SMU's Department of Psychology and The Guildhall at SMU have joined forces against dating violence. Psychology Professors Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald, with Guildhall Lecturer Jeff Perryman and Deputy Director Tony Cuevas, are collaborating on a role-playing program that combines virtual reality with behavioral insight to help teach and test sexual assault avoidance techniques.

The program's environment of a rain-lashed car parked in an isolated area immerses women into not just a location, but also a "conversation" with a potential attacker. It is the first step in what developers hope will be a program to help women practice strategies for averting sexual assault in a controlled situation that is safe, yet feels realistic. "This is a potential breakthrough opportunity for gaming technology - to help solve an important social problem," Jouriles says.

Read more about it in the Spring 2008 Dedman College newsletter. Look for the new issue in your campus mailbox in June. Right, psychology graduate students Gabriella Gomez and Matthew Leahy demonstrate the program.

What are you working on? SMU faculty members have answered that question in many different ways this academic year as they searched for answers to the questions their disciplines raise. Some of the results of that exploration will be on display in Central Unviersity Libraries' 2008 Faculty Recognition Exhibition, opening April 29 and running through Commencement Weekend. Opening day in Fondren Library Center will include a reception for the entire SMU community at 3 p.m., with remarks by Provost Paul Ludden.

In every presidential election year, at least a few candidates seek to establish their bona fides as hunters - usually in front of a camera. But the association of politics with hunting in the United States goes back at least to the American Revolution, says Daniel Herman, Research Fellow in SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies.

By that time, average Americans had come to associate political rights with hunting rights and saw any restriction on the latter as an attack on the former, Herman says. Yet in the late 19th century, "gentlemen hunters" tried to restrict hunting rights to themselves as part of a larger effort to buttress their social authority. What emerged was a discourse about the meaning of hunting that broke down old ideas about gentility and sportsmanship and led to a new, democratic cult of hunting in the 20th century.

Herman will discuss his research in a Clements Center Brown Bag Lecture, "Hunting Democracy," at noon April 16 in the Texana Room, DeGolyer Library. Bring your lunch. (Right, noted presidential sportsman Theodore Roosevelt delivers a speech in New Castle, Wyoming, ca. 1903.)

Everyone wants to pick a winner, but figuring out who's on a roll and who's not is tricky. Three in a row seems to be the key. But is Hillary or Barack on a streak? And what about all those men's and women's basketball teams in the NCAA tournaments?

Suzanne Shu, assistant professor of marketing in SMU's Cox School of Business, and co-author Kurt Carlson of Duke University got to thinking about perceived streaks and who - or what - is hot. In "The Rule of Three: How the third event signals the emergence of a streak," published in the September 2007 Organizational Behavior and Decision Processes, they find evidence that "3" holds significance in the minds of observers across many domains. In five studies, the authors noted direct and indirect evidence that perceived "streakiness" plateaus with the third repeat outcome in a sequence. The rule of three also draws support from human learning and cognition, such as the optimal number in advertising exposures, and perception and judgment in the role of patterns. Read more from SMU News.

What factors influence a girl's or woman's image of her own body, and how can she learn to accept how she looks? After all, the average American woman is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 142 pounds, but the average super model - whose image appears on TV, billboards and in magazines - is about 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 110 pounds. The difference between "the look" and reality causes low self-esteem and can lead to eating disorders.

"Think" host Krys Boyd of KERA Radio talked to SMU's Katherine Presnell, Psychology, and Camille Kraeplin, Journalism, who are studying how the media influences body image and how cognitive dissonance exercises may help. They tell Boyd that women are influenced by the media, their peers and their families - and not always with positive results. Listen to the interview or download it to your iPod.

Every four years, presidential campaigns become unique laboratories for teaching and research in U.S. political science. Harold Stanley, SMU's Geurin-Pettus Distinguished Chair of American Politics and Political Economy, uses primaries, media coverage, campaign finance reports and voter patterns to teach his popular political science course on presidential elections. "Most election analysis is written well after the fact," he says. "The challenge is trying to figure out what is happening while it is happening." Nationally known as an expert in American national politics and electoral change in the South, Stanley's current research focuses on presidential nominations, partisan change, voting rights and Latino politics. Learn more about his work at his website.

Companies spend millions of dollars trying to understand and change their cultures. It can doom mergers and derail careers: 90 percent of acquisitions don't live up to expectations due commonly to culture clashes. John Slocum, O. Paul Corley Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizations in SMU's Cox School of Business, has turned for solutions to institutions ranging from Mary Kay Cosmetics to Whole Foods and from Johnson & Johnson to the Mayo Clinic - all organizations in which founders have left a deep imprint. Their common principle - which Slocum calls "mythopoetic leadership" - has its roots in myth, storytelling and the teachings of Joseph Campbell, and it can inspire employees and managers to achieve great things personally and professionally. In "Creating Cultures Through Mythopoetic Leadership," Slocum and co-author Chip Jarnagin explore this kind of leadership as a framework for developing corporate cultures and "heroic values" based on myths and archetypes - and identify 7 behaviors senior executives should develop to bring out the best in employees and ensure sustained high performance. Read more at the Cox School's faculty research site.

Past research on the U.S. labor market has shown that unemployment rates of African Americans have not only been substantially higher than those of whites over the past four decades, but that these differences have been amplified during recessions. But the extent to which these differences reflect unobserved skill and productivity - or factors such as discrimination - remains a matter of debate. Isaac Mbiti, assistant professor of economics in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, proposes the use of wages earned in the previous year as a measure of a worker's skill and productivity. With co-author Yusuf Soner Baskaya, he has used the Current Population Survey March Supplement and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in each year from 1976 to 2003, to compare the employment outcomes of black and white workers who earned the same wage in the previous year. Their results have provided important data on the sources of black-white differences in employment outcomes. Learn more about Mbiti's research in development and labor economics at his website.

Professor of Earth Sciences Louis Jacobs, doctoral student Yosuke Nishida and master's student Chris Strganac were part of a team that traveled to Antarctica during the austral summer in November and December to discover 120 million-year-old mammal fossils from Livingston Island and other places around the Antarctic Peninsula. They hope to link the evolutionary history of mammals across South America to Africa and Australia through ancient Antarctica when climates were warmer. Read about their journey, as chronicled by Strganac, at SMU's Student Adventures site. Left, the Antarctic Vertebrate Paleontology Expedition: Clare Flemming (American Museum of Natural History, New York), Ross MacPhee (principal investigator, American Museum of Natural History, New York), Jerry Hooker (Natural History Museum, London), Chris Strganac (Earth Sciences, SMU), Yosuke Nishida (Earth Sciences, SMU), Louis Jacobs (Earth Sciences, SMU).

How does Sony decide when to launch a major new gaming innovation? They should consider not just the proximity to a major giving holiday, but to the timing of Microsoft's next big announcement. New research by Sreekumar Bhaskaran and Karthik Ramachandran, professors of information technology in SMU's Cox School of Business, shows why firms must take into account what their competitors are doing when making launch decisions - and cite the ongoing video game console war as a case in point. While Microsoft planned to launch the Xbox 360 in late 2005, Sony scheduled its own PlayStation 3 much later in 2006. Both firms were debuting new consoles that were different in remarkable ways. To date, with a monopoly for about a year, Microsoft has sold 11.6 million consoles to Sony's 5 million.

"The expert consensus ... in 2005 was that Microsoft would be the early bird, but PS3 would be the superior console," Bhaskaran says. "Examples like these in competitive industries beg the question: How do - and how should - firms decide to launch new products in very technologically driven, highly competitive markets?... There are several strategic considerations in this industry. Consumers buy Xboxes because there are games for them. Additionally, given that users frequently participate in online gaming, the network base becomes a very important asset." Bhaskaran's and Ramachandran's work reveals different strategies companies can take to maximize profits, avoid mutual destruction and increase longevity on the long road to technological nirvana. (Right, a partial screenshot from the best-selling Halo 3, currently available only for the Xbox 360 platform.)

• Read more about the research at the SMU Cox website.

• Revisit the Guildhall at SMU's Top 10 Video Games of 2007.

Two current Meadows Museum exhibits on the works of Jerry Bywaters are designed to give visitors a three-dimensional portrait of the influential Dallas artist, right down to his favorite houndstooth fedora. That multifaceted view reflects the work of the two SMU researchers who curated the exhibits - both of whom have published new books on this Texas titan.

In Jerry Bywaters: Interpreter of the Southwest (Texas A&M University Press), Sam Ratcliffe provides a retrospective of Bywaters' paintings that shows the artist's perspective on the people of the region and their interactions with the land. "In a sense, I began writing this in 1986, when Jerry hired me to assist him with organizing his papers at SMU," says Ratcliffe, now head of the Jerry Bywaters Special Collections Wing in the Hamon Arts Library. "Those first days in a broom closet in Fondren Library began my gradual immersion into knowledge of his career - and therefore of the sweep of the cultural history of the Southwest."

For years, Bywaters kept notes about his printmaking in a small loose-leaf notebook. In Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker (SMU Press), Ellen Buie Niewyk, curator of the Bywaters Special Collections in SMU's Hamon Arts Library, worked directly from the frayed pages of the notebook to shed new light on Bywaters' prints. The 39 prints Bywaters created from 1935 to 1948 are reproduced in the book, as well as many of his book illustrations and ephemeral works. The book also include photographs both of the artists and the subjects he depicts. "Jerry Bywaters was a true Texas artist," Niewyk says. "His interpretations of the Texas and Southwest landscape, architecture and people mirror life during the 1930s and 1940s and still delight viewers and art collectors today."

Both books are available in the Meadows Museum Shop and from the Texas A&M University Press Consortium.

Anyone who has tried in vain to find a Wii console during a holiday shopping excursion knows that supply and demand help drive business success. Not enough inventory or staff means lost sales; too much of either means unnecessary costs. A new approach to estimating demand for products and services has the potential to revolutionize business by allowing organizations to estimate and forecast demand more quickly and accurately. The new technique, which uses an asymmetric model rather than the classic bell-curve distribution to display a "truer" demand curve, was created by Marketing Professor Ed Fox and Operations Management Professors Bezalel Gavish and John Semple of SMU's Cox School of Business. The researchers derived their distribution by focusing on the purchase timing of individual customers, Fox says: "If we have detailed data about customer transactions, the time between those transactions can be used to derive a distribution for total demand." Read more at the Cox School website.

As a University of Florida researcher, Sumi Helal made headlines with the launch of his "smart house" - an assistive environment for the elderly or disabled that can monitor everything from a resident's movement across the floor to his or her heart rate, and relay that information to medical staff, family members and caretakers. Now a professor of computer science and engineering in SMU's School of Engineering, Helal envisions a "smart village" that allows individuals with special needs to live alone but not isolated in a place where they can shop, socialize and enjoy the benefits of independence. The effort has the potential to make life better for everyone from aging Baby Boomers to injured veterans. Helal's Florida research partner, IBM, created a demonstration video of Helal's assistive technology called "A Smarter World for Charley" - see it now on YouTube.

Modern culture's perfect woman is ultra-toned and super-slender. Yet for the vast majority of women, the "thin ideal" is unattainable - and for some, it also can be destructive. Katherine Presnell, assistant professor of psychology in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, is helping at-risk teens challenge this ideal with the Body Project, an eating disorder prevention program developed with Eric Stice of the University of Texas. In their nearly 10 years of research, more than 1,000 high school and college women have completed the program, and independent studies nationwide have shown that the Body Project significantly outperforms other interventions in promoting body acceptance, reducing the risk of obesity and preventing eating disorders.

During small-group sessions with a trained leader, Body Project participants argue against the thin ideal. They write letters to hypothetical girls about its emotional and physical costs, and challenge negative "fat talk" while affirming strong, healthy bodies. "Many girls don't question the messages we get from the media, the fashion industry, our peers and parents that it's important to achieve the thin ideal at any cost," says Presnell, who with Stice has published a facilitator guidebook and companion workbook, The Body Project: Promoting Body Acceptance and Preventing Eating Disorders (Oxford University Press, 2007). "We have the girls critically evaluate the ideal, and when they take a stance against their beliefs, that creates dissonance they work to resolve." Learn more about the book.

About 45 million Americans - 15 percent of the population - have some form of learning disability. And when students reach college, their learning differences become amplified because of tougher curricula, increased workloads and the absence of supportive family members. In SMU's School of Education and Human Development, researchers and reading specialists have developed training and research projects to answer some of the most critical questions about the development of students who struggle to read.

"While much has been accomplished, more work lies ahead," wrote Education Dean David Chard in a Dallas Morning News op-ed printed Nov. 1, 2007. "The opportunity to pursue higher education should be a minimum standard for all Americans. Approximately 35 percent of students with learning disabilities are attending colleges and universities, up from 15 percent in 1987."

At the International Dyslexia Association annual conference in Dallas (Oct. 31-Nov. 3, 2007), two SMU faculty members shared their experiences reaching students with learning differences. Patricia G. Mathes, director of the Institute for Reading Research at SMU, spoke on effective practices and research findings for English language learners with reading difficulties, and Karen Vickery, director of the Learning Therapy Program at SMU's School of Education and Human Development, spoke on "Teaching the Teachers: Effective Models for Colleges and Universities." Learn more about SMU research and resources at smu.edu/learndifferently.

If the daily headlines aren't scary enough - wars, fires, super germs, rising oceans - then slip into your local theater for a blood-curdling two or three hours. Horror movies and their stars, from rambling monsters to torturers to psychos, remain ever-popular, especially during the Halloween season.

"The successful horror film is similar to a nightmare," says Rick Worland, chair of SMU's Division of Cinema-Television and author of The Horror Film. "In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued very famously that all dreams are forms of self-communication about our deepest fears and desires. So, the monsters in horror films - human or otherwise - are easily seen as symbolic of what we fear most. The horror genre is traditionally held in low regard, at least in public by arbiters of taste and morality. However, horror often achieves its greatest impact when it exposes or flaunts cultural taboos."

For those who want to get beyond such popular horror films as Jaws and The Exorcist, Kevin Heffernan, associate professor of cinema-television and author of Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, has several recommendations, which are "less familiar but which hold untold pleasures for those lucky enough to see them." Read more from SMU News.

The U.S. government missed an opportunity to improve America's image in the Arab and Muslim worlds when it shut down a public diplomacy television advertising campaign in 2002, according to a recent book by Professor Alice Kendrick in Meadows School of the Arts' Temerlin Advertising Institute and her associate, Jami Fullerton of Oklahoma State University. In Advertising's War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State Department's Shared Values Initiative (Marquette Books, 2006), the professors examined the ads' effectiveness, part of a multifaceted communication campaign - the Shared Values Initiative - that the State Department launched in 2002 to convince the Muslim and Arab world that America wasn't waging war on Islam. About 300 million Arabs and Muslims saw the five televised ads, which depicted Muslims commenting on their happy lives and freedom of worship in America and were broadcast in Indonesia (the nation with the largest Muslim population) and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Despite support from Secretary of State Colin Powell, other bureaucrats and journalists criticized the effort and shut it down; however, they had no scientific evidence to back up their criticism, the authors say. "According to internal State Department documents about SVI in Indonesia, the campaign achieved its objectives. It not only got people talking about Muslim life in America, it also produced more positive perceptions of America," they wrote. Read more at the book's home page.

In the Middle Ages, Spain was comfortably multicultural for several hundred years longer than the rest of Europe, with Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisting in relative peace. But by 1200, European influences began to seep into Spain, and negative stereotypes, particularly of Jews, took hold - culminating in the expulsion of Jews from that country in 1492. Associate Professor of Art History Pamela Patton, whose research specialty is medieval Spain, is working on a book exploring this transformation from previously untapped sources: works of art produced for the Christian majority during this period. "Like drama, song and folklore, visual culture provides a view of Jewish-Christian relationships in the era that 'official' royal and legal texts often do not address," Patton says. Pursuing her research under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Patton says she hopes her book, with the working title Seeing Stereotypes: Christians, Jews, and Images in Medieval Iberia, will "help people understand we're still living out the legacy of the Middle Ages in our relationships with other cultures, and shed some light on how and why stereotypes and superstitions develop." Read more at her entry in the Meadows Art History faculty home page.

Why would businesses such as Toyota, Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo Bank invest good money to create a virtual workplace reality? Ulrike Schultze, professor of information technology in the Cox School of Business, explores game environments and virtual worlds to better understand their communication capabilities for businesses in the real world. Virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, known in the gaming industry as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), can allow thousands of participants to interact simultaneously and model social interactions that mirror everyday real life. In "Reframing Online Games: Synthetic Worlds as Media for Organizational Communication," Schultze and co-author Julie Rennecker explore the diversity of synthetic worlds by developing a framework for classifying games into four categories: simulation games, fantasy games, virtual reality and virtual fantasy. In the process, they intend to "debunk the mythical divide between technologies of work and technologies of play." Read more at the SMU Cox research site. (Right, a virtual retail store created in Second Life.)

In a study titled "Complementing Economic Advances in India: A New Approach in Financing Infrastructure Projects," SMU Finance Professor Andrew Chen and co-author Jennifer Warren Kubik have proposed an innovative solution to improving India's infrastructure that has significant implications for capital markets and development. "For India to continue growth on a sustainable path, investment in infrastructure is critical. Infrastructure bottlenecks are seen as one of the leading obstacles for India in realizing its economic growth potential," the authors say. Yet such development could cost the Indian government as much as $500 billion and will require substantial financing. Chen and Kubik suggest approaching the problem by raising capital through initial public offerings (IPOs) and securitizations globally. This approach, coupled with financial innovations, could help smooth the frictions which lay at the root of India's infrastructure development problems, the authors add. "Infrastructure spending in India is particularly politicized and could gain efficiencies through the benefits of global capital markets rather than at the hands of political agendas," they write. Read the executive summary at the Cox School of Business' faculty research site.

For sculptor Vanessa Paschakarnis, space and form serve as a means to an end: They encourage viewers to "re-evaluate their existence as physical beings." Her works, she says, allude to the "essence of an encounter - an encounter with form as a thing - and the thing as equal companion." Her designs borrow from simple forms in nature; working in stone and bronze, the assistant professor of art in Meadows School of the Arts creates pieces on a scale of the human body. A shark's tooth enlarged takes on centurion-like proportions. A sand dollar lends its shape to a human shield. Her sculptures, Paschakarnis says, "are beings in and of themselves, autonomous objects that occupy space - in the room and in the viewer's head." Read more in the current issue of SMU Research magazine, and view more of Paschakarnis' work at her Web site.

SMU engineers are working to defeat cancer by shedding light on it. The SMU Photonics Group in the School of Engineering is conducting research on photodynamic therapy (PDT), which destroys cancer cells through the use of red laser light in combination with a photosensitizing drug. The drug, administered to a patient hours before treatment, accumulates mainly in cancerous cells. Illuminating the cancerous area activates the drug and kills the cells, with little damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Gemunu Happawana uses semiconductor diode lasers as an optical source - equally powerful as but about 1,000 times smaller than existing PDT lasers, as well as less costly and more efficient. Happawana has developed a self-contained light delivery PDT system that positions semiconductor lasers at the end of a thin coaxial cable, which is inserted into a balloon catheter, allowing precise optical, electrical and thermal control at the tumor's location. Read more at the SMU Photonics Group Web site.

What are the economic incentives for conserving species? Understanding the market forces that drive these environmental decisions - and may drive some species to extinction - is vital for the formulation of public policy toward natural resource management, says Santanu Roy, SMU professor of economics and 2007-08 Ford Research Fellow. That understanding can help governments determine regulatory controls such as quotas on harvesting marine life or on exploitation of forestry. While most current literature applies conventional economic theory, Roy has developed dynamic models that incorporate ecological features such as the effect of random environmental fluctuations on future population size and the potential "existence value" of a species even if it is not harvested. His results negate conventional wisdom about the limits of optimal species conservation and highlight the way harvesting affects resource stocks under "truly adverse" environmental shocks such as Hurricane Katrina - with important implications for policy intervention. Read more at Roy's faculty Web site.

The Pima Indians on the Gila River Reservation have the highest recorded rate of diabetes of any population in the world - but before World War II, diabetes was rarely seen among the 12,000 Indians who live there. The decline of farming set the stage for the crisis, says Carolyn Smith-Morris, assistant professor of anthropology and author of Diabetes Among the Pima (University of Arizona Press, 2006). The dramatic change of diet and activity levels as well as a genetic predisposition to the disease led to the epidemic, which affects 50 percent of the adults on the reservation. "This epidemic is about a culture defining its path in an industrial world," says Smith-Morris, a medical anthropologist who has spent the past 10 years studying the causes and conditions of the health crisis and developing appropriate preventive strategies. She sees positive signs of change as tribal officials take more control of their health care system and health education. Learn more at her faculty Web site.

New and improved treatments - and even cures - for HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases depend upon finding ways to prevent virus production in infected cells. Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Rob Harrod of SMU's Laboratory of Molecular Virology and fellow researchers at UT-Southwestern Medical Center, the University of Washington, Universite Libre de Bruxelles and other research institutions have identified a novel cellular cofactor essential for HIV-1 replication. Inhibition of this factor blocked up to 95 percent of virus production in HIV-1-infected T-lymphocytes in vitro, carrying important implications for the development of therapies against multi-drug-resistant HIV/AIDS. The research has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and featured in the LeadDiscovery pharmaceutical newsletter, and Harrod was invited to present the findings at the Pfizer Pharmaceuticals-Research Technology Center. Read more at his faculty Web site.