News

• The Links Between Executive Function, Negative Affect, and Sensation Seeking During Adolescent Substance Use Development
• AI Moral Stereotyping — The Context of Moral Psychology
• The ViTAL Lab Examines Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Young Adult Mental Health
• 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award: Gale Sinatra

The PROPEL (Promoting Research Opportunities for Equity in Learning) mission is to ensure equitable access to academic and research opportunities for all undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Sophia Deligiannidis, a Psychology and Economics undergraduate student, working on behalf of PROPEL is researching how those with disabilities are impacted by the typical research recruitment environment, and how to avoid any discrimination within the new process that PROPEL is innovating.

Offering a science-driven approach to achieving social change, a newly-published debut book by Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, provost professor of psychological and brain sciences in the College of Natural Sciences, argues that small changes to the “wallpaper” – the local cultures around us – are far more effective in producing structural change locally than seeking change through bias awareness training, symbolic acts or relying solely on good intentions.

A current project of graduate student Aliah Zewail involves identifying and mitigating Western biases that run rampant within the subject of morality coded into AI systems.

A collaboration between UMass Amherst and Virginia Tech launched a longitudinal project examining brain and behavioral outcomes in adolescents from 14-17 years of age. A recent dataset was analyzed by UMass researchers Ann Folker and Kirby Deater-Deckard.

Graduate researchers Minji Lee and Ana Uribe along with Assistant Professor Maria Galano of the ViTAL Lab have published a new study entitled "Racial and ethnic disparities in young adult mental health: Exploring the individual and conjoint effects of ACEs and campus climate."

Among those with chronic diseases, mitigating food insecurity is crucial to improving health outcomes. Consistent access to nutritious food helps to effectively manage conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. This can be especially true in lower-income communities such as Springfield, MA, where access to fresh produce and other healthy food is cost-prohibitive.