Reiko Graham - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Emotional expression and gaze direction are important signals of the internal states and intentions of others and are critical to the human social experience. {These core abilities interact with other nonverbal forms of communication to form the basis of complex social cognitive processes such as theory of mind (Baron- Cohen, 1995).} It is not surprising that the disruption of these processes is associated with socio-affective disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. Neurophysiological evidence in healthy subjects suggests that expression and gaze are processed, at least in part, by the same brain areas. Behavioral evidence corroborates this, and suggests that the timing of these processes is crucial in whether or not they interact. Timing, in turn, is affected by how easily these dimensions can be discriminated. {Event-related potentials (ERPs) can provide important confirmation of these hypotheses regarding gaze and expression processing interactions, providing a more thorough understanding of the biological basis of social intelligence.} An understanding of gaze and emotion processing in healthy adults provides a basis for delineating how these processes might be disrupted by development, disease or injury. Using ERPs, expression and gaze perception in healthy adults will be examined with the Garner interference paradigm. This paradigm provides an index of processing interdependence by determining the extent to which perceivers can selectively attend to one stimulus dimension (e.g. emotion) while ignoring the other (e.g. gaze). In Experiment 1, gaze and expression interactions will be examined with unambiguous fearful and angry expressions and direct and averted gaze. {Behavioral evidence has demonstrated that when expressions are easily discriminated, subjects are able to perform expression judgments without interference from gaze, but unable to make gaze judgments without interference from expression.} Expression was judged more quickly, suggesting that this asymmetric interference arose because expression was processed before gaze could interfere. {ERPs could provide corroborating evidence regarding the timing of these processes.} In Experiment 2, the difficulty of emotion discrimination will be increased by using more subtle facial expressions. Graham & LaBar have shown that when expression was more difficult to discriminate, gaze interfered with emotion judgments and vice versa. This suggests that expression and gaze interactions are modulated by discriminability: whereas expression generally interferes with gaze judgments, gaze modulates expression processing only when emotion discrimination is difficult.{ ERPs are uniquely poised to examine such a speed-of-processing account of these interactions, providing important confirmation about the timing of these interactions in the healthy adult brain.} A great deal of information about others' thoughts and feelings can be determined from emotional expressions and direction of gaze. This research is designed to examine the electrical activity of the brain when individuals view emotional and gazing faces. The goal of this project is to provide a better understanding of the biological basis of social intelligence, a skill that critical to healthy human function. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): College binge drinking is a significant problem in our society. Recent research suggests that Latinas may be at a particularly high risk for the development of problem drinking as they transition from the traditional home environment to the college setting where more liberal drinking norms prevail. Under these circumstances, alcohol-related perceptions and attentional-biases may be important determinants in students'decisions to engage in risky drinking behaviors. The proposed study is a longitudinal examination of the relationship between psychosocial and neurophysiological factors associated with college students'attention to and consumption of alcohol-related beverages during the freshman year of college. This proposal is unique in that it focuses on the understudied population of first-generation, Mexican-American college women, while at the same time using event-related potentials (ERPs) to track changes in neurophysiological indices of attentional bias in real time (e.g., as participants view alcohol-related images). Resulting data will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying changes in alcohol-related attention and perception over the course of female students'first year in the college environment. These findings could ultimately be applied to the development of attentional training programs for the treatment and prevention of excessive alcohol consumption on college campuses. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The transition from the home environment to college is a time of adjustment that is often marked by an increase in alcohol use and recent research suggests that young women, particularly Latinas, may be at a particularly high risk for the development of problem drinking during this transition. The purpose of this study is to examine how alcohol use, attitudes toward alcohol and the ability for alcohol images to capture attention change over the first year of college in young women, and whether these changes differ across cultures. Results of this study will provide a better understanding of the reasons why people engage in activities that may harm their health.

This project will create a scholarship program called SPARK to offer eighteen scholarships to an undergraduate cohort comprised of first year, low income, academically talented engineering, and computer science majors at Texas State University - San Marcos. Scholarship support will continue for 3 years. Targeted recruiting and clearly defined selection criteria will help to create a strong cohort. Participants will live in a shared community integrating learning, mentoring, and academic enrichment. They will also participate in two highly engaged experiential learning summer sessions created specifically for the scholarship program. SPARK will help students refine skills critical to success in a 21st century workforce: adaptability, problem solving, innovation, empowerment, and leadership through the shared residential learning community, co-enrollment in STEM-related courses, a dedicated first year university transition course, and special summer sessions. Regular mentoring sessions will focus on career exploration, personal development, and research opportunities. The project will increase the number of talented female students attaining undergraduate engineering and computer science (ECS) degrees and contribute to the effort to achieve a more diverse STEM workforce.

Project Summary College binge drinking is a significant public health problem that has been associated with injury, assault, unsafe sex, academic problems, alcohol dependence, drunk driving, and even death. In order to prevent and treat college binge drinking, it is important to better understand factors that may lead students to consume alcohol in this fashion. Converging lines of evidence suggest that participants? behavioral and physiological reactions to alcohol cues (i.e., cue-reactivity) contribute to alcohol consumption and loss of inhibitory control over a drinking episode. Alcohol cues in the environment may lead college students to crave and seek alcohol, while impaired inhibitory control may allow the drinking episode to escalate into a binge. These factors have largely been measured under controlled laboratory conditions, but new innovations such as continuous transdermal alcohol biosensors and ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) provide a unique opportunity to examine correlations between life and lab. The proposed study is designed to address these issues through a single laboratory assessment of cue-reactivity and inhibitory control via event-related potentials, followed by a 12-day field phase with alcohol biosensor monitoring plus EMAs. This design will allow us not only to capture the events leading up to a natural binge drinking episode, but also to model the underlying causal processes of binge drinking by combining laboratory and field measurements. Results of this study could provide new targets for real-time interventions for college binge drinking and could ultimately be applied to the development of cognitive bias modification programs for the treatment and prevention of excessive alcohol consumption on college campuses. Undergraduate student researchers at Texas State University will be involved in all aspects of the proposed project, providing them with firsthand experience in cutting-edge addiction research and encouraging continued education and employment in health-related fields.