It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, March 22, 2026
Study: Emotional support lowers incarceration risk for youth in foster care
MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request.
Why this matters:
Youth in foster care often experience family instability, which can disrupt their social relationships, support systems and make the transition to adulthood more challenging. This is especially important to recognize in March during National Criminal Justice Awareness Month.
MSU research found that strong social support networks—the holistic web of family and community members who provide support—are associated with a lower likelihood of incarceration among older adolescents transitioning out of foster care. Emotional support in particular plays a critical role in helping youth navigate this transition.
The findings underscore the importance of efforts by child welfare professionals to strengthen relationships and provide consistent emotional support to youth in foster care, helping them avoid incarceration and achieve more stable and positive outcomes in adulthood.
EAST LANSING, Mich. – Youth in foster care often experience family instability, which can disrupt the continuity of their relationships and social connections. Therefore, the strength and stability of their social support networks can play a critical role in shaping their lives.
Social support networks refer to a holistic web of family members, friends, neighbors and community members who provide emotional, practical, and informational support during times of need.
In her recent study, published in the journal Social Work Research, Keunhye Park, assistant professor at Michigan State University’s School of Social Work, examined the relationship between different dimensions of social support networks, such as type and size, and incarceration among youth with foster care experience.
Specifically, for those transitioning into adulthood, Park found that strong social support networks not only reduced the likelihood of incarceration but also positively facilitated adjusting to adulthood.
“Given the developmental tasks of early adulthood (e.g., pursuing postsecondary education, obtaining employment, securing housing), legal system involvement during the transition to adulthood can present additional challenges and may have lasting implications across the life course,” Park said.
Previous research has shown that weak or disrupted connections with supportive individuals, conventional systems, or widely accepted social values are associated with a higher likelihood of justice system involvement among youth with foster care experience, reinforcing Park’s study, which highlights the importance of stable and supportive support networks.
Among the different types of social support, emotional support stood out as particularly important. Youth who reported having adequate emotional support were less likely to experience incarceration, according to the research.
“Adequate emotional support was significantly associated with decreased odds of incarceration,” said Park. “This research suggests that some forms of social support may be more effective than others in influencing legal system outcomes.”
These findings highlight the importance of active outreach and engagement efforts by child welfare professionals to strengthen supportive relationships that provide comfort, reassurance and encouragement to youth navigating emotional distress.
More specifically, children should be placed in foster care options that best reflect their social networks, with minimal disruptions.
“There are key implications for the development of targeted interventions and support systems within the field of child welfare and social work,” Park said.
Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for more than 170 years. Among the world’s top 100 universities and a leading U.S. public research institution, MSU pushes the limits of discovery and innovation to advance the state of Michigan and the nation, and make a better, safer, healthier world for all. The university provides life-changing educational opportunities through an inclusive academic community with more than 400 programs of study and is the largest producer of talent for Michigan, educating more undergraduates than any other university in the state.
Marc Jacob, assistant professor of democracy and global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. A political scientist, Jacob studies political behavior, public opinion and institutional change.
Amid widespread concern that American political discourse has become less substantive and less civil, often devolving into personal insults, the question of why political elites engage in divisive rhetoric has continued to puzzle the public.
A new study co-authored by University of Notre Dame political scientist Marc Jacob offers a provocative explanation: The answer, quite simply, is media attention.
“The core finding is clear,” Jacob said. “Personal attacks are strongly associated with greater media coverage but show no correlation with fundraising, vote margins, legislative success or personal wealth.”
Developed within the Polarization Research Lab, a research initiative studying political division in the U.S. and around the world, the study was published by PNAS Nexus, a publication of the National Academy of Sciences. Its authors introduce the concept of the “conflict entrepreneur” — a legislator who disproportionately levels personal attacks on the integrity, morality or intellect of their peers.
“Usually when we think about conflict in politics, it’s about political parties and candidates disagreeing on issues to discuss them and arrive at a compromise,” said Jacob, assistant professor of democracy and global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs. “But we are seeing an increasing trend that is not about policy anymore. Conflict takes the form of personal attacks, a new communication style that is shaping democratic politics.”
To map the concept of a conflict entrepreneur, the researchers conducted a large-scale descriptive analysis of the 118th U.S. Congress, which convened from January 3, 2023, to January 3, 2025. They linked a dataset of 2.2 million public statements — ranging from floor speeches and press releases to newsletters and social media posts — to records of media coverage, campaign finance and electoral outcomes. Using a large language model, the team systematically distinguished between legitimate “critical debate” on policy and personal attacks on character.
The researchers found an asymmetric pattern: While personal attacks occur in both parties, they are delivered 2.7 times more frequently by Republicans than by Democrats. Personal attacks also occur 1.3 times more frequently in the House of Representatives than in the Senate.
The most striking finding, however, is the disconnect between an antagonistic rhetorical style and traditional political success, Jacob said.
A legislator who devotes just 5 percent of their communication to personal attacks receives a level of cable news coverage comparable to a colleague dedicating 45 percent of their time to substantive policy debate. For context, the paper notes that the 25 most combative members of Congress receive more cable news attention than the 75 least combative members combined. On social media, posts containing personal insults are shared far more frequently than those focusing on critical policy debate, an average of 606 reposts versus 244.
This high visibility in the media, however, appears to exact a legislative price: The more frequently a member of Congress uses personal attacks, the less likely they are to engage in policy discussion. In addition, conflict entrepreneurs are less likely to co-sponsor legislation and receive fewer assignments to prestigious standing committees.
“These findings suggest that politicians are using the attacks as a strategy to become part of the national political debate without relying on conventional means of legislative work and policymaking,” Jacob said.
The study also challenges the assumption that incivility is a reflection of a legislator’s polarized district: The authors found no correlation between a legislator’s use of personal insults and the baseline partisan animosity in their constituency. In fact, many of the most abrasive legislators come from districts with comparatively moderate electorates. This finding suggests that for a small cohort of elites, a politician’s primary career goal is not the traditional trifecta of reelection, policy influence or institutional power, but media celebrity. As a retired member of Congress noted in a quote used in the paper, “The most recent additions to Congress don’t care about policy; they care about getting attention.”
This dynamic, where visibility is decoupled from political accountability, poses a significant threat to democratic norms, according to the researchers. They conclude that the primary incentive structure is maintained by a media attention economy that prioritizes conflict.
“Most of the communications made by legislators are focused on policy,” Jacob said. “But it is fair to say there is an overemphasis by the media, which unduly covers legislators who attack others. This attention incentivizes people to engage in incivility if the only way to break through is with insults.”
The researchers’ conclusion is both a warning and a call to action: If left unchecked, the corrosive nature of conflict entrepreneurs may continue to erode democratic discourse.
“Political party leadership and media gatekeepers have a central role to play in shifting the incentive structure,” Jacob said. “It’s time to reward those who advance policy and to stop promoting personal attacks as political entertainment, and the media should reflect on what is truly newsworthy. The health and stability of American democracy depend on it.”
The study was co-authored by Yphtach Lelkes of the University of Pennsylvania and Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth College.
Contact: Tracy DeStazio, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.ed
Partisanship, whether you support a particular person, group, or cause, has long been known as a key factor in misinformed beliefs—from COVID-19 to Brexit. But how does partisanship drive bias and misinformation? Is it because people of different parties consume different media? Or are we motivated to be biased?
“This is an age-old debate in social psychology … whether something is due to basic cognitive processes or motivational processes,” said Tyler Hubeny, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. In a new study published in Psychological Science, Hubeny and his colleagues put these two competing theories to the test.
The new study sought to test a common argument that partisan bias arises from differential knowledge. In this theory, researchers frame partisan bias as a byproduct of the information ecosystem, where people of different party allegiances are exposed to different news sources, leading to differing knowledge bases and conclusions. But the flip side—and a more daunting cause of misinformation—is that partisan bias exists because people’s desires influence how they determine whether information is true or false.
“The aim was to try and test that and rule it out and say, well, if we completely take away the differences in prior beliefs, do we still see evidence of partisan bias? And if we do, then it probably is due to that motivational explanation,” Hubeny said.
The new study focused on the United States, where Hubeny and his colleagues recruited over 600 American citizens through an online portal. Instead of using a person’s existing political partisanship, such as Democrat or Republican, the researchers randomly split the participants into Team Spain, Team Greece, or No Team.
“We basically gave them this phony personality test, kind of like the ones you would see on Buzzfeed,” Hubeny explained. The test asked a series of personality questions, which determined the group the participant belonged in. By randomly assigning participants to teams, the researchers were able to eliminate any differences in knowledge that might have existed.
After a participant was given their assigned group, researchers then asked them to judge whether a series of statements were true or false. Some of the statements were favorable to Spain (e.g., “Spain has produced more Nobel Prize winners than Greece”), while others were favorable to Greece. The researchers then analyzed the responses using a method called signal detection theory, which allowed them to measure the participants’ truth sensitivity (how well a participant can distinguish true and false information) and acceptance thresholds (how often they would reject information in general).
The researchers found that even with the random teams, there was a partisan effect in how people determined the truthfulness of the information. This effect was present not because of any differences in knowledge, but because their arbitrary party identity shifted their acceptance thresholds.
“People were more accepting of the information that was congenial toward their randomly assigned team, and less accepting when that information was uncongenial toward their randomly assigned team,” Hubeny said. Therefore, the study supports the theory that partisan bias can exist because of motivational processes, outside of differential knowledge.
These findings have implications for misinformation interventions. “Oftentimes, when we’re talking about misinformation and partisan bias or polarization, we think we all just need to get on the same page information-wise,” Hubeny said. However, the findings from this study show that the penchant to believe false information, or reject the truth, has more complex cognitive origins. It’s not just about “having the facts,” they wrote.
Hubeny noted there aren’t many effective interventions that target the motivated-reasoning side of partisan bias. To seek new approaches, future research should look at why people are motivated to seek out false information related to their partisanship and dig into the specific cognitive mechanisms behind these biases.
“If we can try and pin down exactly what’s going on in motivated reasoning, then hopefully we can develop tools that will be better able to address this source of partisan bias,” Hubeny said.
Writing in BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, an international team of conservation scientists and biodiversity researchers argue that the global fragrance industry is uniquely positioned to become a genuine partner in stemming the collapse of plant diversity—but only if it moves beyond narrow supply-chain commitments and embeds conservation finance into its core business practices. The article was authored by researchers affiliated with The Red List Project (USA), the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK), Brazilian universities including the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, and the independent Brazilian asset management firm Fama re.capital, reflecting a transnational collaboration that bridges conservation science and sustainable finance.
The stakes at play, both for industry and the world's flora, are extremely high, say the authors. An estimated 45% of the world's flowering plants (roughly 150,000 species) are at risk of extinction, and the fragrance market, projected to grow from $60.73 billion in 2025 to $101.47 billion by 2034, draws on approximately 2000 plant species for its essential oil supply alone. The authors argue that this dependence on botanical diversity creates both an obligation and an opportunity for the fragrance industry to act. Programs like The Red List Project, they say, provide a working, scalable example of how industry and conservation needs can be met harmoniously for the benefit of industry, nature, and people.
The Red List Project is described as a "conservation-first" model that pairs fragrance manufacturers with local conservation organizations, with the aim of producing marketable products while also supporting local environmental stewards. In these collaborations, industry participants draw creative inspiration from threatened species to create novel fragrance combinations, rather than harvesting the threatened species directly for their aromatic compounds. Proceeds of the fragrances' sales are then directed to the in-country conservation partners. The model "integrates biodiversity objectives directly into fragranced product development, using scent inspiration rather than wild harvesting," the authors write. In addition, the project aims to generate consumer awareness of the specific species and ecosystems being protected and used as product inspiration. Individual projects to date span Brazil's Atlantic Forest, the Ecuadorian Chocó cloud forests, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean Basin, and Micronesia.
The authors are careful to acknowledge that using commerce to fund conservation is an approach that is not without its critics. Seminal scholarship has cautioned against what earlier researchers termed "selling nature to save nature." However, the authors contend that "blanket criticisms of monetization risks may well be stifling responsible efforts to harness private capital" in ways that could advance conservation goals, which have thus far proved difficult to achieve.
Just as important, the authors also see opportunities to foster environmental justice for the Indigenous and local communities who live in biodiverse areas. They propose that benefit sharing in the fragrance sector should encompass "both tangible and intangible returns for Indigenous and local communities" across financial, technological, educational, and cultural dimensions—and they are hopeful that The Red List Project and similar efforts may make this possible.
