Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted Black Americans' dire and disproportionately negative health outcomes and healthcare experiences. This spotlight also incited public discourse about the lack of medical trust in the Black community. Importantly, these experiences and outcomes for Black Americans began long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is a reminder that we strongly encourage you to attend SPAM in person.
However, we understand that occasionally you won't be able to make it. I
will project my audio and slides over zoom today for those of you who won't
be able to attend in person today. That said, please attend in person if
you are able to do so. Here's the link:
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87396119642?pwd=aTNXeDRvZEIwbG1UK0drbkx5RFdIQT09
We all want to spend time with people we value and who value us in return. How do we learn who these individuals are? One route is through complex planning: we can predict others’ behavior by inferring their preferences (e.g., how much they value us) or consulting a mental map that lets us generalize past experiences (e.g., inferring a mentor will offer knowledge based on our experience with prior mentors). But complex planning is effortful, and people tend to avoid mental effort. In this talk, I will highlight how simpler reward learning also guides social interactions.
Children are sensitive to (un)fairness. But do children respond to unfairness the same way they respond to other moral violations? Through five studies with over 280 children and 540 adults in the U.S., we find that children may not equate norms of fairness in resource distribution with harm-based moral norms, even into middle childhood and adulthood, pointing to the need for a more nuanced understanding of children’s developing perceptions of social norms.
Gonadal hormones such as estradiol have a powerful effect on neuronal plasticity, particularly in the hippocampus, a region crucial for memory consolidation and spatial cognition. Previous in vitro work has found that estradiol triggers second messenger cascades, driving synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus. In particular, estradiol has been found to drive a pronounced proliferation of dendritic spines, the primary sites of excitatory synaptic connections.
