Research Spotlight: Virtual reality vs. dating violence
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
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
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?
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.
or 
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
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
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
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
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
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.
For years, Bywaters kept notes about his printmaking in a small loose-leaf notebook. In
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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'
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
SMU engineers are working to defeat cancer by shedding light on it. The SMU Photonics Group in the
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
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
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