DALLAS (SMU) – SMU has adapted their study on a psychological condition known as anhedonia to reflect new restrictions in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Researchers at SMU and UCLA have been involved in a five-year study of a treatment for anhedonia – the inability to find pleasure in any aspect of life – since 2019.
Psychology professors Alicia Meuret and Thomas Ritz at SMU and Michelle G. Craske at UCLA are studying the effectiveness of a type of cognitive behavioral therapy aimed at teaching people to seek out and recognize the positive aspects of life – increasing their sensitivity to reward. They will compare their results with a more traditional approach of treating the negative affect side of their problems.
But because millions of Americans have been asked to stay at home to keep from possibly spreading the COVID-19 virus, researchers have made some adjustments to how they are doing the study.
For instance, instead of encouraging study participants to meet with friends in-person to increase feelings of joy and connectedness, the recommendation has been modified to arranging meetings online. Participants are also being given skills they can use to cope more effectively with COVID-19 worries about health and future, as well as how to generate feelings of gratitude and how to take other people’s viewpoint in account when thinking. And all sessions between participants and therapists are being done via telehealth instead of in person, because of the COVID-19 restrictions.
Researchers are still recruiting Dallas and Los Angeles residents to participate in the study. More information about the study is available here.
About SMU
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
DALLAS (SMU) – “Even if she doesn’t say it, I know it’s my fault that my mother gets sad.”
Kids who believe comments like this – assuming blame for their mom’s sadness or depression – are more likely to face depression and anxiety themselves, a new study led by SMU has found.
“Although mothers with higher levels of depressive symptoms face increased risk that their children will also experience symptoms of depression and anxiety, our study showed that this was not the case for all children,” said SMU family psychologist and lead author Chrystyna Kouros. “Rather, it was those children who felt they were to blame for their mother’s sadness or depression…that had higher levels of internalizing symptoms.”
In light of the findings, Kouros said it’s critical that parents and others who regularly interact with children pay close attention to the kinds of comments that kids make about their mom’s symptoms and to intervene if children incorrectly think that it’s their fault that their mom is depressed. Children who take on this blame can benefit from therapies and interventions that target negative thoughts, said Kouros, SMU associate professor of psychology.
Sharyl E. Wee and Chelsea N. Carson, graduate students at SMU, and Naomi Ekas, an associate professor of psychology at Texas Christian University, also contributed to the study, which was published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
The study is based on surveys taken by 129 mothers and their children, who were recruited from the Dallas-Fort Worth community through schools, flyers and online advertisements. On average, children included in the study were 13 years old.
Moms were asked to agree or disagree to 20 statements like “I could not shake off the blues” and “I lost interest in my usual activities” to assess if they had depressive symptoms, even if they had not actually been diagnosed with depression. Nearly 12 percent of the women surveyed were found to have potential clinical levels of depressive symptoms.
The moms were also asked to assess whether they felt their children had symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Kids, meanwhile, were asked to complete a total of four surveys to see if they were dealing with any anxiety or depression and whether they blamed themselves for any signs of depression in their mothers.
Kouros said there are two likely explanations for the linkage between mothers’ depressive symptoms and kids’ own mental health issues:
“If children blame themselves for their mothers’ depressive symptoms, then they may be more likely to brood about their mother’s symptoms. And we know from an extensive body of research that rumination over stressors – especially ones that are uncontrollable – is linked with depression and anxiety,” Kouros said. “Also, if children feel personally responsible for their mothers’ symptoms, they may try to ‘make it better’ and use ineffective coping strategies. This could lead to a sense of helplessness, failure, and low self-worth in the child, since ultimately the child was misattributing the cause of their mothers’ depressive symptoms.”
More studies are needed to see if depressed dads have the same effect on their children, Kouros said.
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
DALLAS (SMU) – Want to be more outgoing? Or less uptight?
In an interview with Fox4ward’s Dan Godwin, SMU psychology professor Nathan Hudson said that it is possible for people to change aspects of their personality. But it will require some work on your part.
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, community and the world.
New SMU study may provide insight on how our brains are able to produce so many different types of neurons, which control everything we do
DALLAS (SMU) – SMU (Southern Methodist University) researchers have discovered another layer of complexity in gene expression, which could help explain how we’re able to have so many billions of neurons in our brain.
Neurons are cells inside the brain and nervous system that are responsible for everything we do, think or feel. They use electrical impulses and chemical signals to send information between different areas of the brain, and between the brain and the rest of the nervous system, to tell our body what to do. Humans have approximately 86 billion neurons in the brain that direct us to do things like lift an arm or remember a name.
Yet only a few thousand genes are responsible for creating those neurons.
All cells in the human nervous system have the same genetic information. But ultimately, genes are turned “on” or “off” like a light switch to give neurons specific features and roles. Understanding the mechanism of how a gene is or is not turned on – the process known as gene expression – could help explain how so many neurons are developed in humans and other mammals.
“Studies like this are showing how by unique combinations of specific genes, you can make different specific neurons,” said Adam D. Norris, co-author of the new study and Floyd B. James Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at SMU. “So down the road, this could help us explain: No. 1, how did our brain get this complex? And No. 2, how can we imitate nature and make whatever type of neurons we might be interested in following these rules?”
Scientists already have part of the gene expression puzzle figured out, as previous studies have shown that proteins called transcription factors play a key role in helping to turn specific genes on or off by binding to nearby DNA.
It is also known that a process called RNA splicing, which is controlled by RNA binding proteins, can add an additional layer of regulation to that neuron. Once a gene is turned on, different versions of the RNA molecule can be created by RNA splicing.
But before the SMU study was done, which was published in the journal eLife, it was not exactly clear what the logistics of creating that diversity was.
“Before this, scientists had mostly been focused on transcription factors, which is layer No. 1 of gene expression. That’s the layer that usually gets focused on as generating specific neuron types,” Norris said. “We’re adding that second layer and showing that [transcription factors and RNA binding proteins] have to be coordinated properly.
And Norris noted, “this was the first time where coordination of gene expression has been identified in a single neuron.”
The sad-1 gene, present in all of the worm’s 300 neurons (visualized by fluorescence), is spliced into different versions in different neurons. Neurons with one version fluoresce red, neurons with the other version fluoresce green, and yellow neurons in the bottom panel contain both versions.
Using a combination of old school and cutting-edge genetics techniques, researchers looked at how the RNA of a gene called sad-1, also found in humans, was spliced in individual neurons of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans. They found that sad-1 was turned on in all neurons, but sad-1 underwent different splicing patterns in different neuron types.
And while transcription factors were not shown to be directly participating in the RNA splicing for the sad-1 gene, they were activating genes that code for RNA binding proteins differently between different types of neurons. It is these RNA binding proteins that control RNA splicing.
“Once that gene was turned on, these factors came in and subtly changed the content of that gene,” Norris said.
As a result, sad-1 was spliced according to neuron-specific patterns.
They also found that the coordinated regulation had different details in different neurons.
“Picture two different neurons wanting to reach the same goal. You can imagine they either go through the exact same path to get there or they take divergent paths. In this study, we’re showing that the answer so far is divergent paths,” said Norris. “Even in a single neuron, there are multiple different layers of gene expression that together make that neuron the unique neuron that it is.”
Norris used worm neurons because “unlike in humans, we know where every worm neuron is and what it should be up to. Therefore, we can very confidently know which genes are responsible for which neural process.
“The very specific details from this study will not apply to humans. But hopefully the principles involved will,” Norris explained. “From the last few decades of work in the worm nervous system, specific genes found to have a specific effect on the worm’s behavior were later shown to be responsible for the same types of things in human nerves.”
The lead author of the study was Morgan Thompson, a graduate student at SMU. Ryan Bixby, Robert Dalton, Alexa Vandenburg — all former or current students in SMU’s Biological Sciences department — also contributed to the study. In addition, John A. Calarco from the University of Toronto, Canada was a co-author.
About SMU
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
DALLAS (SMU) – Researchers at SMU and UCLA are enrolling subjects for a five-year study of a treatment for a psychological condition known as anhedonia – the inability to find pleasure in any aspect of life. A grant of approximately $4 million from the National Institute of Mental Health will allow professors Alicia Meuret and Thomas Ritz at SMU and Michelle G. Craske at UCLA to study the effectiveness of their treatment in 168 people suffering from this very specific symptom.
Professor Alicia Meuret
“The goal of this novel therapeutic approach is to train people to develop psychological muscle memory – to learn again how to experience joy and identify that experience when it occurs,” said Meuret, professor of psychology and director of SMU’s Anxiety and Depression Research Center. “Anhedonia is an aspect of depression, but it also is a symptom that really reaches across psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders. It’s the absence or the lack of experiencing rewards.”
People suffering from depression often report feeling down or blue, loss of appetite and having difficulty sleeping or concentrating, all described generally as “negative affect.” Meuret explained that there is another other side to depression – the reduction of all that is positive. This reveals itself in someone who says he or she is not especially anxious or depressed, but nothing gives them joy anymore.
“They don’t feel motivated to do anything, and when they do things that formerly gave them pleasure, they just don’t enjoy them anymore,” Meuret said. “We call that a deficit in the reward system – a reduction to reward sensitivity.”
Historically, treatments for affective disorders such as anxiety and depression have been aimed at reducing negative affect, Meuret said. Over the next five years, Meuret, Ritz and Craske will treat 168 people using a type of cognitive behavioral therapy aimed at teaching people to seek out and recognize the positive aspects of life – increasing their sensitivity to reward. They will compare their results with a more traditional approach of treating the negative affect side of their problems.
Professor Thomas Ritz
The monitoring of treatment success will include simple biomarkers of enjoyment. “The heart beats faster in joy, something that has been shown to be absent in anhedonia,” said Ritz, an SMU professor of psychology who specializes in studying the relationship between biology and psychology in affective disorders and chronic disease. Other measures will capture immune activity, which is important as an indicator of long-term health.
Clinical psychology graduate students working on the project are Juliet Kroll, Divya Kumar, Natalie Tunnell, Anni Hasration, Andres Roques and Rebecca Kim, a recent SMU alumna, who will coordinate the day-to-day administration of the project.
Those interested in participating in the study may phone Rebecca Kim at 214-768-2188 or fill out the pre-screen form here.
The NIMH-funded study will follow the training framework of an SMU-UCLA pilot study conducted from 2014-2018:
The first half of the treatments are targeted at changing behavior, using strategies where the patient learns to seek out pleasant activities that they have previously enjoyed. Scheduled “homework” records that they list their mood before and after the activity, savoring the pleasurable moments in these activities. When resuming a session, the patient recalls the activity as if experiencing it in real time, such as, “I see Amy. I feel a connection with her. We walk on the street, and I can see the leaves changing.”
Cognitive training provides exercises that identify the positive aspects of various activities, taking responsibility for those activities and imagining what they would feel like.
The last module is compassion training, helping the patient to again learn to share love and kindness with another person, cultivating gratitude and generosity and learning to generate and savor positive feelings in the moment.
“Rather than saying to our patients, ‘Let me help you feel less bad,’ we are saying, ‘Let me help you re-learn how to feel good,” Meuret said. “It’s very rewarding as a researcher psychologist that these patients can feel again – feel something positive. I think there’s nothing worse than losing this sense of reward.”
Led by SMU psychologist and UTSW psychiatrist, Dallas Asthma Brain and Cognition Study will use brain scans to explore relationship between inflammatory lung disease and brain function in older adults
DALLAS (SMU) – SMU psychologist Thomas Ritz and UT Southwestern Medical Center psychiatrist Sherwood Brown will lead a $2.6 million study funded over four years by the National Institutes of Health to explore the apparent connection between asthma and diminished cognitive function in middle-to-late-age adults.
The World Health Organization estimates that 235 million people suffer from asthma worldwide.
The study will build on the work Brown and Ritz have accomplished with a core group of researchers over a period of eight years. Their pilot data, gleaned from brain imaging and analysis of chemical changes, indicates that neurons in the hippocampus of young-to-middle-age adults with asthma are not as healthy as those in the control group without asthma. The hippocampus is that portion of the brain that controls long-term memory and spatial navigation.
“In our early study, we found that there were differences between healthy control participants and young-to-middle-age asthma patients in that the latter showed a slightly lower performance in cognitive tasks,” Ritz said. “We wonder how that looks in older age. When you have asthma for a lifetime, the burden of the disease may accumulate.”
The early findings also led his group to wonder if the impact on cognition is related to the severity of the disease.
“This all makes sense, but no one has looked specifically at how that relates to brain structure,” Ritz said. “With this grant we will look at structures – the neurons and axons, the white and gray matter of the brain, how thick they are in various places. We look at what kind of chemicals have been accumulating, which are the byproducts of neural activity. We want to know how various areas of the brain function during cognitive tasks.”
The four-year project will allow researchers to study a sample of up to 200 participants who are between the ages of 40-69. In addition to Ritz and Brown, the research group includes Denise C. Park, director of research for the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas; Changho Choi, professor of radiology at UTSW; David Khan, professor of internal medicine at UTSW; Alicia E. Meuret, professor of clinical psychology at SMU, and David Rosenfield, associate professor of psychology at SMU. SMU graduate students working on the grant are Juliet Kroll and Hannah Nordberg.
“This is how neuroimaging works today – it is a team sport,” Ritz said. “You cannot do it on your own. You have to strike up collaborations with various disciplines. It’s very exciting because it is stimulating and interesting to collaborate with colleagues in different areas.”
The study, scheduled to run through May 31, 2022, will allow the research team to examine several possible factors that may impact cognition in people with asthma.
“Is it lack of oxygen? That’s a very good question,” Ritz said. “But it cannot be the full story. Real lack of oxygen only happens in severe asthma attacks and in most cases, people having an asthma attack are still well saturated with oxygen.
Carbon dioxide levels are often too low in asthma patients – but it is uncertain whether that is a .”
Another possibility, he said, is that the problems with disrupted sleep experienced by many people with asthma might relate to cognitive function.
“Just imagine you how you perform after lack of sleep,” Ritz said. “In the long run, we know sleep is important to the health of our brain. If over a lifetime you’ve had interruptions in sleep, it may impact your neural health.”
This research is being supported by the National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under grant number 1R01HL142775-01.
These areas of the brain uniquely activate in people with higher empathy when they listen to music. (Credit: SMU, UCLA)
High-empathy people process music using their social cognitive circuitry.
Christopher Bergland for Psychology Today covered the research of Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Wallmark’s study with researchers at UCLA found that people with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music.
The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.
The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.
“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark has said. He is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.
The Psychology Today article published June 18, 2018.
By Christopher Bergland
Psychology Today
Those who deeply grasp the pain or joy of other people and display “higher empathic concern” process music differently in their brains, according to a new study by researchers at Southern Methodist University and UCLA. Their paper, “Neurophysiological Effects of Trait Empathy in Music Listening,” was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
As you can see by looking at the images at the top of the page and to the left, the SMU-UCLA researchers used fMRI neuroimaging to pinpoint specific brain areas that light up when people with varying degrees of trait empathy listen to music. Notably, the researchers found that higher empathy people process music as if it’s a pleasurable proxy for real-world human encounters and show greater involvement of brain regions associated with reward systems and social cognitive circuitry.
In the field of music psychology, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that varying degrees of trait empathy are linked to how intensely someone responds emotionally to music, his or her listening style, and overall musical preferences.
For example, recent studies have found that high-empathy people are more likely to enjoy “beautiful but sad” music. Additionally, high empathizers seem to get more intense pleasure from listening to music in general, as indicated by robust activation of their reward system in the fMRI.
The latest research on the empathy-music connection was conceived, designed, and led by Zachary Wallmark, who is a musicologist and assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. In 2014, Wallmark received his PhD from UCLA. He currently serves as director of the MuSci Lab, which is an interdisciplinary research collective and lab facility dedicated to the empirical study of music. Below is a YouTube clip of Wallmark describing his latest research:
These areas of the brain uniquely activate in people with higher empathy when they listen to music. (Credit: SMU, UCLA)
“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Zachary Wallmark, SMU
KERA journalist Justin Martin covered the research of Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Wallmark’s study with researchers at UCLA found that people with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music.
The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.
The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.
“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark has said. He is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.
By Justin Martin
KERA News
A new study from Southern Methodist University shows that empathetic people — those who are generally more sensitive to the feelings of others — receive more pleasure from listening to music, and their brains show increased activity in areas associated with social interactions.
Researchers interviewed participants about their taste in music — songs they loved and others they hated. Then, participants were put into an MRI scanner and played different selections, including unfamiliar tunes, and researchers studied how their brain reacted to them.
All participants experienced positive activity in the brain when listening to music they loved, says Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor of musicology at SMU, who led the study. This activity increased for empathetic people.
When played unfamiliar music they didn’t like, empathetic participants still showed activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, an area associated with executive control and regulation of emotional reactions, Wallmark says.
“What this suggested to us is that these empathic people are hearing new music…and they tell us they dislike it after the fact…but they might be deliberately trying to ratchet down their negative reaction, maybe give more of the benefit of the doubt to this new music, even though they find it highly aversive,” Wallmark said.
A simple cognitive task as early as four days after a brain injury activates the region that improves memory function, and may guard against developing depression or anxiety
Concern is growing about the danger of sports-related concussions and their long-term impact on athletes. But physicians and healthcare providers acknowledge that the science is evolving, leaving questions about rehabilitation and treatment options.
Currently, guidelines recommend that traumatic brain injury patients get plenty of rest and avoid physical and cognitive activity until symptoms subside.
But a new pilot study looking at athletes with concussions suggests total inactivity may not be the best way to recover after all, say scientists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, where the research was conducted.
The study found that a simple cognitive task as early as four days after a brain injury activated the region that improves memory function and can guard against two hallmarks of concussion — depression and anxiety.
“Right now, if you have a concussion the directive is to have complete physical and cognitive rest, no activities, no social interaction, to let your brain rest and recover from the energy crisis as a result of the injury,” said SMU physiologist Sushmita Purkayastha, who led the research, which was funded by the Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.
“But what we saw, the student athletes came in on approximately the third day of their concussion and the test was not stressful for them. None of the patients complained about any symptom aggravation as a result of the task. Their parasympathetic nervous system — which regulates automatic responses such as heart rate when the body is at rest — was activated, which is a good sign,” said Purkayastha, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness.
The parasympathetic nervous system is associated with better memory function and implicated in better cardiovascular function. It also helps to regulates stress, depression and anxiety — and those are very common symptoms after a concussion.
“People in the absolute rest phase after concussion often experience depression,” Purkayastha added. “In the case of concussion, cutting people off from their social circle when we say ‘no screen time’ — particularly the young generation with their cell phones and iPads — they will just get more depressed and anxious. So maybe we need to rethink current rehabilitation strategy.”
The new study addresses the lack of research upon which to develop science- and data-based treatment for concussion. The findings emerged when the research team measured variations in heart rate variability among athletes with concussions while responding to simple problem-solving and decision-making tasks.
While we normally think of our heart rate as a steady phenomenon, in actuality the interval varies and is somewhat irregular — and that is desirable and healthy. High heart rate variability is an indicator of sound cardiovascular health. Higher levels of variability indicate that physiological processes are better controlled and functioning as they should, such as during stressful (both physical and challenging mental tasks) or emotional situations.
Concussed athletes normally have lowered heart rate variability.
For the new study, Purkayastha and her team administered a fairly simple cognitive task to athletes with concussions. During the task, the athletes recorded a significant increase in heart rate variability.
The study is the first of its kind to examine heart rate variability in college athletes with concussions during a cognitive task.
The findings suggest that a small measure of brain work could be beneficial, said co-investigator and neuro-rehabilitation specialist Kathleen R. Bell, a physician at UT Southwestern.
“This type of research will change fundamentally the way that patients with sports and other concussions are treated,” said Bell, who works with brain injury patients and is Chair of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at UT Southwestern. “Understanding the basic physiology of brain injury and repair is the key to enhancing recovery for our young people after concussion.”
Co-authors from SMU Simmons School include Mu Huang and Justin Frantz; Peter F. Davis and Scott L. Davis, from SMU’s Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness; Gilbert Moralez, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, Dallas; and Tonia Sabo, UT Southwestern.
Concussion symptom improved with simple brain activity
Volunteer subjects for the study were 46 NCAA Division I and recreational athletes who participate in contact-collision sports. Of those, 23 had a physician-diagnosed sports-related concussion in accordance with NCAA diagnostic criteria. Each of them underwent the research testing within approximately three to four days after their injury.
Not surprisingly, compared to the athletes in the control group who didn’t have concussions, the athletes with concussions entered answers that were largely incorrect.
More importantly, though, the researchers observed a positive physiological response to the task in the form of increased heart rate variability, said Purkayastha.
“It’s true that the concussed group gave wrong answers for the most part. More important, however, is the fact that during the task their heart rate variability improved,” she said. “That was most likely due to the enhancement of their brain activity, which led to better regulation. It seems that engaging in a cognitive task is crucial for recovery.”
Heart rate variability is a normal physiological process of the heart. It makes possible a testing method as noninvasive as taking a patient’s blood pressure, pulse or temperature. In the clinical field, measuring heart rate variability is an increasingly common screening tool to see if involuntary responses in the body are functioning and being regulated properly by the autonomic nervous system.
The parasympathetic is blunted or dampened by concussion
Abnormal fluctuations in heart rate variability are associated with certain conditions before symptoms are otherwise noticeable.
Monitoring heart rate variability measures the normal synchronized contractions of the heart’s atriums and ventricles in response to natural electrical impulses that rhythmically move across the muscles of the heart.
After a concussion, an abnormal and unhealthy decline in heart rate variability is observed in the parasympathetic nervous system, a branch of the autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic is in effect blunted or dampened after a concussion, said Purkayastha.
As expected, in the current study, heart rate variability was lower among the athletes with concussions than those without.
New findings add evidence suggesting experts rethink rehab
But that changed during the simple cognitive task. For the athletes with concussions, their heart rate variability increased, indicating the parasympathetic nervous system was activated by the task.
Heart rate variability between the concussed and the controls was comparable during the cognitive task, the researchers said in their study.
“This suggests that maybe we need to rethink rehabilitation after someone has a concussion,” Purkayastha said. — Margaret Allen, SMU
These areas of the brain uniquely activate in people with higher empathy when they listen to music. (Credit: SMU, UCLA)
Higher empathy people appear to process music like a pleasurable proxy for a human encounter — in the brain regions for reward, social awareness and regulation of social emotions.
People with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music, according to a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA.
The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.
“High-empathy and low-empathy people share a lot in common when listening to music, including roughly equivalent involvement in the regions of the brain related to auditory, emotion, and sensory-motor processing,” said lead author Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts.
But there is at least one significant difference.
Highly empathic people process familiar music with greater involvement of the brain’s social circuitry, such as the areas activated when feeling empathy for others. They also seem to experience a greater degree of pleasure in listening, as indicated by increased activation of the reward system.
“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark said.
Researchers in 2014 reported that about 20 percent of the population is highly empathic. These are people who are especially sensitive and respond strongly to social and emotional stimuli.
The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.
The new study indicates that among higher-empathy people, at least, music is not solely a form of artistic expression.
“If music was not related to how we process the social world, then we likely would have seen no significant difference in the brain activation between high-empathy and low-empathy people,” said Wallmark, who is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.
“This tells us that over and above appreciating music as high art, music is about humans interacting with other humans and trying to understand and communicate with each other,” he said.
This may seem obvious.
“But in our culture we have a whole elaborate system of music education and music thinking that treats music as a sort of disembodied object of aesthetic contemplation,” Wallmark said. “In contrast, the results of our study help explain how music connects us to others. This could have implications for how we understand the function of music in our world, and possibly in our evolutionary past.”
The co-authors are Choi Deblieck, with the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Marco Iacoboni, UCLA. The research was carried out at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA.
“The study shows on one hand the power of empathy in modulating music perception, a phenomenon that reminds us of the original roots of the concept of empathy — ‘feeling into’ a piece of art,” said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
“On the other hand,” Iacoboni said, “the study shows the power of music in triggering the same complex social processes at work in the brain that are at play during human social interactions.”
Comparison of brain scans showed distinctive differences based on empathy
Participants were 20 UCLA undergraduate students. They were each scanned in an MRI machine while listening to excerpts of music that were either familiar or unfamiliar to them, and that they either liked or disliked. The familiar music was selected by participants prior to the scan.
Afterward each person completed a standard questionnaire to assess individual differences in empathy — for example, frequently feeling sympathy for others in distress, or imagining oneself in another’s shoes.
The researchers then did controlled comparisons to see which areas of the brain during music listening are correlated with empathy.
Analysis of the brain scans showed that high empathizers experienced more activity in the dorsal striatum, part of the brain’s reward system, when listening to familiar music, whether they liked the music or not.
The reward system is related to pleasure and other positive emotions. Malfunction of the area can lead to addictive behaviors.
Empathic people process music with involvement of social cognitive circuitry
In addition, the brain scans of higher empathy people in the study also recorded greater activation in medial and lateral areas of the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for processing the social world, and in the temporoparietal junction, which is critical to analyzing and understanding others’ behaviors and intentions.
Typically, those areas of the brain are activated when people are interacting with, or thinking about, other people. Observing their correlation with empathy during music listening might indicate that music to these listeners functions as a proxy for a human encounter.
Beyond analysis of the brain scans, the researchers also looked at purely behavioral data — answers to a survey asking the listeners to rate the music afterward.
Those data also indicated that higher empathy people were more passionate in their musical likes and dislikes, such as showing a stronger preference for unfamiliar music.
Precise neurophysiological relationship between empathy and music is largely unexplored
A large body of research has focused on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy — how we understand and experience the thoughts and emotions of other people. Studies point to a number of areas of the prefrontal, insular, and cingulate cortices as being relevant to what brain scientists refer to as social cognition.
Studies have shown that activation of the social circuitry in the brain varies from individual to individual. People with more empathic personalities show increased activity in those areas when performing socially relevant tasks, including watching a needle penetrating skin, listening to non-verbal vocal sounds, observing emotional facial expressions, or seeing a loved one in pain.
In the field of music psychology, a number of recent studies have suggested that empathy is related to intensity of emotional responses to music, listening style, and musical preferences — for example, empathic people are more likely to enjoy sad music.
“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence,” Wallmark said, “that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Margaret Allen, SMU
Users earn rewards with the “Just Drive” app designed to prevent distracted driving.
Neha Husein gripped her steering wheel as her car jolted forward, hit from behind on one of Dallas’ busiest and most dangerous freeways. Shaken, but not injured, the high school senior surveyed the significant damage to her car. The cause of the crash? The driver behind her was texting while driving.
The 2014 collision was the SMU junior’s inspiration to develop a solution to stop drivers from texting while driving, a practice that killed 455 Texans and played a role in 109,660 crashes in Texas in 2016. Her smart-phone app, “Just Drive,” awards points to drivers who lock their phones while driving. Those points can then be redeemed for coupons or free food, drinks or merchandise.
Husein is one of six college entrepreneurs selected to participate March 10 in the Red Bull Launch Institute at Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. She will meet with industry leaders and other entrepreneurs to further develop and amplify her project. The institute is scheduled from 3 to 6:30 p.m. at Palazzo Lavaca, 1614 Lavaca St., Austin.
She’s not being judgmental. Everyone has texted while driving, Husein says.
“We are used to multitasking, and sitting in traffic gets boring,” she says.
But the marketing and human rights major believes positive reinforcement can change behavior. Rewards are motivating to millennials like Husein. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, drivers age 16 to 34 are most likely to text while driving, but Husein is betting the app will appeal to all ages.
“Expecting incentives is a generational thing, but it’s a human thing too,” she says. “People enjoy rewards.”
Husein first presented “Just Drive” at SMU’s October 2017 Big Ideas pitch contest. She won $1,000 for her 90-second pitch and used it to create a wireframe app mock-up. The Big Ideas pitch contest is part of SMU’s Engaged Learning program, a campus wide initiative designed to enhance student learning by connecting a personal passion to academic learning and turning it into a personal project. Faculty mentorship is a key part of the Engaged Learning program.
Husein’s mentor, SMU law professor Keith Robinson, is a specialist in patent, intellectual property and technology law and co-directs the Tsai Center for Law, Science and Innovation in SMU’s Dedman School of Law. He also teaches a class to law students on designing legal apps.
“I like people who show initiative and are willing to bet on themselves,” says Robinson, who meets weekly with Husein to discuss intellectual property issues and trademark application. “Neha has developed an app for a relatable problem, one that can save lives.”
Husein is a Carrollton, Texas, native who grew up with an entrepreneur mindset. She remembers manning a toy cash register alongside her father at his convenience store. He was on hand in February 2018 to see his daughter present her business plan at the second stage of SMU’s Big Ideas competition – and win $5,000 in start-up funds.
“Just Drive is a perfect combination of my interests in human rights and marketing,” Husein says. “It combines business with a philanthropic cause.”
She plans to launch the “Just Drive” app in September, 2018. — Nancy George, SMU
A former special education teacher, Allor’s research is school-based and focuses on reading acquisition for students with and without disabilities, including students with learning disabilities and intellectual disabilities.
She is principal investigator on the federally-funded research grant “Project Intensity: The Development of a Supplemental Literacy Program Designed to Provide Extensive Practice with Multiple-Criteria Text for Students with Intellectual Disabilities” from the Institute of Education Sciences.
The grant’s purpose is to develop carefully designed texts and application lessons to provide students who are struggling to learn to read, particularly those with intellectual disabilities.
Allor was awarded the 2000 Award for Outstanding Research by the Council on Learning Disabilities.
By Sanya Monsoor
Texas Tribune
With each issue, Trib+Edu brings you an interview with experts on issues related to public education. Here is this week’s subject:
Jill Allor is a professor with the Department of Teaching and Learning at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on reading and reading disabilities.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Trib+Edu: Tell me about the most important aspects of your research as it relates to kids with disabilities and struggling readers.
Jill Allor: One of the things that’s really interesting about kids with disabilities is the things we know that are effective for teaching kids in general are also effective for them.
The differences are in how explicit we need to be and how much repetition is needed. A child with a disability needs more intensive instruction — they need more practice and they need every step laid out very carefully.
Research shows if you start out with explicit instruction in kindergarten and first grade, you can address reading problems extremely early. You can prevent many problems and prevent some kids from even needing a diagnosis.
Trib+Edu: What are some of the biggest challenges in identifying and addressing these problems?
Allor: There are some kids that have average intelligence or better but yet struggle to learn how to read. We have a lot of research about what to do for them. They need explicit instruction and the primary problem is usually in the phonological areas. So focusing on phonics early and making that very explicit is critical.
The majority of the kids in special education have learning disabilities. But more recently, since 2005, my focus has been on students who have intellectual disabilities.
A student with a learning disability generally has an average IQ level but has an unexpected problem learning how to read. For a student with an intellectual disability, they’re going to have problems learning in all areas.
What we found in our research is all of the things that work for students who have a learning disability, who are struggling readers, also work for (students with an intellectual disability) but it needs to be even more explicit and more intensive.
Trip+Edu: How do you attain that intensive instruction?
Vogel and Wise expect deep inroads in their quest to narrow the search for chemical compounds that improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.
“Crowdsourcing as well as computational power may help us narrow down our search and give us better chances at selecting a drug that will be successful,” said Vogel. “And gamers can take pride in knowing they’ve helped find answers to an important medical problem.”
Up to now, Wise and Vogel have tapped the high performance computing power of SMU’s Maneframe, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation. With ManeFrame, Wise and Vogel have sorted through millions of compounds that have the potential to work. Now, the biochemists say, it’s time to take that research to the next level — crowdsourced computing.
A network of gamers can crunch massive amounts of data during routine gameplay by pairing two powerful weapons: the best of human intuition combined with the massive computing power of networked gaming machine processors.
Taking their research to the gaming community will more than double the amount of machine processing power attacking their research problem.
“With the distributed computing of the actual game clients, we can theoretically have much more computing power than even the supercomputer here at SMU,” said Clark, also adjunct research associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. SMU Guildhall in March was named No. 1 among the Top 25 Top Graduate Schools for Video Game Design by The Princeton Review.
“If we take a small percentage of the computing power from 25,000 gamers playing our mod we can match ManeFrame’s 120 teraflops of processing power,” Clark said. “Integrating with the ‘Minecraft’ community should allow us to double the computing power of that supercomputer.”
Even more importantly, the gaming community adds another important component — human intuition.
Wise believes there’s a lot of brainpower eager to be tapped in the gaming community. And human brains, when tackling a problem or faced with a challenge, can make creative and intuitive leaps that machines can’t.
“What if we learn things that we never would have learned any other way? And even if it doesn’t work it’s still a good idea and the kids will still get their endorphin kicks playing the game,” Wise said. “It also raises awareness of the research. Gamers will be saying ‘Mom don’t tell me to go to bed, I’m doing scientific research.”
The Vogel and Wise research labs are part of the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery (CD4) in SMU’s Dedman College. The center’s mission is a novel multi-disciplinary focus for scientific research targeting medically important problems in human health. Their research is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.
The research question in play
Vogel and Wise have narrowed a group of compounds that show promise for alleviating the problem of chemotherapy failure after repeated use. Each one of those compounds has 50 to 100 — or even more — characteristics that contribute to their efficacy.
“Corey’s contribution will hopefully tell us which dozen perhaps of these 100 characteristics are the important ones,” Vogel said. “Right now of those 100 characteristics, we don’t know which ones are good ones. We want to see if there’s a way with what we learn from Corey’s gaming system to then apply what we learn to millions of other compounds to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
James McCormick — a fifth year Ph.D. student in cellular molecular biology who earned his doctoral degree this spring and is a researcher with the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery — produced the data set for Clark and Guildhall.
Lauren Ammerman, a first-year Ph.D. student in cellular and molecular biology and also working in the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery, is taking up the computational part of the project.
Machines can learn from human problem solving
Crowdsourcing video gamers to solve real scientific problems is a growing practice.
Machine learning and algorithms by themselves don’t always find the best solution, Clark said. There are already examples of researchers who for years sought answers with machine learning, then switched to actual human gamers.
Gamers take unstructured data and attack it with human problem-solving skills to quickly find an answer.
“So we’re combining both,” Clark said. “We’re going to have both computers and humans trying to find relationships and clustering the data. Each of those human decisions will also be supplied as training input into a deep neural network that is learning the ‘human heuristic’ — the technique and processes humans are using to make their decisions.”
Gamers already have proven they can solve research problems that have stymied scientists, says Vogel. She cites the video game “Foldit” created by the University of Washington specifically to unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme.
Some other Games With A Purpose, as they’re called, have produced similar results. Humans outperform computers when it comes to tasks in the computational process that are particularly suited to the human intellect.
“With ‘Foldit,’ researchers worked on a problem for 15 years using machine learning techniques and were unable to find a solution,” Clark said. “Once they created the game, 57,000 players found a solution in three weeks.”
Modifying the “Minecraft” game and embedding research data inside
Gamers will access the research problem using the version of “Minecraft” they purchased, then install a “mod” or “plugin” — gamer jargon for modifying game code to expand a game’s possibilities — that incorporates SMUs research problem and was developed in accordance with “Minecraft” terms of service. Players will be fully aware of their role in the research, including ultimately leaderboards that show where players rank toward analyzing the data set in the research problem.
SMU is partnering with leaders in the large “Minecraft” modding community to develop a functioning mod by the end of 2017. The game will be heavily tested before release to the public the second quarter of 2018, Clark said.
The SMU “Minecraft” mod will incorporate a data processing and distributed computing platform from game technology company Balanced Media Technology (BMT), McKinney, Texas. BMT’s HEWMEN software platform executes machine-learning algorithms coupled with human guided interactions. It will integrate Wise and Vogel’s research directly into the SMU “Minecraft” mod.
SMU Guildhall will provide the interface enabling modders to develop their own custom game mechanic that visualizes and interacts with the research problem data within the “Minecraft” game environment. Guildhall research is funded in part by Balanced Media Technology.
“We expect to have over 25,000 people continuously online during our testing period,” Clark said. “That should probably double the computing power of the supercomputer here.”
That many players and that much computing power is a massive resource attacking the research problem, Wise said.
“The SMU computational system has 8,000 computer cores. Even if I had all of ManeFrame to myself, that’s still less computing and brainpower than the gaming community,” he said. “Here we’ve got more than 25,000 different brains at once. So even if 24,000 don’t find an answer, there are maybe 1,000 geniuses playing ‘Minecraft’ that may find a solution. This is the most creative thing I’ve heard in a long time.” — Margaret Allen, SMU
Meuret is director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU, with expertise in discussing the differences between fear and anxiety and when each is helpful and adaptive and when they are harmful and interfere with our lives.
An associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Division of the SMU Department of Psychology, Meuret received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Hamburg based on her doctoral work conducted at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University and the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
Her research program focuses on novel treatment approaches for anxiety and mood disorders, biomarkers in anxiety disorders and chronic disease, fear extinction mechanisms of exposure therapy, and mediators and moderators in individuals with affective dysregulations, including non-suicidal self-injury.
The article “A Tiny Spot In Mouse Brains May Explain How Breathing Calms The Mind,” cites new findings from Meuret’s research, which found patients undergoing exposure therapy for anxiety fared better when sessions were held in the morning when levels of the helpful natural hormone cortisone are higher in the brain.
By Jessica Boddy
NPR
Take a deep breath in through your nose, and slowly let it out through your mouth. Do you feel calmer?
Controlled breathing like this can combat anxiety, panic attacks and depression. It’s one reason so many people experience tranquility after meditation or a pranayama yoga class. How exactly the brain associates slow breathing with calmness and quick breathing with nervousness, though, has been a mystery. Now, researchers say they’ve found the link, at least in mice.
The key is a smattering of about 175 neurons in a part of the brain the researchers call the breathing pacemaker, which is a cluster of nearly 3,000 neurons that sit in the brainstem and control autonomic breathing. Through their research is in mice, the researchers found that those 175 neurons are the communication highway between the breathing pacemaker and the part of the brain responsible for attention, arousal and panic. So breathing rate could directly affect feeling calm or anxious, and vice versa.
If that mouse pathway works the same way in humans, it would explain why we get so chilled out after slowing down our breathing. […]
[…] Alicia Meuret, an associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University who also wasn’t involved in the study, wasn’t sure if what the authors described as calm mouse behavior could be described as such. “It’s hard to determine what calm behavior is [in mice],” Meuret says. “We can see their behavior, but we don’t know what effect the loss of neurons has on their emotions.”
Banzett echoed that concern, noting the authors inferred emotion because “they equate the increase in grooming behavior with the emotional state of calmness.”
In the first study of its kind, self-persuasion software on an iPad motivated low-income parents to want to protect their teens against the cancer-causing Human Papillomavirus.
Journalist Justin Martin with KERA public radio news covered the research of SMU psychology professor Austin S. Baldwin, a principal investigator on the research.
The SMU study found that low-income parents will decide to have their teens vaccinated against the sexually transmitted cancer-causing virus if the parents persuade themselves of the protective benefits.
The study’s subjects — almost all moms — were taking their teens and pre-teens to a safety-net pediatric clinic for medical care. It’s the first to look at changing parents’ behavior through self-persuasion using English- and Spanish-language materials.
A very common virus, HPV infects nearly one in four people in the United States, including teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control. HPV infection can cause cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females; penile cancer in males; and anal cancer, back of the throat cancer and genital warts in both genders, the CDC says.
The CDC recommends a series of two shots of the vaccine for 11- to 14-year-olds to build effectiveness in advance of sexual activity. For 15- to 26-year-olds, they are advised to get three doses over the course of eight months, says the CDC.
Currently, about 60% of adolescent girls and 40% of adolescent boys get the first dose of the HPV vaccine. After that, about 20% of each group fail to follow through with the second dose, Baldwin said.
Guilt, social pressure and even a doctor’s recommendation aren’t enough to motivate low-income families to vaccinate their teenagers for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), according to research from Southern Methodist University.
But a follow-up study from SMU finds that if parents persuade themselves of the benefits of the vaccinations, more teenagers in low-income families receive protection from the sexually transmitted, cancer-causing virus.
Austin Baldwin, a professor of psychology at SMU, led the research.
What the study tells us about poverty: HPV is a sexually transmitted virus that is the primary cause of a variety of cancers. There’s been a vaccine developed in the last 10 years, 12 years that’s now approved. At times, those who are underinsured or uninsured don’t have this same level of access to it. Both here locally as well as nationally [among] folks who are poor, who are uninsured, we see clear disparities across a variety of health outcomes including cancer, including cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine is potentially a very effective means to address some of those health disparities.
How the study was conducted: We recruited parents of adolescents who get their pediatric care at Parkland clinic, and they participated in an iPad app that we developed. It provides them with some basic information about HPV and about the vaccine. It then prompts them with a number of questions to think about why getting the vaccine may be important, and then it prompts them to generate their own reasons for why they would get the vaccine. Most of the parents who had not previously given thought to or were undecided about the vaccine reported that they had decided to get their adolescent vaccinated.
Research professor Kate Canales believes design is crucial to disrupting higher education, and the timing has never been better.
Fast Company reporter Doreen Lorenzo interviewed Kate Canales, a research professor and the director of design and innovation programs at SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering.
Canales spoke to Lorenzo as part of Co.Design’s “Designing Women,” a series of interviews with inspiring women in the design industry. The interview published Dec. 7, 2016.
Canales oversees the popular Innovation Gymnasium and serves as Director of the new Master of Arts in Design & Innovation (MADI) program. She has a background in mechanical engineering, product design and design research. Much of her recent work focuses on building creative capacity inside organizations. She studies and teaches the ways we innovate on the basis of human needs and behavior, and is responsible for integrating empathy and creativity into the technical engineering curriculum. Kate teaches several design courses including Human-Centered Design and Building Creative Confidence.
She has worked as a designer and design researcher at IDEO and as a Creative Director at frog design, both internationally recognized leaders in the field of design and innovation.
Canales holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Her writing on human-centered design has appeared in GOOD magazine, The Atlantic, and The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.
By Doreen Lorenzo
Fast Company Doreen Lorenzo: How did you end up where you are today? Did you go directly to academia or did you jump into design first?
Kate Canales: I started my early professional career at Ideo, right out of college. I grew up there over eight years. As a designer, Ideo is my hometown. Then after a couple of years working freelance, I joined frog design in Austin as a principal designer and then a creative director. In 2012 I joined SMU. Although that turn looks a little abrupt, in my heart it really made sense. I had been evolving to support work that did not just deliver great design to clients, but helped clients become more design-led. When SMU called and asked me to help them develop a design program, it was something that made a lot of sense to me. It felt like a natural progression.
Did you go to school for design?
My degree is in mechanical engineering, but I pursued a minor in studio art. Truly, I didn’t feel stirred by either one of those independently, but in the place where those two things overlapped I found a lot of fulfillment. That was design.My degree is in mechanical engineering, but I pursued a minor in studio art. Truly, I didn’t feel stirred by either one of those independently, but in the place where those two things overlapped I found a lot of fulfillment. That was design.
Let’s talk about this phenomenon that’s called design thinking. Why is it so important?
In our program at SMU, we’ve chosen to use the term human-centered design, which overlaps dramatically with what people mean when they say design thinking.
Design thinking emerged as a topic when we all started applying design methodology to problems that hadn’t traditionally presented themselves as design problems. For instance, using design as a problem-solving framework to understand how students might interact more effectively with online courses. That kind of problem might not have looked like a design problem previously. What we’ve learned is that design pairs really well with other ways of working.
Wallmark, assistant professor and chair of music history at SMU Meadows School of the Arts, is using music studies, cognitive sciences and original brain imaging experiments to research the nature of our emotional response to music.
“I am deeply honored to receive this recognition,” Wallmark said. “With the support of the NEH, I hope in my work to help people better understand music’s grip on human emotion and imagination.”
Ates, associate professor in the Clements Department of History, is drawing on a variety of archival sources from different languages to write Sheikh Abdulqadir Nehri (d. 1925) and the Pursuit of an Independent Kurdistan. In the book, Ates will explore the quest for a Kurdish state between 1880-1925, when the creation of such a state emerged as a distinct possibility and then quickly unraveled.
“What this grant tells us is that our work has national relevance,” Ates said. “Recognition of SMU’s faculty work by a prestigious institution like NEH further cements SMU’s standing as a research university. With the support of NEH, I hope to answer one of the enduring questions of the contemporary Middle East: The Kurdish statelessness.”
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.
This is the first time since 2010 that two awards were granted to SMU faculty members within the same funding cycle. More recently, history professor Alexis McCrossen received the fellowship in 2015 and assistant professor of English Timothy Cassedy earned it in 2014.
“NEH fellowships are among the most competitive humanities research opportunities in the nation, with a funding rate of approximately seven percent,” said Meadows Dean Sam Holland. “We are delighted that Zach has won this recognition, which is significant for the Meadows Music Division and reflects the growing visibility and stature of SMU on the national research stage.”
“Recognition from the NEH reinforces that our faculty garner national and international recognition for their research,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “Professor Ates’ work is very timely as the world struggles to determine how best to address our needs for greater intercultural understanding.”
Wallmark teaches courses in American popular music, including opera history and the psychology of music, and serves as director of Meadows’ new MuSci Lab, an interdisciplinary research group and lab facility dedicated to the scientific study of music. His first book, Timbre and Musical Meaning, is under contract with Oxford University Press. He will be combining his NEH support with a sabbatical from Meadows for a full year of dedicated research and writing time.
Ates’ research focuses on Ottoman-Iranian relations, Kurdish history, borderlands and the borderland peoples, and the history of sectarianism in the Middle East. His first book Tunalı Hilmi Bey: Osmanlıdan Cumhuriyet’e Bir Aydın, (Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları, 2009), examines competing projects of Ottoman intellectuals to keep the disparate parts of the Empire together, as well as their responses to the age of nationalism and the birth of the Turkish Republic. Partially based on his award-winning dissertation, his second book, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary (Cambridge University Press, 2013) discusses the making of the boundaries that modern states of Iraq, Turkey and Iran share.
Meuret is director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU, with expertise in discussing the differences between fear and anxiety and when each is helpful and adaptive and when they are harmful and interfere with our lives.
An associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Division at the SMU Department of Psychology, Meuret received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Hamburg based on her doctoral work conducted at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University and the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
Her research program focuses on novel treatment approaches for anxiety and mood disorders, biomarkers in anxiety disorders and chronic disease, fear extinction mechanisms of exposure therapy, and mediators and moderators in individuals with affective dysregulations, including non-suicidal self-injury.
The article “For better talk therapy, try taking a nap,” cites new findings from Meuret’s research, which found patients undergoing exposure therapy for anxiety fared better when sessions were held in the morning when levels of the helpful natural hormone cortisone are higher in the brain.
By Andrea Petersen
Wall Street Journal
New tweaks are improving the age-old practice of talk therapy.
Doing therapy in the morning, taking a nap afterward or adding a medication that enhances learning are just a few of the methods scientists are discovering that can make cognitive behavioral therapy work better.
CBT, which involves changing dysfunctional patterns of thoughts and behaviors, is one of the most well-researched and effective treatments for a range of mental health issues, including anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders.
But about a quarter to half of people with depression and anxiety don’t get significant relief after a course of CBT, which usually consists of about 12 to 15 weekly sessions. Some patients find the treatment time-consuming and difficult. Anywhere from 15% to 30% of people who begin it don’t finish, says David H. Barlow, founder of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. “There’s still plenty of room for improvement,” he says.
A study published in September in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology that involved 24 patients with anxiety disorders found that therapy appointments earlier in the day were more effective than those later in the day.
In the study, subjects—who all had panic disorder with agoraphobia (fear of situations where escape may be difficult)—were treated with exposure therapy, a common component of CBT: They repeatedly confronted situations they feared, such as being in elevators or crowds. Subjects with sessions early in the day reported less severe anxiety symptoms at their next session than those who had sessions later in the day.
The researchers found that higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol that naturally occur in the morning were responsible for at least part of the benefit of the earlier sessions. “Acute boosts of cortisol can actually facilitate learning,” says Alicia E. Meuret, associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University and lead author of the study.
Meuret is director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU, with expertise in discussing the differences between fear and anxiety and when each is helpful and adaptive and when they are harmful and interfere with our lives.
An associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Division at the SMU Department of Psychology, Meuret received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Hamburg based on her doctoral work conducted at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University and the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
Her research program focuses on novel treatment approaches for anxiety and mood disorders, biomarkers in anxiety disorders and chronic disease, fear extinction mechanisms of exposure therapy, and mediators and moderators in individuals with affective dysregulations, including non-suicidal self-injury.
The article “The Science-Backed Reason To See Your Therapist In The Morning,” cites new findings from Meuret’s research, which found patients undergoing exposure therapy for anxiety fared better when sessions were held in the morning when levels of the helpful natural hormone cortisone are higher in the brain.
By Sarah DiGiulio
Huffington Post
Not a morning person? There still might be a good reason to get up and at it when it comes to booking time with your therapist.
A new study found that patients actually made more progress in overcoming anxiety, fears and phobias when they went to psychotherapy in the morning versus the afternoon. In fact, a test of panic symptoms revealed that patients had nearly 30 percent more improvement after an a.m. appointment than an afternoon session.
It’s not about whether or not you’re a morning person or a night owl, study author Alicia E. Meuret, a clinical psychologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told The Huffington Post. The new data suggests morning therapy sessions are aided by higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that our bodies naturally release throughout the day.
The regular release of cortisol plays a role in ramping up metabolism and your immune system to get your body ready to go for the day, she explained. But more cortisol is released in the morning.
“There is already good evidence that learning is facilitated in the morning. There is also good evidence that cortisol facilitates learning,” she said. But this study is the first to suggest that your morning cortisol boost may also help you better face ― and deal with ― your fears and anxieties.
New study found patients with anxiety, phobias and fears showed greater improvement from therapy that was scheduled in the morning, when levels of cortisol — a naturally occurring hormone — test higher.
Patients make more progress toward overcoming anxiety, fears and phobias when their therapy sessions are scheduled in the morning, new research suggests.
The study found that morning sessions helped psychotherapy patients overcome their panic and anxiety and phobic avoidance better, in part, because levels of cortisol — a naturally occurring hormone — are at their highest then, said clinical psychologist Alicia E. Meuret, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
“The hormone cortisol is thought to facilitate fear extinction in certain therapeutic situations,” said Meuret, lead author on the research. “Drugs to enhance fear extinction are being investigated, but they can be difficult to administer and have yielded mixed results. The findings of our study promote taking advantage of two simple and naturally occurring agents – our own cortisol and time of day.”
The study taps into research that anxiety and phobias are best treated by learning corrective information. Patients with anxiety and phobic disorders will overestimate the threat that a sensation or situation can cause. But by direct exposure, a patient learns that the likelihood of an expected catastrophe is very low.
“For example, a patient may think that standing in an elevator could cause him or her to lose control or faint, suffocate, or may create physical symptoms that would be intolerable,” Meuret said. “By having them stand in an elevator for a prolonged time, the patient learns that their feared outcome does not occur, despite high levels of anxiety. We call this corrective learning.”
However, since not all patients benefit equally from exposure therapy, researchers seek to identify ways to enhance corrective learning. To date, no simple way to augment fear extinction has been established.
The hormone cortisol is thought to help the extinction of fear. It appears to suppress the fear memory established by earlier distressing encounters while at the same time helping a patient better absorb and remember the new corrective information.
“In a prior study, we have shown that higher levels of cortisol during and in anticipation of exposure facilitate corrective learning,” said Meuret, an associate professor in the SMU Psychology Department and director of the SMU Anxiety and Depression Research Center in the Clinical Psychology Division of the department. “We also know that cortisol is higher early in the day. But we did not know whether cortisol would act as a mediator between time of day and therapeutic gains. This is what our study investigated.”
Exposure therapy in general resulted in significant improvements
Participants in the study were 24 people diagnosed with panic disorder and agoraphobia, which is a fear of public places where a person feels panicked, trapped or helpless.
For the study, participants underwent a standard psychotherapeutic treatment of “exposure therapy,” in which patients are exposed to situations that can typically induce their panic or fear with the goal that repeated exposure can help diminish a disabling fear response over time.
Patients received weekly sessions over three weeks, each lasting, on average, 40 minutes. Exposure situations included tall buildings, highways and overpasses, enclosed places such as elevators, supermarkets, movie theaters, and public transportation such as subways and intercity trains and boats. In addition, levels of cortisol were measured at various times during each exposure session by swabbing inside the mouth for saliva.
In the session following exposure, the researchers measured patients’ appraisals of the threats, their avoidance behavior, how much control they perceived themselves as having, and the severity of their panic symptoms.
Assessing the results from those measurements, the researchers found the exposure therapy in general resulted in significant improvements in all measures over all time periods.
Biggest gains after sessions that started earlier in the day
However, patients made the biggest gains in overcoming their fears after the sessions that started earlier in the day. At the next session, patients reported less severe symptoms for threat misappraisal, avoidance behaviors and panic symptom severity. They also perceived greater control over their panic symptoms.
“Notably, higher cortisol was related to greater reductions in threat appraisal, perceived control and panic symptom severity at the next session,” Meuret said, “and that was the case over-and-above the effects of time-of-day, with large effect sizes.”
That finding suggests that cortisol accounts for some of the therapeutic effects associated with time-of-day, she said.
Because cortisol levels are generally higher in the morning, the authors speculate that higher cortisol levels may aid extinction learning, and contribute to enhanced early-day benefits of exposure sessions through such a mechanism.
However, Meuret cautioned that the precise mechanism by which cortisol enhances the effectiveness of morning exposure sessions remains unclear and can’t be directly addressed from the data in this study. The sample size of the study was small and findings need to be confirmed independently in larger studies, she said.
Meuret and her team suspect additional mechanisms are at play to explain the time-of-day effect. Other factors could include memory and learning and the body’s natural circadian rhythm, quantity and quality of sleep, attention control, and interactions between those factors and others. — Margaret Allen, SMU
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information, www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
“Newton figured out the laws of motion centuries ago but when we apply them to the human body it gets really complex, really quickly.” — Peter Weyand
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Peter Weyand in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications, at 214-768-7654, or email news@smu.edu.
Journalist Simon Usborne tapped the human-speed expertise of SMU biomechanics expert Peter Weyand for an article in the London newspaper The Guardian. The article examines the potential for humans to continue improving strength and speed beyond what has already been achieved.
Usborne interviewed Weyand for his expertise on the mechanics of running and speed of world-class sprinters like Usain Bolt. The article “How fast can we go? The science of the 100m sprint” published Oct. 3, 2016.
Weyand, director of the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory, is one of the world’s leading scholars on the scientific basis of human performance. His research on runners, specifically world-class sprinters, looks at the importance of ground forces for running speed, and has established a contemporary understanding that spans the scientific and athletic communities.
In particular, Weyand’s finding that speed athletes are not able to reposition their legs more rapidly than non-athletes debunked a widespread belief. Rather, Weyand and his colleagues have demonstrated sprinting performance is largely set by the force with which one presses against the ground and how long one applies that force.
By Simon Usborne
The Guardian
The greatest race in the Olympics is the simplest. Eight runners, eight straight lines. A bang, an explosion of muscle and, less than ten seconds later, a winner. And all they do is run. No bikes, boats, vaults or horses — just one foot in front of the other. Yet, in those three dozen blinks of an eye, sprinters in the 100m perform physical feats so advanced that scientists are still trying to understand them.
“On one level you’d think we would have pieced it together a long time ago,” says Peter Weyand, one of the world’s leading students of running and professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at South Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. “Newton figured out the laws of motion centuries ago but when we when we apply them to the human body it gets really complex, really quickly.”
Simply analysing the extreme motion and exertions of a sprinter is challenging. Weyand and his team have a large treadmill in their lab capable of rolling at 90mph. In the punishing max test, athletes straddle the moving belt and hop on for a few seconds at a time. They start slow, with rests in between. “We increase the speed until the athlete can’t maintain it,” the professor says. “We need eight steps without moving backwards for a good trial.”
The tests are a safer version of jumping off the back of an old Routemaster bus and staying upright for eight paces – athletes wear harnesses in case they trip – but how fast is the bus going? “The unofficial record on our treadmill is 11.72 metres per second,” Weyand says. That’s 26.7mph, or not far off a city speed limit, or Bolt’s peak speed during his 2009 world record run of 27.8mph. “When we have elite athletes do the test, the whole office comes over to watch.”
High-speed treadmills, slow-motion imaging and pressure sensors have allowed scientists to study aspects of elite sprinting that were largely unknown as recently as 15 years ago. “If you asked a coach in the late 1990s what they were doing it was all very much based on form,” Weyand says. “But when we started this work back at that time, the first thing we figured out is that what makes these guys fast is how forcefully they can hit the ground in relation to their body weight.”
When Usain Bolt looks like he’s floating over the track, he’s really not. That extreme rippling in the face that slow motion footage reveals in some runners demonstrates the forces that transfer from foot to floor. “We know that Bolt will peak out with each step at about five times his weight, while non-sprinting athletes will peak at about 3.5 times,” Weyand explains. “The science is clear: the top athletes are specialised to deliver the most force to the ground and that’s what makes them fast. But even now I think we’re still in the formative phase — it hasn’t yet translated into broad practices in training.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information, www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Diagnosing concussions is difficult because it typically rests on subjective symptoms such as forgetfulness, wobbly gait and disorientation or loss of consciousness. A new study of college athletes investigates objective indicators using Doppler ultrasound to measure brain blood flow and blood vessel function.
A hard hit to the head typically prompts physicians to look for signs of a concussion based on symptoms such as forgetfulness, wobbly gait and disorientation.
But symptoms such as those are subjective. And youth who are anxious to get back to their sport can sometimes hide the signs in order to brush off adult concerns, says physiologist Sushmita Purkayastha, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
Now a new study funded by the Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas aims to find noninvasive objective indicators to diagnose whether an athlete has suffered a concussion. Using transcranial Doppler ultrasound, the study will probe the brains of college athletes to measure blood vessel function in the brain, looking for tell-tale signs related to blood flow that help diagnose concussion, said Purkayastha, a researcher on the new study.
“We know this is an understudied area. With other health problems, when the doctor suspects diabetes or hypertension, they don’t guess, they run objective tests to confirm the diagnosis. But that’s not the case with concussion — yet,” said Purkayastha, whose research expertise is blood flow regulation in the human brain. “That’s why my research focus is to find markers that are objective and not subjective. And this method of monitoring blood flow in the brain with ultrasound is noninvasive, inexpensive and there’s no radiation.”
Purkayastha and others on the research team are working under a one-year, $150,000 pilot research grant from the Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair, a UT Southwestern initiative funded by the Texas Legislature to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of brain injuries.
The team will observe 200 male and female college athletes over the next two years. Half the athletes will be students playing a contact-collision sport who have recently suffered a sports-related concussion. The other half, a control group, will be students playing a contact-collision sport who don’t have a concussion. The study draws on athletes from football, soccer, equestrian sports, cheerleading and recreational sports.
The researchers began testing subjects in August. They expect to have results by the Fall of 2017.
“We are very excited at establishing this collaboration between SMU and the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Department at UTSW. Our work with Dr. Purkayastha promises to give meaningful insight into the role of cerebral blood flow mechanisms after concussion and will point us in the right direction for improved neurorecovery,” said physician Kathleen Bell, a leading investigator at U.T. Southwestern’s Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair and principal investigator on the study. Bell is a nationally recognized leader in rehabilitation medicine and a specialist in neurorehabilitation.
Diagnosing concussions by using objective, non-invasive and inexpensive markers will result in accurate diagnosis and better return-to-play decisions following a concussion, thereby preventing the long-term risk of second-impact syndrome, said Purkayastha, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness of SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
“Although sports-related concussions are common, the physiology of the injury is poorly understood, and hence there are limited treatments currently available,” she said.
Hemorrhage or blackouts result, for example, if autoregulation malfunctions
While the brain is the most important organ in the body, it has been very understudied, said Purkayastha, a professor in the Simmons School of Education & Human Development. But since blood vessels in the brain behave similarly to those in the rest of the body, it’s possible to measure blood vessel function in the brain by monitoring blood pressure and brain blood flow. Observing those functions could reveal a marker, she said.
In Purkayastha’s lab on the SMU campus, student athletes are being outfitted with two small ultrasound probes, one on each side of their forehead in the temple area, to test blood vessel function. Specifically, the two probes monitor the blood flow through middle cerebral artery, which supplies blood to 75 percent of the brain. The artery traverses the brain, circulating blood to the brain tissues responsible for movement, cognition and decision-making.
Branching from the middle cerebral artery is a network of blood vessels that get smaller and smaller as they get further from the artery, spreading like tree branches through the brain. The smallest vessels — via a different local regulatory mechanism — maintain constant blood flow to the brain, making microadjustments, such as constricting and dilating in the face of constant changes in blood pressure. Adjustments occur as a person’s muscles move, whether standing, sitting, exercising, or even just laughing and experiencing emotion. These continual adjustments in the vessels — called cerebral autoregulation — keep blood flow constant and regular. That prevents problems such as hemorrhaging or passing out from large fluctuations in blood pressure that is either too high or too low.
Researchers suspect concussion diminishes a vessels ability to properly regulate blood flow
In the current study, ultrasound probes on the temples record the vessels’ microadjustments as digital data. That information is processed through a WinDaq data acquisition software and analyzed to examine cerebral autoregulation with spontaneous changes in blood pressure during that period of time.
Unlike at the doctor’s office, when a cuff is used to measure blood pressure at a rate of single measurements during 30 seconds, Purkayastha’s ultrasound monitoring of blood pressure provides continuous blood pressure recording throughout each heartbeat. As sound waves bounce into the artery and send back an echo, they measure the speed of red blood cells and other blood components moving through the artery.
“We collect 10 minutes of very high frequency data points collecting information on beat-to-beat changes in blood pressure and blood flow to the brain for every single heartbeat,” said Purkayastha. “Then we analyze and post-process and examine how well the blood vessels were able to maintain constant blood flow to the brain. We suspect in people with concussion that the autoregulation function isn’t operating properly which leads to impairments in function such as wobbly gait, disorientation or forgetfulness. This is a noninvasive way to see if there’s a flaw in the autoregulation.”
Athletes with confirmed diagnosis of concussions will be tested three times during the course of the study. The first test is three days after a suspected concussion, the second is 21 days afterward, and the third is three months afterward.
“The pilot studies so far look promising and our goal is to better understand the mechanism behind injury and design objective markers detecting concussion,” said Purkayastha.
The Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center, a component of the Harold and Annette Simmons Comprehensive Center for Research and Treatment in Brain and Neurological Disorders, is a collaborative initiative involving local and national organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, University of Texas Dallas and its Center for BrainHealth, Children’s Medical Center, Dallas VA Medical Center, and Parkland Health and Hospital System, as well as Texas Health Resources and Texas Health Ben Hogan Sports Medicine. — Margaret Allen, SMU
Video game that directs students to make arm movements fosters understanding for proving complex geometry theorems
Students who make relevant arm movements while learning can improve their knowledge and retention of math, research has shown.
Now researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a model using geometry proofs that shows potential for wide adoption — a video game in which students make movements with their arms to learn abstract math concepts.
The research is the first to use widely available technology combined with relevant body gestures and apply it to the learning of complex reasoning in a highly conceptual, pre-college math domain — geometric proof production.
“Our goal is to create an environment that supports students in making motions that help them understand the math better, Walkington said.”
Walkington and educational psychology professors Mitchell Nathan and Peter Steiner, University of Wisconsin-Madison are collaborating on the project with SMU Guildhall, SMU’s graduate-level academic program for digital game-development.
“Much of math education is about learning rules and procedures. Geometry proof is different,” said Nathan, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Students have to learn how to think conceptually about why certain statements about shapes are true, how they are always true, for all members of a class of shapes, and how to explain it to others so they are convincing. We think that level of mathematical understanding is embodied.”
Emerging research is investigating the theory that our body actions can actually influence our thoughts, in addition to our thoughts driving our actions. Body movement can induce new activity in our neural systems. This activity can create and influence our learning, thinking and mental organization. This mind-body partnership, dubbed “embodied cognition,” is driving new approaches to learning subjects such as math.
“What is so exciting about this geometry research project is that it shows how theories of embodied cognition are becoming mature enough to start to develop a whole new class of educational technology that we can envision as part of everyday math classrooms in the near term,” Nathan said.
Video game fosters learning by pairing gestures with geometry proofs
At the heart of the new study is the video game “The Hidden Village.” A motion-capture video game, “The Hidden Village” helps foster learning by pairing motions with geometry proofs. Designed for a Windows PC computer with Microsoft’s Kinect 2 motion-capture camera attached, the game’s signature design element is an episodic story paired with directives for arm movements.
Each episode leads a student to perform certain motions with their arms, correlating those with questions and answers related to proofs of geometry theorems.
To begin, a student stands in front of the Kinect camera. The camera detects the student, then calibrates to each student’s body shape, size and movement, familiarizing itself with the student.
When play begins, the camera and software detect movements in real time and provide feedback about whether the students are appropriately matching the motions.
A demo of the latest version of the video game is available on Youtube, with an explanatory video at this link.
Directed body motions can improve proving of theorems
The previous version of the game was tested at a high school in Dallas in February with positive results. The researchers are presenting those results in early November at the Psychology of Mathematics Education conference in Tucson, Arizona.
Preliminary findings showed students liked learning in the video game format, and benefited when they were encouraged to think about how their body motions related to the geometric proofs.
“High school students really struggle to learn proof in geometry, and often their initial performance on these proofs is very low,” said Walkington, who specializes in math education and connecting it to students’ concrete everyday experiences. “However, making and thinking through the motions from the game, they’re given a new resource with which to think about the problems.”
Recent research led by Nathan found that directed body motions can lead to improvements in geometry theorem proving even when students claim no awareness of the relevance of the actions to the mathematical tasks. Research has also found that verbal prompts from a teacher to connect the actions to mathematical ideas further improve student proof practices.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information, www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The New York Daily News quoted SMU Psychology Professor George W. Holden for his expertise on spanking in an article about a Georgia principal paddling a 5-year-old boy as punishment. The paddling was caught on video and went viral on the Internet by viewers who were horrified and shocked.
Holden is a leading expert on parenting, discipline and family violence. He strongly advocates against corporal punishment and cites overwhelming research, including his own, that has demonstrated that spanking is not only ineffective, but also harmful to children, and many times leads to child abuse.
Holden, an expert in families and child development, is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.
Holden’s earlier research, “Corporal punishment: Mother’s self-recorded audio,” provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
His work into the determinants of parental behavior, parental social cognition, and the causes and consequences of family violence has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, The Timberlawn Research Foundation, and, most recently, the U.S. State Department.
By Laura Bult
New York Daily News
Horrified viewers watched video of a Georgia principal paddling a 5-year-old boy as punishment — a legal but controversial action that has sparked a conversation about the effects of corporal punishment on children.
It is still legal to strike kids as a form of punishment in public schools in 19 states, primarily in the south and the west, despite research and experts’ views that it amounts to child abuse.
“I suspect this thing happens a lot. A lot of paddling goes on in small towns in Texas, and particularly in southern states,” George Holden, the chair of the psychology department at Southern Methodist University and the president of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, told the Daily News.
The practice persists primarily in the south because of the heavy influence of religion, Holden added.
Students in states where it is legal received swats, spanks and slaps 166,807 times in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the most recent federal data.
Corporal punishment is protected by a 1977 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that physical discipline in schools didn’t violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Shana Marie Perez’s viral video showing her son getting punished by Jasper County Primary School principal Pam Edge as the assistant principal held him down was lawful, but disturbed many opponents of the archaic practice.
“Corporal punishment is potentially damaging to children, it’s not the best way to deal with them and it’s also a violation of their right not to be hit,” Holden fumed, saying that giving children painful punishments teaches them to be violent and often results in depression and anxiety.
“If the adult is hitting a child, they learn to hit other children if they’re upset or angry,” he said.
Perez claimed the school threatened her son with suspension if she didn’t agree to the punishment and that she could get sent to jail for truancy for having already withheld him from school for 18 days that school year.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Day of presenting in Hughes-Trigg Student Center allows students to discuss their research, identify potential collaborators, discover other perspectives.
SMU graduate and undergraduate students presented their research to the SMU community at the University’s Research Day 2016 on Feb. 10.
The annual Research Day event fosters communication between students in different disciplines, gives students the opportunity to present their work in a professional setting, and allows students to share with their peers and industry professionals from the greater Dallas community the outstanding research conducted at SMU.
A cash prize of $250 was awarded to the best poster from each department or judging group.
Faris Altamimi, a student of Dr. Sevinc Sengor in Lyle School‘s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, presented a study investigating experimental and modeling approaches for enhanced methane generation from municipal solid waste, while providing science-based solutions for cleaner, renewable sources of energy for the future.
Yongqiang Li and Xiaogai Li, students of Dr. Xin-Lin Gao in Lyle School’s Mechanical Engineering Department, are addressing the serious blunt trauma injury that soldiers on the battlefield suffer from ballistics impact to their helmets. The study simulated the ballistic performance of the Advanced Combat Helmet.
Audrey Reeves, Sara Merrikhihaghi and Kevin Bruemmer, students of Dr. Alexander Lippert, in the Chemistry Department of Dedman College, presented research on cell-permeable fluorescent probes in the imaging of enzymatic pathways in living cells, specifically the gaseous signaling molecule nitroxyl. Their research better understands nitroxyl’s role as an inhibitor of an enzyme that is key in the conversion of acetaldehyde to acetic acid.
Rose Ashraf, a student of Dr. George Holden in the Psychology Department of Dedman College, presented her research on harsh verbal discipline in the home and its prediction of child compliance. It was found permissive parents are least likely to elicit prolonged compliance.
Nicole Vu and Caitlin Rancher, students of Dr. Ernest N. Jouriles and Dr. Renee McDonald in the Psychology Department of Dedman College, presented research on children’s threat appraisals of interparental conflict and it’s relationship to child anxiety.
See the full catalog of participants and their abstracts.
SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.
By Margaret Allen
SMU News & Communications
It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:
Hot topic merits open access
Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.
Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.
Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.
A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.
Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.
The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.
The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.
The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.
To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.
Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.
The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.
The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.
Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.
Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.
That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.
Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.
Chemistry research group edits special issue
Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.
The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.
The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.
CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.
There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.
Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.
The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.
Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.
The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.
KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.
SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal
Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)
Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.
The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.
The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.
The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
“It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.
The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.
Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”
The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”
Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.
Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.
Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.
But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.
Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”
The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.
The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.
Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.
The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”
Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award
Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)
Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”
The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.
Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.
As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.
The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.
Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.
Two SMU psychology professors working with University of Maryland engineers have been awarded a National Institutes of Health grant in October that will bring nearly $2 million to their joint project to create a wearable device for pediatric asthma patients that helps them avoid asthma triggers.
The asthma device will monitor air quality (including pollen levels and temperature), carbon dioxide levels in the blood, physical activity, breathing, emotional states and other stimuli to identify each patient’s individual asthma triggers and alert them when conditions are ripe for an attack. The concept is similar to the glucose monitor that alerts diabetes patients when their blood sugar is low, but it also includes much more complex monitoring of the patients’ environment.
The device’s current iteration is a portable unit, but the Maryland team is miniaturizing it so that it can be worn as a vest.
SMU psychology professors Alicia E. Meuret and Thomas Ritz, have teamed up with University of Maryland Center for Advanced Sensor Technology professors Yordan Kostov, Xudong Ge and Govind Rao, which provides a natural extension of each team’s research.
“Most of my early research has been developing a treatment that addresses hyperventilation using portable CO2 measurement devices, and teaching patients who suffer from panic disorders to normalize their CO2 levels and stop hyperventilating,” said Meuret, an associate professor in SMU’s Department of Psychology. “The colleagues at University of Maryland contacted me because they wanted to use one of the refined devices as a therapeutic measure, and the partnership grew from there.”
One eventual goal for the academic partnership is for the device to provide Meuret’s treatment instructions to patients during an attack so they can more quickly recover.
How patients perceive asthma triggers and how they can better manage them has been Ritz’ major research interest. He says 25 percent to 30 percent of patients have asthma symptoms triggered by emotional stimuli, which can be demonstrated by experiments with mood induction.
“That percentage is clinically significant,” Ritz says. “It’s a large endeavor with researchers from across the United States working on it and exchanging experience to develop their projects further.”
While the Maryland team works on the hardware for the project — and other research teams across the country work on the software — SMU’s Ritz and Meuret are working on the psychology and the clinical testing of the device with patients. Starting in January, the pair will conduct tests where students wearing the sensors change their breathing systematically or watch mood-inducing stimuli, such as sad, frightening or joyful movie clips.
Other tests of the environmental sensors will be done with adolescent asthma patients’ daily life. This will generate the data that will make the device’s components eventually run smoothly.
The SMU allotment of the NIH grant’s funds is $540,737. The University of Maryland team also includes environmental engineering researchers Chris Hennigan and electrical engineering researchers Ryan Robucci and Nilanjan Banerjee. — Kenny Ryan
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Three independent studies find women near peak fertility who desire to maintain body attractiveness are motivated to eat less — unlike women who are not near ovulation, using hormonal birth control, or not motivated to maintain body attractiveness
Biology isn’t the only reason women eat less as they near ovulation, a time when they are at their peak fertility.
Three new independent studies found that another part of the equation is a woman’s desire to maintain her body’s attractiveness, says social psychologist and assistant professor Andrea L. Meltzer, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
Women nearing ovulation who also reported an increase in their motivation to manage their body attractiveness reported eating fewer calories out of a desire to lose weight, said Meltzer, lead researcher on the study.
When women were not near peak fertility — regardless of whether they were motivated to manage their body attractiveness, near peak fertility but not motivated to manage their body attractiveness, or using hormonal birth control, they were less likely to want to lose weight and didn’t reduce their calories, Meltzer said.
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To book an interview with Andrea Meltzer call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
“These findings may help reconcile prior inconsistencies regarding the implications of ovulatory processes,” said Meltzer. “The desire to manage body attractiveness was a motivational factor for desired weight loss when women are nearing ovulation.”
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The authors note that their study adds to a growing body of ovulation research, particularly as it relates to women’s health and weight management.
Previous studies in the field have found that women, and many non-human mammals, consume fewer calories near peak fertility.
They’ve also found that ovulation shifts a woman’s goals to attract a partner, motivating her to enhance her appearance to compete for men.
The authors note, however, that studies by other researchers attribute those ovulatory shifts in eating behavior solely to physiological factors related to an interaction between the nervous system and the endocrine system.
But Meltzer and her colleagues say the new findings suggest an additional reason, one that is related to cultural norms and influences that dictate one way women may enhance their attractiveness is by managing their weight: Ovulating women may be motivated to lose weight and eat less if they are also motivated to improve their body attractiveness.
“Indeed, in our research we saw that shifting levels of hormones interacted with women’s desires to manage their body attractiveness, which predicted an important behavior — eating less,” Meltzer said. “These findings illustrate that broader social norms that dictate that thin women are more attractive can play a role, in addition to physiological factors.”
Meltzer’s co-authors on the study are James K. McNulty, Florida State University, Saul L. Miller, University of Kentucky, and Levi R. Baker, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Findings are confirmed across three independent studies
The three independent studies involved three different groups of women.
The first study followed 22 heterosexual women who were not using hormonal contraceptives and found they desired greater weight loss when they were closer to ovulation than when they were not.
The second study followed 92 heterosexual women, some who were using and some who were not using hormonal contraceptives. Its findings replicated the findings of the first study: Women who were not using hormonal contraceptives near peak fertility reported wanting to weigh less. In contrast, women in the study using hormonal contraceptives — which act on the endocrine system to disrupt the menstrual cycle and prevent pregnancy by altering hormonal fluctuations — didn’t demonstrate a desire to lose weight.
A third study followed 89 married women and found that those who were not using hormonal birth control were the ones most motivated to restrict eating during peak fertility, but only when they were more motivated to maintain their body attractiveness.
“Not only did the primary effect replicate across three independent studies,” the authors said, “it emerged in two samples of undergraduate women from different universities and a sample of married women and did not vary across participants’ weight using two samples of women who had a normal weight on average and one sample of women who were overweight on average.” — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
“I’m not arguing one should be lax and not engage in any discipline, but one can easily discipline children without hitting them.” — George Holden
Public News Service quoted SMU Psychology Professor George W. Holden as an expert source in an article about a new study from Duke University that warns against resorting to physical punishment.
Holden is a leading expert on parenting, discipline and family violence. He strongly advocates against corporal punishment and cites overwhelming research, including his own, that has demonstrated that spanking is not only ineffective, but also harmful to children, and many times leads to child abuse.
Holden, an expert in families and child development, is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.
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To book a live or taped interview with Dr. George Holden in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Holden was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass.
Most recently Holden’s research, “Real-time audio of corporal punishment,” found that children misbehaved within 10 minutes of being spanked and that parents don’t follow the guidelines for spanking that pro-spanking advocates claim are necessary for spanking to be effective.
Other recent research, “Parents less likely to spank,” showed that parents who favor spanking changed their minds after they were briefly exposed to summaries of research detailing the negative impact of corporal punishment on children. Holden, who considers spanking a public health problem, said the research indicates that parents’ attitudes about spanking could economically, quickly and effectively be changed to consider alternative disciplinary methods.
Holden’s earlier research, “Corporal punishment: Mother’s self-recorded audio,” provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
His work into the determinants of parental behavior, parental social cognition, and the causes and consequences of family violence has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, The Timberlawn Research Foundation, and, most recently, the U.S. State Department.
By Stephanie Carson
Public News Service
This week, many Tennessee children are rejoicing because it’s spring break, but the time off from school may wear on the patience of some parents.
A new study from Duke University warns against resorting to physical punishment.
In the study of 1,000 children and mothers from eight different countries, researchers found that maternal warmth can’t dampen the anxiety and aggression connected to physical punishment.
“A parent who is both causing pain to the child by frequently hitting a child, but also saying they love them and hugging them, is very confusing to a child,” says George Holden, a psychology professor at Southern Methodist University. “It’s virtually unanimous that physical punishment is not an effective parenting technique.”
Instead of spanking or hitting, experts cited in the report recommend examining the causes of the behavior.
For example, asking questions such as, “Is your child hungry? Are you pushing them too hard?”
Holden adds joint problem solving is also effective, as well as modeling good behavior yourself.
Holden is one of the founders of the U.S. Alliance to Stop the Hitting of Children, which is a group of experts and parents lobbying for the end of physical means of punishment.
“It doesn’t promote good, warm, loving relationships, which is what is the most important thing to do in raising a child,” Holden stresses. “Now I’m not arguing one should be lax and not engage in any discipline, but one can easily discipline children without hitting them.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The three developed a video-based program for teaching young women assertiveness training and allowing them to practice it with the goal of helping them resist unwanted sexual overtures that could ultimately result in sexual assault. Jouriles and McDonald also devised a bystander intervention program that teaches young men and women how to recognize and intervene in a dangerous situation.
Simpson Rowe, an associate professor and graduate program co-director in the SMU Department of Psychology, is lead author on the pilot study from SMU.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Lorelei Simpson Rowe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
The virtual-reality simulation component of “My Voice, My Choice” utilizes a software program developed by Jouriles and McDonald in conjunction with SMU’s award-winning Guildhall video gaming program. Jouriles and McDonald are clinical psychologists in the SMU Psychology Department. Jouriles is professor and chair. McDonald is a professor and associate dean of research and academic affairs for Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
Results of their study found teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment.
The effects persisted over a three-month period following the training.
Melissa Repko, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, interviewed Jouriles, who told her, “You can make an argument that realistically what we need to do is change the aggressor’s or the perpetrator’s behavior. But on the other hand, as a father, I didn’t want to just wait around,” said Jouriles.
By Melissa Repko
The Dallas Morning News
A boyfriend and girlfriend fighting at a party. A couple stumbling around in an alcohol-fueled stupor. A teen getting pressured to kiss someone who gave her a ride.
Those scenarios are depicted in two programs developed by Southern Methodist University psychology professors to help young adults prevent sexual assault and sexual harassment.
One program uses video to suggest how college students can intervene to help friends in risky situations. The other program uses virtual reality software so that teens practice being assertive and resisting unwanted advances.
Professors Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald, a husband-and-wife research team, have studied violence prevention for most of their careers. They’ve researched marital conflict, spousal abuse and children’s response to family violence.
Jouriles said he got interested in adolescent issues, such as dating violence, when their daughter was young. He wanted to help keep her safe.
“You can make an argument that realistically what we need to do is change the aggressor’s or the perpetrator’s behavior. But on the other hand, as a father, I didn’t want to just wait around,” said Jouriles, chair of SMU’s psychology department.
Universities have taken different approaches to fight campus assaults, such as talking about consent at student orientations, posting fliers on campus and hosting speakers. Some offer programs to teach students to recognize and intervene in dangerous situations.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
“Watching young women, who begin by saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, say ‘no, I’m not interested! Stop asking me!’ is the most exciting part.” — Simpson Rowe
The three developed a video-based program for teaching young women assertiveness training and allowing them to practice it with the goal of helping them resist unwanted sexual overtures that could ultimately result in sexual assault. Jouriles and McDonald also devised a bystander intervention program that teaches young men and women how to recognize and intervene in a dangerous situation.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Lorelei Simpson Rowe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
The virtual-reality simulation component of “My Voice, My Choice” utilizes a software program developed by Jouriles and McDonald in conjunction with SMU’s award-winning Guildhall video gaming program. Jouriles and McDonald are clinical psychologists in the SMU Psychology Department. Jouriles is professor and chair. McDonald is a professor and associate dean of research and academic affairs for Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
Simpson Rowe, an associate professor and graduate program co-director in the SMU Department of Psychology, is lead author on the pilot study from SMU.
Results of their study found teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment.
The effects persisted over a three-month period following the training.
Owens interviewed the researchers,and McDonald told her that girls learn, “You can be nice and strong. But, be strong. And if nice doesn’t work, be strong and don’t worry about being nice. Get out of the situation.”
By Robbie Owens CBS DFW Channel 11 A parent’s drive to protect is a powerful motivator: just ask Ernest Jouriles, PhD and Renee McDonald, PhD. A decade ago, the husband and wife team of researchers in the Psychology department at Southern Methodist University saw their daughter Nicola’s approaching adolescence as a huge incentive to begin work on a training program to help young women diffuse—or at least re-direct– sexually charged situations.
But, early results failed to engage the teenage mind. So why not tap into the video game generation’s love of gadgets? “We were thinking, ‘can we do something with virtual reality that could help teens basically practice skills to get out of situations that are potentially difficult—that might be dangerous’,” says Dr. Jouriles, co-author on the research, clinical psychologist, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Psychology.
Here’s how it works: students are first taught assertiveness skills. Those skills are then tested during a real time ‘virtual reality’ session. A male research assistant controls the avatar and acts as an aggressor. Of course, the goggles and monitor give up the gig—this exercise in assertiveness isn’t real. But, research assistant and SMU Senior Katie Bridges says it certainly feels real. “You start feeling uneasy,” says Bridges.
Students first learn assertiveness skills. Then those skills are tested during a real time ‘virtual reality’ session. A male research assistant controls the avatar and acts as an aggressor.
“It’s very brief,” says Dr. McDonald, co-author on the research, “which is unusual, and has such a strong effect on victimization rates.” Dr. McDonald is a clinical psychologist, professor and associate dean of research and academic affairs for SMU’s Dedman College. “We’ve been able to reduce them by half among women who go through the program.”
Lorelei Simpson Rowe, PhD, is the lead author on the study, a clinical psychologist, and associate professor in the department. She says she taught young women self-defense during her undergraduate days at Michigan State and says the ‘virtual reality’ training is a perfect extension of her passion to help strengthen young women.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Simpson Rowe, an associate professor and graduate program co-director in the SMU Department of Psychology, is lead author on the pilot study from SMU.
The virtual-reality simulation component of “My Voice, My Choice” utilizes a software program developed by Jouriles and McDonald in conjunction with SMU’s award-winning Guildhall video gaming program. Jouriles and McDonald are clinical psychologists in the SMU Psychology Department. Jouriles is professor and chair. McDonald is a professor and associate dean of research and academic affairs for Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
Results of their study found teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment.
The effects persisted over a three-month period following the training.
Newsweek journalist Lauren Walker interviewed Simpson Rowe, who told Walker, “We don’t want to support victim blaming of any kind,” she said, “so what we emphasize instead are these are skills you can use to protect yourself, like locking your door…but the only person who is responsible for the occurrence of any kind of violence or victimization is the perpetrator.”
By Lauren Walker
Newsweek
Most women have dealt with unwanted sexual advances. In fact, one national survey estimates that 65 percent have experienced some form of street harassment. But a study out of Southern Methodist University found that teenage girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after undergoing assertive resistance training in virtual reality.
While virtual reality is routinely used to train soldiers or treat anxiety disorders, training of this nature is new.
Virtual simulations “seem to be more immersive than face-to-face role plays,” said clinical psychologist Lorelei Simpson Rowe, the study’s lead author. “The participant is not thinking any more about being in a room in a psychology study with other people around,” she is “focused on what she is seeing through the glasses and what she’s hearing.”
The study included 78 female students aged 14 to 18 from an all-girls urban high school. First, all were asked to fill out questionnaires related to their experiences with sexual violence and victimization. Next, the girls were split into two groups; 42 participated in the “My Voice, My Choice” (MVMC) training program, while 36 remained in the control group and received no training.
Each 90-minute training session was led by a female facilitator and included two to four young women. The group first discussed what assertiveness means and what it looks like, and then the bulk of the training was practicing these skills in virtual simulation.
“A lot of times when women engage in verbal standing up for themselves, it is very hard because we are pretty much socially conditioned to be agreeable,” said Kelli Dunlap, a doctor of psychology, JoLT fellow at American University and self-proclaimed huge gamer. “The idea of being in an environment that is building and practicing those skills so that you can take them into a real world scenario, I think that can be really helpful.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Au’s coverage includes details of how SMU researchers developed the training simulation by modifying the popular first-person video game Half-Life 2, combined with a virtual reality headset.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Lorelei Simpson Rowe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Simpson Rowe, an associate professor and graduate program co-director in the SMU Department of Psychology, is lead author on the pilot study from SMU.
The virtual-reality simulation component of “My Voice, My Choice” utilizes a software program developed by Jouriles and McDonald in conjunction with SMU’s award-winning Guildhall video gaming program. Jouriles and McDonald are clinical psychologists in the SMU Psychology Department. Jouriles is professor and chair. McDonald is a professor and associate dean of research and academic affairs for Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
Results of their study found teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment.
The effects persisted over a three-month period following the training.
By Wagner James Au
New World Notes
Can virtual reality and 3D gaming help people stand up for themselves in real life? In a pilot study developed by Southern Methodist University, a group of young women practiced assertiveness against male sexual aggression using a modified version of Half-Life 2 and a VR headset. After the training (dubbed “My Voice, My Choice”), as this summary indicates, the early results were extremely positive: “22 percent in the control group reported sexual victimization during the three-month follow-up period, compared to only 10 percent in the ‘My Voice, My Choice’ group.” (Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasis.) While this is just initial data working from a small sample, the growth of virtual reality makes this study one worth repeating in other pilot programs, so I reached out to the lead researchers, Dr. Lorelei Simpson Rowe and Anthony Cuevas, for more details on their training program:
What were some of the most interesting personal reactions to this simulation?
Dr. Lorelei Simpson Rowe: “Many participants were surprised at how difficult it was to be assertive. They thought of themselves as being able to be assertive, but found it more challenging in the simulations than they expected. At the same time, many of the participants also seemed to feel more confident after they successfully used the skills and got positive feedback from others.
“Most students chose to participate in the study because they were given gift cards to thank them for their time – they weren’t initially interested in the program – but afterward, they told us how important it was and that they felt all students should go through MVMC.”
What advice would you give other researchers and developers working on similar VR experiences?
Dr. Lorelei Simpson Rowe: “I think important next steps will include developing fully computerized protocols (i.e., those that don’t require an actor). Additionally, the simulations need to be realistic and consistent with experiences that participants might actually have.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Research partners in collaborative venture will help rapidly prototype new diagnostic and clinical treatment approaches
Vision impaired by age-related macular degeneration, a progressive, degenerative disease of the retina and the most common cause of vision loss for people over 50.
The new collaborative venture will help to rapidly prototype new diagnostic and clinical treatment approaches, focusing on the specific needs of patients who are losing their vision to age-related macular degeneration.
Physician Karl Csaky, Chief Medical Director and T. Boone Pickens Senior Scientist at the Retina Foundation of the Southwest, will lead the joint venture, along with Marc Christensen, Dean of SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering.
Age-related macular degeneration is a progressive, degenerative disease of the retina and is the most common cause of vision loss for individuals 50 years and older. Currently, there are 18 million Americans who have some form of age-related macular degeneration.
Pictured, left to right, Marc Christensen, Dean, Lyle School, SMU; Monica Egert Smith, Community Philanthropy Director, W.W. Caruth, Jr. Foundation; Brent Christopher, President and CEO, Communities Foundation; and Karl Csaky, Chief Medical Officer, Retina Foundation.
It is projected that the population over the age of 60 will double by the year 2030, which will dramatically increase the number of individuals affected by this disease. At present there are few effective treatments for the majority of patients who suffer from age-related macular degeneration.
“I am extremely thankful to the Caruth Foundation for providing their generous support for a unique approach to help patients with age-related macular degeneration,” said Dr. Csaky. “This one of a kind initiative will focus on leveraging the strengths of two preeminent Dallas institutions.”
This $2.5 million award from the W. W. Caruth, Jr. Foundation at CFT recognizes the great need to develop an innovative approach to medical research for age-related macular degeneration, adapting new technologies and treatments that directly correlate to the patients’ disease state. “This type of unique partnership between a top engineering school and a clinical research organization has the potential to be replicated in other areas of medicine as well,” said Brent Christopher, President and CEO of Communities Foundation of Texas. “This model of pairing disparate disciplines to tackle challenging medical issues is the transformational approach Will Caruth would have championed.”
Since 1982, the Retina Foundation of the Southwest has been on the leading edge of basic research to better understand age-related macular degeneration and how it works to destroy central vision, which is necessary for reading, writing and driving. The Foundation also works closely with patients in a clinical setting to better understand the vision loss they are experiencing over time.
SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering is dedicated to the role of innovation in finding solutions to real-world problems and has a dedicated space for those pursuits – the Deason Innovation Gymnasium. The Lyle School will help to accelerate the clinical application of technologies.
“We are grateful for this opportunity to collaborate with Retina Foundation doctors to help develop and prototype treatments tailored to patient needs,” said Christensen. “For example, we’ll be in a position to tackle problems such as the delivery of medication to the retina through polymer chemistry and mechanical engineering. Engineering and medicine can partner in astounding ways, and we are excited to see how our framework for fostering innovation accelerates solutions to medical challenges.”
The opportunity presented by the W. W. Caruth, Jr. Foundation at CFT to collaborate with the Retina Foundation of the Southwest supports SMU and the Lyle School in the University’s commitment to increased research being advanced by the Second Century Campaign. — Kim Cobb
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Simpson Rowe, an associate professor and graduate program co-director in the SMU Department of Psychology, is lead author on the pilot study from SMU.
The virtual-reality simulation component of “My Voice, My Choice” utilizes a software program developed by Jouriles and McDonald in conjunction with SMU’s award-winning Guildhall video gaming program. Jouriles and McDonald are clinical psychologists in the SMU Psychology Department. Jouriles is professor and chair. McDonald is a professor and associate dean of research and academic affairs for Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
Results of their study found teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment.
The effects persisted over a three-month period following the training.
By Scott Kaufman
Raw Story
study by researchers at Southern Methodist University has demonstrated that teenage girls who learn to assertively decline sexual advances in a virtual reality simulator are less likely suffer long term effects from sexual victimization.
The training program, called “My Voice, My Choice,” allowed “girls to practice being assertive in a realistic environment. The intent of the program is for the learning opportunity to increase the likelihood that they will use the skills in real life,” associate professor of psychology at SMU Simpson Rowe said.
“Research has shown that skills are more likely to generalize if they are practiced in a realistic environment, so we used virtual reality to increase the realism,” she continued. “It is very promising that learning resistance skills and practicing them in virtual simulations of coercive interactions could reduce the risk for later sexual victimization.”
The simulation training is similar to technology used to train soldiers, physicians, and pilots. Small groups of two to four women were trained by a facilitator how to engage in “assertive resistance,” including the use of a firm voice, exhibiting confidence in body language, and clearly stating their limits. They then practiced these skills in the “virtual coercive simulator” designed by the SMU research team.
In it, they would be seated on a bed with a male who engaged in aggressive behavior that escalated in the face of the teen’s resistance. The teens would then review footage of their encounter with the facilitator and the other members of their group.
Renee McDonald, one of the study’s co-authors, said that “one advantage the virtual simulations offer is the ability to actually observe whether, and how, the girls are using the skills in coercive situations that feel very real.”
“This provides girls with opportunities for immediate feedback and accelerated learning, and for facilitators to easily spot areas in need of further strengthening. The value of this advantage can’t be overstated.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Study participants in the “My Voice, My Choice” program practiced saying “no” to unwanted sexual advances in an immersive virtual environment
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, finds a new study.
The effects persisted over a three-month period following the training, said clinical psychologist Lorelei Simpson Rowe, lead author on the pilot study from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
The research also found that those girls who had previously experienced dating violence reported lower levels of psychological aggression and psychological distress after completing the program, relative to girls in a comparison group.
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To book a live or taped interview with Lorelei Simpson Rowe in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
“The virtual simulations allowed girls to practice being assertive in a realistic environment. The intent of the program is for the learning opportunity to increase the likelihood that they will use the skills in real life,” said Simpson Rowe, an associate professor and graduate program co-director in the SMU Department of Psychology. “Research has shown that skills are more likely to generalize if they are practiced in a realistic environment, so we used virtual reality to increase the realism.”
The training program, called “My Voice, My Choice,” emphasizes that victims do not invite sexual violence and that they have the right to stand up for themselves because violent or coercive behavior is never OK.
“It is very promising that learning resistance skills and practicing them in virtual simulations of coercive interactions could reduce the risk for later sexual victimization,” said Simpson Rowe.
She cautioned, however, that the research is preliminary and based on a small sample: 42 in the “My Voice, My Choice” condition and 36 in a control condition. Future research is needed to establish the benefits of the program across different age groups and populations, for example, college versus high school students.
The study’s strengths included its randomized controlled design and a high participant retention rate among the 78 teen girls in the study.
The virtual-reality simulation component of “My Voice, My Choice” utilizes a software program developed by study co-authors Ernest N. Jouriles and Renee McDonald in conjunction with SMU’s Guildhall video gaming program. Jouriles and McDonald are clinical psychologists in the SMU Psychology Department. Jouriles is professor and chair. McDonald is a professor and associate dean of research and academic affairs for Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
“One advantage the virtual simulations offer is the ability to actually observe whether, and how, the girls are using the skills in coercive situations that feel very real,” McDonald said. “This provides girls with opportunities for immediate feedback and accelerated learning, and for facilitators to easily spot areas in need of further strengthening. The value of this advantage can’t be overstated.”
One question that remains for future research is whether the practice in virtual simulations was the operative factor that reduced sexual victimization, Simpson Rowe said.
“We need to determine if practice in a virtual setting is the key factor in making the intervention effective, or if other factors, such as being encouraged to stand up for themselves, led to the outcomes,” she said.
Females who firmly resist unwanted advances stand a greater chance of escaping a sexually coercive situation The current study builds on decades of earlier related studies by a broad range of researchers.
– About 25 to 50 percent of women in the U.S. are victims of sexual violence, usually in their teens or early 20s, according to a 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Justice. While many sexual violence prevention programs have been developed, few have been rigorously evaluated and even fewer have been shown to actually reduce sexual victimization.
– Historically, risk-reduction programs teach skills to identify and escape threats, and are typically targeted at females. Usually they only have small-to-moderate effects on victimization, or don’t succeed in any reduction.
– There is significant research evidence, however, that girls and women who say “no” firmly, yell, or physically fight back have a better chance of escaping a sexually coercive situation without being raped, compared to those who freeze, cry, apologize or politely resist, which some attackers view as “token” refusals.
– Simulation training using virtual reality is used routinely and successfully to train soldiers, physicians and pilots. Extensive research has shown that skills learned under stressful or dangerous conditions similar to those occurring in real life are more likely to generalize to the real world. The real-world context, in the case of the current study, is sexual coercion or unwanted sexual advances.
Small groups met with trained facilitator, provided peer feedback
Participants were 78 female students in 9th through 12th grade from an all-girls urban high school.
The teens were randomly assigned to either the group that received the “My Voice, My Choice” training or to a wait-list control group. In total, 42 girls completed the virtual reality training, while 36 were in the control group that received no training until the end of the follow-up.
“Although young women are aware of the risk of sexual violence, they don’t always view that risk as relevant to themselves and aren’t always eager to sit through a 90-minute program,” Simpson Rowe said. The girls were thus provided gift cards to a local store for their time.
Training started with a small group of 2 to 4 young women led by a trained female facilitator. For 30 minutes the facilitator explained and modeled assertive resistance, teaching the girls how to make it clear that sexual coercion and unwanted advances are not acceptable, such as using a firm voice tone, showing confident body language, and stating their limits (e.g., “I don’t want to have sex with you, so stop asking me”).
Each small group then transitioned to practicing the skills in the virtual coercive simulations.
Variety of scenarios are simulated in a virtual bedroom
“In the small group setting, there was usually some nervous giggling or shyness at first, but the girls became really engaged when they practiced the skills in the virtual simulations,” Simpson Rowe said.
Through virtual-reality goggles connected to the computer with the simulation software, each girl viewed a male avatar seated next to her on a couch in a virtual bedroom. The avatar’s speech, facial expressions and movement were manipulated via computer by a male actor. The girls interacted with the avatar in a variety of simulations which were observed by the facilitator and other group members.
The young women then took turns practicing the “My Voice, My Choice” skills, reassured that they could stop at any time and would never actually be touched. Each participant engaged in three 2- to 3-minute simulations.
Simulations started with less intense scenarios, where the male was mildly pressuring, such as asking repeatedly for the girl’s phone number. Scenarios escalated to increasingly more severe situations, such as verbally coercing the girl to kiss him, becoming increasingly aggressive in speech, and being more persistent in the face of resistance.
Following each simulation, other group members and the facilitator provided feedback to each girl on how she could increase the effectiveness of her response. Suggestions included using a firmer tone of voice, and refusing without apologizing.
“The students really gave one another good feedback about how to improve,” Simpson Rowe said. “And once they went through the training they told us it was so valuable they’d recommend it for everyone.”
Reports of multiple episodes of sexual or physical victimization uncommon
Each month for three months afterward, the girls completed an established and well-validated 25-question survey, the Conflict in Adolescent Dating Relationships Inventory, to assess occurrence of any sexual, physical or psychological victimization. They also completed a measure of psychological distress.
Results showed 22 percent in the control group reported sexual victimization during the three-month follow-up period, compared to only 10 percent in the “My Voice, My Choice” group.
“My Voice, My Choice” did not reduce rates of physical victimization. However, among those girls who had higher rates of previous dating violence victimization, completion of “My Voice, My Choice” was associated with lower rates of psychological victimization — being yelled at or called names, having a boy try to frighten or spread rumors about her — and lower rates of psychological distress.
That finding indicates the “My Voice, My Choice” training could also reduce the risk for psychological victimization and distress among girls who have been previously victimized.
“This finding is particularly noteworthy because other violence prevention programs have generally been ineffective or less effective for previously victimized young women,” said Simpson Rowe, who also heads the Couples Research Lab at SMU.
The research was funded by the Timberlawn Psychiatric Research Foundation, Dallas. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Study found that heterosexual women who were told males preferred females with fuller figures felt better about their weight.
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To book an interview with Andrea Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
New York’s Daily News newspaper reported on the research of SMU social psychologist Andrea L. Meltzer, who was lead author on a new series of studies that found that telling women that men desire larger women who aren’t model-thin made the women feel better about their own weight.
Results of the three independent studies suggest a woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer. The researchers found that how women perceive men’s preferences influenced each woman’s body image independent of her actual body size and weight. “On average, heterosexual women believe that heterosexual men desire ultra-thin women,” says Meltzer.
AFP RelaxNews
When told that men desire full-bodied, voluptuous figures, women felt better about their own weight, say researchers at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
“A woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer,” says lead author and social psychologist Andrea Meltzer of SMU.
Heterosexual women, says Meltzer, tend to believe that men prefer the dieted-down, ultra-thin bodies that dominate the media.
“Consequently, this study suggests that interventions that alter women’s perception regarding men’s desires for ideal female body sizes may be effective at improving women’s body image,” she says.
This would be an important step for women’s health and well-being because prior research has shown that women with a positive image of their physique tend to eat healthier, exercise more and have a superior overall self-image.
On the flipside, those who are unhappy with their body have less sex, less sexual satisfaction and less marital satisfaction.
“It is possible that women who are led to believe that men prefer women with bodies larger than the models depicted in the media may experience higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression,” says Meltzer.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Prior research has shown that women with a positive image of their physique tend to eat healthier, exercise more and have a superior overall self-image.
Book a live interview
To book an interview with Andrea Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
The popular news site Huffington Post reported on the research of SMU social psychologist Andrea L. Meltzer, who was lead author on a new series of studies that found that telling women that men desire larger women who aren’t model-thin made the women feel better about their own weight.
Results of the three independent studies suggest a woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer. The researchers found that how women perceive men’s preferences influenced each woman’s body image independent of her actual body size and weight. “On average, heterosexual women believe that heterosexual men desire ultra-thin women,” says Meltzer.
AFP/Relaxnews
When told that men desire full-bodied, voluptuous figures, women felt better about their own weight, say researchers at Southern Methodist University in the US.
“A woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer,” says lead author and social psychologist Andrea Meltzer of SMU.
Heterosexual women, says Meltzer, tend to believe that men prefer the dieted-down, ultra-thin bodies that dominate the media.
“Consequently, this study suggests that interventions that alter women’s perception regarding men’s desires for ideal female body sizes may be effective at improving women’s body image,” she says.
This would be an important step for women’s health and well-being because prior research has shown that women with a positive image of their physique tend to eat healthier, exercise more and have a superior overall self-image.
On the flipside, those who are unhappy with their body have less sex, less sexual satisfaction and less marital satisfaction.
“It is possible that women who are led to believe that men prefer women with bodies larger than the models depicted in the media may experience higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression,” says Meltzer.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
prior studies have suggested that women who are happy with their bodies tend to eat better, be more active, have more self-esteem, are less prone to depression, and shun eating disorders and excessive dieting.
Book a live interview
To book an interview with Andrea Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
HealthDay writer Robert Preidt reported on the research of SMU social psychologist Andrea L. Meltzer for the news site U.S. News & World Report. Meltzer was lead author on a new series of studies that found that telling women that men desire larger women who aren’t model-thin made the women feel better about their own weight.
Results of the three independent studies suggest a woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer. The researchers found that how women perceive men’s preferences influenced each woman’s body image independent of her actual body size and weight. “On average, heterosexual women believe that heterosexual men desire ultra-thin women,” says Meltzer.
By Robert Preidt
HealthDay
When it comes to how satisfied they are with their own bodies, notions women hold of what men look for in females may be key, a new study suggests.
Researchers at Southern Methodist University in Dallas found that women are happier with their weight if they believe that men prefer full-bodied women instead of those who are model-thin.
“Women who are led to believe that men prefer women with bodies larger than the models depicted in the media may experience higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression,” lead researcher Andrea Meltzer, a social psychologist at Southern Methodist, said in a university news release.
The study included almost 450 women, the majority of whom were white, who were shown images of women who were either ultra-thin or larger-bodied.
Some women were also told by the researchers that men who had viewed the pictures had tended to prefer the thinner women, while others were told that men had preferred the larger women.
Both groups of women then completed a questionnaire meant to assess how they felt about their weight.
The result: women who were told that men prefer larger-bodied women were more satisfied with their own weight.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
In a new study, female participants felt better about their bodies when told that men are attracted to plus-sized models.
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To book a live or taped interview with Andrea Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
Writer Julie Beck at the popular news site The Atlantic reported on the research of SMU social psychologist Andrea L. Meltzer, who was lead author on a new series of studies that found that telling women that men desire larger women who aren’t model-thin made the women feel better about their own weight.
Results of the three independent studies suggest a woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer. The researchers found that how women perceive men’s preferences influenced each woman’s body image independent of her actual body size and weight. “On average, heterosexual women believe that heterosexual men desire ultra-thin women,” says Meltzer.
By Julie Beck
The Atlantic
Last summer, Meghan Trainor’s doo-woppy single “All About That Bass” was seen by a lot of people as a body-positive empowerment anthem, with its condemnation of magazine Photoshop, and accompanying video of people of all sizes dancing in front of pastel backgrounds. But other people took issue with some of the lyrics — “I’ve got that boom boom that all the boys chase,” or “boys like a little more booty to hold at night.” Writers at Jezebel, Slate, and other publications accused the song of implying that self-esteem comes from male acceptance, that of course women shouldn’t worry about their size, because men still like them.
“Loving yourself because dudes like what you’ve got going on is a pretty flimsy form of self-acceptance,” Chloe Angyal wrote at Feministing. “In fact, it’s not really self-acceptance at all if it depends on other people thinking you’re hot.”
Trainor’s message might not be a perfect one, but new research shows it is effective. A recent study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that telling women men were attracted to non-stick-thin models increased their body satisfaction.
The researchers, from Southern Methodist University and Florida State University, had undergraduate heterosexual women look at images of plus-sized models (“plus-sized” in model terms—the models in the photos were estimated to be between a size 8 and 10, or “representative of the average female undergraduate,” the study says). In some cases, the width of the pictures was reduced by 30 percent, “to depict the thin-ideal.”
The women were either told that men picked the images because they found them attractive, or just that the images were taken from the media. In one experiment, another control group was told that men prefer thin women.
The participants reported higher satisfaction with their weight when they were told men were attracted to the average-sized models. But body satisfaction when women were told nothing was the same as when they were told men are attracted to ultra-thin women. This didn’t surprise the researchers, though.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Results of three independent studies suggest a woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer
Telling women that men desire larger women who aren’t model-thin made the women feel better about their own weight in a series of new studies.
Results of the three independent studies suggest a woman’s body image is strongly linked to her perception of what she thinks men prefer, said lead researcher and social psychologist Andrea Meltzer, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
How women perceive men’s preferences influenced each woman’s body image independent of her actual body size and weight.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Andrea Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
“On average, heterosexual women believe that heterosexual men desire ultra-thin women,” said Meltzer, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at SMU. “Consequently, this study suggests that interventions that alter women’s perception regarding men’s desires for ideal female body sizes may be effective at improving women’s body image.”
The findings could have significant implications for women’s health and well-being, Meltzer said.
Prior research has shown that women satisfied with their body and weight tend to eat healthier, exercise more, and have higher self-esteem. They also tend to avoid unhealthy behaviors, such as excessive dieting and eating disorders, and they suffer less from depression.
In contrast, other research has demonstrated that women unhappy with their body and weight have less sex, less sexual satisfaction, and less marital satisfaction.
“It is possible that women who are led to believe that men prefer women with bodies larger than the models depicted in the media may experience higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression,” Meltzer said.
A total of 448 women participated in the three studies, conducted by Meltzer and co-author James K. McNulty, Florida State University.
The authors note that prior research has shown that women who watch TV and read more fashion magazines are less satisfied with their weight and have a poor body image.
Meltzer and McNulty wanted to test whether a woman’s feelings about her own weight would be influenced if she viewed images of larger-bodied women when told they were judged attractive by men.
Women’s weight satisfaction improved after image manipulation exercise
In all three studies, female participants viewed images of female models with bodies larger than the thin-ideal wearing a variety of clothing, ranging from typical street clothes to bathing suits. In each image, the models’ heads were cropped so participants wouldn’t be influenced by facial attractiveness. The women in the images were cataloged by participants as ranging in U.S. clothing size from 8 to 10, which is slightly smaller than the average for American women, size 12-14, but larger than model-thin, typically size 2-4.
Each study also included one or more control groups. Some women were shown the images of large-bodied women, but without portraying them as attractive to men. Others were shown images of women who were ultra-thin and told that men preferred them. Still another group was shown both the larger-bodied and ultra-thin women and told that women felt the larger-bodied women were more attractive.
Women in all groups completed a self-report questionnaire designed to measure weight satisfaction.
In all three studies, women had higher levels of satisfaction with their own weight after viewing the images of the larger women who were portrayed as attractive to men, while statistically controlling their actual weight.
“Although the current studies demonstrated that telling women that men prefer women with body sizes larger than the thin-ideal can have immediate positive effects on women’s body image, it is unclear how long these effects may last,” Meltzer said. “Indeed, all studies assessed women’s weight satisfaction immediately after the manipulation. It would likely take repeated exposure to images of larger-bodied women ostensibly desired by men to strongly rival the patterns of reinforcement that are so pervasive in the media.”
All participants were heterosexual women and the majority identified as Caucasian. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
“As a society, we are using more technology, and there’s increasing evidence that artificial light has had a negative consequence on our health,” says Zoltowski, who was awarded $320,500 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health to continue its research on the impact of blue light.
“Our study uses physical techniques and chemical approaches to probe an inherently biological problem,” Zoltowski said. “We want to understand the chemical basis for how organisms use light as an environmental cue to regulate growth and development.”
By Doug Dunbar
CBS DFW 11
Can’t get a good night’s sleep. You might be getting a little too much blue light.
What’s that? It’s a big issue the Federal government is asking researchers at SMU to study.
There’s a reason why it’s dark in this lab. It’s because they’re studying light.
They have the lights off so they can purify the proteins in the dark.
So that we can study the activation process when we first expose them to light. But not just any light. Blue light. The stuff in fluorescents, and devices like laptops and phones. But also daylight.
One of the negative consequences of blue light is associated with our metabolic clock being offset from our brain clock. That can lead to problems for diabetes, cancer, mood disorders.
[ …] But Zoltowski and his crew could potentially tackle problems much bigger than sleeping.
“If we understand how these proteins that respond to light work we can create new biotechnology.”
Maybe new ways to deliver drugs, or even targeted cancer treatments.
“We can shine light on a very specific spot and that can allow us to activate any biological event we want at that very precise location and time.”
“We’re introducing blue light into the environment and into our daily lives at times when we’re not supposed to see it – and that basically causes dysfunction in our biological processes.” — Brian Zoltowski
KERA Public Radio journalist Justin Martin explored the good and bad of blue light in our environment with Brian Zoltowski, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Chemistry.
“As a society, we are using more technology, and there’s increasing evidence that artificial light has had a negative consequence on our health,” says Zoltowski, who was awarded $320,500 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health to continue its research on the impact of blue light.
“Our study uses physical techniques and chemical approaches to probe an inherently biological problem,” Zoltowski said. “We want to understand the chemical basis for how organisms use light as an environmental cue to regulate growth and development.”
By Justin Martin
KERA
Light is necessary for life on earth, but scientists believe that too much of a certain wavelength can cause everything from crop diseases to changes in the migratory patterns of animals. SMU professor Brian Zoltowski is working to unravel the mystery of blue light in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Interview Highlights: Brian Zoltowski
… On what defines blue light:
“Blue light refers to a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that has specific energy. Usually we define things by basically their wavelength of light. So typically blue light can be centered around 450 nanometers but can range … from about 425 nanometers to 475 nanometers.”
… On the origin of excess blue light:
“Blue light is very abundant in nature in general. That’s why organisms actually use that wavelength of light to drive their biological processes. But it turns out though that because it’s abundant in nature, we like to have it to be abundant in our products like our lights, our computers, our laptops and everything else. So we introduce a lot more foreign blue light into the environment compared to what should naturally be there.”
… On blue light’s effects in animals vs. plants:
“A lot of that is not known, which is one of the reasons we’re actually doing a lot of this research. What we do know is that blue is extremely important for basically growth and development of any organism you can conceive of. How that’s ultimately regulated and when there can be too much is a big question. The bigger question is when you get the blue light, nature is designed to use blue light as a signal as to what time of day it is. So when we’re introducing blue light into the environment or into our daily lives through computers and laptops, we’re introducing blue light at times of day like evening when we’re not supposed to see it – and that basically causes dysfunction in our biological processes.”
… On how blue light fosters fungal growth:
“There’s growing understanding that a lot of these fungal pathogens of plants – there are several that actually attack wine, which causes billions of dollars of crop loss each year. There are some that we’re interested in that also basically attack a lot of your grain crops — so you’re looking at wheat, alfalfa — that have very detrimental aspects to agriculture. Their ability to infect the plant is regulated by blue light.”
The pill may be altering how attractive a woman finds a man, depending on whether he’s judged good looking
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To book a live or taped interview with Andrea Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
Choosing a partner while on the pill may affect a woman’s marital satisfaction, according to a new study from Florida State University and Southern Methodist University.
In fact, the pill may be altering how attractive a woman finds a man.
In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers examined 118 newlywed couples for up to four years. The women were regularly surveyed with questions asking them about their level of satisfaction with the relationship and their use of contraceptives.
The results showed that women who were using hormonal contraceptives when they met their husband experienced a drop in marital satisfaction after they discontinued a hormone-based birth control. But, what’s interesting is how the change in their satisfaction related to their husbands’ facial attractiveness.
Women who stopped taking a hormonal contraceptive and became less satisfied with their marriage tended to have husbands who were judged as less attractive. The women who were more satisfied after stopping contraceptive use had husbands who were judged as good looking.
“Our study demonstrated that women’s hormonal contraceptive use interacted with their husbands’ facial attractiveness to predict their marital satisfaction,” said SMU psychologist Andrea L. Meltzer, a co-author on the study.
Specifically, women who met their relatively more attractive husbands while using hormonal contraceptives experienced a boost in marital satisfaction when they discontinued using those contraceptives, said Meltzer, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.
In contrast, women who met their relatively less attractive husbands while using hormonal contraceptives experienced a decline in marital satisfaction when they discontinued using those contraceptives, she said.
Hormonal processes may be at work, said Michelle Russell, a doctoral candidate at Florida State and lead author on the study.
“Many forms of hormonal contraception weaken the hormonal processes that are associated with preferences for facial attractiveness,” Russell said. “Accordingly, women who begin their relationship while using hormonal contraceptives and then stop may begin to prioritize cues of their husbands’ genetic fitness, such as his facial attractiveness, more than when they were taking hormonal contraceptives. In other words, a partner’s attractiveness plays a stronger role in women’s satisfaction when they discontinue hormonal contraceptives.”
In contrast, beginning a hormonal contraceptive after marriage did not appear to have negative or positive impacts on a woman’s satisfaction, regardless of her husband’s looks.
In the United States, 17 percent of women ages 17 to 44 were on birth control pills in 2010, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Nearly 5 percent more used other hormonal contraception methods such as injections or a vaginal ring.
Psychology Professor James McNulty, who is Russell’s adviser and one of her co-authors, noted that it is important to understand that this is only one factor affecting satisfaction.
“The research provides some additional information regarding the potential influences of hormonal contraceptives on relationships, but it is too early to give any practical recommendations regarding women’s family planning decisions.” — Kathleen Haughney, Florida State University
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Blue light from artificial lighting and electronic devices knocks circadian rhythms off-kilter, resulting in health problems, sleep, cancer development, mood disorders, drug addiction, crop disease and even confused migratory animals
A study funded by the National Institutes of Health is unraveling the mystery of how blue light from residential and commercial lighting, electronic devices and outdoor lights can throw off-kilter the natural body clock of humans, plants and animals, leading to disease.
At the right time of day, blue light is a good thing. It talks to our 24-hour circadian clock, telling our bodies, for example, when to wake up, eat and carry out specific metabolic functions.
In plants, blue light signals them to leaf out, grow, blossom and bloom. In animals, it aids migratory patterns, sleep and wake cycles, regulation of metabolism, as well as mood and the immune system.
But too much blue light — especially at the wrong time — throws biological signaling out of whack.
“As a society, we are using more technology, and there’s increasing evidence that artificial light has had a negative consequence on our health,” said Zoltowski, an assistant professor in SMU’s Department of Chemistry.
“Our study uses physical techniques and chemical approaches to probe an inherently biological problem,” he said. “We want to understand the chemical basis for how organisms use light as an environmental cue to regulate growth and development.”
The lab studies a small flowering plant native to Europe and Asia, Arabidopsis thaliana. The flower is a popular model organism in plant biology and genetics, Zoltowski said.
Although signaling pathways differ in organisms such as Arabidopsis when compared to animals, the flower still serves an important research purpose. How the signaling networks are interconnected is similar in both animals and Arabidopsis. That allows researchers to use simpler genetic models to provide insight into how similar networks are controlled in more complicated species like humans.
Understanding the mechanism can lead to targeted drug treatments
In humans, the protein melanopsin absorbs blue light and sends signals to photoreceptor cells in our eyes. In plants and animals, the protein cryptochrome performs similar signaling.
Much is known already about the way blue light and other light wavelengths, such as red and UV light, trigger biological functions through proteins that interact with our circadian clock. But the exact mechanism in that chemical signaling process remains a mystery.
“Light is energy, and that energy can be absorbed by melanopsin proteins that act as a switch that basically activates everything downstream,” Zoltowski said.
Melanopsin is a little-understood photoreceptor protein with the singular job of measuring time of day.
When light enters the eye, melanopsin proteins within unique cells in the retina absorb the wavelength as a photon and convert it to energy. That activates cells found only in the eye — called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglian cells, of which there are only about 160 in our body. The cells signal the suprachiasmatic nucleus region of the brain.
“We keep a master clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus — it controls our circadian rhythms,” he said. “But we also have other time pieces in our body; think of them as watches, and they keep getting reset by the blue light that strikes the master clock, generating chemical signals.”
The switch activates many biological functions, including metabolism, sleep, cancer development, drug addiction and mood disorders, to name a few.
“There’s a very small molecule that absorbs the light, acting like a spring, pushing out the protein and changing its shape, sending the signal. We want to understand the energy absorption by the small molecule and what that does biologically.”
The answer can lead to new ways to target diabetes, sleep disorders and cancer development, for example.
“If we understand how all these pathways work,” he said, “we can design newer, better, more efficacious drugs to help people.”
Chemical signal from retina’s “atomic clock” synchronizes circadian rhythms
Besides increased reliance on artificial lighting indoors and outdoors, electronic devices also now contribute in a big way to blue light exposure. Endless evening hours on our smartphones and tablets with Candy Crush, Minecraft or Instagram don’t really help us relax and go to sleep. Just the opposite, in fact.
The blue glow those devices emit signals our circadian clock that it’s daytime, Zoltowski said. Red light, on the other hand, tells us to go to sleep.
Awareness of the problem has prompted lighting manufacturers to develop new lighting strategies and products that transition blue light to red light toward evening and at night, Zoltowski said.
Targeted solutions could neutralize destructive blight in staple crops
In plants, the researchers study how the absence of “true dark” in nature due to artificial light can reduce yields of farm crops and promote crop disease.
For example, fungal systems rely on blue light to proliferate, forming pathogens known as blight in crops resulting in leaves that look chewed on and reducing yields.
“We study fusarium and verticillium,” Zoltowski said. “They cause about $3 billion worth of crop damage a year to wheat, corn, soybeans — the staple food crops.”
Understanding their ability to infect crops would allow scientists to potentially design small molecules that target and disrupt the fungal system’s circadian clock and neutralize their proliferation.
Research to understand how light and clock regulation are coupled
In animals, Zoltowski’s lab studies the blue light pathway that signals direction to birds and other animals that migrate. Blue light activates the protein that allows various species to measure the earth’s magnetic field for directionality. For example, Monarch butterflies rely on the cryptochrome photoreceptor for their annual migration to Mexico.
“We’re interested in how these pathways are regulated in a diverse range of organisms to understand how we can manipulate these pathways to our advantage,” he said, “for health consequences and to improve agriculture yields.”
The researchers will map the reaction trajectory beginning from the initial absorption of the photon to the point it alters an organism’s physiology.
Zoltowski notes that light is just one of a handful of external cues from our environment that trigger biological processes regulating the circadian clock. Others include temperature changes, feeding and metabolites.
Besides the NIH grant, the lab operates with $250,000 from the American Chemical Society’s Herman Frasch Foundation for Chemical Research Grants in Agricultural Chemistry. — Margaret Allen
New study finds taking deep breaths doesn’t work; sufferers pairing biofeedback with shallow breaths increased carbon dioxide and improved long-term lung health
Asthma patients taught to habitually resist the urge to take deep breaths when experiencing symptoms were rewarded with fewer symptoms and healthier lung function, according to a new study from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
The results suggest asthma patients using behavioral therapy in conjunction with their daily asthma medicine can improve their lung health over the long-term, said principal investigators Thomas Ritz and Alicia E. Meuret, both SMU clinical psychologists.
Also, sufferers may potentially reduce their dependence on emergency medication, such as rescue inhalers, the researchers said.
SMU clinical psychologist Dr. Alicia Meuret helps a patient learn shallow breathing with biofeedback to relieve symptoms of air hunger. (Photo: SMU)
Asthma can be a life-threatening disease if not managed properly, according to the American Lung Association. Nearly 26 million Americans have asthma, says ALA.
One of the most common chronic disorders in childhood, asthma is the third leading cause of hospitalization among children under 15, ALA says.
Asthma attacks typically provoke sufferers to gulp air and take deep breaths to relieve the frightening fear of asphyxiation, said Ritz and Meuret. In addition, asthma sufferers tend to breathe too much even when not experiencing symptoms.
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To book a live or taped interview with Alicia Meuret in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
But Ritz, Meuret and their co-authors found with their research that deep breathing is exactly the wrong thing to do.
For their study, one group of asthma patients used biofeedback to monitor their breathing for reassurance they were getting sufficient oxygen. The patients practiced shallower, shorter breaths to increase their intake of carbon dioxide, CO2. A second group also practiced slower breathing, but without biofeedback.
“This study goes to the heart of hyperventilation — which is deep, rapid breathing that causes a drop in CO2 gas in the blood. That makes a person feel dizzy and short of breath,” Ritz said. “Patients in our study increased CO2 and reduced their symptoms. And over a six-month period we saw in the biofeedback group an actual improvement in the physiology of their lungs.”
Shallow breathing method is counterintuitive
“When people hyperventilate, there is something very strange happening,” Meuret said. “In essence they are taking in too much air. But the sensation that they get is shortness of breath, choking, air hunger, as if they’re not getting enough air. It’s almost like a biological system error.”
Onlookers commonly give the advice, “Take a deep breath.” But that’s just the opposite of what a struggling breather should do.
“They don’t need any more oxygen,” Meuret said. “But consciously or not, people start to take deeper breaths — and that makes the symptoms worse.”
Among the study’s 120 patients who used the brief, four-week biofeedback therapy to boost their CO2, the researchers found that of 21 clinical indices of pathology more than 80 percent resulted in significant reductions. The researchers saw improvement in asthma symptoms and control, better lung function, reduced oversensitivity of the airways and less use of reliever medication, as well as improvement in physiology and the pathology of the airways.
Biofeedback method tested against tough scientific control group
The biological-behavioral treatment method, called Capnometry-Assisted Breathing Training, or CART for short, was developed by Meuret. Previous randomized controlled studies by Meuret found CART reduced symptoms of panic and hyperventilation in patients with panic and anxiety.
The handheld capnometer, equipped with a digital readout, enables patients via biofeedback to track changes in their CO2 when they alter their breathing during breathing training exercises and instruction sessions. Capnometers are medical devices that can only be purchased by a health care provider.
For the current SMU study, CART patients were compared to a randomized control group that also received a breathing treatment — specifically, slower breathing, or SLOW for short.
Patients in the SLOW group used the CART device also for their home exercises to validate they were breathing slower. The only difference between the CART and SLOW groups was that CART patients received biofeedback about their CO2.
“We tested CART against the toughest scientific control we could devise — another breathing treatment, where patients receive the same amount of attention from their therapist, use equipment to help them alter their breathing, are primed to pay attention to their own asthma management, and receive encouragement to take their medicine more regularly,” Ritz said.
CART and SLOW patients both improved, but CART benefits were long-lasting
Patients in the study were from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, all of them medically diagnosed with asthma. Each patient’s asthma diagnosis was independently validated at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas by a methacholine airways stress test, a stringent diagnostic procedure to confirm patients met the criteria for asthma.
After four weeks of CART and SLOW training, asthma symptoms for both groups had improved, even when controlling for any change in medication intake.
However at follow up six months later, asthma symptoms for the SLOW control group had returned to higher levels.
“The follow-up period is often viewed as the moment of truth of how effective a treatment is,” said Meuret. “Once a patient doesn’t have to come to treatment, does the treatment continue to be beneficial? After four weeks, both treatments were beneficial, but CART was superior — and showed even greater improvements beyond that.”
CART patients also became less distressed about the methacholine test, indicating higher distress tolerance to their symptoms, Ritz said.
In addition, during treatment, the airways of CART patients widened during treatment in the lab, according to measurements taken by a forced oscillation technique. That was a positive development that allowed patients to breathe easier. Airways in the SLOW group actually narrowed a bit, said Ritz. Nevertheless, SLOW resulted in significant improvement also.
“The long-term goal of the CART research is to test whether we can achieve the same improvements with occasional intervals of capnometer feedback training, or ideally test whether shallow breathing in itself will achieve the same stable increases in CO2,” said the researchers.
CART not a relaxation technique
CART is not relaxation training. Quite the opposite.
“It’s actually very, very, very unrelaxing when patients start,” Meuret said.
For patients with low CO2 in particular, the process of breathing slow and shallow to increase the CO2 level — even just slightly — tends to trigger extreme air hunger.
“Only by reassuring themselves that the symptoms are caused by low CO2 and not low oxygen, they can keep on going,” Meuret said. “And that’s even more difficult for asthmatics than anxious patients who have a normal lung function.”
Patients initially want to take a deep breath, she said. “But I reassure them not to, telling them to ‘Look at the CART device, look at their oxygen, it’s at 100 percent, it can’t get any higher.’”
CART therapy can improve quality of life, reduce health dangers
“The goal is to reduce the need of the emergency medication,” Ritz said. “It’s a quality of life issue.”
Patients with asthma symptoms miss out on sports, limit their physical activity, or are kept out of school P.E. and other activities. They can also become depressed and anxious, and get over-sensitive to sensations.
“The more you can reduce these symptoms the more the person can take part in daily life like a normal person,” Ritz said.
Physiologically, symptoms are also an indicator the asthma patient may have more inflammation and constriction.
While there’s always the risk an attack may be fatal, Ritz said, lesser outcomes are serious also. It’s recommended to intervene in asthma early, ideally during childhood, because the airways become reshaped.
“The longer they’re inflamed, the thicker the tissue of the airways get and the narrower the airways and the less they can relax,” he said.
Other co-authors on the study were SMU psychologist David Rosenfield, graduate student Ashton M. Steele, and physician Mark W. Millard, Baylor University Medical Center Dallas. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
We need fear to survive, as a protective and necessary mechanism, but excessive anxiety and fear can interfere with our lives — Meuret
KERA public radio 90.1 hosted SMU psychologist Alicia Meuret on Krys Boyd‘s “Think” program Oct. 6. Meuret, Boyd and Madhukar Trivedi, chair of the University of Texas-Southwestern’s Mental Health Department, discussed “How fear serves us and when it can lead us astray,” particularly in the wake of the much-discussed Ebola case in Dallas.
Meuret is director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU and discussed the differences between fear and anxiety and when each is helpful and adaptive and when they are harmful and interfere with our lives.
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The program, “The Psychology of Fear,” featured discussions on whether fear is contagious, alternatives to managing thoughts that fuel anxiety, and actual thrill-seeking behavior in which we seek out exciting experiences.
Meuret is an associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Division at the SMU Department of Psychology. Meuret received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Hamburg based on her doctoral work conducted at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University and the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
Her research program focuses on novel treatment approaches for anxiety and mood disorders, biomarkers in anxiety disorders and chronic disease, fear extinction mechanisms of exposure therapy, and mediators and moderators in individuals with affective dysregulations, including non-suicidal self-injury.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
“There are hundreds of studies finding that children who are spanked more are more likely to show a variety of problems,” — SMU parenting expert George Holden
SMU Psychology Professor George W. Holden, psychology, and Michael Farris, president of ParentalRights.Org, debated opposite sides of the controversial question “Should parents be allowed to practice corporal punishment?” The debate aired Sept. 25 on NBC’s Meet the Press: Make the Case.
Holden is a leading expert on parenting, discipline and family violence. He strongly advocates against corporal punishment and cites overwhelming research, including his own, that has demonstrated that spanking is not only ineffective, but also harmful to children, and many times leads to child abuse.
Holden, an expert in families and child development, is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.
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To book a live or taped interview with Dr. George Holden in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Holden was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass.
Most recently Holden’s research, “Real-time audio of corporal punishment,” found that children misbehaved within 10 minutes of being spanked and that parents don’t follow the guidelines for spanking that pro-spanking advocates claim are necessary for spanking to be effective.
Other recent research, “Parents less likely to spank,” showed that parents who favor spanking changed their minds after they were briefly exposed to summaries of research detailing the negative impact of corporal punishment on children. Holden, who considers spanking a public health problem, said the research indicates that parents’ attitudes about spanking could economically, quickly and effectively be changed to consider alternative disciplinary methods.
Holden’s earlier research, “Corporal punishment: Mother’s self-recorded audio,” provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
His work, into the determinants of parental behavior, parental social cognition, and the causes and consequences of family violence, has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, The Timberlawn Research Foundation, and, most recently, the U.S. State Department.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Holden was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass.
Most recently Holden’s research, “Real-time audio of corporal punishment,” found that children misbehaved within 10 minutes of being spanked and that parents don’t follow the guidelines for spanking that pro-spanking advocates claim are necessary for spanking to be effective.
Other recent research, “Parents less likely to spank,” showed that parents who favor spanking changed their minds after they were briefly exposed to summaries of research detailing the negative impact of corporal punishment on children. Holden, who considers spanking a public health problem, said the research indicates that parents’ attitudes about spanking could economically, quickly and effectively be changed to consider alternative disciplinary methods.
Holden’s earlier research, “Corporal punishment: Mother’s self-recorded audio,” provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
By Jonathan Merritt
The Week
As everyone living above ground knows, Minnesota Vikings’ star running back Adrian Peterson has been indicted on child abuse charges. The NFL star hit his four-year-old son with a “switch,” creating welts on the child’s legs, scrotum, and buttocks. In response, the outspoken Christian athlete invoked the Almighty, tweeting a picture from a popular religious devotional, Jesus Calling, with a quote about the perils of “habitual judging.”
Peterson isn’t the only Christian who thinks good parents should hit their children, or even that their faith commands it. Eighty percent of born-again Christians believe that spanking is acceptable. This is 15 percent higher than the general population.
But the wrong-headed belief that hitting children is not only a good thing but a “God thing” is rooted in poor and partial readings of the Bible, as well as ignorance about modern social science.
This false gospel of spanking preached by many belt-swinging believers is harmful to children. It must stop.
An article on the “Focus on the Family” website written by evangelical author Chip Ingram says, “The Bible’s word on discipline clearly demands that parents be responsible and diligent in spanking.”
I grew up in the evangelical South in a pro-spanking family. When my fellow Christians talked about protecting parents’ “rights to discipline their children,” they would often quote Proverbs 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Holden also appeared on the NPR Public radio show “On Point” with host Tom Ashbrook as part of a guest panel of experts talking about corporal punishment in light of the Adrian Peterson case. The segment, “Kids, Discipline, And The Adrian Peterson Debate” aired Sept. 17.
Holden, an expert in families and child development, is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. George Holden in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Holden was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass.
Most recently Holden’s research, “Real-time audio of corporal punishment,” found that children misbehaved within 10 minutes of being spanked and that parents don’t follow the guidelines for spanking that pro-spanking advocates claim are necessary for spanking to be effective.
Other recent research, “Parents less likely to spank,” showed that parents who favor spanking changed their minds after they were briefly exposed to summaries of research detailing the negative impact of corporal punishment on children. Holden, who considers spanking a public health problem, said the research indicates that parents’ attitudes about spanking could economically, quickly and effectively be changed to consider alternative disciplinary methods.
Holden’s earlier research, “Corporal punishment: Mother’s self-recorded audio,” provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
By Emily Mathis
Dallas Observer
The internet has gone wild over the past few days with news that Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings is facing child abuse charges after disciplining his 4-year-old son with a switch, and was separately accused of leaving a scar on another 4-year-old son’s face. A native of Palestine, Texas, Peterson’s charge has spurred an impassioned debate between corporal punishment advocates and fierce opponents. But in nearby DeSoto ISD, the practice is a long-standing tradition, and one that is shied away from public eyes.
Last school year, DeSoto ISD administered corporal punishment 227 times. DISD spokeswoman Beth Trimble points out that some of those kids were repeat offenders, so the actual number of children paddled is unclear. Nevertheless, the incident is indicative of a continuing trend across Texas public schools for corporal punishment. According to Dr. George Holden, a psychologist and family violence researcher at SMU, Texas leads the nation in cases of corporal punishment.
“The most common reason parents approve is that it was done to them as children. They turned out okay, so they do it to their kids. It’s an easy technique to use to get immediate behavior change from the child,” says Holden. Still, specific data is often unclear for the number of kids physically punished in Texas schools. “It’s also something that school districts don’t want to advertise or draw attention to,” says Holden. “And students are embarrassed.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
One line of her research focuses on the etiology, maintenance, and progression of child and adolescent depression, and how symptoms change over time. She has a particular interest in the effects of children’s exposure to everyday marital conflict and parental psychopathology.
CBS 11 reviewed the research of Chyrstyna Kouros concerning how marital disputes can damage the relationship between parent and child in the article “Study: Marital Tension Disturbs The Family Bond,” which published Aug. 29.
By CBS 11
A new study from researchers at Southern Methodist Universityfound that arguments between couples may negatively impact bonds between children and parents.
Researchers discovered that when parents reported higher tension levels or conflict in their marriage, the interaction with their child, during that time, was also greatly strained. This was more commonly experienced in fathers, who pushed greater amounts of stress onto relationships in family life, according to the study.
Overall mothers were more likely to compartmentalize issues than fathers in a bad marriage.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The world recognized publisher of news and information, U.S News, has covered the research of psychology expert Chrystyna Kouros, assistant professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.
Chrystyna Kouros focuses on understanding depressive symptoms and depression in the context of family stress.
One line of her research focuses on the etiology, maintenance, and progression of child and adolescent depression, and how symptoms change over time. She has a particular interest in the effects of children’s exposure to everyday marital conflict and parental psychopathology.
U.S. News reporter Robert Preidt explains that the repercussion of a marital dispute can be a damaged relationship between parents and their children in his article “Parents’ Fights May Strain Bonds With Their Kids,” which published Aug. 28.
By Robert Preidt
U.S News
Arguments between parents may damage their relationships with their children, a new study indicates.
Parents in more than 200 families were asked to make daily diary entries for 15 days. At the end of each day, mothers and fathers rated the quality of their marriage and their relationship with their children.
On days when parents reported conflict and tension in their marriage, their dealings with their children were also strained, according to the study recently published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
However, there were notable differences between mothers and fathers. Marital conflict affected mothers’ relationships with their children for just one day.
“In fact, in that situation, moms appeared to compensate for their marital tension. Poor marital quality actually predicted an improvement in the relationship between the mom and the child. So, the first day’s adverse spillover is short-lived for moms,” study author Chrystyna Kouros, an assistant professor in the psychology department at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, said in a university news release.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Dads, in particular, let conflict adversely impact relationships with children, while moms compartmentalize marital conflict after first day.
Children suffer consequences, too, when mom and dad argue or have tension in their relationship, experts warn.
Dads, in particular, let the negative emotions and tension from their marriage spill over and harm the bond they have with their child, says a new study’s lead author, psychologist Chrystyna D. Kouros, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
The findings drive home the conclusion that the quality of a marriage is closely tied to each parent’s bond with their child, Kouros said.
The findings are based on data provided by 203 families, where family members completed daily diary entries for 15 days. Moms and dads rated the quality of their marriage and their relationship with their child at the end of each day.
The authors found that when parents reported tension and conflict in their marriage, simultaneously that day’s interactions with their child were peppered with tension and conflict.
Even so, distinct differences also were identified in moms and dads.
In situations where the quality of the marriage was low, moms appeared to compartmentalize the problems they were having in their marriage by the next day.
“In fact, in that situation, moms appeared to compensate for their marital tension,” Kouros said. “Poor marital quality actually predicted an improvement in the relationship between the mom and the child. So, the first day’s adverse spillover is short lived for moms.”
That was not the case for dads, the researchers found.
“In families where the mom was showing signs of depression, dads on the other hand let the marital tension spill over, with the result being poorer interactions with their child, even on the next day,” she said.
Couple’s marriage is a hub or anchor for the entire family
Marriage quality, the authors concluded, affects the whole family, said Kouros, an assistant professor in SMU’s SMU Department of Psychology.
“We see from the findings that the marriage is a hub relationship for the family,” she said. “The quality of that relationship spills over into each parent’s interactions with the child. So if mom and dad are fighting, it will show up initially — and in some cases on the second day — in a poorer quality relationship with their kids.”
Co-authors of the research were Lauren M. Papp, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Marcie C. Goeke-Morey, The Catholic University of America, and E. Mark Cummings, University of Notre Dame.
The research was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, one of the National Institutes of Health. — Margaret Allen
“It’s certainly no shocker that our kids are capable of reading. More than anyone, we know how bright they are.” — Ellen Seidman
Popular mommy blogger Ellen Seidman, whose blog “Lovethatmax” focuses on issues related to children identified with a disability, blogged about new SMU education reading research. Led by SMU reading expert Jill Allor, the study’s findings offer hope for thousands of children identified with intellectual disability or low IQ who have very little, if any, reading ability.
The four-year, pioneering study is the first large-scale longitudinal study of its kind to demonstrate the reading potential of students with intellectual disability or low IQ, said lead author Jill H. Allor, principal investigator of the study, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
The current study also demonstrates the effectiveness of a teaching method that’s scientifically based for use with children identified with intellectual disability or low IQ, said Allor, a reading researcher whose expertise is reading acquisition.
Coauthors included Patricia Mathes, TI Endowed Chair in Evidence-Based Education and a professor in the Simmons School.
Mathes and Allor, former special education teachers, developed the study’s reading program after research into how children with dyslexia and other learning problems learn to read. The program was previously validated with struggling readers without intellectual disability or low IQ.
The research will continue under a new $1.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant, also led by Allor, principal investigator.
By Ellen Seidman
Love that Max
It’s not every day that I read about a study in the news and I get all emotional. But one about teaching reading to kids with special needs: yes. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, it found that students with intellectual disability who participated in a four-year program with intensive, specialized instruction learned to read at a first-grade level or higher. The kids, who had Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome and physical disabilities, started the study around age 7.
I’m well aware that it’s possible for kids with ID to learn to read because Max is reading, and making good progress. Still, it’s thrilling to see proof-positive research—and it’s surely going to inspire many parents out there. The study was done at Southern Methodist University and involved two verbal groups of children; one group of 76 received reading intervention, and the other group of 65 kids got the usual instructional method of teaching reading.
Kids in the intervention group were taught reading 40 to 50 minutes a day in small settings, with a ratio of four students per teacher. They used a program developed by two former special education teachers for struggling readers with average IQs called Early Interventions in Reading (here’s a PDF about it). The program helps with letter knowledge and sounds, recognizing syllables and other phonological awareness, sounding out and sight words. Kids repeatedly read in unison, paired up with teachers, and read independently, too. Other activities touched on comprehension and listening.
Scientific American science blogger Josh Fischman drew on the sleep expertise of SMU Assistant Professor of Chemistry Brian D. Zoltowski to explain how artificial light from our smartphones and other digital devices causes sleep deprivation. His blog article, “How your smartphone messes with your brain — and your sleep,” published May 20 and has been heavily shared through social media.
Zoltowski’s lab at SMU studies one of the many proteins involved in an organism’s circadian clocks. Called a photoreceptor, the protein responds to light to predict time of day and season by measuring day length.
The circadian clock is an internal biological mechanism that responds to light, darkness and temperature in a natural 24-hour biological cycle. The clock synchronizes body systems with the environment to regulate everything from sleep patterns and hunger in humans to growth patterns and flowering in plants.
“Our research focuses on understanding the chemical basis for how organisms perceive their surroundings and use light as an environmental cue to regulate growth and development,” Zoltowski says.
Zoltowski and the American Chemical Society created a video explaining the light-sleep deprivation relationship.
By Josh Fischman
Scientific American
It’s not the Angry Birds, streaming videos, emails from your boss, or your Facebook updates that disturb your sleep when you spend an evening staring at your smartphone or tablet. OK, the apps can keep you glued to your screen until the wee hours, and that doesn’t help. But it is the specific type of light from that screen that is throwing off your natural sleep-wake cycles, even after you power down. In a new video from Reactions: Everyday Chemistry, a sleep researcher explains the eerie power of blue light over your brain.
Cells at the back of your eyes pick up particular light wavelengths and, with a light-sensitive protein called melanopsin, signal the brain’s master clock, which controls the body’s circadian rhythms. Blue light, which in nature is most abundant in the morning, tells you to get up and get moving. Red light is more common at dusk and it slows you down. Now, guess what kind of light is streaming from that little screen in your hand at 11:59 P.M.? “Your iPad, your phone, your computer emit large quantities of blue light,” says sleep researcher and chemist Brian Zoltowski of Southern Methodist University
Business Insider Science Editor Jennifer Walsh tapped the sleep expertise of SMU Assistant Professor of Chemistry Brian D. Zoltowski to explain how artificial light from our smartphones and other digital devices causes sleep deprivation. Her article, “Your Smartphone Is Destroying Your Sleep,” published May 19.
Zoltowski’s lab at SMU studies one of the many proteins involved in an organism’s circadian clocks. Called a photoreceptor, the protein responds to light to predict time of day and season by measuring day length.
The circadian clock is an internal biological mechanism that responds to light, darkness and temperature in a natural 24-hour biological cycle. The clock synchronizes body systems with the environment to regulate everything from sleep patterns and hunger in humans to growth patterns and flowering in plants.
“Our research focuses on understanding the chemical basis for how organisms perceive their surroundings and use light as an environmental cue to regulate growth and development,” Zoltowski says.
Zoltowski and the American Chemical Society created a video explaining the light-sleep deprivation relationship.
By Jennifer Welsh
Business Insider
Artificial light is one of the biggest causes of sleep deprivation in modern humans, but there’s some special witch magic in smartphone and tablet light that really messes with our sleep cycle — essentially forcing us to stay awake by convincing our bodies that it’s actually morning.
Smartphones do this because they let off bright blue light.
“One of the best biological cues we have to what time of day it is is light. And it turns out that blue light in particular is very effective at basically predicting when morning is,” chemistry researcher Brian Zoltowski says in the video below, from the American Chemical Society.
In the evenings, there’s more red light than blue light, which signals your body to prep for bed. The red light does this by interacting with the protein melanopsin in cells deep inside your eyes — ones that are specifically made to regulate circadian rhythms and don’t play a role in how we see.
When the light hits this protein, it changes, and these cells send a signal to the “master clock” of the brain, which dictates when we wake and when we get sleepy. When it sends a “wake up” signal at night, our body clock gets screwed up.
The solution to a screwed up body clock? Force yourself to do things at the right time of the day — eating at mealtimes, getting to bed at a normal time, and getting up at a good time as well. And, of course, avoid that blue light at night.
Study offers hope for all struggling readers after large sample of special education students and students with low IQ significantly improved their reading ability over several academic years
The findings of a pioneering four-year educational study offer hope for thousands of children identified with intellectual disability or low IQ who have very little, if any, reading ability.
The study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, is the first large-scale longitudinal study of its kind to demonstrate the reading potential of students with intellectual disability or low IQ, said lead author Jill H. Allor, principal investigator of the study, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
The researchers found that students with intellectual disability who participated in four years of persistent, specialized instruction successfully learned to read at a first-grade level or higher.
“This study proves that we should never give up on anyone. It raises expectations for all children,” Allor said. “Traditionally the focus of instruction for students with intellectual disability has been functional skills, such as how to manage their personal hygiene, do basic chores around the house or simple work skills. This study raises academic expectations as well.”
The study demonstrates there’s hope for every struggling reader, said Allor, a reading researcher whose expertise is reading acquisition. The study’s implications can be life-changing for non-readers and struggling readers.
“If these children, and any other struggling readers, can learn to read, that means they can go grocery shopping with a shopping list, read the labels on boxes and cans, and read basic instructions,” Allor said. “Even minimal reading skills can lead to a more independent life and improved job opportunities.”
The findings indicate a critical need for more research to determine ways to streamline and intensify instruction for these students, said Allor, whose research focuses on preventing reading failure among struggling readers.
“This study demonstrates the potential of students with intellectual disability or low IQ to achieve meaningful literacy goals,” said Allor. “And it also clearly demonstrates the persistence and intensity needed to help children with low IQs learn to read.”
Students identified with intellectual disability account for nearly one in every 100 public school students, according to the study, which cites the U.S. Department of Education. Of those identified with intellectual disability who do graduate, most don’t receive a diploma, only a certificate of completion, said the study’s authors, all from SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
“This article is a call for boldness and the redoubling of our efforts to truly teach all children to read,” said the authors.
The study was funded with a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Allor, professor in the department of teaching and learning in the SMU Simmons School, was principal investigator.
Successful instruction relied on proven, scientific-based teaching method
For the study, a group of 141 children was divided into two groups. One group of 76 children received the reading intervention. A group of 65 children was taught in a business-as-usual instructional environment, which included various amounts of reading instruction and methods.
The children in the intervention group were taught reading 40 to 50 minutes a day in intensive small group settings of one to four students per teacher. Teachers used “Early Interventions in Reading,” a proven curriculum designed by SMU reading specialist and study co-author Patricia G. Mathes and Allor.
Most of the students entered the study around the age of 7 and variously were identified with disabilities including Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome or a physical disability. All of the students had the ability to speak.
IQs of the students in the study ranged from 40 to 80. IQ scores in the range of 85 to 115 are considered to be average.
Instruction was provided by six teachers certified in special education and four part-time teachers certified in general education. Teaching experience ranged from five years to 35 years.
After four years of the specialized teaching the researchers found that students with mild or moderate intellectual disability could independently read at the first-grade level, and some even higher.
Students receiving the specialized instruction significantly outperformed the comparison group on a variety of key reading tests.
Scientifically based reading program put to the test
The current study also demonstrates the effectiveness of a teaching method that’s scientifically based for use with children identified with intellectual disability or low IQ, said Allor.
Mathes and Allor, former special education teachers, developed the study’s reading program after research into how children with dyslexia and other learning problems learn to read.
Teachers providing the intervention received extensive support and training, the authors said. That included multi-day professional development training on curriculum implementation, monthly meetings with the research team to address instructional and behavioral issues, and instructional support from reading coaches who previously taught the intervention.
The program, previously validated with struggling readers without intellectual disability or low IQ, included a series of brief activities that increased in difficulty that were geared toward phonological awareness, letter knowledge and sounds, sounding out and sight words.
Fluency was developed from repeated reading in unison to paired reading and independent timed reading, the authors said. Comprehension activities included strategies for both listening and reading comprehension.
Students used provided materials that included word cards, small readers and activity pages to play reading games or to read aloud with someone else.
IQ is generally considered a predictor of learning ability, but in this study with students who are intellectually disabled or low IQ, the results showed that IQ didn’t always predict academic achievement. Although generally students with higher IQs improved more quickly, there were many individual cases where a student with a lower IQ outperformed a student with a higher IQ, Allor said.
Coauthors were Patricia Mathes, TI Endowed Chair in Evidence-Based Education and a professor in the Simmons School; J. Kyle Roberts; Jennifer P. Cheatham, research associate; and Stephanie Al Otaiba, professor.
The research will continue under a new $1.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant, led by Allor, principal investigator on the grant. Al Otaiba and Paul Yovanoff, both professors in SMU’s new special education program, are co-investigators on the new grant. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Apparently, rude sales people and fancy brands go well together.
Rude sales people at luxury retailers actually boost sales, according to new research by SMU Cox School of Business Assistant Professor Morgan Ward.
Ward and a co-researcher discovered the surprising fact after studying the purchasing desires of customers treated rudely by sales people at up-scale stores. They reported their findings in the Journal of Consumer Research in “Should the Devil Sell Prada? Retail Rejection Increases Aspiring Consumers’ Desire for the Brand.”
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Morgan Ward in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
Ward is an assistant professor of marketing. Her research interests are consumer behavior, identity and gift-giving. Her teaching interests include consumer behavior, brand management, retail merchandising and marketing management.
By Patrick M. Sheridan
CNN Money
At least that’s what a recent study shows. Shoppers appear to want to buy more of the high end brands after being treated badly, according to research conducted by two professors.
They said this kind of behavior is driven by an inherent human nature of wanting to prove they belong in an exclusive club.
“As upsetting as it is to be condescended to, in a luxury environment it appears to work in the brand’s favor,” said Morgan Ward, who teaches at Southern Methodist University. He said it’s about wanting to be “part of the tribe” or the in-crowd.
Ward co-authored the research paper, which was based on several scenarios in which participants interacted with phony salespeople they thought worked for upscale brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Burberry. Some of the people posing as sales staff were rude and some were not.
Related: Inside Louis Vuitton’s success
Surprisingly, customers in the simulations had an increased desire to buy the luxury goods after being treated rudely. In fact, the ruder they were, the higher the desire to buy the posh items.
That’s exactly how it went down in real life with McKenzie Kirby, a 21-year-old accounting major from Urbana, Ill., who likes to shop at luxury stores.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
He was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass.
Most recently his research showed that parents who favor spanking changed their minds after they were briefly exposed to summaries of research detailing the negative impact of corporal punishment on children. Holden, who considers spanking a public health problem, said the research indicates that parents’ attitudes about spanking could economically, quickly and effectively be changed to consider alternative disciplinary methods.
Holden’s earlier research provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
UPI
U.S. adults exposed to research on spanking showing subsequent child behavioral problems may change their discipline methods, researchers say.
Child psychologist George Holden of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who favors alternatives to corporal punishment, wanted to see if parents’ positive views toward spanking could be reversed if they were made aware of the existing research.
Holden and three SMU colleagues used a simple, fast, inexpensive method to briefly expose 118 college students to short research summaries that detailed spanking’s negative impact.
The summary consisted of several sentences describing the link between spanking and short- and long-term child behavior problems, including aggressive and delinquent acts, poor quality of parent-child relationships and an increased risk of child physical abuse.
Nearly 75 percent of the study subjects said after seeing the research they thought less favorably of spanking.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The independent news provider Indo-Asian News Service covered the research of SMU psychologist George W. Holden about the controversial practice of corporal punishment. The coverage published in a Jan. 29 article “Spanking your kids won’t make them disciplined” in The Times of India and in India’s Business Standard.
Holden, an expert in families and child development, is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, at endhittingusa.org.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. George Holden in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
He was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass.
Most recently his research showed that parents who favor spanking changed their minds after they were briefly exposed to summaries of research detailing the negative impact of corporal punishment on children. Holden, who considers spanking a public health problem, said the research indicates that parents’ attitudes about spanking could economically, quickly and effectively be changed to consider alternative disciplinary methods.
Holden’s earlier research provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
Indo-Asian News Service
For parents who spank their children believing it’s an effective form of discipline, think again.
According to child psychologists, spanking is actually a harmful practice.
“Parents spank with good intentions – they believe it will promote good behaviour, and they don’t intend to harm the child. But research thinks otherwise,” said child psychologist George Holden, a professor in the Southern Methodist University’s department of psychology in Texas who has carried out extensive research on spanking.
Holden and her colleagues used a simple and inexpensive method to briefly expose participants to short research summaries that detailed spanking’s negative impact.
Carrying out two studies, one with non-parents and one with parents, Holden and his co-authors found that attitudes were significantly altered.
“These studies demonstrate that a brief exposure to research findings can reduce positive corporal punishment attitudes in parents and non-parents,” stressed Holden.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Studies demonstrate that brief exposure to research findings can reduce positive corporal punishment attitudes in parents and non-parents
Parents who spank their children believe it’s an effective form of discipline. But decades of research studies have found that spanking is linked to short- and long-term child behavior problems.
Is there any way to get parents to change their minds and stop spanking? Child psychologist George Holden, who favors humane alternatives to corporal punishment, wanted to see if parents’ positive views toward spanking could be reversed if they were made aware of the research.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. George Holden in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Holden and three colleagues at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, used a simple, fast, inexpensive method to briefly expose subjects to short research summaries that detailed spanking’s negative impact.
Carrying out two studies, one with non-parents and one with parents, Holden and his co-authors on the research found that attitudes were significantly altered.
“Parents spank with good intentions — they believe it will promote good behavior, and they don’t intend to harm the child. But research increasingly indicates that spanking is actually a harmful practice,” said Holden, lead author on the study. “These studies demonstrate that a brief exposure to research findings can reduce positive corporal punishment attitudes in parents and non-parents.”
The researchers believe the study is the first of its kind to find that brief exposure to spanking research can alter people’s views toward spanking. Previous studies in the field have relied on more intensive, time-consuming and costly methods to attempt to change attitudes toward spanking.
“If we can educate people about this issue of corporal punishment, these studies show that we can in a very quick way begin changing attitudes,” said Holden, a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology who has carried out extensive research on spanking.
Study probed attitudes, which research has found predict behaviors
Research has found that parents who spank believe spanking can make children behave or respect them. That belief drives parental behavior, more so than their level of anger, the seriousness of the child’s misbehavior or the parent’s perceived intent of the child’s misbehavior.
Additionally, parents form their opinions based on advice from others they trust, primarily their own parents, their spouse and pediatricians, followed by mental health workers, teachers, parent educators and religious leaders.
Two studies with parents and non-parents both find changed attitudes
In the first SMU study, the subjects were 118 non-parent college students divided into two groups: one that actively processed web-based information about spanking research; and one that passively read web summaries.
The summary consisted of several sentences describing the link between spanking and short- and long-term child behavior problems, including aggressive and delinquent acts, poor quality of parent-child relationships and an increased risk of child physical abuse.
The majority of the participants in the study, 74.6 percent, thought less favorably of spanking after reading the summary. Unexpectedly, the researchers said, attitude change was significant for both active and passive participants.
A second study replicated the first study, but with 263 parent participants, predominantly white mothers. The researchers suspected parents might be more resistant to change their attitudes. Parents already have established disciplinary practices, are more invested in their current practices and have sought advice from trusted individuals.
But the results indicated otherwise. After reading brief research statements on the web, 46.7 percent of the parents changed their attitudes and expressed less approval of spanking.
“Given the brevity of our intervention, the results are notable,” said the authors. “Our Web-based approach is less expensive, potentially quicker, and more easily scaled up to use at a community level.”
With spanking a public health concern, this approach offers a simple way to reach a large audience to change attitudes and reduce parents’ reliance on corporal punishment, said Holden, who was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass. For example, educational modules could be developed for high school students, the authors said.
Co-authors were: Alan S. Brown, professor, SMU Department of Psychology and department chair, SMU Department of Sociology; Austin S. Baldwin, assistant professor, SMU Department of Psychology; and Kathryn Croft Caderao, graduate student, SMU Department of Psychology. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
He was recently elected president of Dallas’ oldest child abuse prevention agency, Family Compass.
Most recently his research showed that parents who favor spanking changed their minds after they were briefly exposed to summaries of research detailing the negative impact of corporal punishment on children. Holden, who considers spanking a public health problem, said the research indicates that parents’ attitudes about spanking could economically, quickly and effectively be changed to consider alternative disciplinary methods.
Holden’s earlier research provided a unique real-time look at spanking in a way that’s never before been studied. In a study of 37 families, mothers voluntarily recorded their evening interactions with their young children over the course of six days, including incidents of corporal punishment.
Kathleen Raven
Reuters
Regardless of the culture a child lives in, corporal punishment may do lasting psychological harm, German researchers say.
In a new study conducted in Tanzania, where physical punishment is considered normal, primary school students who were beaten by teachers or family members in the name of discipline tended to show more behavior problems, not fewer, the researchers found.
“Parents aim to educate children through corporal punishment, but instead of learning good social behaviors, the beatings often have the opposite effect,” said Tobias Hecker, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz, who led the study.
“Some people still believe, despite an overwhelming body of evidence, that corporal punishment in some cultures won’t result in as many negative effects,” George Holden told Reuters Health.
“But, as this study shows, it’s difficult to find support for that argument,” said Holden, a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who was not involved in the study.
Past research, mainly in industrialized countries, has found that children and teens who experience corporal punishment may “externalize” their negative experiences in the form of bad behavior and emotional problems, Hecker and his colleagues write in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
SMU biochemists and students probe biochemistry of membrane proteins that thwart cancer chemotherapies
One of the most significant Etruscan discoveries in decades names female goddess Uni
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Students grasp abstract math concepts after they demonstrate them with arm motions
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Wildfire on warming planet requires adaptive capacity at local, national, int’l scales
Early armored dino from Texas lacked cousin’s club-tail weapon, but had a nose for danger
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Nearby massive star explosion 30 million years ago equaled brightness of 100 million suns
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Good news! You’re likely burning more calories than you thought
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National Center for Arts Research white paper counters findings of the Devos Institute Study on Culturally Specific Arts Organizations
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Hunt for dark matter takes physicists deep below earth’s surface, where WIMPS can’t hide
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Department of Defense awards $2.6 million to SMU STEM program for minority students
Real-time audio of corporal punishment shows kids misbehave within 10 minutes of spanking
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The Undying Radio: Familiarity breeds content when it comes to listeners and music
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