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It's always a question sort of lurking around in my mind, which is, you know, I'm a little

neurotic, I'm a little crazy, I'm a little weird, and is that because I was studied?

And who would I have been if I hadn't been studied?

In research, there's something called the Observer Effect,

and it's when the very active watching something changes or influences the thing being watched.

For Susanna Breslin, you could say her entire life is the observer effect in action,

because for 30 years, she was watched by psychology researchers.

Jack and Gene Block in the late 1960s conceived,

block and block longitudinal study,

and at the time there was this paradigm crisis in personality research.

People just weren't clear on whether or not personality traits were real

and whether they remained stable over the course of a lifetime.

And the only way to find out was to gather together a group of

kids and study them from childhood and well into adulthood, and then see, you know, could you

see they were essentially the same person over time?

Susanna was one of 128 kids that the blocks recruited for this study.

And while the researchers definitely didn't intend to play a role in shaping their participants,

Susanna says in her case, they absolutely did, in ways both positive and negative.

Ultimately, I had a longer relationship with a study than I did with my father.

So it was kind of like a third parent.

This is all in the mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

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