Glenn Close's IU visit includes a discussion on stigma and mental illness with PBS professor Olaf Sporn's Themester class on "The Connected Brain"

On November 5, Glenn Close stopped in on PBS professor Olaf Sporn's P457 seminar, "The Connected Brain," as part of her trip to the campus to raise awareness of mental illness and combat the stigma that surrounds it. Accompanied by IU sociologist Bernice Pescosolido, who studies stigma and mental health, the class visit followed her large public lecture at the Whittenberger Auditorium. Sporns’ course is one of the 2013 Themester course offerings related to “Networks in a Complex World” and the discussion started with a question of how social networks might or might not help raise awareness and combat stigma.

Undergraduate Senior Elliot Layden asked a question on whether knowledge of the physical or organic causes of mental illness might help to reverse its stigma. Close responded with an anecdote that suggested it might not.

On a visit to a graduate neuroscience lab at a large, prestigious university, she spent some time with the graduate students in the lab. One woman in particular had stood out as a really articulate, star student among them. When Close got up to go to the bathroom, the woman followed her out and came up to her weeping. She told Close that she suffered from serious depression and could never divulge this to others in the lab or she would lose their respect and her standing in the lab.

Sporns further explored the issue, pointing out the way such “organic or physical causes” themselves have complex relationships to the world in which they exist. Social experience, including the experience of being stigmatized, can affect and alter brain chemistry and function. He called attention to the work being done on embodiment that reveals the complex way in which the physical structures and functions of the brain respond to and are shaped by social and environmental phenomena.

Pescosolido added to this with the notion that for this reason, it was necessary for many fields to come together to tackle the topic: neuroscientists and psychologists, anthropologist and sociologists, to name a few. No single view can capture the complexity of mental illness and stigma.

“We are now trying to work together,” she explained, “so we can see how the brain, how social relationships, how different social contexts all work together in terms of changing the brain, changing people’s lives, because we now know it’s very complex. We now know all of those things are working together in concert.”

Mary Murphy an APS "Rising Star" Award Winner

Congratulations to Mary Murphy!

Mary has just been named a 2013 Rising Star by the American Psychological Society. Look for her profile in the May/June issue of the APS Observer. As noted by APS, the award places Mary "among an impressive cohort of individuals who in the early stages of their career are already making significant contributions in psychological science."

Mary joins previous recipients of this prestigious award from our department, Brian D'Onofrio in 2012 and BJ Rydell in 2011.

One strand of her research seeks to broaden our understanding of interracial interactions and offer strategies to improve them. In work she began this January she examines the challenges faced in one-on-one interracial interactions between White, Black, and Latino individuals. The study examines how two factors--the racial diversity of an interaction partner’s friendship network and the goals they adopt for the interaction--influence both partners' experiences.

Her hope is to "illuminate factors and mechanisms underlying positive interracial interaction so that we can create a diverse society that works together."
 

A second strand of her research focuses on structural and contextual barriers for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  Here she is developing the "cues hypothesis" that suggests that subtle situational cues in the environment can trigger experiences of identity threat, decreased belonging, and decreased desire to persist in these environments.  These subtle situational cues may have powerful and far-reaching effects for potential targets of stereotypes and stigma. 

 

Her aims here are to make those cues visible and to understand the mechanisms underlying them so that, through interventions, identity-threatening cues are less likely to hamper the lives of stigmatized people.

APA PsyTalks video series debuts with a talk by IU distinguished professor and chancellor's professor Linda Smith on how babies learn

The inaugural episode of PsyTalks, APA's series of 'TED-style' presentations by prominent psychologists, features IU distinguished professor and chancellor’s professor of psychological and brain sciences, Linda Smith, with an explanation of how movement and sight determine how babies learn.

As part of its public education campaign, APA is launching a video series titled PsyTalks with an episode explaining how babies' movements provide the experiences from which they learn. Linda Smith, distinguished professor and chancellor's professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, hosts the episode, the first featuring psychology's leading researchers discussing their latest findings.

Check out Linda Smith's APA PsyTalk here:
       
http://www.apa.org/pubs/newsletters/access/2013/02-12/babies-learn.aspx