Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 11 of 28

Zapping Your Brain Is Dope

On March 21, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine, Neuroscience

Emerging technology has created a new doping technique for athletic performance that is, as of now, perfectly legal.

Coined “neuro-doping,” this method sends electric current through one’s brain to facilitate quicker learning, enhanced muscular strength, and improved coordination. Use of this electronic stimulus has taken off in the sports world as a replacement for other doping methods banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Because it’s relatively new, WADA has yet to establish rules around neuro-doping. Plus, it’s virtually undetectable. Naturally, a lot of athletes are taking advantage of it.

One specific method of neuro-doping is known as Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation (tDCS). It works by sending a non-invasive and painless electrical current through the brain for around three to 20 minutes, in order to excite the brain’s cortex, ultimately increasing neuroplasticity (Park). This can be done commercially via a headset like device for $200.

Image result for transcranial direct current stimulation headset — The Halo Sport

Weight lifters, sprinters, pitchers, and skiers are just some of many types of athletes who can benefit from tCDS. By practicing with these headphones on, new neural pathways are constructed to help their bodies achieve peak performance. Dr. Greg Appelbaum, director of Opti Lab and the Brain Stimulation Research Center, says it’s especially useful for athletes where technique and motor skills triumph — such as a sprinter getting out of the blocks or an Olympic ski jumper hanging in the air. Top-tier athletes are pushing that fine limit of what the human body can accomplish, but neuro-doping allows them to take it one step further.

Neuro-doping has other applications, too. Imagine insanely skilled Air Force pilots, surgeons with exceptionally nimble hands, or soldiers with perfect aim. tCDS is being used to make progress in things like Alzheimer’s and memory function because of its impact on cognitive functioning in the forms of increased attention span and memory. You could even learn the guitar faster.

In this sort of context, it’s a no brainer that neuro-doping should be taken advantage of. But how ethical is it in sports?

The precedent for WADA to ban a substance or technique has been based on meeting two of the following three criteria: (1) drugs or tools that likely enhance performance to secure a winning edge; (2) drugs or tools that place athletes’ health at risk; (3) any substances or techniques that ruin the “spirit-of-sport” (Park). Lots of research has shown tCDS is pretty legit. As for health risks, tCDS is still in the experimental stage, so not much can be said about its side effects. Ethically, it causes a lot of controversy.

Many issues come into play when thinking about allowing athletes to neuro-dope. Given its similarities with other popular drugs, tCDS could introduce unfair advantages. Furthermore, not everyone may have access to the technology, and not everyone may want to use it. However, it’s important to note that sports already have unfair advantages. Access to things like proper coaching and nutrition may not be a reality for everyone. Sports are just inherently competitive.

Back when baseball players doped, it was awesome to watch them crush balls out of the park. Reintroducing performance enhancement through tCDS could mean we start seeing mountain bikers launching insane air and world records being smattered. The human body could achieve newfound heights.

Are the benefits worth it? Does neuro-doping ruin the “spirit of the sport?” Regardless of these important questions, tCDS is a fascinating scientific discovery that could make a difference in this world. So, what do you think?

Post by Will Sheehan

Park, Cogent Social Sciences (2017), 3: 1360462
https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2017.1360462

Dolphin Smarts

By Anne Littlewood

On March 15, 2019

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Neuroscience

Imagine you are blindfolded and placed into a pool of water with a dolphin. The dolphin performs a movement, such as spinning in a circle, or swimming in a zig-zag pattern, and your task is to imitate this movement, without having seen it. Ready, go.

Sound impossible? While it may not be possible for a human to do this with any accuracy, a dolphin would have no problem at all. When cognitive psychologist and marine mammal scientist Kelly Jaakkola gave this task to the dolphins at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida, they had no problem at all copying a human’s behavior. So how did they do it? Jaakkola thinks they used a combination of active listening and echolocation.

How smart are dolphins? (Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Stuart Burns)

Humans love to claim the title of “smartest” living animal. But what does this mean? How do we define intelligence? With a person’s GPA? Or SAT score? By assigning a person a number that places him or her somewhere on the scale from zero to Einstein?

Honestly, this is problematic. There are many different types of intelligence that we forget to consider. For example, Do you know that five is less than seven? Can you remember the location of an object when you can’t see it? Can you mimic a behavior after watching it? Are you capable of cooperating to solve problems? Can you communicate effectively? All of these demonstrate different intelligent skills, many of which are observed in dolphins.

Needless to say, dolphins and humans are entirely different creatures. We have different body plans, different ways of interacting with the world, and different brains. It has been 90 million years since we shared a common ancestor, which is why the things we do have in common are so fascinating to researchers.

Like us, dolphins understand ordinality. When presented with two novel boards with different numbers of dots, dolphins at the Dolphin Research Center chose the smaller number 83 percent of the time. But unlike us, they weren’t counting to solve this problem. When they were shown boards that represented consecutive numbers, the dolphins struggled, and often failed the task.

Similar to humans, dolphins understand that when objects are hidden from view, they still exist. At the Dolphin Research Center, they could easily remember the location of toy when a trainer hid it inside a bucket. However, unlike humans, dolphins couldn’t infer the movement of hidden objects. If the bucket was moved, the dolphins didn’t understand that the toy had moved with it.

Dr. Jaakkola presents to a packed room of Duke students

While they may not be physicists, Jaakkola has shown that dolphins are stellar cooperators, and amazing at synchronous tasks. When asked to press an underwater button at the same time as a partner, the dolphins pushed their buttons within 0.37 milliseconds of each other, even when they started at different times. As the earlier example shows, dolphins can also imitate incredibly well, and this skill is not limited to mimicking members of their own species. Even though humans have an entirely different body plan, dolphins can flexibly use their flipper in place of a hand, or their tail in place of legs, and copy human movements.

It is believed that dolphins evolved their smarts so that they could navigate the complex social world that they live in. As the researchers at the Dolphin Research Center have shown, they possess a wide array of intelligent abilities, some similar to humans and others entirely different from our own. “Dolphins are not sea people,” Jaakkola warned her audience, but that’s not to discount the fact that they are brilliant in their own way.

Style Recommendations From Data Scientists

By Sarah Haurin

On March 1, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Data, Neuroscience

A combination of data science and psychology is behind the recommendations for products we get when shopping online.

At the intersection of social psychology, data science and fashion is Amy Winecoff.

Amy Winecoff uses her background in psychology and neuroscience to improve recommender systems for shopping.

After earning a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience here at Duke, Winecoff spent time teaching before moving over to industry.

Today, Winecoff works as a senior data scientist at True Fit, a company that provides tools to retailers to help them decide what products they suggest to their customers.

True Fit’s software relies on collecting data about how clothes fit people who have bought them. With this data on size and type of clothing, True Fit can make size recommendations for a specific consumer looking to buy a certain product.

In addition to recommendations on size, True Fit is behind many sites’ recommendations of products similar to those you are browsing or have bought.

While these recommender systems have been shown to work well for sites like Netflix, where you may have watched many different movies and shows in the recent past that can be used to make recommendations, Winecoff points out that this can be difficult for something like pants, which people don’t tend to buy in bulk.

To overcome this barrier, True Fit has engineered its system, called the Discovery engine, to parse a single piece of clothing into fifty different traits. With this much information, making recommendations for similar styles can be easier.

However, Winecoff’s background in social psychology has led her to question how well these algorithms make predictions that are in line with human behavior. She argues that understanding how people form their preferences is an integral part of designing a system to make recommendations.

One way Winecoff is testing how true the predictions are to human preferences is employing psychological studies to gain insight in how to fine-tune mathematical-based recommendations.

With a general goal of determining how humans determine similarity in clothes, Winecoff designed an online study where subjects are presented with a piece of clothing and told the garment is out of stock. They are then presented with two options and must pick one to replace the out-of-stock item. By varying one aspect in each of the two choices, like different color, pattern, or skirt length, Winecoff and her colleagues can distinguish which traits are most salient to a person when determining similarity.

Winecoff’s work illustrates the power of combining algorithmic recommendations with social psychological outcomes, and that science reaches into unexpected places, like influencing your shopping choices.

Post by undergraduate blogger Sarah Haurin

Meet the Researcher Who Changed How We Care for Rape Survivors

By Anne Littlewood

On February 26, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Field Research, Global Health, Medicine, Policy

One of the first things I was told during freshman orientation was that two out of every five young women at Duke experience some form of sexual assault during their four years as an undergraduate. Shortly after that, I was informed that as a Duke student, I was not allowed to protect myself with pepper spray, because it is banned by university policy.

At the 2019 Harriet Cook Carter Lecture, Ann Burgess, a professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College, reported that 25 to 30 percent of women and 10 percent of men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, statistics that make our campus standard of 40 percent seem strikingly high in comparison. Burgess has devoted her life to the support of sexual assault survivors, and pioneered treatments for victims of such abuse. For the past fifty years, she has studied the traumatic effects of rape and violence on patients of all ages, and worked closely with the FBI Academy to research the underlying causes of such crimes. Her work at the FBI was so impactful, Netflix decided to write a TV series about her, a crime drama called “Mindhunter.” Talk about a powerful woman.

Ann Wolbert Burgess, DSNc, APRN, BC, FAAN (Photo from Duke University School of Nursing)

When she began her work with rape survivors in the 1970s, the world was a very different place. Public attitudes towards sexual assault were unsupportive and disapproving of victims. Rape thrived on prudery, silence, and misunderstanding. There were very few reported cases, low conviction rates of criminals, and plenty of victim blaming. “We just didn’t talk about these kinds of things,” Burgess recalled. “There was no public recognition.”

So have we advanced? Yes, absolutely. Throughout the years, Burgess says she has seen a crucial shift towards more support for survivors. She has helped the FBI develop better systems for criminal profiling, and testified countless times in court to ensure justice for survivors of all ages. Burgess has witnessed these court cases changing policies, and affecting the genesis of laws that will better protect citizens against rape and other violent crimes. She has studied lasting trauma in survivors, and used this research to implement new culturally and developmentally appropriate services for victims. She believes that, as a society, we are doing a much better job today to reduce stigma and support survivors, but that the work is not even close to finished.

Sexual assault is still an intensely pervasive issue in society. Rape can happen anywhere, to anyone, and Burgess thinks it all boils down to the cultural emphasis on aggression. “We’ve all become complacent to the violence in the world that we live in,” as panelist Lynden Harris put it. As a society, we perpetuate aggressive masculinity, often without even realizing it. And especially in communities like the military, where women and men alike are highly regulated and taught to avoid showing weakness at all costs, the stigma surrounding sexual assault is intense. Commander Alana Burden-Huber, director of public health services at the Cherry Point Naval Health Clinic, shared her perspective that it can be very difficult to come forward in such a world of conformity. She also mentioned that female jurors in sexual assault cases tend to be much harsher on female survivors than male jurors, and attributes this to the fact that female members of the military are constantly trying to be harder and more stoic, so as to parallel military men.

Mindy Oshrain and Ann Burgess listen intently to the contributions of other panelists

Panelist Mindy Oshrain, a consulting associate in the Duke Department of Psychiatry, quieted the crowd by sharing a moving quote from Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” She reminded us that it is so important to listen to patients, and slow down enough to ask someone multiple times if they are doing okay. It is easy to forget this at a place like Duke, where we are all constantly moving 100 miles a minute, checking boxes as we rush from one activity to the next, but it can make all the difference to stop, and take the time to ask again- How are you really doing? What can I do to support you? Empathy has the power to change the world.

As a sophomore, I now live in a building full of young women on the edge of Central Campus, on a street that is only serviced by Duke transportation in one direction. Just a few months ago, I woke up to a Duke Alert message on my phone, which informed me that a violent rape crime had occurred in the night, just fifty yards from my apartment. While we may have come a long way since the 1970s, the unavoidable fact remains that as young women living in this world, we are not safe. Let’s change that.

Magazine Covers Hew to Stereotypes, But Also Surprise

By Anna Gotskind

On February 21, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Data, Students

Data + Women’s Spaces

Media plays a large role in the lives of most people. It’s everywhere. Even if you don’t actively purchase magazines, you are exposed to the covers in daily life. They are at newsstands, in grocery stores, in waiting rooms, online and more. Intrigued by the messages embedded in magazine covers, Nathan Liang (psychology, statistics), Sandra Luksic (philosophy, political science) and Alexis Malone (statistics) sought out to understand how women are represented in media as a part of a research project in the Data+ program.

Data+ is one of the many summer research opportunities at Duke. It’s a 10-week program focused on data science that allows undergraduate students to explore different research topics using data-driven approaches. Students work collaboratively in small interdisciplinary teams and develop skills to marshal, analyze, and visualize data.

The team’s project, titled Women’s Spaces, focused on a primary research question: Which messages are pervasive in women’s and men’s magazines and how do these messages change over time, across magazines, and between different target audiences.

Together, the team analyzed 500+ magazine covers published between January 2010 and June 2018, from Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Essence, Good Housekeeping and Seventeen. They used image analysis, text analysis and sentiment analysis in order to understand how women are represented on the magazine covers.

To conduct image analysis the team used Microsoft Azure Face Detect with Python in order to identify cover models. This software accounted for perceived emotions, age and race. They also noted the race/ethnicity and hair length of the cover models. Their research revealed that excluding Essence, 85 percent of magazine covers were white and had below average body sizes. One specific thing they found was that men had a greater range of emotions while women seemed to always appear happy. Furthermore, there was less emotional variance among minorities and in general, no Asian men. However, they did note that there may have been a software bias in that Microsoft Azure may not have picked up as well on the emotions of minorities.

In order to conduct text analysis, the team had to self-type the text on the magazine covers because oftentimes the text on magazine covers was layered on top of images making it hard for software to detect. This reduced the number of magazines that they were able to analyze because it took up so much time. They then used a Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf) algorithm to determine both how often a term occurred on the cover how important a term was. Their results revealed several keywords associated with different magazines. Some of these include sex (Cosmopolitan), curvy, beauty, and business (Essence), cooking, cleaning, and kitchen (GH), cute (Seventeen), and cars, America, and Barbeque (Esquire)

Lastly, they conducted a sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis involved computationally identifying the opinions expressed in the magazine covers to determine their attitude on the topic being displayed. While sentiment libraries exist, there were not any that had magazine/advertising industry-specific sentiments and thus, were not usable for the research. As a result, the team created their own sentiment dictionary with categories like “positive,” “negative,” “sex,” “sell-words,” “appearance,” “home,” “professional,” “male” and “female.”

At the end of the summer, their main takeaway was that magazines tend to reinforce gender norms and stereotypes. The covers also backed up some of the established preconceived notions they had about magazines. However, they also discovered messages of empowerment. Interestingly, these were often connected to beauty as well as consumerism.

In a presentation, the team explained that one of the lessons they took away from the summer was that Data science is not objective, but biases are hard to spot. They noted that throughout the process they made sure to question their methodologies of analyzing data. It was particularly challenging to determine where the biases were coming into play: be it their questions, data sources or even understanding of feminism. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the project, combining humanities with data science, the team was academically diverse. Luksic stated in the presentation that she, especially, came in skeptical of the idea that technology was assumed to be “objective”.

Luksic added, “It’s one thing to know, on a abstract level, that data science is not objective. It is another thing entirely to try to do or practice data science in a way that minimizes your subjectivities. Ultimately, we hope for a data science that can incorporate subjectivity in a way that emphasizes differences, such as between black-centered feminism and anti-black feminism.”

The discoveries made by the team play into a larger discussion about women’s roles in media and how that influences feminism and empowerment in relation to marketing and how that impacts women’s movements.

Luksic stated, “the versatility of data science allowed us to pursue multiple different paths with different conceptions of feminisms underlying them, which was exciting and empowering.”

By Anna Gotskind

Bias in Brain Research

By Sarah Haurin

On February 19, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Neuroscience

Despite apparent progress in achieving gender equality, sexism continues to be pervasive — and scientists aren’t immune.

Cordelia Fine researches how scientists buy into gender biases.

In a cyber talk delivered to the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, professor Cordelia Fine of the University of Melbourne highlighted compelling evidence that neuroscientific research is yet another culprit of gender bias.

Fine says the persistent idea of gender essentialism contributes to this stagnation. Gender essentialism describes the idea that men and women are fundamentally different, specifically at a neurological level. This “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” attitude has spread from pop culture into experimental design and interpretation.

However, studies that look for sex differences in male and female behavior tend to show more similarities than differences. One study looked at 106 meta-analyses about psychological differences between men and women. The researchers found that in areas as diverse as temperament, communication styles, and interests, gender had a small effect, representing statistically small differences between the sexes.

Looking at fMRI data casts further doubt on how pronounced gender differences really are. A meta-analysis of fMRI studies investigating functional differences between men and women found a large reporting bias. Studies finding brain differences across genders were overrepresented compared to those finding similarities.

Of those small sex differences found in the central nervous system, Fine points out how difficult it is to determine their functional significance. One study found no difference between men and women in self-reported emotional experience, but found via fMRI that men exhibited more processing in the prefrontal cortex, or the executive center of the brain, than women. Although subjective experience of emotion was the same between men and women, the researchers reported that men are more cognitive, while women are more emotional.

Fine argues that conclusions like this are biased by gender essentialism. In a study she co-authored, Fine found that gender essentialism correlates with stronger belief in gender stereotypes, that gender roles are fixed, and that the current understanding of gender does not need to change.

When scientists allow preconceived notions about gender to bias their interpretation of results, our collective understanding suffers. The best way to overcome these biases is to ensure we are continuing to bring more and more diverse voices to the table, Fine said.

Fine spoke last month as part of the Society for Neuroscience Virtual Conference, “Mitigating Implicit Bias: Tools for the Neuroscientist.” The Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (@DukeBrain) made the conference available to the Duke community.

The Importance of Moms

By Anne Littlewood

On February 10, 2019

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Field Research, Lecture, Neuroscience

Emily Bray, Ph.D., might have the best job ever. Since earning her bachelor’s at Duke in 2012, she has been researching cognitive development in puppies, which basically means she’s spent the last seven years playing with dogs. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.

Last Friday marked the 10th birthday of Duke’s Canine Cognition Center, and the 210th birthday of Charles Darwin. To celebrate, Brian Hare, Ph.D., invited former student Bray back to campus to share her latest research with a new generation of Duke undergraduates. The room was riveted — both by her compelling findings and by the darling photos of labs and golden retrievers that accompanied each slide.

Dr. Emily Bray shows photos of her study participants

During her Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania, Bray worked with Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney, and James Serpell to investigate the effects of mothering on puppy development. For her dissertation, she studied a population of dog moms and their puppies at The Seeing Eye, Inc. The Seeing Eye is one of the oldest and largest guide dog schools in the U.S. They have been successfully raising and training service dogs for the blind since 1929, but like most things, it is still an imperfect science. Approximately half of the puppies bred at The Seeing Eye fail out of program. A dog that completes service training at The Seeing Eye represents two years of intensive training and care, and investing so much time and money into a dog that might eventually fail is problematic. Being able to predict the outcomes of puppies would save a lot of wasted time and energy, and Emily Bray has been doing just this.

What makes a good dog mom? (Photo from Dirk Vorderstraße, from Wikimedia Commons)

Through her work at The Seeing Eye, Bray found that, similar to humans, dogs have several types of mothering styles. She discovered that dog moms tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum from low to high maternal involvement. Some of the moms were very involved with their puppies, and seldom left their side. These hovering moms had high levels of cortisol, and became quite stressed when separated briefly from a puppy. They coddled their children, and often nursed from a laying down position, doing everything they could to make life easy for their babies. On the other side of the spectrum, Bray also observed moms that displayed much more relaxed mothering. They often took personal time, and let their puppies fend for themselves. They were more likely to nurse while sitting or standing up, which made their children work harder to feed. They were less stressed when separated from a puppy, and also just had generally lower levels of cortisol. Sound like bad parenting? Believe it or not, this tough love actually resulted in more successful puppies.

Duke’s very own assistance dogs in training!

As the puppies matured, Bray conducted a series of cognitive and temperament tests to determine if maternal style was associated with a certain way of thinking in the puppies. Turns out, dogs who experienced high maternal care actually performed much worse on the tests than dogs who were shown tough love when they were young. At The Seeing Eye graduation, it was also determined that high maternal care and ventral nursing was associated with failure. Puppies that were over-mothered were more likely to fail as service dogs.

Her theory is that tough love raises more resilient puppies. When mom is always around, the puppies don’t get the chance to experience small stressors and learn how to deal with challenge. The more relaxed moms actually did their kids a favor by not being so overbearing, and allowed for much more independent development.

Bray is now doing post-doctoral research at the University of Arizona, where she is working with Canine Companions for Independence (CCI) to determine if maternal style has similar effects on the outcomes of dogs that will be trained to assist people with a wide range of disabilities. She is also now doing cognition and temperament tests on moms pre-pregnancy to determine if maternal behavior can be predicted before the dogs have puppies. Knowing this could be a game changer, as this information could be used for selective breeding of better moms.

Me snuggling Ashton, one of the Puppy Kindergarten dogs

If you got the chance to hang out with puppies Ashton, Aiden, or Dune last semester, you have an idea of how awesome Bray’s day-to-day work is. These pups were bred at CCI, and sent to Duke to be enrolled in Duke Puppy Kindergarten, a new program on campus run through Duke’s Canine Cognition Center. Which of these three will make it to graduation? I’ve got money on Ashton, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

The bottom line according to Bray? “Mothering matters, but in moderation.”

Overcoming Judgment Biases in STEM

By Lydia Goff

On January 30, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Neuroscience, Science Communication & Education

Beginning in childhood we all develop unconscious stereotypes that influence how we see ourselves and others – including what careers we choose, and who we choose to recruit, hire or promote in the workplace.

Researchers discussed the origins and effects of these judgement biases during a virtual conference titled Mitigating Implicit Bias: Tools for the Neuroscientist, which was put on by the Society for Neuroscience and screened by DIBS at Duke on Jan. 23 and 24.

Associate professor of neuroscience Anne Churchland of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory proposed several ideas for overcoming gender bias in the workplace, especially for women in STEM or other male-dominated domains. Asking questions, speaking with authority (particularly about one’s own work), finding a way to communicate with senior colleagues, trying risky experiments, making one’s achievements known, sending one’s work to high-level journals, and applying to awards and grants are her main suggestions. Above all these strategies, she recommends finding good friends and colleagues to help. As research shows, when women are successful in arenas that are viewed as distinctly male, both women and men like them less. These negative reactions can be discouraging and even career-affecting, and any support system will help to overcome that struggle.

The ‘Brilliance Barrier ‘ is a judgement bias explored by Andrei Cimpian’s research at New York University. One study shows that for every ten parents who searched on Google, “Is my daughter talented?”, twenty-five parents looked up “Is my son talented?”

Another study describes the gendered reviews on ratemyprofessor.com. Men are two to three times more likely to be called genius than women. Women though are more likely to be portrayed as warm or caring.

Cimpian uses these studies to develop the Field-specific Ability Beliefs hypothesis (FAB). FAB attributes women’s underrepresentation to a combination of the idolized brilliance/genius and the “brilliance” equals men stereotype. The higher the FAB in a field, the greater the emphasis on brilliance in it. When graphing the percentage of women with PhDs and the FAB for a specific field such as philosophy or physics, higher FABs are associated with a lower number of PhDs. African American representation also decreases as the FAB increases. Cimpian classifies one potential mechanism of this trend as minorities having less interest in fields with high FABs. In addition, increased bias, discrimination, and imposter syndrome could explain why minorities appear to avoid getting PhDs in high FAB fields.

Cimpian also demonstrates how susceptible children are to judgement biases. At age five, the percentage of girls who pick their own gender as “really, really smart” and the percentage of boys who do the same are similar. When children reach seven though, the percentage of boys choosing men exceeds the girls picking women. He suggests de-emphasizing brilliance, genius, and gifted in favor of work ethic because minorities are more likely to be recommended when the job description asks for commitment than when it asks for intelligence. Language has the potential to change the amount of representation in high FAB fields, such as STEM.

Image result for jackie fleming cartoons — Never Give Up – Cartoon by Jackie Fleming

Lastly, psychology professor Ione Fine at the University of Washington talked about the hiring process in her lab and how she reduces bias by laying out and weighting criteria beforehand. Instead of focusing on objective criteria like GPA and GRE scores, she advocates for more interviews with set lists of questions and a paper discussion. She also recommends calling the recommendation letter writers. After selecting a diverse group of research assistants, Fine then makes sure they have the proper support and mentoring. Reinforcing that they were chosen for their potential and that she is their advocate helps them feel empowered to succeed in her lab. Through mentoring and supporting diversity, anyone can help minorities overcome the judgement biases surrounding them.

Nature vs. Nurture and Addiction

By Sarah Haurin

On January 24, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Lecture, Medicine, Neuroscience

Epigenetics involves modifications to DNA that do not change its sequence but only affect which genes are active, or expressed. Photo courtesy of whatisepigenetics.com

The progressive understanding of addiction as a disease rather than a choice has opened the door to better treatment and research, but there are aspects of addiction that make it uniquely difficult to treat.

One exceptional characteristic of addiction is its persistence even in the absence of drug use: during periods of abstinence, symptoms get worse over time, and response to the drug increases.

Researcher Elizabeth Heller, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania Epigenetics Institute, is interested in understanding why we observe this persistence in symptoms even after drug use, the initial cause of the addiction, is stopped. Heller, who spoke at a Jan. 18 biochemistry seminar, believes the answer lies in epigenetic regulation.

Elizabeth Heller is interested in how changes in gene expression can explain the chronic nature of addiction.

Epigenetic regulation represents the nurture part of “nature vs. nurture.” Without changing the actual sequence of DNA, we have mechanisms in our body to control how and when cells express certain genes. These mechanisms are influenced by changes in our environment, and the process of influencing gene expression without altering the basic genetic code is called epigenetics.

Heller believes that we can understand the persistent nature of the symptoms of drugs of abuse even during abstinence by considering epigenetic changes caused by the drugs themselves.

To investigate the role of epigenetics in addiction, specifically cocaine addiction, Heller and her team have developed a series of tools to bind to DNA and influence expression of the molecules that play a role in epigenetic regulation, which are called transcription factors. They identified the FosB gene, which has been previously implicated as a regulator of drug addiction, as a site for these changes.

Increased expression of the FosB gene has been shown to increase sensitivity to cocaine, meaning individuals expressing this gene respond more than those not expressing it. Heller found that cocaine users show decreased levels of the protein responsible for inhibiting expression of FosB. This suggests cocaine use itself is depleting the protein that could help regulate and attenuate response to cocaine, making it more addictive.

Another gene, Nr4a1, is important in dopamine signaling, the reward pathway that is “hijacked” by drugs of abuse. This gene has been shown to attenuate reward response to cocaine in mice. Mice who underwent epigenetic changes to suppress Nr4a1 showed increased reward response to cocaine. A drug that is currently used in cancer treatment has been shown to suppress Nr4a1 and, consequently, Heller has shown it can reduce cocaine reward behavior in mice.

The identification of genes like FosB and Nr4a1 and evidence that changes in gene expression are even greater in periods of abstinence than during drug use. These may be exciting leaps in our understanding of addiction, and ultimately finding treatments best-suited to such a unique and devastating disease.

Post by undergraduate blogger Sarah Haurin

Finding Success in Science and the Economic Brain

By Guest Post

On December 26, 2018

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Guest Post, Science Communication & Education

How can we understand how humans make decisions? How do we measure the root of motivation?

Gregory Samanez-Larkin, an assistant professor in Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke, uses neuroeconomic and neuromarketing approaches to seek answers to these questions. He combines experimental psychology and economics with neuroimaging and statistical analysis as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding human behavior.

From studying the risk tendencies in different age groups to measuring the effectiveness of informative messages in health decision-making,Samanez-Larkin’s diverse array of research reflects the many applications of neuroeconomics.

He finds that neuroeconomic and neurofinance tools can help spot vulnerabilities and characteristics within groups of people.

Though his Motivated Cognition & Aging Brain Lab at Duke, he would like to extend his work to finding interventions that would encourage healthier or optimal decision-making. Many financial organizations and firms are interested in these questions.

While Samanez-Larkin has produced some very influential research in the field, the path to his career was not a straightforward one.Raised in Flint, Michigan, he found that the majority of people around him were not very career-oriented. He found a passion for wakeboarding, visual art, and graphic design.

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan-Flint, he was originally on a pre-business track. But after taking various psychology courses and assisting in research, Samanez-Larkin was captivated by the excitement and the advances in brain imaging at the time.

However, misconceptions about the field caused him to question whether or not going into research was the right fit, leading him to seek jobs in marketing and advertising instead. But in job interviews, he ended up questioning the methods and the ways companies explained the appeal of different ways of advertising. Realizing that he really enjoyed asking questions and evaluating how things work, he reconsidered pursuing science.

After a series of positive experiences in a research position in San Francisco, Samanez-Larkin began his graduate studies at Stanford University. The growing field of neuroeconomics — which combined his diverse set of interests in neuroscience, psychology, and economics — continued the “decade-long evolution” of Samanez-Larkin’s career.

Samanez-Larkin’s experiences in his career journey are reflected strongly in his approach to teaching.

“I feel like my primary responsibility is to help people become successful,” he says, as we sit comfortably on the sofas in his office.“Everything I do is for that.”

In his courses, Samanez-Larkin emphasizes the need to think critically and evaluate information, consistently asking questions like, “How do we know something works or not? How do I know how to evaluate if it works or not? How can I become a good consumer of scientific information?”

In his teaching, Samanez-Larkin hopes to set students up with usable, translatable skills that are applicable to any field.

Samanez-Larkin also hopes to support his students in the same way he received support from his previous mentors. “It’s cool to learn about how the brain works, but ultimately, I’m just trying to help people do something.”

Guest Post by Ariba Huda, NCSSM 2019