 So welcome everybody to our next Cecil Gibb seminar today. We're really happy for everyone to be joining us on this kind of dreary day. But what better way to be inside than to be at a research seminar by a wonderful guest. So I'm going to hand over to Kali who'll do a bit of housekeeping for you and then to Professor Kate Reynolds to introduce our wonderful speaker for today. Hi everyone. So just letting everybody know that the session today is going to be recorded and that recording will be made available to you afterwards. You've all been muted and will remain muted for the presentation. If you'd like to ask a question at the end then just raise your hand with the zoom function and we'll turn off your mute so you can ask. If you prefer there is also a chat and Q&A function but we're going to do mostly verbally spoken questions. So I'll hand over to Kate. Thanks. So I wanted to welcome our speaker today, Katie Greenway. We've been talking to Katie about this talk probably since February. She was scheduled to come and talk I think the week before ANU decided to stop these kind of gatherings I guess. And then we postponed it to now thinking that by October we could presumably try and get Katie here face to face to join us and we were going to make the most of that visit. So we had all sorts of things planned for Katie to work with early career researchers on grant writing and grant success and other kind of ways in which she was going to interact with the social group. So we're still going to hold you to that, Katie, but we're very happy to have you here to join us today for the seminar. And one of the reasons why we thought Katie was such a good speaker was because of her experience really as an early career researcher. Although you're probably not quite that now, Katie, I would hesitate. I'm clinging to the name. But Kay is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. She has had a number of fellowships, including one with the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. She's had lots of ARC success, including with a DECRA and you're currently a future fellow on the ARC system. And we all know just how hard and challenging getting awarded those fellowships are. So it's great to have you here to talk about some of the research that I think is part of the future fellowship. Part of the discovery grant. Yeah, all within the ARC family. That Katie has. So I'll hand over to you to tell us all about secrets. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. And thanks everyone for coming. It's really lovely to see some familiar names. And I look forward to touching base with some of you when we can do some more interactive sessions in future. I'm personally very sorry that I can't be there in person to meet everyone. But, you know, hopefully in the future we'll be able to do this as per COVID normal. I'll begin sharing my screen and please do mention if there's any issues, you know, with seeing this as I go through. As Kate mentioned, I'm going to talk a little bit about secrecy today, which is something that I'm very interested in, but have only just recently started researching in collaboration with a number of people who know about this topic much more than I and are much more qualified in some of the methods that I'll be discussing. So this has been a real fun exercise for me to learn more about the process of secrecy and how it plays out in everyday life using some methods that are able to capture the richness of this process as it occurs daily. And using daily diary and experience sampling methodology. And so these are the researchers who are involved in this discovery grant looking at the concept of secrecy in everyday life. And what I'm just going to do in this talk is really try and give you a bit of an overview about some of the things that certainly were interesting questions for me when I started thinking about this area of research. Around this question of what we keep secret. And also a little bit about how we're thinking about the process of keeping secrets and what are some of the ways that we can better understand these processes and ideally with a view to intervening to improve people's experience while during the process of keeping secrets. So we think about secrecy as the sustained intention to conceal information from another person or people. And what this means is it's possible to have a secret even if you never actually have to find yourself concealing that information from someone else. An example that I use is if I have a secret that I once cheated on the test, and I intend that to remain secret from other people, then I'm having a secret about that information, even though it may never come up in conversation where I actively have to conceal that information from anyone else. So that's the way that we think about secrecy as the intention to have information stay concealed from others. And the way that secrecy has traditionally been looked at in past work is originally using lab based paradigms and the greatest tradition of social psychology, bringing people into the lab, and giving them an often relatively arbitrary secret to keep. Sometimes it's a particular word that they couldn't let a lab partner know about. But of course, this lacks ecological validity in that it's it can never really approximate the experience of keeping a secret that is very important to you from many people in your lives. So some other approaches have looked at surveys of real people who have real secrets. And that's approximating more this sense of what it's actually like to keep a secret that's very important to you. But an issue with that particular approach is that it only really captures specific types of secrets. So you have to go to populations of people who you believe are keeping secrets about a particular thing. Be that a mental health diagnosis or someone's sexuality status or a secret in a relationship, for example. And so that's, again, not capturing the full range of secrets that people might have in their everyday lives. And so an approach that Michael Slapion, who's a colleague and friend and collaborator on this work. The approach that he's taken is to look at common secrets, things that we usually keep secret from other people and trying to take a more systematic approach to documenting what those kinds of secrets might be. In the process of doing this, Michael surveyed at this stage, thousands of people across many different studies to get a sense of the kinds of things that they keep secret. And from this he's developed the common secrets questionnaire, which gives these range of secrets. It's identified 38 common things that people keep secret from others and turn that into a questionnaire that can allow us to assess these secrets across a wider range of the population. This is one of these studies looking at the ranking of these different things that people keep secret. So the numbers next to the secrets here indicate their relative rank of importance within this particular study. Those ranks do shift around quite a bit. So it's not the case that having extra relational thoughts is the most common secret that people keep. It was just the most common secret in this particular sample. You can see here that people keep secrets about a wide variety of things. And I like to group these into three main categories. One that is really secrets involving other people and interactions with other people and ways that we might have treated them. Another category that's probably the largest category, which is sensitive information about ourselves that we don't want other people to know about. And then there's this really interesting subset of secrets that are positive secrets that we don't want people to know about, or at least during a set period of time we don't want them to know about. And I'm really happy to talk about that category of secrets and how we're looking at those. Although the majority of the work that I'm going to talk about today does focus on relatively negative secrets in people's lives. So this is what the questionnaire looks like or an example item from this questionnaire. It gives people these 38 experiences that they might have had in everyday life. In this particular example, having extra relational thoughts about someone outside of your relationship or using drugs. And the response options here give people a range of ways of identifying a secret that they might have ranging from, I've had this experience and kept it secret from absolutely everyone through to, I've had this experience but never kept it secret or even I've never had this experience. So it's able to distinguish a secret that's kept from absolutely everyone in your life from a secret that's only kept from certain people, and also a secret that is maybe a prior secret or something that you once kept secret. If you're interested in this questionnaire, I encourage you to go to keepingsecrets.org where you can take the questionnaire yourself and get feedback on how common your secrets are in relation to people in your particular age bracket and gender category. And what Michael's research shows is that secrecy is an incredibly common process. So about 97% of people are keeping at least one secret at any given time. That might sound like a lot, but recall that this isn't necessarily information that's kept secret from absolutely everyone. This can be secret that's kept from only certain people or even just one person in your life. And I think even more strikingly, Michael's research shows that we keep a lot of secrets. We don't just have one secret. In fact, on average, people are keeping around about 13 secrets at any given time. That does fluctuate across the different samples that we look at in different studies, but it does tend to hover around this 13 mark. And in some work that we've done, we've also looked at confided secrets or secrets that we have that other people have told us and found that in some cases we have even more secrets that have been confided in us than we have our own. So secrecy is really ubiquitous. It's this thing that's with us in everyday life, which I think makes it even more interesting to study. So just looking at a broad kind of brush stroke approach to secrecy and what are some of the things that we keep and how do we keep those secrets. On average, we're keeping some secrets, about a third of the secrets that we've surveyed over a number of different studies are kept from absolutely everybody. Another third is kept from about one to two people. And then there's certain secrets that three or more people know. So these might be what we could call open secrets. The vast majority of secrets are being kept about information that relates to oneself compared to other people. So this is that really large category of secrets that tends to be about sensitive information about ourselves that we don't want other people to know. And also the vast majority of secrets that people keep are negative in valence. So we tend to feel relatively bad about the information that we keep secret and it's only this sliver of certain types of secrets that we could consider positive or that we might feel good about keeping. And secrecy, I think probably unsurprisingly, if you've thought about this in relation to maybe your own experience can have some negative well-being consequences. So it turns out that experimental work has shown that keeping a secret is fatiguing. It actually feels really tiring and exhausting to keep information from others. I think this makes a lot of sense when we think about how communicative and social we are by nature, it's actually hard work to keep information from other people. And also secrecy can be very socially isolating. So it's something that keeps us from others. It creates a barrier between us and other people by not being able to be fully open and transparent in our dealings with other people. And the question is why does secrecy have these particular negative impacts? And traditional approaches to secrecy have really thought about it as a process of concealment. The argument goes that secrecy is problematic for our well-being because we have to work really hard to inhibit information from getting out to other people. So when we're interacting with other people, we have to stop ourselves from blurting out information or we have to steer the conversation away from topics that might relate to the secret. But what Michael's work shows is that there's actually a different experience that we have with secrecy, which can actually be even more impactful on our well-being, which is simply thinking about our secrets. So outside the times when we have to interact with people and might have to conceal information from them, we're actually alone with thoughts of our secret. And our minds can return to those thoughts and perseverate on those thoughts, even when we're not with other people. And this is really how we tend to study secrecy now in our work is by looking at episodes where people have to conceal information from other people, and episodes when they're alone thinking about information related to their secret. And these are examples of some items that we would usually ask or traditionally ask when looking at those two experiences with secrecy. And what quite a bit of research shows now is that we actually think about our secrets more than we conceal them. So when asking people to reflect over the past month, how many times they thought about their secret and how many times they had to conceal their secret from other people, we tend to find that people say they think more about their secret than they end up actually concealing it. And that's important because to these traditional approaches to secrecy have really conceptualized it as a concealment or an inhibition process, which means that they're missing out on a lot of the information that actually makes secrecy impactful for our psychological well-being. And what this research also shows is that it's thinking about secrets that tend to be particularly impactful for well-being. So when looking at the relative variance in predicting various well-being and negative social outcomes, it tends to be the case that the degree to which we think about or our mind wanders to thoughts of our secret is what's predicting these negative well-being outcomes compared to the amount of times that we end up concealing that information from others. And there's some good reasons for that. For example, when we're concealing information from others that tends to be relatively planned, we know we're going into an interaction with someone who we don't want to find out this particular piece of information. So it's relatively expected that we're going to have to face these interaction episodes where we may have to conceal. And so we can make plans for how we're going to tackle that if it comes up. It feels relatively more under our control. Contrast that with the amount of time that we spend thinking about our secrets and our minds wander to thoughts of our secrets. And these tend to be centered around things that are unresolved, that are ongoing, or things that we want to act on but haven't quite acted on yet or significant personal concerns that we have. And there's not necessarily a clear path forward for how to deal with that problematic thought process in the same way that there is with an active concealment process. So that's some of the reasons why thinking about our secrets can be more detrimental for psychological wellbeing than can concealment of secrets. So contrasting these current approaches to secrecy with how we've decided to look at secrets, which is in everyday life. And to do this we use daily diary studies and experience sampling studies to look at people's experiences of thinking about and concealing their secrets across a longer period of time with more assessment times. So for those of you not familiar with these methodologies, essentially the daily diary approach involves asking people once a day, usually in the evening, how many times they thought about or concealed their secret across that day and other psychological experiences they may have had with their secret during that particular 24 hour period. And in the particular study that I'll talk about we had a baseline survey before people did the daily diary surveys and a follow up survey after they did this which allowed us to gather some individual difference information about people and about their secrets. But also, as I'll talk about a little bit in the results, it allows us to see how people's daily experiences with thinking about and concealing their secrets maps on to their retrospective recall of how much they actually end up doing that. In contrast, an experience sampling study has a lot more measurement occasions. So here we use a smartphone app that my colleagues have developed at the University of Melbourne called SEMA3. It's an open source application if anyone's interested in doing this kind of work. And it essentially participants download the app on their phone and they get buzzed in this particular case six times a day for seven days via the app in order to fill out a very short survey about their experiences with their secret over the past two hour period. And in that particular study, we also had people do a baseline survey before doing the experience sampling component for among other things so that we could make sure that people actually had a secret and we're keeping a secret so that we could ask them about their most significant secret and their experience of that secret over the following seven days. So there were some real advantages to this approach over some of the previous methodological approaches to secrecy. We're particularly interested in whether this might reduce some recall bias that people have when we ask people to estimate how many times they thought about or concealed their secret over the past month. We're really widening the scope of people's recall and we know that they may not be particularly accurate at being able to identify times that they actually thought about or concealed their secret during that period. It also increases the ecological validity we can see how people are responding and experiencing their secrets as they go about their everyday lives not relying on them being in a lab in a relatively artificial circumstance and of course we can use this to look at their real secrets that they're having right at the moment. This also allows us to look at dynamic processes and how patterns in thinking about and concealing secrets fluctuate over time. And of course other psychological experiences related to secrecy around well being or social outcomes like loneliness, for example, and we're able to see how that those dynamic processes fluctuate as a function of context. So that's a real benefit of the ESM approach is being able to assess changes in people's everyday contexts and how that might map on to these kinds of processes looking at things like whether individuals are with someone else when they're filling out the survey, for example, or other features of their physical or social environment that might impact on their psychological experience of secrecy. Or indeed other psychological processes. So I'll tell you really briefly and I should clarify these are really new data for me so I actually just finished middling around in these data sets this morning. And so this is kind of hot off the presses information that I'll, I'll give you here. In the daily diary study we had 200 online participants recruited through prolific academic complete the common secrets questionnaire. And then we had people who had a current secret identify their most significant secret that they would respond about over the subsequent week as they filled out the daily surveys. And that of the participants who had secrets there was a range from a couple of people who had absolutely no secrets through to 31 the maximum here would be 38 secrets so some of these people are very small handful as you can see from the histogram quite a lot of secrets, although this tends to hover around about the 10 average and from the secrets that people currently have they selected the most significant secret and we just let them self identify what that is without going into too much detail about what that might look like for people. This is just an indication of some of the, the most common secrets that people were keeping in this particular sample. So the most common secret that people identified having in this study was having lied to someone being followed by being dissatisfied with the self in some sense. But as I said before, these relative frequencies tend to shift across the different studies so it's not the case that certain things are more likely to be kept secret than others universally. And looking at just a couple of profile or demographics about the secrets that people were keeping on average these were relatively significant secrets so about 5.35 on a seven point scale that makes sense because we've asked people to identify their most significant secret. Generally speaking people felt relatively more negative than positive about their secrets. And they felt a moderate amount of control over their secrets so something we're interested in secrecy is whether you view your secret as something that you control and are able to give out to other people as you choose or if it's something that controls you and it's something that you're at the mercy of the situation you're in whether that nation is slipped to other people accidentally or not. And in this particular sample about half of our participants didn't intend to reveal that secret to anyone compared to the next largest majority of people who weren't sure whether they were interested in revealing the secret. So mostly we want to keep these secrets to ourselves or at least we want to reserve the right to not give that information to others if we don't want to. And so we were really interested in how much people actually reported thinking about and concealing their secret across this particular week and contrasting that with people's retrospective recall of how much they did this in past studies when we ask over a wider period of time. And across this seven days we found that on average people reported thinking about their secret about 13 times whereas they reported concealing their secret about five times and that follows the general pattern that we've seen in other work that it seems to be relatively more common to be alone and thinking about your secret than it does to be actively concealing that secret from someone else. But if we can trust that the daily diary estimates with previous research where we've asked people to estimate across a much larger period so across the past month how many times have you thought about your secret versus concealed it. There's a real mark difference in how much people actually report doing this so it seems like we're not particularly good at estimating how much we do these particular behaviors when we think about it over a wider period of time. That is not all that uncommon in in comparing retrospective recall and global self report scales compared to more fine grain daily diary studies but it's interesting in this case that we do get a larger number when we're asking people in the last 24 hours compared to in the last 30 days. We also asked people in this study after they finished the daily diary surveys to estimate how many times they think they thought about and concealed their secret over the past week and in part what we were interested in was whether people can remember how many times they did this after they've gone through this daily diary process and whether that might change from a baseline survey to a follow up survey. And when we compare these we find that people do seem to be relatively good once they've gone through a period of reporting every day on how much they think about and conceal their secrets. They tend to be fairly accurate after the fact in reporting on how much they did that at least in the daily diary context. Really, most recently we've just finished the experience sampling component of this particular study where we asked just over 100 community participants. This was a combination of first year psychology students and people who we recruited through social media and other advertisements in Melbourne. And we had them complete the common secrets questionnaire and then undergo an ESM protocol where they received six surveys a day for seven days and reported again on the most significant secret. And again, we found this quite large range of secrets from zero to 30 secrets. Of course, people who don't have secrets can't participate in the study or our final sample of people who did have secrets and we had around about 15 people who didn't have secrets who we couldn't invite to do the ESM component. And we find again that these are relatively significant secrets that people are keeping this makes sense because this is when we ask people to identify what is the most significant secret. Again, these tend to be relatively more negative than positive and people have this moderate degree of control. This time we had slightly more people say that they did intend to reveal their secret compared to people who didn't. But the vast majority, well not vast, but the majority of people said they weren't sure about this. So I think this also kind of tells us that people are a little bit conflicted about the process of secrecy and whether or not they might want to share that information with others. In this study, really interestingly, we found that people reported thinking about their secrets a lot more than in past work. And they also reported thinking about their secrets more than they concealed their secrets. If we compare the ESM study on the left here, then we see that there's quite a big jump in the amount that people report thinking about their secrets. This is maybe not so surprising because this time we're asking people six times a day compared to once a day in the Daily Diary study. And something that we're kind of thinking about and trying to noodle out ourselves is, is it the case that people are thinking about their secrets more because we're prompting them to through the process of asking them about their secrets? Or are we just getting a more accurate interpretation of how much people actually think about these secrets? And that's an ongoing issue with ESM protocols in general to understand how much of it is this sort of increase in responsiveness as we ask people to reflect more on these psychological processes in daily life. We are people in the baseline survey to think about the week prior and estimate how many times they thought that they had thought about or concealed their secret. And we found that on average people said that they, they estimated that they did that about 13 times during the previous week compared to in the ESM survey, it was more like 30 times. I should say this 12.76 average of thinking about secrets in the baseline survey is actually pretty spot on when we look at the comparisons with the Daily Diary studies. So it does sort of get me thinking about maybe what might be the best method for assessing people's actual thinking about secrecy and maybe hovering it about the day level when we look at asking people these questions might be a bit more appropriate than the more fine grained full ESM protocol. So I'm going to speak really briefly just to give you a taste of where we're heading with this, this work moving beyond this more descriptive sense of the data to understanding the processes that people use to keep secrets. And of course something that I've mentioned before is that these secrets tend to be mostly negative in in valence. And of course research and surprisingly shows that people feel quite a range of negative emotions about the secrets that they keep and about the process of secrecy itself. In our Daily Diary and ESM work we find this as well so it's particularly the case that the degree to which people mind wander to or think about their secrets predicts feeling more negative across the week controlling for how they felt the previous day. So if I'm thinking more about my secret, I'm more likely to feel bad after the fact. It's less the case that concealment predicts these negative outcomes although it's still associated with some negative experiences. But this is just more generally in line with the fact that it's thinking about our secrets or mind wandering to thoughts of our secrets that seems to predict these negative well-being or emotionality outcomes compared to concealment. So something that I'm really interested in in some other work that I do is the process of emotion regulation and how we alter our emotional state to get it to a point that it's working effectively for us. And so this is a lens that we're also taking with secrecy is, you know, what are the strategies that people use to manage their emotions. Very very much about at this stage and do this we're looking at a range of candidate strategies that can very loosely be grouped to what we might call more adaptive strategies or strategies that tend to be associated with more outcomes and maladaptive strategies that tend to be associated with negative outcomes. I'm not going to go into too much detail about what each of these strategies do aside from saying that rumination is an emotion regulation process where we tend to perseverate on particularly negative emotions and expressive suppression is a strategy that we tend to use to hide how we're feeling on our faces so people can't tell how we're feeling on the inside. And those were two strategies that we anticipated may be particularly implicated in mind wandering and concealment, respectively. I'm going to skip over this particular bit in the interest of time because I do want to leave plenty of time for Q&A. But just to give you a taste of how some of these strategies are being associated with these secrecy processes in our daily diary and experience sampling studies. In our daily diary study we did find quite a strong link between thinking about or mind wandering to thoughts of our secrets and rumination about our emotions. I think that makes a lot of sense because these seem to be very linked processes. In the ESM study we actually found something slightly different which was that thinking about our secrets was associated with greater use of all of the emotion regulation strategies that we looked at. So this may be some indication that there could be some dis-regulation of emotion going on. The more we think about our secrets or feel overwhelmed with or consumed by thoughts of our secrets, the more we really try and use a range of different strategies to deal with the emotions that come up as a result of that. And so we may not be particularly effective emotion regulators when we're trying to regulate the emotions we experience in the context of thinking about our secrets. In contrast, concealment in the daily diary study was associated with greater use of expressive suppression. This makes sense to me theoretically because these are both relatively more behavioral strategies. So concealment involves inhibiting information, saying information to others, expressive suppression involves inhibiting emotional responses. So this was definitely in line with our predictions, although in the ESM survey we didn't find that particular link and instead we found that concealment was associated with greater rumination about our emotions. So we need to go back to the drawing board and think a little bit more about why we might be getting some of these conflicting outcomes. So what this is starting to get us to think about is the role that emotion regulation might play in secrecy and some of its well-being outcomes. And in particular what we are maybe hypothesizing is that it could be that people are using relatively ineffective or unsuccessful emotion regulation strategies to try and deal with the emotions that come up when they think about secrecy. And that could be one of the reasons why their well-being suffers as a result. And in particular, when we think about those secrets and are alone with those secrets and maybe feel more cut off from others. What this suggests to us is that if we can intervene at this stage and try and improve people's emotion regulation outcomes in the context of secrecy, we may be able to better improve people's experiences with keeping secrets. I should clarify here, we don't take an approach of suggesting that people shouldn't keep secrets or should reveal their secrets. That's definitely not for us to say and there are many good reasons why people might want to keep secrets. What we see our role is really understanding what that experience is like and understanding how to help people better manage that process if indeed they do want to keep keeping secrets. So let's just sum up here. I've told you that secrecy is incredibly common. In fact, most of the people in this Zoom webinar will be keeping a secret at this very moment. And we keep secrets about a range of different topics and we tend to think about those secrets more than we tend to actively conceal them from others. And we also experience a range of really strong emotions about keeping secrets. And we may be using some relatively more unhelpful strategies when we try and cope with the process of secrecy, which could account for some of these negative outcomes. This is just an acknowledgement of my incredibly generous funding sources without whom any of this work would be possible. And my great collaborators and lab mates who have been extremely helpful in the process of doing some of this work. So finally, I guess, thank you everyone for your attention. I'm looking forward to having a chat. Thanks, Katie. So we know a lot more now than we did at the beginning about secrets. I've got a few questions, but maybe we'll start there because I can't see anyone else. So I can indulge myself here as being part of the hosting. It struck me that when we saw what people are keeping secrets about, lots of them are to do with social norms that, you know, because we are sort of social animals and it seemed like the secrets were about those social relationships. And this idea that you've sort of presented that people are sort of cut off from others when they're ruminating or thinking about their secrets. But in fact, you know, they could be trying to problem solve social dynamics. It could connect them to others in to some others and exclude them from from other, you know, certain other people. So there could be a whole sort of given they're driven by this social life. They actually could be all about navigating social life to some degree. And yeah, absolutely. You've thought about, but is it a direction for for how you think about this work going forward? For sure. That's, I think, probably the most important next stage of this work is to really start to unpack what exactly are people thinking about when they're thinking about their secrets. My hunch is it the vast majority of that content will be social in nature. So in some other work where we've looked at people's motives for keeping secrets, we find there's a range of them, but they almost all tend to be social in nature. So people want to keep secrets to preserve social harmony. So I don't want to talk about and and have people, you know, have awkward conversations about things for reputational reasons. I don't want people to think poorly of me and also for belongingness reasons. I don't want people to exclude me or think poorly of me and not allow me to, you know, be part of the group. And so I my bet is my a primary prediction registration right here. My bet is that the vast majority of things that people think about when they think about their secrets will be in relation to social dynamics and social relationships and social groups compared to me as an individual. But that's certainly like, I think the next step for this work. I have a daughter who's 13 and, you know, I could think that whole careers could be spent just understanding secrets within that social network, the social dynamic. I mean, presumably people are learning about what to do. There's a whole way to navigate the world of secrets as well and how successfully you do that could have a real impact for I would imagine that age group in particular. So that's, yeah, I can point you in the direction of 13 year old girls. But let's go to others. I might let you do this. Yes. Yep. So I think I think Aaron was in first. So I'll let her chat. Okay. Is it working? Yep. That's working. Oh, fantastic. Katie, that was such a fascinating presentation. Every time you went on to the next slide, I thought, oh, lie detection, human memory. So my area of research is in cognition and human memory. And one of the things I was thinking about as you were talking was whether you had sort of separated out different types of secrets. So trying to understand the function, for example, of an autobiographical memory type secret. And in particular, when you look at that literature, they think they think about sort of the function of autobiographical memories as giving us sort of directive information about how to behave in the future. And the other thought that sort of associated with that autobiographical secrets as opposed to secrets about thoughts or agendas and that kind of thing is that autobiographical secrets are very closely or I'm just guessing maybe more closely associated with one sense of identity. So I wonder, you know, what your thoughts are in terms of unpacking the different types of secrets in terms of their functions and impact. I think that's such an interesting area to look into what I sort of, I guess a data, a data answer first and then a more speculative answer later. What we tend to find when looking at the common secrets questionnaire is it's not the actual type of secret that seems to matter when predicting wellbeing and social outcomes. So it's not the case that certain secret contents like, you know, having had an abortion or having lied to someone or having financial difficulties doesn't seem to be the case that those certain types of those secrets weigh more heavily on wellbeing compared to others. It seems to be the fact that it's, you know, whether it's significant and important to you that seems to matter the most. I would hypothesize that these autobiographical secrets, as you said, would probably be some of the more important and significant ones for people because they do have those, you know, identity implications and also we're probably constantly as we're meeting new people in the position of trying to figure out, do I disclose this? Do I, you know, not disclose this? What do I do with this information? How do I present myself? So I think that's such an interesting like case of secrets to look at. And frankly, it's not a way that I'd thought about it in the past. Like, I think there's also some, some interesting like past focused versus like future focused elements there as well. And I guess what we, well, I'm trying to think about what the mind wandering literature would say about this. I have a feeling that more, I can't remember which one it is either past focused mind wandering or future focused mind wandering tends to be better for us might be future focused because we can plan and adjust. Yeah. I'd have to look into that. But I think that's a kind of cool frame to look at and has definitely given me a lot to think about. So thank you. Really, really enjoyed your talk. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Erin. I'm just going to apologize to everybody. My video has somehow disappeared. But I'm sure you could all hear me. We've got a lineup of questions for you, Katie. So this is pretty exciting. So we might run with Michael next if Cali can unmute Michael and then Tegan and then Stephanie. I'm sorry. Thanks, Katie. Fantastic. But actually, Kate asked my question. So I'll give the floor to someone else. Thanks, Michael. We might go to Tegan then. Hi, Katie. Hi. Your work as always. I'll just ask you a quick question so we can move on to others. And really, that's just about how participants experience the actual study itself in terms of that opportunity to actually express their secrets. And I think I sort of got the sense you are arguing both that thinking about it all the time might cause negative emotions, but also trying to conceal it all the time might cause negative emotions. So is there, particularly in the studies where people are writing about their secrets kind of multiple times a day for a week, is there kind of potentially a positive kind of cathartic experience for having the chance to kind of share their secret with the researchers? Yeah, I certainly hope so. So what some ESM work has shown in the emotion space is the process of reflecting on your emotions can actually have positive well-being outcomes across time because they help you better understand your emotions and then identify ways of kind of dealing with that. So that was something that we certainly thought a lot about going into the study, not only the kind of ethical implications of asking people to think about and discuss their secrets, but also doing it over this like repetitive kind of period of time. The way that we did that just from like a functional perspective was in the baseline survey, we had people do the common secrets questionnaire which doesn't require you to disclose specific pieces of information just to select certain experiences and identify them as whether they're secret or not. And then when they identified their most significant secret, we had them write a few keywords about that secret without any specific information, but just something that would remind them. And then during the study we asked them, you know, remember we're asking you to think about your most significant secret. Do you remember what it is? And if they said no, then we sent them to a unique webpage where they could look up their own secret keywords. And so we never have access to that information and we sort of keep that separate. So that was kind of just the ethical process of how we tried to get around that. But in terms of how people seem to experience that, because we're just asking them really simply how many times you thought about it, how many times you had to conceal it, and then how you felt about it. We are hoping that this isn't having negative impacts on people and certainly we didn't have any seemingly negative responses from people and our compliance was really quite high across the study. So on average people filled out about 85% of the surveys and there was over 3000 surveys that they did over that period. So yeah, I hope it was a good process for people. And we also don't find that wellbeing and emotion experience like tapers off. People don't get more negative across the week as well, which is comforting to see. They don't seem to be suffering as a result of thinking about their secrets. Thanks, Katie. That makes sense. Thank you, Teagan. So we're going to move to Steph now. Thanks, Kristen. Hi, Katie. Really great talk. Really interesting topic. I've got two questions. One touched on actually a little bit in response to Kate's. So you're talking about the how and the what of secrets. I wondered if you thought about the why and so the functional reasons that people keep secrets. Is it purely self-interest? Is it maintaining relationships, protecting others? And does that impact, I suppose, the impact of holding that secret? Yeah. So actually this talk is kind of cannibalised from another talk that I've given in the past that does address the why as well. I cut that out for interests of time. But yeah, in that work we've looked at those reasons that people keep secret. And as I said, they tend to be mostly social in nature. Even I would argue the kind of self-interest reasons for keeping secrets are ultimately social in nature or almost are always social in nature because it has to do with how other people would react if they found that information out about you. And in one paper where we looked at this, we looked at it in the context, it's very relevant coming up now, in the context of the 2016 US presidential election and looked at people's reasons for keeping their vote secret. So we had people who were secretly voting for Trump and people who were secretly voting for Clinton and people who were secretly voting for a third party candidate. And there we found that those three social reasons were the main ones that people reported keeping their secret, but also that the act of keeping that vote secret from others. And in particular, you know, ruminating about or thinking about that secret was associated with a variety of negative well-being outcomes as well as regretting the vote after the fact. So that was a fun study to run. And I'm interested to see if we get similar results if we repeat it in a month or so. Yeah, that's really interesting. My other question is more just a thought. It's interesting that you said that like the magnitude of the secret isn't sort of what predicts its impact on well-being. I wonder if you've thought about measuring something like a cognitive variable like individual differences in attention or control, which is, you know, how much you're able to sort of focus on things that are task relevant and suppress things that aren't. I wonder if that might be important in this kind of context. I think it would be super important. Unfortunately, we didn't have any, we haven't assessed any of those types of individual differences in the baseline surveys that we've done. Although I should have a chat to you afterwards about what we should maybe add in some of our follow-up studies. We have one paper that looks at whether people want to engage with or suppress thoughts of their secrets. That's not a sort of individual difference approach to it. But we're just interested in whether people want to not think about their secrets or whether they actually want to think about their secrets. And what we find there is that the more significant the secret, the more people actually want to think about it and engage with it. And, you know, wonder about different implications that it might have, or I suspect it's this kind of future-focused planning stuff, how am I going to deal with this, you know, in an ongoing way. Whereas the more trivial the secret, the more people just wanted to suppress it and forget about it. So I certainly think those kinds of attentional orientation processes are really important when it comes to secrecy and emotion regulation for that matter as well. Great. Thanks again. Really great to have really enjoyed it. Thank you, Steph. That actually has completed our list of questions and we're just about out of time now. So we might have to end there. I think that was so fantastic. Katie, I really thoroughly enjoyed it. It's such an interesting area that I don't know we think about very much, even though we're all keeping secrets as you said. So I wanted to say on behalf of RSP, thank you so much for taking your time out today and sharing your research with us. And we do hope you can come and visit very soon and do those meetings that you had been planning. For everybody else, we have another research seminar next week. So we have Professor Lindell Strasdans, who's the director of the Research School of Population Health here at the ANU. And she'll be speaking about time as a social determinants. So we look forward to all of you joining us again and I thank you again, Katie, for such a wonderful presentation today. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone. Bye. Have a great week.