Jagdeep Wadhwa-Brown
Department, Institution: Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck
UBEL Pathway: Health and Wellbeing
Supervisor: Co Supervised by Professor Emily Jones and Professor Jonathan Smith
Contact details: Jwadhw01@student.bbk.ac.uk
About Me
After completing a BSc in Neuroscience and Psychology (Dual Honors) at Keele University, I went on to complete a PGCE (Secondary Chemistry) and, later, a MA (Science Education) from UCL. I then had a very happy and successful 15-year teaching career, mostly in special needs education. In my efforts to better support the learning of my students I undertook a MSc in Educational Neuroscience, jointly run by UCL and Birkbeck.
My Research
My project employs a multi-modal, mixed-methods approach to understand the embodied experience of masking in autistic women. It integrates in-depth qualitative interviews with objective physiological and neural data.
To capture the personal, subjective experience of masking, I will use Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which is designed to explore how individuals make sense of their lived experiences. This narrative data will be compared with real-time physiological measures, such as heart rate and skin conductance, to provide objective markers of bodily stress and arousal. Concurrently, neural activity will be monitored using EEG and fNIRS to identify the brain processes involved.
By comparing these three streams of information—the individual’s verbal account, their body’s response, and their brain’s activity—my research will identify areas of convergence. This integrated approach will allow for a more comprehensive and robust understanding of the cognitive processes underlying masking, contributing to the interdisciplinary field of Experiential Neuroscience.
Impact of My Research
The insights from this study hold the potential for significant, real-world change for autistic women. By providing objective measures of the severity of masking, the research may equip practitioners with new tools to assess the effectiveness of therapies and interventions. This could help inform targeted support programmes that empower autistic women to recognise and manage masking behaviours, and may lead to earlier interventions that prevent or reduce the risk of burnout. Ultimately, this work aims to foster more inclusive educational environments and workplaces by informing the creation of better-tailored support structures and policies that reduce the need for masking.
This project hopes to make a foundational contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Experiential Neuroscience. It provides a framework for studying the embodied cognitive processes of masking, moving beyond traditional qualitative approaches that can often lose individual nuance. This should offer a richer, more comprehensive understanding of a deeply personal phenomenon. Ultimately, if this approach is successful in validating the experience of masking, it could be applied as a new methodological framework to study a wide variety of other subjective experiences.