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.
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.
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.
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 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.
SMU psychologists train Swedish social workers to use Project Support, a proven parenting program shown to reduce child abuse
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Renee McDonald or Ernest Jouriles in the SMU Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
The government of Sweden is partnering with psychologists at SMU to launch a parenting program shown to reduce child abuse. A two-year study funded by the Swedish government is looking at the feasibility of implementing the parenting program nationwide in that country.
The program, “Project Support,” was created by SMU psychologists Renee McDonald and Ernest Jouriles. Research has shown it reduces child abuse and neglect in severely violent families.
McDonald and Jouriles are partnering with Kjerstin Almqvist, a psychologist at Karlstad University in Sweden who specializes in the treatment of children suffering domestic violence, under a $730,000 grant from Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare. The grant was awarded to Swedish researchers investigating best practices for children exposed to domestic violence and child abuse.
McDonald and Jouriles were in Sweden recently to train social services agency staff on how to implement Project Support.
The parenting program will be rolled out initially to 100 families in the four Swedish cities of Stockholm, Trollhättan, Ronneby and Örebro. Social workers from the nation’s social service agencies in those cities will take Project Support into homes in which children have been exposed to severe family violence.
At the end of the two-year study, Swedish officials will determine if Project Support is to be endorsed for routine use in Swedish social service agencies for families in which the children have been exposed to family violence.
“This project is a great example of how science can be brought to bear to help alleviate real human suffering,” McDonald said. “Our Swedish colleagues are committed to ensuring that their country’s social services are demonstrably effective in reducing child maltreatment and improving the mental health of children in violent families.”
Project Support provides families with parenting help, emotional support
Project Support is an intensive, one-on-one program in which mental health service providers meet with families weekly in their homes for up to 6 months. During that time, parents are taught specific skills, including how to pay attention and play with their children, how to listen and comfort them, how to offer praise and positive attention, how to give appropriate instructions, and how to respond to misbehavior. Service providers also provide mothers with emotional support and help them access needed materials and resources through community agencies, such as food banks and Medicaid.
“Although the Swedish government makes sure every citizen can provide for their physical needs, many women who are victims of domestic violence need additional supports to help them leave a violent relationship and begin to live with their children on their own,” Almqvist said. “Swedish programs that provide support for mothers are successful helping them become independent and autonomous. However, such programs are not sufficient to help the children in the families overcome the adverse effects of the violence. Project Support has shown substantial positive effects for mothers as well as children in the U.S., and we hope it will be equally successful in Sweden.”
Almqvist is Professor in Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Karlstad University.
Project Support decreased reports of abuse, improved family functioning
McDonald and Jouriles launched Project Support in the United States in 1996 to address the mental health problems of maltreated children and children exposed to domestic violence and child abuse. Those factors in childhood often lead to considerable problems for children later in life, such as substance abuse, interpersonal violence and criminal activity, say the SMU psychologists.
Project Support is listed on federal and state databases as an intervention for children in violent families that is supported by research evidence.
Research in Texas found the program reduced abusive parenting among mothers who live in poverty and whose families have a history of domestic violence or child abuse. Mothers reduced their use of harsh discipline and physical aggression toward their children and were much less likely to be referred to Texas Child Protective Services for child abuse. Project Support also improved children’s psychological adjustment, especially conduct problems, the researchers found.
Most recently, use of Project Support was expanded in Dallas to serve some families who were previously homeless. The oldest child abuse and prevention agency in Dallas, Family Compass, is supplying Project Support services to families served by the Housing Crisis Center, whose mission is to combat homelessness.
“Professor Almqvist approached us over a year ago about adapting Project Support for use in Sweden and conducting an evaluation of it in Sweden,” said McDonald. “We recently conducted an intensive training class for the staff members of the agencies who will be providing Project Support services. The next phase begins in September, when families begin to receive the services.”
Every year U.S. child welfare agencies receive more than 3 million reports of child abuse and neglect involving nearly 6 million children, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Approximately 13 percent of children in the U.S. are exposed to severe acts of inter-parent violence.
In Sweden, approximately 5 percent of that nation’s children are exposed to severe acts of inter-parent violence, according to Swedish statistics. — 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.
SMU partners with Family Compass to roll out one-on-one parenting intervention to improve the lives of abused and neglected children
A parenting program developed by researchers in SMU’s Department of Psychology will now help Dallas-area families who were once homeless.
Family Compass, one of the oldest child abuse prevention agencies in Dallas, is expanding its use of “Project Support.” The Project Support program was developed by SMU psychologists Renee McDonald and Ernest Jouriles to reduce child abuse and neglect in severely violent families.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Renee McDonald or Ernest Jouriles in the SMU Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
“Families who have been homeless are emerging from a very stressful situation,” McDonald said. “At a time when parents are trying to get back on their feet, Project Support provides structure and training that guide them in parenting their children in ways that are loving and effective. This helps children do better in school, feel happier and behave better at home.”
Family Compass will use Project Support in its new partnership with the Housing Crisis Center in Dallas. Starting this year, Family Compass will provide assistance to families in permanent and transitional supportive housing, said Jessica Trudeau, executive director of Family Compass.
An $18,000 grant to SMU from Verizon Foundation will fund Project Support for families referred to Family Compass either by Texas Child Protective Services or the Housing Crisis Center.
“The prevalence of families who are homeless in Dallas continues to escalate,” Trudeau said. “We are working with these families because the scientific literature indicates that housing instability places children at risk for abuse. At Family Compass, we seek to serve those at highest risk in our community. We believe that every child deserves protection and a hopeful future.”
The grant also will fund an in-depth evaluation of Project Support’s impact on Family Compass families to determine whether the program’s effects are maintained over time.
Families that consent to participate will be randomly assigned to one of two groups — one that will receive Project Support help, or a control group that will receive existing services through Texas Child Protective Services or the Housing Crisis Center, McDonald said. Each family will be assessed at the start of the program, after six months of services, and six months after they complete the program’s services.
The SMU Psychology Department will provide doctoral students to enroll families and conduct assessments, McDonald said.
McDonald is an associate professor in the SMU Department of Psychology and Associate Dean for Research in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at SMU. Jouriles is a professor and chairman of the SMU Psychology Department.
Project Support provides families with parenting help, emotional support
Project Support was launched in 1996 to address the mental health problems of maltreated children and children exposed to domestic violence, both of which often lead to considerable problems for children later in life, such as substance abuse, interpersonal violence and criminal activity.
As part of Project Support, mental health professionals meet with families weekly in their homes for up to 6 months. During that time, caregivers are taught specific skills, including how to pay attention and play with their children, how to listen and comfort them, how to offer praise and positive attention, how to give appropriate instructions and commands, and how to respond to misbehavior.
Therapists also provide mothers with emotional support and help them access needed materials and resources through community agencies, such as food banks and Medicaid. The therapists help mothers evaluate the adequacy and safety of the family’s living arrangements, the quality of their child-care arrangements and how to provide sufficient food with little money.
Since its launch, Project Support has been adopted by agencies nationally and internationally as a treatment for children in violent families that is supported by research evidence.
Research found the program reduced abusive parenting among mothers who live in poverty and whose families have a history of domestic violence or child abuse. Mothers reduced their use of harsh discipline and physical aggression toward their children and were much less likely to be referred to Texas Child Protective Services for child abuse. Project Support also improved children’s psychological adjustment, especially conduct problems, the researchers found.
Project Support decreased reports of abuse, improved family functioning
“Family Compass approached us two years ago about adopting an intervention supported by clinical research,” said McDonald. “We started training their clinical workers. So this is a program that was incubated at SMU and is now being deployed in the community.”
Family Compass first implemented Project Support in 2011 with clients in its existing Parent Aide program. Parent Aide, a free home-visitation program, coaches parents in nonviolent discipline methods for up to two years, Trudeau said.
Founded in 1992, Family Compass has served more than 38,450 children and parents in its mission to guide families away from violence toward a healthy family.
The nonprofit organization’s clients include families referred to Texas Child Protective Services, Dallas Independent School District, Parkland Health and Hospital System, Baylor Hospital and other local agencies.
“So far, Project Support’s impact on families includes improved nonviolent parenting practices, decreased reports of abuse to Child Protective Services, and healthier children in families with improved functioning,” Trudeau said.
Every year U.S. child welfare agencies receive more than 3 million reports of child abuse and neglect involving nearly 6 million children, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Each day in the United States five children die from injuries related to abuse. — 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.
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Ernest Jouriles in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.
Journalist Ann Douglas elaborates on the study in her article about the way parents make a difference when it comes to encouraging their children to make healthy relationship choices.
By Ann Douglas
Toronto Star
Parents can make a difference when it comes to encouraging their children to make healthy relationship choices down the road.
These skills don’t develop automatically — nor can you expect to cover everything your child needs to know in a one-time “facts of relationships” conversation.
You’ll want to start the conversation about respectful and empathetic relationships during the preschool years, or even earlier, and to carry on that conversation throughout the teen years and beyond, says Lynn Zimmer, executive director of YWCA Peterborough, Victoria, and Haliburton, a non-profit organization that operates a secure emergency shelter for women and children fleeing abuse.
She encourages parents to consider the following question: “What values can you transmit to your children so that they are respectful and resilient — not completely compliant, and yet not doing harm to others?”
Children learn more from our actions than from our words.
“We have to think about what relationship models we are providing for our children — to consider what they are seeing at home,” notes writer and speaker Michael Kaufman, co-founder of the White Ribbon Campaign.
Research indicates that harsh parenting — parenting that is physically or verbally abusive — affects children’s perceptions of what constitutes a loving relationship.
A study conducted at Southern Methodist University and published in Psychology of Violence this past April, noted that teenagers who have been traumatized by harsh parenting and exposure to violence in the home may be “primed to respond aggressively to negative behavior from a romantic partner, or even to ambiguous behavior that they erroneously interpret as hostile or threatening.” In other words, trauma may interfere with the brain’s ability to make sense of and to cope with conflict in a relationship.
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 research of SMU psychologists Renee McDonald, Ernest Jouriles and David Rosenfield was featured in an article on the web site GoodTherapy.org.
McDonald, lead author on the research and a professor of psychology, researches specific child adjustment problems, such as aggression and antisocial behavior, and how they are associated with exposure to family conflict and violence. She has begun to develop and evaluate intervention programs to assist children exposed to frequent and severe interparent violence.
McDonald and Jouriles are co-founders and co-directors of SMU’s Family Research Center. The Center advances knowledge about family functioning and malfunctioning, trains students in clinical psychology and treats families who participate in programs at the research center.
By GoodTherapy.org
Over 15 million children live in homes in which intimate partner violence (IPV) occurs.
“A sizable proportion of these children experience significant mental-health problems, but many appear to experience only mild distress, especially those drawn from community samples,” said Renee McDonald of the Department of Psychology at Southern Methodist University. “Parent– child communications about interparent conflict may represent another important dimension of parenting for children who have been exposed to IPV.”
Children who witness interparent conflict often express curiosity about the conflict. A number of mothers have reported that if asked, they would explain to their children about the conflict. However, to date, few studies have looked at that behavior to identify the influence it would have on the child’s adjustment.
“It seems plausible that mother–child communications about interparent conflict affect children’s understanding of the conflict, and theorists often point to the importance of children’s understanding of their parents’ conflict in influencing children’s adjustment,” said McDonald.
SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or to book them in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650 or UT Dallas Office of Media Relations at 972-883-4321.
From picking apart atomic particles at Switzerland’s CERN, to unraveling the mysterious past, to delving into the human psyche, SMU researchers are in the vanguard of those helping civilization understand more and live better.
With both public and private funding — and the assistance of their students — they are tackling such scientific and social problems as brain diseases, immigration, diabetes, evolution, volcanoes, panic disorders, childhood obesity, cancer, radiation, nuclear test monitoring, dark matter, the effects of drilling in the Barnett Shale, and the architecture of the universe.
The sun never sets on SMU research
Besides working in campus labs and within the Dallas-area community, SMU scientists conduct research throughout the world, including at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and in Angola, the Canary Islands, Mongolia, Kenya, Italy, China, the Congo Basin, Ethiopia, Mexico, the Northern Mariana Islands and South Korea.
“Research at SMU is exciting and expanding,” says Associate Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies James E. Quick, a professor in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. “Our projects cover a wide range of problems in basic and applied research, from the search for the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN to the search for new approaches to treat serious diseases. The University looks forward to creating increasing opportunities for undergraduates to become involved as research expands at SMU.”
Funding from public and private sources
In 2009-10, SMU received $25.6 million in external funding for research, up from $16.5 million the previous year.
“Research is a business that cannot be grown without investment,” Quick says. “Funding that builds the research enterprise is an investment that will go on giving by enabling the University to attract more federal grants in future years.”
The funding came from public and private sources, including the National Science Foundation; the National Institutes of Health; the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Energy; the U.S. Geological Survey; Google.org; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Texas’ own Hogg Foundation for Mental Health; and the Texas Instruments Foundation.
Worldwide, the news media are covering SMU research. See some of the coverage. Browse a sample of the research:
CERN and the origin of our universe Led by Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU physics researchers belong to the global consortium of scientists investigating the origins of our universe by monitoring high-speed sub-atomic particle collisions at CERN, the world’s largest physics experiment.
Compounds to fight neurodegenerative diseases
Synthetic organic chemist and Chemistry Professor Edward Biehl leads a team developing organic compounds for possible treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s. Preliminary investigation of one compound found it was extremely potent as a strong, nontoxic neuroprotector in mice.
Hunting dark matter Assistant Professor of Physics Jodi Cooley belongs to a high-profile international team of experimental particle physicists searching for elusive dark matter — believed to constitute the bulk of the matter in the universe — at an abandoned underground mine in Minnesota, and soon at an even deeper mine in Canada.
Robotic arms for injured war vets
Electrical Engineering Chairman and Professor Marc Christensen is director of a new $5.6 million center funded by the Department of Defense and industry. The center will develop for war veteran amputees a high-tech robotic arm with fiber-optic connectivity to the brain capable of “feeling” sensations.
Green energy from the Earth’s inner heat
The SMU Geothermal Laboratory, under Earth Sciences Professor David Blackwell, has identified and mapped U.S. geothermal resources capable of supplying a green source of commercial power generation, including resources that were much larger than expected under coal-rich West Virginia.
Exercise can be magic drug for depression and anxiety
Psychologist Jasper Smits, director of the Anxiety Research and Treatment Program at SMU, says exercise can help many people with depression and anxiety disorders and should be more widely prescribed by mental health care providers.
The traditional treatments of cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy don’t reach everyone who needs them, says Smits, an associate professor of psychology.
Virtual reality “dates” to prevent victimization
SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles, Renee McDonald and Lorelei Simpson have partnered with SMU Guildhall in developing an interactive video gaming environment where women on virtual-reality dates can learn and practice assertiveness skills to prevent sexual victimization.
With assertive resistance training, young women have reduced how often they are sexually victimized, the psychologists say.
Controlled drug delivery agents for diabetes Associate Chemistry Professor Brent Sumerlin leads a team of SMU chemistry researchers — including postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students — who fuse the fields of polymer, organic and biochemistries to develop novel materials with composite properties. Their research includes developing nano-scale polymer particles to deliver insulin to diabetics.
Sumerlin, associate professor of chemistry, was named a 2010-2012 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, which carries a $50,000 national award to support his research.
Human speed An expert on the locomotion of humans and other terrestrial animals, Associate Professor of Applied Physiology and Biomechanics Peter Weyand has analyzed the biomechanics of world-class athletes Usain Bolt and Oscar Pistorius. His research targets the relationships between muscle function, metabolic energy expenditure, whole body mechanics and performance.
Weyand’s research also looks at why smaller people tire faster. Finding that they have to take more steps to cover the same distance or travel at the same speed, he and other scientists derived an equation that can be used to calculate the energetic cost of walking.
Pacific Ring of Fire volcano monitoring An SMU team of earth scientists led by Professor and Research Dean James Quick works with the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire near Guam on the Northern Mariana Islands. Their research will help predict and anticipate hazards to the islands, the U.S. military and commercial jets.
The two-year, $250,000 project will use infrasound — in addition to more conventional seismic monitoring — to “listen” for signs a volcano is about to blow.
Reducing anxiety and asthma A system of monitoring breathing to reduce CO2 intake is proving useful for reducing the pain of chronic asthma and panic disorder in separate studies by Associate Psychology Professor Thomas Ritz and Assistant Psychology Professor Alicia Meuret.
The two have developed the four-week program to teach asthmatics and those with panic disorder how to better control their condition by changing the way they breathe.
Breast Cancer community engagement Assistant Psychology Professor Georita Friersen is working with African-American and Hispanic women in Dallas to address the quality-of-life issues they face surrounding health care, particularly during diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.
Friersen also examines health disparities regarding prevention and treatment of chronic diseases among medically underserved women and men.
Paleoclimate in humans’ first environment Paleobotanist and Associate Earth Sciences Professor Bonnie Jacobs researches ancient Africa’s vegetation to better understand the environmental and ecological context in which our ancient human ancestors and other mammals evolved.
Jacobs is part of an international team of researchers who combine independent lines of evidence from various fossil and geochemical sources to reconstruct the prehistoric climate, landscape and ecosystems of Ethiopia in particular. She also identifies and prepares flora fossil discoveries for Ethiopia’s national museum.
Ice Age humans
Anthropology Professor David Meltzer explores the western Rockies of Colorado to understand the prehistoric Folsom hunters who adapted to high-elevation environments during the Ice Age.
Meltzer, a world-recognized expert on paleoIndians and early human migration from eastern continents to North America, was inducted into the National Academy of Scientists in 2009.
Understanding evolution The research of paleontologist Alisa WInkler focuses on the systematics, paleobiogeography and paleoecology of fossil mammals, in particular rodents and rabbits.
Her study of prehistoric rodents in East Africa and Texas, such as the portion of jaw fossil pictured, is helping shed more light on human evolution.
DALLAS, July 30 (UPI) — Abusive mothers, who are taught parenting skills and given emotional support, can improve their parenting skills, two U.S. researchers say.
Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald of Southern Methodist University in Dallas say parenting improved in impoverished, neglectful, abusive mothers after home visits, classes and emotional support from therapists.
The study, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, says large improvements in mothers’ parenting were observed in families given instruction and emotional support compared to families that did not receive the services.
Jouriles is professor and chairman of the SMU Psychology Department. McDonald and Rosenfield are associate professors. Corbitt-Shindler is a psychology department doctoral candidate.
Mothers who live in poverty and who have abused their children can stop if they are taught parenting skills and given emotional support.
A new study has found that mothers in families in which there is a history of child abuse and neglect were able to reduce how much they cursed at, yelled at, slapped, spanked, hit or rejected their children after a series of home visits from therapists who taught them parenting skills.
There were large improvements in mothers’ parenting in families that received the intensive services, compared to families that did not receive the services, according to SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, two of the study’s eight authors.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Ernest Jouriles or Renee McDonald in the SMU Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
As a result of the intensive, hands-on training, the women in the study said they felt they did a better job managing their children’s behavior, said Jouriles and McDonald. The mothers also were observed to use better parenting strategies, and the families were less likely to be reported again for child abuse.
“Although there are many types of services for addressing child maltreatment, there is very little scientific data about whether the services actually work,” said McDonald. “This study adds to our scientific knowledge and shows that this type of service can actually work.”
Help for violent families
The parenting training is part of a program called Project Support, developed at the Family Research Center at SMU and designed to help children in severely violent families.
The research was funded by the federal Interagency Consortium on Violence Against Women and Violence Within the Family, along with the Texas-based Hogg Foundation for Mental Health.
“Child maltreatment is such an important and costly problem in our society that it seems imperative to make sure that our efforts — and the tax dollars that pay for them — are actually solving the problem,” said Jouriles. He and McDonald are co-founders and co-directors of the SMU Family Research Center.
In 2007, U.S. child welfare agencies received more than 3 million reports of child abuse and neglect, totaling almost 6 million children, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Poor and single with children
The study worked with 35 families screened through the Texas child welfare agency Child Protective Services, CPS. The parents had abused or neglected their children at least once, but CPS determined it best the family stay together and receive services to improve parenting and end the maltreatment.
In all the families, the mother was legal guardian and primary caregiver and typically had three children. On average she was 28, single and had an annual income of $10,300. Children in the study ranged from 3 to 8 years old.
Half the families in the study received Project Support parenting education and support. The other half received CPS’s conventional services.
New parenting skills + help
Mental health service providers met with the 17 Project Support families weekly in their homes for up to 6 months.
During that time, mothers, and often their husbands or partners, were taught 12 specific skills, including how to pay attention and play with their children, how to listen and comfort them, how to offer praise and positive attention, how to give appropriate instructions and commands, and how to respond to misbehavior.
Also, therapists provided the mothers with emotional support and helped them access materials and resources through community agencies as needed, such as food banks and Medicaid. The therapists also helped mothers evaluate the adequacy and safety of the family’s living arrangements, the quality of their child-care arrangements and how to provide enough food with so little money.
Services provided to families receiving traditional child welfare services varied widely. The range of services included parenting classes at a church or agency, family therapy or individual counseling, videotaped parenting instruction, anger-management help, GED classes and contact by social workers in person or by phone.
Fewer recurrences of abuse
Only 5.9 percent of the families trained through Project Support were later referred to CPS for abuse, compared with almost 28 percent of the control group, the researchers found.
“The results of this study have important implications for the field of child maltreatment,” said SMU’s Rosenfield.
Project Support was launched in 1996 to address the mental health problems of maltreated children and children exposed to domestic violence, both of which often lead to considerable problems for children later in life, such as substance abuse, interpersonal violence and criminal activity. Previous studies have shown the program can improve children’s psychological adjustment as well as mothers’ ability to parent their children appropriately and effectively, according to the researchers.
Project Support: A promising practice
With funding from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Project Support has been included in a study evaluating 15 “promising practices” nationally for helping children who live in violent families.
Jouriles is professor and chairman of the SMU Psychology Department. McDonald and Rosenfield are associate professors.
Other researchers were William Norwood, University of Houston; Laura Spiller, Midwestern State University; Nanette Stephens, University of Texas; Deborah Corbitt-Shindler, SMU; and Miriam Ehrensaft, City University of New York.
SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.
It’s a stormy night when a young man offers a young college woman a ride home. First he makes friendly small-talk. But then he becomes sexually aggressive and angry.
Can she get out of this situation without getting hurt?
While this could be a real experience for many women, in this case it’s virtual reality. The purpose is role-playing in a psychology laboratory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Although realistic and scary, the role-playing is nevertheless a safe way to teach assertiveness skills to young women so they can resist sexual victimization, according to new research.
The researchers tracked participants in the assertiveness program over three months and found that women in a control group were sexually victimized at twice the rate of those who had practiced the skills.
New research in which women practice their newly learned skills on a virtual-reality “date” holds promise for making the program even stronger.
Between 25 percent and 50 percent of American women will experience sexual coercion or sexual assault during their lifetime, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Those in their teens and early 20s are at particularly high risk, research shows.
The toll on victims ranges from depression and anxiety to drug abuse, psychiatric symptoms and chronic medical conditions.
“Sexual assault prevention programs for young women are widely available,” says Jouriles, professor and chairman of the SMU Department of Psychology. “However, only a few have been scientifically evaluated. Although some of these programs have been shown to change young women’s knowledge and attitudes about sexual assault, they have not generally been shown to prevent actual assaults.”
SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald.
Jouriles and McDonald designed the virtual reality program in collaboration with students and faculty at The Guildhall, SMU’s graduate-level video-game design program. They worked with Simpson to develop the assertiveness training program and are currently using the virtual-reality technology to enhance women’s practice experiences when they learn assertiveness skills.
To participate, a young woman wears a head-mounted display and earphones that allow her to navigate a make-believe sexually risky environment. It immerses her in a setting that feels genuinely threatening. She faces off against an avatar controlled by a live male actor, who delivers the dialogue and controls the speech and actions of the virtual date.
The department’s 10-foot-by-12-foot laboratory room is furnished with two adjoining bucket seats and a couch to replicate either the front seat of a car or a party setting.
Similar to a multi-player, interactive video game, the sophisticated head-mounted display streams computer-generated, 3D images. The perspective is first-person, which tracks and changes with the wearer’s head position. Earphones surround the wearer with the sounds of pounding rain and music from the car radio.
SMU psychologist Lorelei Simpson.
The woman experiences the make-believe environment from a seat next to the avatar. In a 10- to 12-minute role-play, the actor challenges the young woman’s assertiveness by gradually escalating the conversation from small-talk and flirtation to verbal sexual coercion and anger. The avatar’s lips move in sync with the actor’s speech, and his facial expressions and movements, such as changing the radio station and drinking beer, make the virtual interaction more natural.
Research by Jouriles and McDonald published in 2009 found that young women who practiced navigating the virtual reality environment had a stronger negative reaction to the sexual threat than did participants in conventional role-playing without virtual reality technology.
Although the study didn’t evaluate the reason for that difference, Jouriles and McDonald hypothesized that the virtual environment makes it easier for participants to become immersed in role-play. It’s possible that women in a conventional role-playing environment feel more self-conscious or that the situation is more artificial than women interacting with an avatar, which results in more guarded responses, they said.
McDonald is an associate professor. Simpson is an assistant professor.
If children feel threatened by even very low levels of violence between their parents, they may be at increased risk for developing trauma symptoms, new research suggests.
A study by psychologists at SMU found that children who witness violence between their mother and her intimate partner report fewer trauma symptoms if they don’t perceive the violence as threatening.
The research highlights the importance of assessing how threatened a child feels when his or her parents are violent toward one another, and how that sense of threat may be linked to symptoms of trauma.
Children’s perception of threat determines any trauma
“Our results indicated a relation between children’s perception of threat and their trauma symptoms in a community sample reporting relatively low levels of violence,” said Deborah Corbitt-Shindler, a doctoral candidate in the psychology department at SMU. “The results of the study suggest that even very low levels of violence, if interpreted as threatening by children, can influence the development of trauma symptoms in children.”
Family violence experts estimate that more than half of children exposed to intimate partner violence experience trauma symptoms, such as bad dreams, nightmares and trying to forget about the fights.
SMU study surveyed Dallas area families
The SMU study of 532 children and their mothers looked at the link between intimate partner violence and trauma symptoms in children. The families were recruited from communities in the urban Dallas area. The National Institute of Mental Health funded the research.
In the study, mothers were asked to describe any violent arguments they’d had with their intimate partners, and they were asked about trauma symptoms they may have experienced because of the violence.
Similarly, the children in the study, age 7 to 10 years old, were asked to appraise how threatened they felt by the violence they witnessed, and about trauma symptoms they may have experienced because of the violence. The researchers defined “threat” as the extent to which children are concerned that: a family member might be harmed, the stability of the family is threatened, or a parent won’t be able to care for them.
Trauma: Nightmares, bad dreams, trying to forget
To assess trauma, children were asked questions such as if they’ve had bad dreams or nightmares about their mom’s and dad’s arguments or fights; if thoughts of the arguments or fights ever just pop into their mind; if they ever try to forget all about the arguments and fights; and if they ever wish they could turn off feelings that remind them of the arguments and fights.
The SMU researchers found that even when mothers reported an episode of intimate partner violence, their children reported fewer trauma symptoms when they didn’t view the episode as threatening. Although a mother’s emotions sometimes affect their children’s emotions, in this study the mothers’ trauma symptoms were unrelated to the children’s traumatic responses to the violence.
Corbitt-Shindler conducted the study in conjunction with her faculty advisers — Renee McDonald, associate professor, and Ernest Jouriles, professor and chair of the SMU Psychology Department. Additional co-authors of the study were SMU clinical psychology doctoral candidates Erica Rosentraub and Laura Minze; and Rachel Walker, SMU psychology department research assistant. — Margaret Allen
Psychology Professors Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald, with Guildhall Lecturer Jeff Perryman and Deputy Director Tony Cuevas, are collaborating on a role-playing program that combines virtual reality with behavioral insight to help teach and test sexual assault avoidance techniques.
The program’s environment of a rain-lashed car parked in an isolated area immerses women into not just a location, but also a “conversation” with a potential attacker.
It is the first step in what developers hope will be a program to help women practice strategies for averting sexual assault in a controlled situation that is safe, yet feels realistic.
“This is a potential breakthrough opportunity for gaming technology to help solve an important social problem,” Jouriles says.
During one session, the experience starts in a small, nondescript office where two automobile seats are bolted to a raised platform: An actor sits in the driver’s seat, and a woman sits in the passenger seat to his right. When she puts on video goggles and a headset, she suddenly finds herself in a parked car during a howling rainstorm. Rivulets of water stream down the windshield, flashes of lightning illuminate the interior of the car, and thunder beats a steady cadence.
She doesn’t see the actor beside her, she sees a three-dimensional video game character at the wheel of the car. She is drawn into small talk, but the driver turns increasingly aggressive, eventually demanding sexual intimacy. It is nothing short of frightening and, oddly enough, very real.
Role-playing is a well-established method for teaching people to deal with complex social situations, says Jouriles, professor and chair of psychology in Dedman College. But he hit a wall in his research when he tried the method to teach relationship violence avoidance techniques to a high school health class in the late 1990s.
“The role-playing produced giggles,” Jouriles says. “And from my perspective, it didn’t capture the imaginaton of the students.”
SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald.
Jouriles and McDonald, associate professor of psychology in Dedman College, joined the SMU faculty in August 2003, when a handful of psychologists around the country were beginning to experiment with virtual programs to treat anxiety disorders, such as allowing people who were afraid of flying to “practice” without boarding an airplane.
They wondered whether SMU’s newly opened Guildhall could help teach and test sexual assault avoidance techniques by immersing a woman into not just a virtual location, but also a “conversation” with a potential attacker.
“We created an enclosed environment,” says Perryman, Guildhall lecturer, who worked on the program with Guildhall’s Cuevas.
“We wanted our participant to feel powerless. The rain was added to isolate her. The car is particularly creepy. We worked hard at that,” says Perryman.
The simulation requires participants to wear a head-mounted video display with tracking technology that senses head movements and an audio headset, which transmits the voice of the avatar “driver” and other sounds from the virtual environment. The avatar’s lips move in sync with the voice of the actor, who controls the character’s facial expressions and movements through a video keyboard. The virtual driver can be made to nod, shrug, even pound the steering wheel in anger when he is rebuffed.
Jouriles, McDonald and their team studied the responses of 62 undergraduate women who were randomly assigned to traditional or virtual reality role-play and outfitted with heart monitors. All were asked to complete questionnaires afterward on their moods and experience.
The women who donned the headgear and went through the virtual scenario rated the experience’s realism higher than those in the traditional role play group. Behavioral observations also suggested that women experiencing the virtual car scene appeared more angry and afraid.
Jouriles calls those results “very promising.” The next step, he says, is to develop a virtual scenario that can test techniques to avert sexual assault. He hopes to see some variation on the virtual program developed for use in high schools and colleges. — Kim Cobb
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It’s a stormy night when a young man offers a young college woman a ride home. First he makes friendly small-talk. But then he becomes sexually aggressive and angry.
If children feel threatened by even very low levels of violence between their parents, they may be at increased risk for developing trauma symptoms, new research suggests.
Family violence experts estimate that more than half of children exposed to intimate partner violence experience trauma symptoms, such as bad dreams, nightmares and trying to forget about the fights.