This week’s edition of the UCSB Current highlights a recent paper by Professor Kyle Ratner’s team. Professor Kyle Ratner and his trainees Locke Welborn (now at University of East Anglia) and Youngki Hong have published a paper in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, focusing on how negative stereotype exposure affects responses to monetary incentives. They found that Mexican-American students exposed to negative stereotypes showed different brain responses to anticipated monetary gains and losses compared to those who were not so exposed.

This is the first step in a series of studies that the research team are conducting to understand neural pathways through which stigma can influence psychological and physical health.