Gary Evans - US grants

This award will support the travel costs for 9 invited American scientists to attend a joint seminar on environmental cognition and assessment with scientists from Italy, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The seminar, organized by Dr. Gary W. Evans, University of California, Irvine, and Dr. Tommy Garling, University of Umea, Sweden, will be held in Umea from June 29 to July 2, 1988. The purpose of the seminar is to advance understanding of how humans comprehend and evaluate their physical environments. Three major topic areas of the seminar will be: (1) how aspects of the physical environment affect and interact with impressions, beliefs, and decisions about the environment, (2) how various models of psychological processes fit perception and cognition of environments, and (3) how people change their perceptions and cognitions of the environment in response to experience and aging. The seminar will also examine how people's goals and objectives for an environment affect their judgments about it. The seminar will provide a useful forum for interchanging ideas and will most likely lead to additional collaborative research between the American and foreign scientists. The participants are outstanding researchers who were chosen because they represent diverse areas in environmental psychology that use different models and approaches. Besides resolving scientific issues, the seminar will lead to knowledge with relevance to policy-making, planning, and design of human environments. The organizers plan to publish a book based on the seminar papers.

The research is concerned with the effects of residential density, its effects on psychological health (broadly defined), and the ways in which social support can mediate this relationship. The PI will investigate (via longitudinal survey techniques) the psychological health, social support system, and social withdrawal of people in residences of varying crowdedness. The survey will be repeated (with the same sample of respondents) at 3 and 6 months. After the first interview, respondents in the extreme quartiles (or population density) will be asked to participate in laboratory research (at 6 and 16 weeks post initial interview). The experiments creatively investigate these people's chronic physiological stress level, the extent to which they affiliate with others in similar straits, and their ability to seek and receive social support. This proposal attacks the effects of density at both the social psychological and the psychophysiological levels. It promises to tell us much about the effects of social support on people's reaction to stressful environments. Its contributions to both theory and application should be enormous.

This award will support collaborative research between Dr. Gary Evans, University of California, Irvine and Professor Gunn Johansson, Department of Psychology, University of Stockholm, Sweden. The objective of the project is to determine characteristics of the work environment that affect occupational stress and the etiology of cardiovascular disease. The specific research proposed will evaluate an experiment in environmental and job re-design being conducted by the Stockholm Public Transit District. The intervention aims to reduce traffic congestion for bus drivers and improve passenger service. A before/after quasi-experimental design with a non-equivalent control group will evaluate the experimental intervention. Multi-methodological assessments of occupational stress will include psychophysiological indices, self-reports and trained observations of drivers while on the job. Detailed assessments of the physical and psychosocial bus driving environment will be carried out. This collaboration brings together a Swedish work psychologist experienced in psychophysiological measurements of the impacts of psychosocial work characteristics, with the US investigator, who is an environmental psychologist with expertise in stress research and quantitative methods.

The proposed study is a prospective, longitudinal, analysis of the psychophysiological effects of chronic exposure to environmental stress. The proposed research takes advantage of a unique, naturally occurring experiment caused by the relocation of a major international airport. At the present airport site we will monitor people currently exposed to high levels of noise and then track these same individuals as their ambient environment becomes normal following the shutdown of the airport. At the new airport site, the opposite situation will occur: Individuals currently living in normal, quiet ambient conditions will become exposed to loud aircraft noise. At both sites, control groups will be formed who are not exposed to aircraft noise. The present proposal will piggyback onto a German sponsored grant. NIH funds are requested to cover costs of cardiovascular and psycho-physiological data analysis. Measures will include biochemical assays of chronic neuroendocrine markers of stress, resting blood pressure, and reactivity of blood pressure during cognitive tasks. Perceptions of community noise levels will also be assessed as possible mediators of the stressful effects of chronic exposure to ambient, environmental noise.

DESCRIPTION: The long-term objective of this proposal is to understand the role of exposure to multiple stressors in socioemotional developmental development among children living poverty. Psychological health, psychophysiological stress, and motivational outcomes will be assesses in a follow-up study of early adolescents. Parent-child relationships and stressor coping strategies are examined as personal variables that may help account for the expected negative multiple stressor - socioemotional health outcomes.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One fifth of America's children grow up in poverty. While there is good evidence that this is harmful to health, achievement, and socio-emotional adjustment, very little is known about the brain basis that mediates the detrimental effects of poverty. We address two related primary questions with this research project: (1) How does childhood poverty influence adult brain structure and function? (2). What underlying mechanisms might account for childhood poverty - brain relationships? We hypothesize chronic physiological stress dysregulation as well as harsh, unresponsive parenting during childhood will account for some of the expected linkages between childhood poverty - adult brain structure and function - particularly in the hippocampus, amygdala, and the anterior cingulate/medial prefrontal cortex. This work will piggyback onto a 14 year, ongoing longitudinal research program of low and middle-income individuals focused on childhood poverty, physiological stress, and socio-emotional development conducted by Evans, a developmental psychologist at Cornell. Half of this sample (now age 22) grew up below the poverty line and half middle income. The sample is well characterized over their life course in terms of SES and other demographic variables, as well as both physical and psychosocial risk exposures. Primary outcome variables for this longitudinal cohort include multiple methodological indicators of physiological stress (neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and metabolic) along with parental, self, and teacher ratings of socioemotional development (internalization, externalization, self regulation. In depth data on parenting are also included. The neuroimaging work will be conducted in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan by Liberzon, with expertise in the neuroimaging of stress in health and mental illness, and by Swain a child psychiatrist studying the brain basis of parenting. Brain scanning will be divided into 3 sessions: the first will acquire high resolution images for volumetric and cortical thickness analyses. In addition, a selective emotional attention task as well as an emotion appraisal/re- appraisal task will probe the functionality of amygdala-prefrontal circuits. With scan two, parenting stimuli consisting of baby cries and pictures will be used to activate circuits believed to relate to parenting behavior and social interactions. Furthermore, working memory, delayed discounting and behavioral inhibition tasks will test cortical inhibition, decision-making, in cortico-cortical and cortico-hippocampal circuitry. Finally, immediately prior to the third fMRI scan, a Trier Social Stress Test that reliably generates elevated cortisol levels in laboratory environment will be performed. The subsequent scans will directly assess brain function following acute stress induction, and allow comparison with the baseline brain function in these same subjects, including a repetition of the selective emotional attention task, the parenting task and the emotional face assessment task to re-examine amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex performance. These experiments utilize a uniquely well-characterized longitudinal sample of low- and middle-income individuals in combination with a comprehensive set of conceptually derived, innovative but also validated neuroimaging paradigms. The aim of this project is to examine the potential impacts of childhood poverty on the brain. We will examine areas of the brain well studied in relation to chronic stress and parent-child interactions.

The objective of this program is to demonstrate a low-insertion-loss integrated optical waveguide isolator. The isolator uses a lossy and high refractive index layer that is a ferromagnetic matrix in an indium gallium arsenide phosphide layer. Key tasks include: develop software capable of analyzing waveguides with ferromagnetic layers in the presence of static magnetic fields; design and fabricate integrated waveguide isolators; and design and fabricate a semiconductor laser integrated with an isolator.

The intellectual merit is the realization of a practical optical isolator technology for photonic integrated circuits, which does not currently exist. The proposed isolator is transformative, removing the barriers to large-scale integration in photonic circuits and allowing integrated photonic component counts to equal that seen in microelectronics. This project will also result in the first software capable of handling ferromagnetic layers in complex, multilayer photonic waveguides.

The broader impacts are the nature of the researchers, the inclusion of young researchers and the free distribution of software. The photonics research group at SMU has always been diverse with more than 50% female graduate students. A visiting female professor from Brazil will be part of this project. Undergraduate students and high school students will be involved in this project, helping recruitment of U.S. students for graduate study. The ferromagnetic waveguide software developed on this project, like all the photonic software developed by the SMU Photonics group, will be made available to the photonics community.