Moral illusions may alter our behavior

LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: KAJSA HANSSON, NEWLY PROMOTED DOCTOR IN ECONOMICS AT LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY. view more 

CREDIT: THOR BALKHED

Just as optical illusions can fool the eye to present a distorted image of reality, moral illusions can fool our decision-making ability, making us more selfish. This is the conclusion of a newly presented doctoral thesis from Linköping University. But the results also show that we are more likely to vote for the good of all when taking part in democratic decisions.

“We tend to use what we can call a ‘moral wiggle room’ to justify selfish decisions. This means that we can act selfishly in certain situations, without feeling that our actions are morally wrong,” says Kajsa Hansson, newly promoted doctor in economics at Linköping University, with a thesis entitled Moral Illusions.

In the thesis, she examines several aspects of what she terms ‘moral illusions’, and compares them to optical illusions. She concludes that we can tweak our morals in some situations to increase self-benefit.

“Fairness is in the eye of the beholder. But I have used a broad definition of morality, and I don’t judge whether a certain type of fairness is good or bad. Instead, I use the idea of whether a person experiences that they are not living up to their own notion of good morality,” says Kajsa Hansson.

Moral illusions mainly arise in competitive situations when many people compete for the same rewards. This is a consequence of psychological mechanisms that cause us to assess fairness differently, depending on whether we are successful or not. This is particularly the case when we lack information about the fairness of the situation. When the brain attempts to fill in missing information, it may create an image that does not match reality – in the same way as occurs for an optical illusion.

One example is how we view losing. If we lose, we tend to blame it on that the playing field was not level, or that the game was rigged. When we win, in contrast, we explain this by our excellent playing skills. This tendency may describe why successful people believe that the world is a meritocracy, and that economic inequalities are thus fair. 

Kajsa Hansson has also investigated how we react to decisions when we can avoid information that may encourage unselfish behaviour. In this case, again, our morality can be tweaked, since we are reluctant to seek out more information that risks giving us a bad conscience. Such information may force us to act unselfishly.

There is, however, one situation in which moral illusions do not play a role – when decisions are taken democratically. This may be the case for decisions taken by the national parliament, but it also applies in the committees of clubs, companies, etc., where several people are involved and take decisions collectively. This result contradicts the currently accepted theory, which says that we become less moral when the responsibility for a decision is shared among several people. This phenomenon is known as the “diffusion of responsibility”.

“When decisions are taken democratically, there is always someone else we can blame, and previous studies have shown that we become more selfish when the responsibility for a decision is spread among several people. However, our results do not support the idea that people become less moral when taking such decisions. In fact, quite the opposite,” says Kajsa Hansson.

In the study, Kajsa Hansson and her colleagues carried out three experiments in which the participants must choose whether to donate or claim money. In some experiments, the decision was a democratic one between several participants; in others the participants acted individually. The results showed that it was not possible to see any selfish behaviour. Indeed, they showed that people tend to become more generous in this scenario.

“Our results are actually very good news. They suggest that we possess the insight that we take decisions for others, and we act collectively. We can speculate that people realise that we can contribute more to the common good when everyone contributes,” says Kajsa Hansson.

The thesis considers decision-making in a broad perspective, and looks at how morality affects it. Kajsa Hansson believes that it can help us understand each other better.

“We may not always agree with everyone’s interpretations of reality, but we can understand where they come from.”

The thesis has been funded by the Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation and the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation.

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DOI

10.3384/9789179293963 

ARTICLE TITLE

Moral Illusions

USA

Pet neuter surgeries fall off during pandemic, driving shelter overpopulation

Almost 3 million missing neuter surgeries nationwide, plus vet shortages, are leading to stressed pet shelters

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

Progress made over decades to control overpopulation of dogs and cats through high-volume spay-neuter surgeries is at risk thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a team of UF researchers conclude in a new study.

The impact — felt both at community shelters and veterinary clinics — includes sharp declines in spay-neuter surgeries after the initial pandemic-triggered lockdowns, followed by staffing shortages in clinics and shelters, overcrowding and lagging pet adoption rates. All of these problems are compounded by a nationwide shortage of veterinarians, which has been felt even more acutely in shelters and spay-neuter clinics, the researchers say in a study that appears today (Sept. 13) in Frontiers of Veterinary Science.

Progress made over decades to control overpopulation of dogs and cats through high-volume spay-neuter surgeries is at risk thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a team of UF researchers conclude in a new study.

The study focused on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the volume of surgical procedures performed by spay-neuter clinics, said Simone Guerios, D.V.M., Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor of shelter medicine at UF and the study’s lead author.

The team drew its research from 212 clinics nationally, all of which make use of the cloud-based clinic management software program Clinic HQ, which is specifically designed for facilities that focus on spay-neuter and preventive health care services.

 “The high level of spay-neuter achieved over the past five decades is the single most important driver of reduced pet overpopulation and euthanasia in animal shelters,” Guerios said. “The rise in subsidized spay-neuter access helped drive the euthanasia of shelter pets in the United States from an estimated 13.5 million in 1973 to 1.5 million in 2019.”

Using 2019 as a baseline, the UF team aimed to determine the impact of the pandemic on the volume of spay-neuter procedures performed in 2020-2021 at the 212 clinics, which collectively performed more than 1 million surgeries per year and were on track to increase surgeries by 5% over the previous year.

But in the 24 months from January 2020 through December 2021, 190,818 fewer surgeries were performed at the clinics studied than would be expected had 2019 levels been maintained, the researchers found.

“If a similar pattern was experienced by other spay-neuter programs in the United States, it would suggest there is a deficit of more than 2.7 million spay-neuter surgeries that animal welfare organizations have yet to address,” said co-author Julie Levy, D.V.M., Ph.D., the Fran Marino Endowed Distinguished Professor of Shelter Medicine Education at UF’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

All the impacts of the pandemic combined have the potential to undermine progress made in controlling pet populations and euthanasia in shelters, Levy added.

“Currently, shelters are in crisis mode, with overcrowding and lagging adoptions,” Guerios said. “Pet overpopulation seems to be increasing, leading to increased shelter euthanasia for the first time in many years.”

The UF College of Veterinary Medicine is responding to societal needs by increasing class size and remodeling its surgical training facility to enhance surgical skills development. The college also offers four courses and clerkships specifically designed to provide students with real-world spay-neuter experience, Levy said.

As part of these hands-on learning opportunities, UF veterinary students spay and neuter thousands of cats and dogs in their local communities, she added.

“Through our recent expansion of class size to meet the increasing demand for veterinary graduates, along with unique certificate programs and shelter medicine internships, our college is taking proactive action to address these disturbing trends in animal healthcare and well-being,” said Christopher Adin, D.V.M., chair of UF’s department of small animal clinical sciences, which oversees the college’s shelter medicine program.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Veterinary Science

DOI

10.3389/fvets.2022.912893 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

58 COVID-19 associated reduction 57 60 in elective spay-neuter surgeries 59 62 for dogs and cats

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2022

COVID was deadlier for those with intellectual and development disabilities

COVID was the top cause of death for people with IDD, while it was the third leading cause of the death for people without

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

Authors of a new peer-reviewed paper have discovered that COVID was the leading cause of death for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in 2020.

The study, “COVID-19 Mortality Burden and Comorbidity Patterns Among Decedents with and without Intellectual and Developmental Disability in the US”, looked at 2020 death certificate data to examine death patterns for people with or without IDD. They found that those without an IDD, COVID was the third leading cause of death, following heart disease and cancer. But for those with IDD, COVID was the number one cause of death.

IDD are conditions characterized by life-long impairments in mobility, language, learning, self-care, and independent living. Examples include Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, and intellectual disabilities.

Syracuse University Associate Professor Scott Landes and lead author of the paper, published by the Disability and Health Journal, said that this study had confirmed earlier predictions that COVID-19 would be deadlier among people with IDD.  

“Even when we adjusted for age, sex, and racial-ethnic minority status, we found that COVID-19 was far deadlier for those with IDD than those without,” said Landes. “Furthermore, people with IDD were dying at much younger ages.”

The research team for the study includes Landes, a faculty associate for the Aging Studies Institute at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; Julia Finan, a graduate student in the sociology department at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University; and Dr. Margaret Turk, Distinguished Service Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, N.Y.

In understanding why the COVID-19 burden is greater for people with IDD, the researchers feel that more attention needs to be given to comorbidities as well as living arrangements.

“People with IDD are living in congregate settings at a higher percentage than those without an IDD,” said Landes. “Group living situations, especially with close-contact personal care support, is associated with the spread of COVID-19. For the estimated 13 to 20 percent of adults with IDD living in these settings, the risk cannot be overstated.”

“While it is important to attend to differences in comorbidity patterns, it is also necessary to realize that the increased COVID-19 burden among people with IDD may at least partly be due to social factors such as a higher proportion of this population living in group care settings, insufficient attention to care needs on a public and private level, and inequities in access to quality healthcare,” said Landes.

Additionally, the researchers noted the higher occurrences of hypothyroidism and seizures among all IDD statuses, and obesity among decedents with intellectual disability and Down syndrome. “Out of an abundance of caution, medical providers should carefully monitor symptoms among COVID-19 patients with IDD diagnosed with hypothyroidism and/or seizures.”

But the researchers say that more research is needed to explore these social factors in better understanding the COVID-19 death rates for people with IDD.

Furthermore, the authors note that the study is focused on the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. A current data inequity that permits IDD to be reported as the cause of death prevents understanding whether people with IDD continue to experience a disproportionate COVID-19 burden.

“This is preventing adequate surveillance of the health of this marginalized population during the ongoing pandemic. While changes are needed to the death certificate coding and revision process to address this data inequity in the long-term, in the immediate, the CDC will need to recognize this inequity and take necessary action to allow for analysis of current death certificate data at the decedent level for this population,” said Landes.

Reporters looking to connect with the authors of the report, please contact Ellen James Mbuqe, executive director of media relations at Syracuse University, at 412-496-0551 or ejmbuqe@syr.edu

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JOURNAL

Disability and Health Journal

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

COVID-19 Mortality Burden and Comorbidity Patterns Among Decedents with and without Intellectual and Developmental Disability in the US

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Sep-2022

COVID-19 amplified hardship for many Harvey victims

Rice, Notre Dame, Environmental Defense Fund study measures psychological, economic resilience after hurricane, pandemic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RICE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: A STUDY BY RICE UNIVERSITY, THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND LED BY RASHIDA CALLENDER, A RESEARCH ASSOCIATE AT RICE, SHOWS THE ECONOMIC AND MENTAL HEALTH CONSEQUENCES ON VICTIMS OF HURRICANE HARVEY AND COVID-19 WERE CUMULATIVE. view more 

CREDIT: RICE UNIVERSITY

HOUSTON – (Sept. 13, 2022) – A study by Rice University, the University of Notre Dame and the Environmental Defense Fund shows the economic and mental health consequences on victims of Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19 were cumulative. The results appear in Environmental Research.

The result springs from separate surveys on the impact of Harvey and COVID-19, led by Katherine Ensor, the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice; Marie Lynn Miranda, director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative at Notre Dame and former Rice provost; and Elena Craft, senior director for climate and health at the Environmental Defense Fund. 

The study originated with 2018’s Texas Flood Registry (TFR), a first-of-its-kind registry to track the short and long-term health and housing impacts of a hurricane through online survey data. As COVID-19 came into play, the researchers realized the tools that support the TFR could be used to track the impact of the pandemic and assess whether multiple exposures magnify preexisting harms.

“We've already looked at how prior exposure to Hurricane Harvey and other flooding events affect economic and mental health outcomes,” said Rashida Callender, a research associate at Rice and lead author on the project. “We know prior exposure to natural disasters of short duration such as a flood can reduce resilience, but there's never been a study that looked at prior flooding exposure and how that affects outcomes during a longer-term, nonweather-related disaster such as a pandemic.”

The new study built upon technical infrastructure from the existing TFR to launch the national COVID-19 Registry in April 2020. Its purpose is to track experiences during the pandemic, including health, behavior and economic changes.

The analysis incorporates answers from approximately 3,000 participants returned questionnaires to both the TFR and COVID-19 registries.

“Something that stood out was a clear distinction between the impact of acute effects and secondary stressors,” Callender said.

The team concluded the following:

• COVID-19 outcomes were impacted more by Hurricane Harvey-related economic and mental health stressors than by acute home flooding and damage.
• People who lost income during Harvey were four times more likely to lose income during COVID-19.
• People who experienced Hurricane Harvey as a “severe impact event” were five times more likely to have severe anxiety during COVID-19 compared to those whose experience with Harvey was not a meaningful impact event.

But Callender pointed out the sample group who returned surveys is not representative of the general population. 

“In general, our study population has been a majority non-Hispanic white, female population, many of whom have a college degree or higher,” she said. “For us, it suggests that in the general population, the impacts could potentially be greater. We did find that non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic respondents were more than twice as likely to report having difficulty paying rent or bills during the pandemic, consistent with other studies documenting disproportionate impacts of COVID-19.”

The registries are hosted by the Kinder Institute Urban Data Platform (UDP). The UDP is a secure computing platform and data repository hosting 282 datasets about the greater Houston area. 

Ensor said the Kinder Institute’s support made the study possible. “The UDP is a tremendous resource for our community, and I am proud to have played a leading role in its creation,” she said.

With both climate change accelerating the frequency and intensity of natural disasters and COVID-19 becoming endemic, the question remains how to handle the next disaster and who will be more heavily affected.

Callender said tracking the long-term aftermath of exposure to prior disasters can underscore the importance of identifying higher-risk people and communities when developing response efforts and intervention programs. 

-30-

Read the abstract at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122013470

This news release can be found online at https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/covid-19-amplified-hardship-many-harvey-victims.

 

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Hurricane Harvey Registry can help far beyond Houston: https://news2.rice.edu/2018/10/09/hurricane-harvey-registry-can-help-far-beyond-houston%E2%80%A8-2/

Texas Flood Registry: https://floodregistry.rice.edu/tfr

Images for download:

 

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2022/09/0919_HARVEY-1-web.jpg

A study by Rice University, the University of Notre Dame and the Environmental Defense Fund  shows the economic and mental health consequences on victims of Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19 were cumulative. (Credit: 123rf.com)

 

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2022/09/0919_HARVEY-2-web-rashida-callender.jpg

CAPTION: Rashida Callender. (Credit: Rice University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

 

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JOURNAL

Environmental Research

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Economic and mental health impacts of multiple adverse events: Hurricane Harvey, other flooding events, and the COVID-19 pandemic

Some forms of elder abuse worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, study finds

The Keck School of Medicine of USC-led study, the first direct comparison of elder abuse data before and during the pandemic, found increased reports of physical and emotional abuse and co-occurring abuse

Peer-Reviewed Publication

KECK SCHOOL OF MEDICINE OF USC

 

IMAGE: DUKE HAN, PHD, DIRECTOR OF NEUROPSYCHOLOGY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF FAMILY MEDICINE, KECK SCHOOL OF MEDICINE OF USC view more 

CREDIT: USC PHOTO/RICARDO CARRASCO III

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, experts have raised the alarm about a heightened risk of elder abuse. Many older adults faced social isolation, experienced financial instability, or relied heavily on their caregivers — factors that have been linked to elder abuse in the past.

Despite the concern, data on the subject has been limited. Though some studies have compared reports of elder abuse before versus during the pandemic, they used data from two different sources, limiting researchers’ ability to draw conclusions.

“A lot of people have been asking how elder abuse might be changing during the pandemic, but there wasn’t objective data about those trends,” said Duke Han, PhD, director of neuropsychology in the Department of Family Medicine and a professor of family medicine, neurology, psychology and gerontology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Han and his colleagues conducted the first study comparing elder abuse rates before and during the pandemic from a single data source, the National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA). While they did not find a significant increase in overall reports of abuse, their findings do show cause for concern. Reports of physical and emotional abuse increased, as did reports of multiple abuses happening at the same time. The study was published in the journal BMC Geriatrics.

“Even though we didn’t see a statistical increase in reports of abuse, our data points to the idea that the abuse happening during the pandemic was more severe,” said Han, the study’s senior author.

Shifting patterns of abuse

The researchers analyzed calls, emails and social media messages to the NCEA resource line, which provides information and assistance related to elder abuse. They studied two separate one-year periods: before the pandemic (March 16, 2018 to March 15, 2019) and during its peak (March 16, 2020 to March 15, 2021).

First, contacts were separated into those that alleged abuse versus those that did not (for example, callers seeking general information about NCEA resources). About half of the contacts included allegations of abuse, but the percentage of contacts reporting abuse did not differ significantly between the two time periods.

Next, the researchers looked more closely at the type of abuse alleged, categorizing each report as financial, physical, sexual or emotional abuse, or neglect. Across both time periods, financial abuse—which can involve a family member or caretaker misusing an older person’s money or possessions—was most common. But during the pandemic, higher rates of emotional and physical abuse were reported. A higher percentage of contacts (27.1% during the pandemic versus 18.7% before) also reported more than one form of abuse happening at the same time.

The relationship between victims and alleged perpetrators was also studied, but researchers found no significant differences between the two time periods. Across the board, family members were the most common perpetrators.

While the study shows a shift in elder abuse patterns during the pandemic, it does not prove a causal link between the pandemic and the change in reports. The researchers also emphasize that NCEA’s resource line is not a crisis or reporting line for elder abuse, which may limit the types of calls it receives.

Reaching out to stop abuse

In general, understanding how patterns of elder abuse change during a pandemic can help improve future prevention and outreach efforts, said Gali H. Weissberger, PhD, a senior lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Department of Social Sciences at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and first author of the study. For example, increased outreach may be needed during a pandemic to ensure abuse is reported and resources are available to those who need them.

“Although the ratio of abuse to non-abuse calls didn’t differ between the two time periods, we did see a drop in total calls during the pandemic,” Weissberger said. “That might suggest that during COVID, people just reached out less.”

Through their collaboration with NCEA, the researchers are continuing to collect and categorize data from all calls and messages to the organization’s resource line. They plan to analyze that data for additional insights about elder abuse trends over time.

About this study

The study’s other authors are Aaron C. Lim, Laura Mosqueda and Annie L. Nguyen from the Department of Family Medicine, Keck School of Medicine of USC; Julie Schoen and Richard S. Esquivel from the National Center on Elder Abuse and the Department of Family Medicine, Keck School of Medicine of USC; Kathleen H. Wilber from the USC Leonard David School of Gerontology; and Jenna Axelrod from the NorthShore University HealthSystem.

This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging [RF1AG068166, R01AG060096, K01AG064986, T32 AG000037], the Administration for Community Living grant [90ABRC0001-02–00] and the Department of Family Medicine of the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

About Keck School of Medicine of USC

Founded in 1885, the Keck School of Medicine of USC is one of the nation’s leading medical institutions, known for innovative patient care, scientific discovery, education and community service. Medical and graduate students work closely with world-renowned faculty and receive hands-on training in one of the nation’s most diverse communities. They participate in cutting-edge research as they develop into tomorrow’s health leaders. The Keck School faculty are key participants in training of 1200 resident physicians across 70 specialty and subspecialty programs, thus playing a major role in the education of physicians practicing in Southern California.

 

 

 

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JOURNAL

BMC Geriatrics

DOI

10.1186/s12877-022-03385-w 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Elder abuse in the COVID-19 era based on calls to the National Center on Elder Abuse resource line

More stress, fewer coping resources for Latina mothers post-Trump

New findings from UC San Diego shine a light on the mental-health challenges faced by Latinx Americans in a volatile political climate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SAN DIEGO

The sociopolitical climate in the United States has taken its toll on the mental health of Latina mothers, according to new research from the University of California San Diego. Findings show increased depression, anxiety and perceived stress in a border city and reduced coping resources in both a border and interior US city.

“Latinx Americans have been historically disadvantaged on many fronts, including access to quality education, job security and healthcare, making them particularly vulnerable to stressors that can lead to poor mental health,” said Amy L. Non, a genetic anthropologist at UC San Diego. “Our findings indicate that in a more hostile political landscape their well-being is even more threatened.”

Non co-authored the study with Elizabeth S. Clausing, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska and a doctoral alumna of the UC San Diego Department of Anthropology, and Kimberly L. D’Anna Hernandez, a professor of psychology at Marquette University.

The study – an analysis of longitudinal surveys that the research team began before the Republican nomination of Donald Trump and concluded several years after his election as president – measured changes in sociocultural stressors, protective factors and mental health in two cohorts of Latina mothers, one in San Diego and the other in Nashville.  

Amid their findings: The effects of discrimination were associated with high anxiety in the Nashville group, and acculturative stress, a particular kind of stress experienced by people adapting to a new culture, was associated with consistently worse mental health in the San Diego group.

The researchers  examined stress and coping within families by taking into consideration stressor events, perceptions of these events on the parts of the study participants, available coping resources, and possible crises that can result from imbalances.

“The stressors we measured were influenced by the changing and increasingly hostile political climate toward Latinas following the nomination and election of Donald Trump,” said Non. “We measured such resources for coping as optimism, social support for mothers and protective cultural values. We measured the mothers’ perceptions of stress in relation to many factors, including socioeconomic status, acculturation, racial discrimination, and other factors. Taken all together, these increased stressors and reduced coping resources led to higher levels of mothers’ psychological distress, as measured with scales for anxiety, depression, and such symptoms resulting from stress as sickness, anger and frustration, fear, and feelings of aging too quickly.”

These alarming findings didn’t occur in a vacuum, the researchers believe. The increased stress experienced by Latina mothers, along with reductions in coping resources, were likely related to the rhetoric of Donald Trump as a candidate and as president.

“In Nashville, we noticed reductions in optimism and social support since Trump’s candidacy,” Non said. “We also asked some direct, open-ended questions about how the women felt seeing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats in the wake of the 2016 election, as well as any behavior changes they may have implemented in response to the election results. Many mothers qualitatively expressed increasing fears at what they saw as rising anti-immigrant sentiments. Some expressed concern about their safety when driving or taking their children outside.”

This paper builds on findings of the authors’ prior studies in the interior city dataset, showing immigrant-related stress effects across generations, in the epigenomes of children of immigrant Latina mothers, which may have implications for cardiometabolic health. The authors’ prior work also found acculturative stress and discrimination related to maternal depression and anxiety in the border city. Future research will focus on COVID-related stress and mental health in border city Latina mothers.

The paper, “Changes in Sociocultural Stressors, Protective Factors, and Mental Health for US Latina Mothers in a Shifting Political Climate,” is published in PLOS ONE.

It was funded in part by a young investigator award from the Foundation for Child Development (Non), the Hellman Award from UC San Diego (Non), Chancellor’s Research in Excellence Scholars (Clausing) and NIH grants 1R15 MH112091-01 and 1R15MH099498-01A1 (D'Anna-Hernandez).

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0273548 

ARTICLE TITLE

Changes in Sociocultural Stressors, Protective Factors, and Mental Health for US Latina Mothers in a Shifting Political Climate

2022 Leading Edge Consortium focuses on rethinking the employee experience

Meeting Announcement

SOCIETY FOR INDUSTRIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

The 2022 SIOP Leading Edge Consortium (LEC) will focus on the key workforce issues and challenges organizations have been facing, what they are doing differently to address and adapt to these, and what they have learned about developing agility and resilience along the way.

The LEC returns to Atlanta, and to an in-person format, Oct. 6-8, 2022. More than 30 top speakers with diverse backgrounds in I-O practice, research, and higher education will share:

• data on what employees want from their work experiences today
• how organizations are improving employee well-being
• information about inclusive models for development, advancement, and pay
• how we must equip organizations to manage through disruption.  

This thought-provoking and networking building event has been a hallmark of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology since 2005, providing opportunities to network, learn, and exchange information about the most pressing issues and current topics impacting I-O practice today.

The consortium kicks off with three workshops on Thursday, October 6. Each of these half-day workshops will be held once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Attendees may take one or two, and can register for CE credit. (Registration for the consortium is required for workshop attendance.)

Preconsortium workshops include:

• Workplace Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Belonging: New Perspectives, Insights, and Actions
• Mental Health in the Workplace: The Critical Role of Managers
• How Leaders Create Organizational Agility and Resilience: It’s Not What You Think

The consortium begins on Friday, October 7, at 8 a.m. ET and will include an entire day of cutting-edge programming. A reception and networking dinners will follow. Saturday will feature a half day of programming from 8 am to noon, providing attendees with a robust learning opportunity while allowing for more options for travel or enjoying Atlanta.

For more information, visit the LEC webpage.

New method for comparing neural networks exposes how artificial intelligence works

Adversarial training makes it harder to fool the networks

Reports and Proceedings

DOE/LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS AT LOS ALAMOS ARE LOOKING AT NEW WAYS TO COMPARE NEURAL NETWORKS. THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED WITH AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE CALLED STABLE DIFFUSION, USING THE PROMPT “PEEKING INTO THE BLACK BOX OF NEURAL NETWORKS.” view more 

CREDIT: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a novel approach for comparing neural networks that looks within the “black box” of artificial intelligence to help researchers understand neural network behavior. Neural networks recognize patterns in datasets; they are used everywhere in society, in applications such as virtual assistants, facial recognition systems and self-driving cars.

“The artificial intelligence research community doesn’t necessarily have a complete understanding of what neural networks are doing; they give us good results, but we don’t know how or why,” said Haydn Jones, a researcher in the Advanced Research in Cyber Systems group at Los Alamos. “Our new method does a better job of comparing neural networks, which is a crucial step toward better understanding the mathematics behind AI.”

Jones is the lead author of the paper “If You’ve Trained One You’ve Trained Them All: Inter-Architecture Similarity Increases With Robustness,” which was presented recently at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. In addition to studying network similarity, the paper is a crucial step toward characterizing the behavior of robust neural networks.

Neural networks are high performance, but fragile. For example, self-driving cars use neural networks to detect signs. When conditions are ideal, they do this quite well. However, the smallest aberration — such as a sticker on a stop sign — can cause the neural network to misidentify the sign and never stop.

To improve neural networks, researchers are looking at ways to improve network robustness. One state-of-the-art approach involves “attacking” networks during their training process. Researchers intentionally introduce aberrations and train the AI to ignore them. This process is called adversarial training and essentially makes it harder to fool the networks.

Jones, Los Alamos collaborators Jacob Springer and Garrett Kenyon, and Jones’ mentor Juston Moore, applied their new metric of network similarity to adversarially trained neural networks, and found, surprisingly, that adversarial training causes neural networks in the computer vision domain to converge to very similar data representations, regardless of network architecture, as the magnitude of the attack increases.

“We found that when we train neural networks to be robust against adversarial attacks, they begin to do the same things,” Jones said.

There has been extensive effort in industry and in the academic community searching for the “right architecture” for neural networks, but the Los Alamos team’s findings indicate that the introduction of adversarial training narrows this search space substantially. As a result, the AI research community may not need to spend as much time exploring new architectures, knowing that adversarial training causes diverse architectures to converge to similar solutions.

“By finding that robust neural networks are similar to each other, we’re making it easier to understand how robust AI might really work. We might even be uncovering hints as to how perception occurs in humans and other animals,” Jones said.

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

If You’ve Trained One You’ve Trained Them All: Inter-Architecture Similarity IncreasesWith Robustness

Reaching national electric vehicle goal unlikely by 2030 without lower prices, better policy

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: JOHN GRAHAM view more 

CREDIT: INDIANA UNIVERSITY

The United States government has set an ambitious national goal of reaching 50 percent penetration of plug-in electric vehicles by 2030, but a new study from researchers at Indiana University’s Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs shows that the U.S. is unlikely to meet this goal unless electric vehicles become more affordable for consumers.

The study, “Affordable Electric Vehicles: Their Role in Meeting the U.S. Contribution to the Paris Climate Goals,” was recently published in the journal Frontiers. The research was conducted by Professor John D. Graham and Eva Brungard, who is a research assistant at IU and has held internships at both an electric vehicle manufacturer and trade association.

“We need to focus policy makers, automakers, and electric utilities on how to stimulate consumer demand for—and automaker offerings of—affordable electric vehicles,” said Graham, who also authored the 2021 book The Global Rise of the Modern Plug-In Electric Vehicle: Public Policy, Innovation, and Strategy (Elgar Publishing).

In 2021, President Joe Biden pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions economy-wide by 2050, a commitment that is now a formal U.S. submission under the 2015 Paris Accords of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As it stands, transportation is the largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and 58 percent of transportation emissions come from light-duty passenger vehicles, such as cars and light trucks.

Reaching Biden’s goal to cut emissions requires a transition from internal combustion engines to zero emission vehicles, such as plug-in electric vehicles, but a number of factors are slowing that transition, among them the price of PEVs. PEVs tend to cost $10,000-$20,000 more than their internal combustion engine counterparts, a price point that is slowing customer acceptance. Surging prices of raw materials used in making batteries and electric motors also have hindered a reduction in the price gap.

Graham and Brungard found that the midpoint of prices of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2021—both PEVs and ICE vehicles—to be roughly $45,000. Of the 108 total PEV models offered to U.S. consumers in 2022, only 17 featured a base price below $46,000. Few of those affordable models are appealing to consumers. The good news is that the number of affordable PEVs on the market are increasing, but the dominate U.S. producer of electric vehicles, Tesla, is not prioritizing affordable models.

Without more rapid penetration of plug-in vehicles into the affordable end of the new vehicle market, Biden’s goals could be impossible. However, the commercialization of plug-in models in Europe provide hope for reaching the benchmarks, but it will require sufficiently favorable public policies to spur greater consumer acceptance.

“Instead of relying on unrealistic mandates from California and other states, the federal government needs a comprehensive electric-vehicle policy—performance standards and incentives—similar to what has been adopted in the European Union,” Graham said.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Environmental Science

DOI

10.3389/fenvs.2022.962942 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Affordable Electric Vehicles: Their Role in Meeting the U.S. Contribution to the Paris Climate Goals

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Sep-2022