I Played in the N.F.L. It Needs Way More Than a Black Anthem. If the league wants to show its commitment to its players, it should hire and promote more Black coaches and executives.
Alisa Garner, a clinical psychology doctoral student who works with Greg Stuart, received a prestigious national three-year F31 National Research Service Award (NRSA) from NIAAA of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support her dissertation research titled “Extending a Risk-taking Model of Alcohol-facilitated Consensual and Sexually Coercive Hook-up Behaviors Using a Daily Diary Design among College Men.” The grant also includes funds for a stipend and tuition.
Project Summary
Hook-up behaviors (HUBs; i.e., sexual activity outside an exclusive relationship with no mutual expectation of romantic commitment) are a prevalent problem on college campuses partly due to their association with alcohol use and sexual assault. HUBs and sexual assault frequently co-occur, and HUBs are positively associated with college men’s sexual assault perpetration. Prior research supports the relationship between alcohol use and HUBs, as well as sexual aggression perpetration; however, there is limited understanding into individual difference factors that increase the risk of alcohol-facilitated consensual and coercive HUBs.
Alcohol Myopia Theory (AMT) suggests alcohol intoxication creates a narrowing of attention to salient environmental factors (e.g., rewarding sexual experiences). The dual systems model of risk-taking suggests that socio-emotional system factors such as positive urgency (i.e., a tendency to give into impulses when positive affect is high) and the expectation that alcohol use will result in positive sexual outcomes, such as heightened intimacy and/or arousal, (i.e., alcohol-related sexual expectancies) increases sexual risk-taking. An integrated AMT and dual systems model would suggest that the risk of alcohol-facilitated HUBs may depend on the presence of distal socio-emotional system factors that increase the likelihood of sexual risk-taking behaviors. The overall objective of the proposed study is to elucidate the temporal associations between alcohol use and engagement in consensual and coercive HUBs among college men, and to identify the moderating effects of positive urgency and alcohol-related sexual expectancies, utilizing a daily diary design. No prior research has examined the relationship between college men’s alcohol use and HUBs and whether positive urgency and alcohol-related sexual expectancies moderate the temporal association between alcohol and HUBs.
Guided by the dual systems model and AMT, the proposed study will advance the understanding and prevention of sexually risky behaviors. The specific aims of this proposed study are to: (1) evaluate whether trait positive urgency moderates the temporal association between alcohol use and HUB and (2) evaluate whether alcohol-related sex expectancies moderate the temporal association between alcohol and HUBs. The proposed study will examine these factors in 250 college men as they relate to the under-explored sexual activity of HUBs, utilizing an innovative daily diary design. The proposed study is significant because it will inform researchers and prevention and intervention programs by identifying specific risk factors to ad-dress in the prevention of alcohol-facilitated consensual and coercive HUBs.
The American Psychological Association Interdisciplinary Minority Fellowship Program (IMFP) awarded LaTrice Wright a $23,000 fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year. Wright, a counseling graduate student who works with Jioni Lewis and Kirsten Gonzalez, will receive training and support in working with community-based ethnic and racial minority populations as part of this fellowship
The new fellowship program is designed for master’s and doctoral students in psychology, nursing, social work, marriage and family therapy, mental health counseling, and substance use and addictions counseling whose training prepares them for careers in behavioral health services for ethnic and racial minorities.
Todd Freeberg, professor of psychology, co-edited a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the oldest continually running science journal in the world.
The special issue is on the behavior and ecology of mixed-species animal groups and involves contributions from Freeberg and two former students: Brittany Coppinger (PhD, psychology, ’21) and Shannon Eppert (BS, EEB, ’16).
“It is surprising to most people, but mixed-species groups are common throughout the world,” Freeberg said. “Even though these groups have been studied for decades, articles on the topic have traditionally been published in species-specific journals.”
This special issue brings together researchers with approaches ranging from comparative psychology to community ecology and study subjects including insects, fish, birds, and mammals. Greater focus on mixed-species groups will increase our knowledge of behavioral and ecological processes influencing individuals.
Browse the special issue online here.
Chickadees, titmice and nuthatches flocking together benefit from a diversity bonus – so do other animals, including humans
Greg Reynolds received a National Science Foundation research grant, along with his co-PIs Lorraine Bahrick and Robert Lickliter from Florida International University, for their project “Selective Attention and Intersensory Processing in Infancy.” The total grant is $700,000.
How do infants make sense of the world around them? This project examines the possibility that infant attention is initially drawn to the intersensory redundancy that occurs when the same information is perceived through more than one sensory system. An example of intersensory redundancy is the information common to the movements of the face and sounds of the voice of a person speaking. Multiple measures will be used to determine: (1) whether infants pay attention to information provided by intersensory redundancy before paying attention to other types of information, (2) whether intersensory redundancy helps infants process information more efficiently, and (3) areas of the brain involved in intersensory processing in infancy. Answering these questions will provide insight into how infants learn from caregivers. This project will have broader impacts through training graduate and undergraduate students in cognitive neuroscience, which will increase the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Findings may also contribute to understanding deficits children with disabilities experience processing audiovisual speech.
This project has three major aims that will be addressed in a series of experiments on 5- and 10-month-old infants. Aim 1 examines how intersensory redundancy affects infants’ attention and learning from audiovisual speech, using simultaneous measures of heart rate changes associated with attention and electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of attention and memory. Aim 2 examines whether infants’ attention can be biased toward or away from intersensory redundancy by providing specific types of information during initial learning prior to EEG testing. Aim 3 is to determine which areas of the brain are involved in intersensory processing of audiovisual speech in infancy, using computational modeling of EEG data. Infants are expected to show enhanced brain activity to redundant information provided by audiovisual speech, and areas of prefrontal cortex are expected to be involved in processing intersensory redundancy in infancy.