10.01.08
Posted in Cognitive Science, Education, Gender Bias, Jacob Canon, Politics, Psychology, Racism, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, elections, ethics, history at 11:04 am by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, we share comments and reflections from the UVa Faculty Roundtable concerning Race and Gender in Politics.
Last Thursday, the Miller Center of Public Affairs hosted the UVa Faculty Round Table on Race and Gender in Politics. Sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Arts & Sciences Magazine, the forum was moderated by Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. The panel included UVa faculty members, Paul Freedman, Brian Nosek, Lynn Sanders, Vesla Weaver and Nick Winter.
Moderator, Douglas Blackmon called this point in time “an extraordinary moment in American history and American discourse,” while Associate Politics Professor Paul Freedman referred to this time as “Christmas” for political scientists because of the multicultural base of the presidential candidates.
Reflections on Race and Gender in Politics Forum [7:30m]:
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Freedman said the implicit message in political advertising is the important element of political ads. An example of this was a 2006 Republican ad run in Tennessee, concerning Democrat, Harold Ford, Jr. Freedman said, the ad included “a white woman who claimed to have had met Harold at the Playboy Party and she suggested that he call her, the ad concluded with the text on the screen, Harold Ford…’he’s just not right.’ And many people suggested that the implicit message was, ‘he’s just not white.’” Freedman added this year’s election has seen less of these types of messages.
Associate Politics Professor Lynn Sanders, spoke to the question, “will Obama lose this election due to race.” Referring to a recent Stanford AP poll and the subsequent media spin that Obama will lose the election by six to fifteen percent simply because he is black, Sanders said, “I think that it is really, really interesting how tied we are to that kind of pessimism. There is an alternative framework that we could be focusing on, which is… that we’re living in a time when we have accomplished such a feat that we can have these different kinds of candidates.” Referring to the Bradley/Wilder effect - when voters tell pollsters they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, yet, on Election Day, they vote for the white candidate - Sanders said this effect has lessened over the past forty to fifty years and the reverse was observed in the 2006 Tennessee race between Ford and the Republican candidate.
Assistant Politics Professor Nick Winter spoke about the book he is working on, “The Secret History of Gender.” Winter said, looking at data from the last three decades, the Democratic party is associated with stereotypically feminine traits such as being “… compassionate, generous, egalitarian, and so forth and conversely they like the republican party for relatively stereotypically masculine characteristics, it’s efficient, supports the work ethic…” Yet, when it comes to Presidential candidates, he said the electorate tends to feel “… that our ideas about what it makes a good leader are themselves very associated with ideas about men and masculinity.”
Associate Professor of Psychology Brian Nosek’s data suggests that some political choices we make are influenced by “implicit” feelings toward blacks, women or the aged without us even realizing it. Nosek said of people who participate in his online surveys, “… 80% of white Americans who come on and try this task have a stronger association of black with bad, than white with bad, suggesting that they have associations in their minds that are quite distinct from the egalitarian values that they tend to express. Likewise with gender, it’s harder to associate female with leader or female with career than males, even if they will explicitly say, ‘no, I’m egalitarian minded… we don’t necessarily know that these things are happening.”
Mr. Blackmon observed that the research of the panelist had led to potentially opposed ideas of how much race and gender effect the election process.
Answering this question, Assistant Politics Professor Vesla Weaver satirically noted, that this may be the first time that professor Sanders and she had been considered the “racial optimist in a room.” She went on to say, “I’m certainly not saying that there aren’t negative racial attributions that happen. I do think we need to question how much the Bradley Effect has been overstated, how much the negative aspect of race is the thing that makes headlines, and what effect that has on perceptions, on people, on raising sensitivities, on looking for it.” Professor Sanders added that it was interesting “…the way conservative and optimistic, and liberal and pessimistic, are associated. And this is a real consistent theme in this year’s election.” She said that none of the panelist felt that bigotry and racism were no longer issues, yet much had changed in the short time since the 1960’s.
The goals of the panel to open public discussion on these issues were summarized by Professor Weaver’s salient comments concerning what would occur if the topic of race and gender were not brought to the public’s attention. Weaver said, the danger is not only, not having this type of public discourse, but that “it opens up space for a powerful counter narrative to develop on November 5th. And that is the counter narrative that, for blacks, for young voters, for anyone that was mobilized… and saw this as the first time their constituency was being spoken to, the counter narrative would be, if not now, then when.” She added, “it opens up a rift in that powerful American dream logic. It opens a rift in the notion that this is an egalitarian society. That we can move forward together… And so if we don’t have that very public conversation now about race, the public conversation that going to get had when we look in the mirror on November 5th is going to be a conversation that is going to be uglier.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will discuss the work of Brad Cox, professor of physics and a principal investigator with the University of Virginia’s High Energy Physics Group and his involvement with the new Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland.
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05.21.08
Posted in Jacob Canon, Psychology, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, anxiety, pharmaceutical, physical health, sociology, stress at 11:04 am by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar Web site written by Amber Davis, we look at UVA psychologist Amori Yee Mikami, her research of ADHD, and how intervening factors have made this disorder more complex and detrimental for young females.
In studies conducted on the effects of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in young children, researchers often turn to the most likely exhibitors of the impulsive and aggressive behaviors associated with the ailment — young males. What University of Virginia psychologist Amori Yee Mikami sought to uncover in researching ADHD, however, were the intervening factors that made this disorder more complex and detrimental for young females.
Girls and ADHD [4:59m]:
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Mikami said, “We know a lot about boys with ADHD, partially because the disorder is three times more common in boys. Many research studies on ADHD have focused on how the disorder affects young boys. What I became interested in was how ADHD affected girls’ behaviors, particularly in adolescence.”
Since her original research at the University of California Berkley — where she found evidence supporting the hypothesis that ADHD contributes to social isolation — Mikami has focused on untangling the gender differences in children suffering with ADHD. Her most recent study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, concludes that girls with ADHD are at a greater risk for the binge eating and purging behaviors associated with bulimia nervosa.
Mikami said, “We know that children with ADHD have increased risk for delinquency, aggressive behavior problems, drug use and depression in adolescence, and now this study suggests they may also be at risk for an eating disorder problem. Since eating disorders are 10 times more common in females, and the effects of ADHD on girls are not as widely understood, the link between eating disorders and ADHD may have gone unnoticed or untreated.”
According to Mikami, the impulsive behaviors common in ADHD can make it difficult to maintain healthy eating habits and a healthy weight, leading girls to become self-conscious about their body image. Meanwhile, current ADHD medications on the market such as Ritalin may actually exacerbate the problem.
Mikami, who is currently conducting research to determine potential effects of these medications on bulimia nervosa symptoms said, “These drugs tend to make youth a little thinner because a common side effect of stimulant medications is appetite suppression. What I’m testing is whether this medicine is something that might discourage or encourage eating disorder problems.”
Mikami’s research plans include studying whether young males with ADHD have similar potential to develop eating disorders.
In addition to her ongoing research, Mikami oversees the “Friendship Clinic” in Charlottesville, which offers children with ADHD and their parents an eight-week program in which both parents and children learn how to cope with the disorder together. The clinic allows Mikami to observe how children with ADHD interact with their peers while introducing them to an environment that encourages typical social behavior.
Mikami said, “Early intervention is one of the most effective ways to combat the negative effects of ADHD. Girls with ADHD are often teased and rejected by their peers. Childhood peer problems seem to predict eating disorder symptoms in adolescence. Getting parents and teachers involved might help prevent these instances.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will well look at Dr. George T. Rodeheaver and PluroGel™, his patented gel which reduces suffering and improves the recovery of burn victims and patients with chronic wounds.
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04.30.08
Posted in Consumer Culture, Jacob Canon, Psychology, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, happiness, sociology at 12:04 pm by Jacob Canon
In last week’s show we examined the research of we examined the works of Tobias Lear, secretary to George Washington and envoy to North Africa for President Thomas Jefferson.
Material World [6:21m]:
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In today’s show, adapted from an article recently published on the Oscar Web site written by Melissa Maki, research communications coordinator for the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, we look at the research of Allison Pugh, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and her study of how families deal with the increasing demands of a consumer culture.
Parents in the U.S. have become all too familiar with the latest fashion trends, toys and electronic gadgets as children regularly plead for the next best thing. But how do parents — especially those with limited incomes — comply with their children’s demands?
Allison Pugh, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, began looking at parents’ buying habits as a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. Based on her findings, and with the help of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, Pugh is currently completing a book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture, scheduled to be published by the University of California Press in the spring of 2009.
Pugh said, “I wanted to look at consumption and how the standards for an adequate childhood are ratcheting up, and how affluent and low-income parents are handling that.” She spent three years conducting ethnographic research: interviewing parents, volunteering and observing in three different California schools, including a private school and two public schools, one low-income and one affluent.
During this time, Pugh found common themes among the study’s economically and racially diverse participants. She said, “In all these schools, children feel the need to have certain things or experience certain things — like going to popular movies or local attractions — to be visible or to belong in their social groups.”
The need to belong transcends class boundaries, as does the parental tendency to comply with children’s desires. Pugh found that even those parents struggling to put food on the table and pay bills at the end of the month find ways to provide their kids with expensive, popular items so that their children achieve a sort of “dignity” among their peers.
Yet, Pugh did find differences in the specific buying habits of poor and wealthy families. She said, “Low-income and affluent families are all buying, and they are all buying in response to this need to belong on the part of their children. And in some cases they are even buying the exact same thing, like Game Boys, but the way they buy is different and the way they talk about buying is different.”
Affluent families engage in what Pugh terms “symbolic deprivation,” deemphasizing their spending, not wanting to appear materialistic, and focusing on specific items they don’t buy for their child, whether it be electronics or Barbie dolls. In contrast, she said, low-income families engage in “symbolic indulgence.” Since poor families can’t provide their child’s every desire, they focus on key items with the highest social value, like Sony PlayStations.
Much of the current literature in this area explains the growing culture of spending around kids in the past few decades as parents acting in a rational way in an increasingly materialistic society. The argument is that people are simply trying to get ahead and have more. Pugh’s research is unique in that it brings the significance of emotions into this equation.
Pugh explained, “The proliferation of commodities in childhood has changed what possessions mean. Now they mean belonging to children and they mean care to parents and to children.” She argues that buying for children has created a new dynamic in parent-child relationships. “It’s about recognition of desire, it’s about empathy, and about the parent realizing how difficult it is to be different in American culture.”
Pugh notes that parents today are confronted with two choices, neither of which is good. They can give in to the consumer culture, even if they can’t really afford to, or they can deprive their children of goods, putting kids at risk of being ostracized by their social groups.
Regulating how companies are allowed to market goods to children may be part of the solution to this dilemma, but Pugh asserts that items achieve social value not immediately after children are exposed to advertisements, but when kids get together in small groups and talk about them.
With this in mind, Pugh concludes her book with suggestions of how parents and schools can collectively organize around consumption issues in order to drain commodities of some of their social power. Some promising examples include a Michigan group that is fighting the escalation of party bags and other birthday phenomena, informal groups of parents agreeing to limit their children’s exposure to popular culture, and schools banning cell phones and iPods on their campuses.
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Richard Handler, UVa professor of anthropology, and how the popularized story of colonial Williamsburg, upon reexamination reveals different side of tale.
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11.29.07
Posted in Asian-Americans, European-Americans, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychology, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, happiness at 12:06 pm by Jacob Canon
Are you happy? Well don’t try to be happier; you might become less happy. That is the essence of a multi-cultural study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study was produced by University of Virginia psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi and his co-authors Ed Diener, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and The Gallup Organization, Dong-Won Choi of California State University, East Bay, Chu Kim-Prieto of the College of New Jersey, and Incheol Choi of Seoul National University.
When Less is More [5:01m]:
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Professor Oishi and his colleagues found that, on average, European-Americans claim to be happy in general, more happy than Asian-Americans or Koreans or Japanese. But it is much easier for them to become less happy by negative events. And they tend to recover at a slower rate from negative events than their counterparts in Asia or with an Asian ancestry. On the other hand, Koreans, Japanese, and to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans, are less happy in general, but recover their emotional equilibrium more readily after a setback than European-Americans.
Oishi said, “We found that as a person experiences more positive events, the more they feel the effects of a negative event, people seem to dwell on the negative thing when they have a large number of good events in their life. It is like the person who is used to flying first class and becomes very annoyed if there is a half-hour delay. But the person who flies economy class accepts the delay in stride.”
Oishi, a social psychologist who grew up in Japan and then moved to the United States at 23, is interested in comparing how people from East Asia and the United States respond to the daily events of life. He and his colleagues surveyed more than 350 college students in Japan, Korea and the United States over a three-week period. The students recorded daily their general state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life, as well as the number of positive and negative events they had during the course of each day. The researchers found that the European-Americans needed nearly two positive events,such as getting complimented or getting an A, to return to their normal level of happiness after each negative event, such as getting a parking ticket or a lower grade than expected. The Koreans, Japanese and Asian-Americans generally needed only one positive event to make up for each negative event.
Oishi said that people who become accustomed to numerous positive or happy events in their life are more likely to take a harder fall than people who have learned to accept the bad with the good. And because negative events have such a strong effect when occurring in the midst of numerous positive events, people find it difficult to be extremely happy. They reach a point of diminishing returns. This is why the extreme happiness people may feel after buying a new car or a house, or getting married, can be rapidly diminished when the payments come due or the daily spats begin. It becomes a problem of ratio, or perspective.
Oishi said, “In general, it’s good to have a positive perspective, but unless you can switch your mindset to accept the negative facts of everyday life — that these things happen and must be accepted — it becomes very hard to maintain a comfortable level of satisfaction.”Professor Oishi’s advice: “Don’t try to be happier.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show… I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be… The research of UVa professor Glenn Gaesser and his work concerning nutrition and what are commonly referred as “BAD” carbohydrates.
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11.22.07
Posted in Jacob Canon, James Coan, MRI, Psychology, Relationships, The Oscar Show, University of Virginia, anxiety, brain, emotions, environmental conditions, happiness, hypothalamus, immune, nervous system, neurobiology, neurophysiology, physical health, physiology, sensory inputs, stress at 3:46 pm by Jacob Canon
How did you react the last time you had a fight with that significant someone in your life? With couples, the woman might apologize, or the man might make a joke or express understanding. By doing this, they subtly and briefly lighten the tension as they work their way through a disagreement.
Psychology Professor James Coan discovered a long time ago that by doing this, even when couples fight, they take care of each other. This interplay was significant when Coan designed a study exploring what happens in people’s brains when they behave emotionally or observe other people’s emotions. Coan said, “what we are learning is our emotions are more heavily involved in our day-to-day physical health than we previously thought.
How we deal with our relationships is closely tied to how long we live, how frequently we go to the doctor, how rapidly we recover from injury, how happy we tend to be in our lives.” With his colleagues, Hillary Schaefer and Richard J. Davidson from the University of Wisconsin, Coan sought to demonstrate the neurobiological basis of emotional expression and regulatory processes.
In the study, they used MRI technology to view these responses at the level of glucose metabolism and blood oxygenation in the brain. Because of the importance of emotional connectedness to the study, 16 happily married, heterosexual couples were recruited as test subjects. Wives were placed in the scanner so brain activity could be recorded as each was exposed to the anxiety-producing possibility of an electric shock to the ankle.
Researchers wanted to see what effect different types of emotional support would have in areas of the brain related to the body’s normal fight-or-flight stress response. Readings were taken when the woman was alone in facing this challenge, When a stranger, a male, was present to support her And when her husband offered support. Coan stated, “the scanning environment is pretty hostile to looking at interactions between people.” The MRI machine surrounds the subject’s body and restricts movement. The women weren’t even able to see the support person during the scanning process.
Having the man offer his hand for the woman to hold was about the only intervention possible in this setting. Not surprisingly, the results show there was a healthy reduction in the stress response when test subjects were supported. Stimulation in the regions of the brain that regulate physiological arousal and coordinate large muscles and joints was significantly decreased, no matter who was holding the woman’s hand. However, when it was her husband’s hand she was holding, the response was significantly greater.
Coan said, “When you’re holding a spouse’s hand, you get down-regulation in all of those same systems. But all the other systems that have to do with the conscious regulation of your emotions — having to pay attention to what’s happening with your body and having to become more vigilant for future dangers — all of these other systems come down as well. Your brain doesn’t work as hard when it’s your spouse. What surprised Coan and his colleagues most was the relaxation response demonstrated by what they called “super couples.” In those couples with exceptionally high-quality relationships, “Hand-holding had a significantly greater effect on soothing their brains.”
Tests showed differences involving two structures that were not affected at all in other test subjects. They observed evidence of reduced release of stress hormones by the hypothalamus. These hormones are responsible for inhibiting immune response and other activities that have critical implications for health and well-being.
Of greater interest was the reduction of activity in the right anterior insula. This brain structure modulates the amount of pain stimulus one experiences subjectively. Reduction of activity in this area means test subjects actually felt less pain when they held their husband’s hand.
So it can be said, having someone you love hold your hand really can take the hurt away.
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11.15.07
Posted in Buddhist, Elevation, Jacob Canon, Psychology, Relationships, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, University of Virginia, anxiety, biology, brain, emotions, ethics, happiness, philosophy, physical health, positive psychology, stress at 10:24 am by Jacob Canon
When social psychologist University of Virginia in 1995, he prepared by reading Thomas Jefferson’s writings and making the requisite pilgrimage to Monticello. Little did he realize the impact this Jeffersonian indoctrination would have on his own research.
Haidt’s area of specialization is moral emotions, but before coming to U.Va., he focused his studies on cross-cultural experiences of disgust. He read ancient Buddhist texts and spent time in India, exploring how the beneficial biological aspects of disgust became codified as religious imperatives and keys to social order.
Then he came across Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Robert Skipwith, in which Jefferson describes how “witnessing acts of beauty and moral goodness — whether in literature or reality — swells the chest and inspires a desire to lead a better life.” Suddenly Haidt began thinking about the antithesis of disgust, the psychological effect of uplifting experiences, an emotion he termed “elevation.” Haidt said,“That letter fundamentally changed the course of my research.”
In a moment of zeitgeist, Haidt’s inquiry into elevation coincided with the burgeoning of the academic field, positive psychology, which studies how people find meaning and happiness in life. His research into what prompts elevation and the resulting physical and motivational effects won him psychology’s largest monetary award, the John Templeton Prize for Positive Psychology, in 2001.
While researching elevation, Haidt continued teaching a large undergraduate survey course introducing the study of psychology. In the classroom, he has found it useful to cite quotations and examples from ancient philosophy and world religion to make his points more memorable. Haidt’s colleague, psychology professor Gerald Clore stated, “This penchant for asking what it all means makes him very appealing as an undergraduate lecturer in Introductory Psychology.”
Having received several university and state awards for teaching, Haidt decided to apply his ancient wisdom approach to a study of happiness. Looking at the relationship between what religious and philosophical traditions say about fulfillment and what scientists have discovered about the biological processes involved in the brain’s response to stimuli, Haidt gleaned 10 psychological truths from ancient religious and philosophical texts, which he examines in the 10 chapters of his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
Throughout the work, Haidt analogizes the conscious mind to a rider straddling the elephant of the unconscious mind, trying to guide the giant beast where the rider wants it to go. He cited numerous psychological experiments that demonstrate how at odds the conscious and unconscious minds often are, despite the conscious mind’s skill at rationalizing choices and behavior. His book suggests that by understanding ancient wisdom’s insights into our divided nature, we have a chance of establishing a more harmonious relationship between the conscious and unconscious, gently training our elephants to do as we wish.
Haidt, who has also established an accompanying website, Happinesshypothesis.com , said, “every good idea I’ve ever had in my life is in this book, the book is really a gateway to everything I want to work on for the rest of my life.” Although Haidt spent 2005-2006 at Princeton University as the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor of Ethics at the Center for Human Values, his heart remains in Charlottesville. Haidt said,“it really was because of U.Va., because of Jefferson, that I came to study this completely neglected area of emotion.”
Haidt is currently studying the foundations of moral judgment in liberals and conservatives in order to understand how political appeals might be better crafted. In addition, he’s researching how the application of elevation can be used to increase trust in relationships, especially among married couples.
To learn more about his work and this area of study, visit www.happinesshypothesis.com.
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