingulate cortex get active and the people that had been exposed to a trauma in their lives, but they did not have the symptoms, their brain did not respond the same. It seems like the brain activity was useful in diagnosing who had it and who did not have it. Even though both were exposed to trauma. PTSD can affect many people in different ways. It can affect them in their relationships with others, the way they communicate, and their ability to solve a problem. Not only does PTSD affect people emotionally but also, it can affect in the brain. When someone face a trauma event, they receive flashbacks which might impact how the brain works. Melara claims that when people experience post-traumatic stress disorder it affects one part of the brain called hippocampus. When people have PTSD, their hippocampus is small. If there is a person with PTSD and you look at their twin, the twin would have a normal hippocampus, the difference in their hippocampus prove that traumatic events affect the hippocampus. (Melara, 2019). This means that when people have PTSD, their hippocampus would be affected by the disorder and this is harmful because they will not be able to retain new information which would inhibit their performance compared to other people. By analyzing the brain activity of the patients of his study, scientists can come up with new treatments for PTSD.

In addition, a relatable work from Dr. Melara which also interested me was the study of “Inhibitory Control under Threat: The Role of Spontaneous Eye Blinks in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” In this research paper, Dr. Melara focuses on how PTSD affects the eye blink rate of people that have PTSD. According to Melara (2017), “Here, sEBR could gauge the accumulation of threat material in working memory (i.e., the filling up of working memory), which would effectively undermine the inhibitory control of conflict between targets and distractors in PTSD” ( p. 2). When people tend to suffer anxiety, their eye blink rate increases, compared to people that do not feel anxious. It is the same thing when people suffer from PTSD. EBR is very important because we can see that their blink rate is very different than everybody else’s. EBR is very significant in PTSD because by measuring the eye blink rate they know that PTSD affects the working memory.

Dr. Melara’s work is interesting to me because there are different situations in which people are exposed to traumatic situations such as war, or domestic violence and they may suffer from PTSD. I really like how Dr. Melara focused his research article in post-traumatic stress disorder because this is very common in the United States.  This information is confirmed by PTSD United, a non- profit organization with the mission “to empower and provide support for anyone affected by Post- Traumatic Stress” (PTSD United, 2013). Since, many people in the United States are suffering from PTSD, Melara’s work is important because it can address this epidemic.

I believe that if people take their time to analyze how a stressful an event can be, they might understand people that suffer from PTSD, and not coerce or sway them to do something that they do not want. Sometimes, people experienced an abuse and they develop PTSD, which might lead them to avoid watching movies that have abusive content. Additionally, when many people learn that a psychological disorder has a biological basis to it, meaning it is somethings that was caused by a damage in their brain, people become more sympathetic when people know that it is a medical condition. However, some people that suffer from PTSD do not seek for professional help. “I think the incident of PTSD in that there is like 5 to 8 percent of the population. I think that is small portion of people that seek for professional help probably less of the half. Many of them turn to alcohol or other drugs to deal with it” (Melara, 2019). This means that there is a large percent of people with PTSD who also have an addiction problem because they might have flashbacks and anxiety and they prefer to drink alcohol or use drugs rather than go to a psychologist.

Dr. Melara claims that “the symptoms get worse over time. Suppose that you got a trauma in your childhood you may only develop symptoms when you become an adult. Suppose you were abused when you were a child by your parents or a neighbor you may only start having anxiety attacks and having memory of this when you are 30-year-old” ( Melara, 2019). It is very sad that when people suffer a trauma this becomes a disorder and this trauma haunts them for years and years. The work that he is doing is very important not only in the science field but also in our community, because people can understand that if they are abusing of someone else, they are causing people to develop a trauma and a disorder at the same time.

Furthermore, another research article that focuses on attention and problems of concentration is titled “Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Attentional Inhibition Training and Perceptual Discrimination Training in a Visual Flanker Task.” In this research, he used two different groups. One group was trained in order to have a better accuracy in their task, while the other group that he trained was to ignore the task by having distractions. “The people who were trained to be better at the task they had did not improve to perform the task but the people who were trained to ignore the distraction performed much better” (Melara, 2019). This is very interesting for me because I thought that people that were trained to perform better would have had a better improvement in their task, but it was the opposite. I really liked how he analyzed people’s distraction, because I can understand other people when they get distracted but they are not the only ones. I also get distracted by thoughts that come into my head when I am sitting in a lecture hall listening to my professor.

In conclusion, Robert Melara does extremely important work in the science field, and transforms the way people think about Post-Traumatic stress disorder. It is very interesting to know how people can get distracted when they have a disorder like PTSD but not only people get distracted because they suffer from PTSD, they can get distracted in many ways. It is normal that people get distracted because the human brain is always wondering and thinking about something else when they should pay attention. As a result, by knowing his research we can have a knowledge about how our mind works and how they can be damaged by traumas.

Work Cited

Robert D. Melara, Lesia M. Ruglass, Eric A. Fertuck, Denise A. Hien,
Regulation of threat in post-traumatic stress disorder: Associations between inhibitory control and dissociative symptoms,
Biological Psychology,Volume 133, 2018, Pages 89-98, ISSN 0301-0511,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.01.017.

Melara, R. D., Singh, S., & Hien, D. A. (2018). Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Attentional Inhibition Training and Perceptual Discrimination Training in a Visual Flanker Task. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 12, 191. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00191

PTSD Statistics. (2013). Retrieved April 24, 2019, from http://www.ptsdunited.org/ptsd-statistics-2/

Rubin, M., Hien, D. A., Das, D., & Melara, R. D. (2017). Inhibitory Control under Threat: The Role of Spontaneous Eye Blinks in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Brain sciences, 7(2), 16. doi:10.3390/brainsci7020016

 Jimenez, M. (2019, March). Personal interview with R. Melara.