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Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street … in different countries?

2022-09-12T13:47:00-04:00

Over the last half century, Sesame Workshop (the nonprofit organization that produces Sesame Street) has created local adaptations of Sesame Street around the world with partners in more than a dozen countries. Developed in the years following the launch of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, Sesame Street was born of the desire to educate children using television, with a particular focus on those from disadvantaged backgrounds. As we all know, Sesame Street became a national sensation that grew into the powerhouse franchise of children’s “edutainment.”

Looking beyond the U.S., though, how would the phenomenon fare? Using other languages and alphabets, Count von Count could certainly explain simple math and Grover could teach children about letters. Even so, some of what makes Sesame Street so relatable in the U.S. is how deeply the show is steeped in U.S. culture.

Professor of Global Affairs and Sociology Tamara Kay, jointly appointed at the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and the Keough 91��Ƶ of Global Affairs, researched how this cultural marvel was locally adapted across the globe, spawning parrot Abelardo Montoya, a Big Bird equivalent, in the Mexican version, and Yam Monster, the Nigerian version of Cookie Monster.

Her research paper, “Culture in Transnational Interaction: How Organizational Partners Coproduce Sesame Street” was recently published in the journal “Theory and Society” and provides a framework for how transnational organizational partners or teams can engage in more equitable collaborations as they coproduce a hybrid cultural product together.

Because there is very little research on the process of creating transnational hybrids, Kay’s framework could be valuable to government organizations, NGOs and private companies attempting cross-cultural partnerships. Her research, spanning seven years, took her to Sesame Workshop’s offices in New York, then with New York staff to Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Nigeria. She observed and participated in a variety of meetings, seminars, workshops and training sessions and completed more than 200 hours of interviews with New York staff and partners in other countries. What stood out the most to Kay was how New York staff and partners in individual country teams across the world built relationships, negotiated and managed conflicts.

“When I started the project, I thought partners in lower resource countries would want less interaction and more autonomy from New York staff. But the opposite actually was true,” Kay said. “They wanted more feedback, more support. As I observed New York staff and partners around the world interacting in real time to produce a local adaptation of Sesame Street together, I realized that their interactions were aligning interests, mitigating asymmetrical power dynamics, facilitating mutual learning and building trust. It wasn’t just about what they were creating, but about how they were building relationships to create it together.”

Kay’s research on Sesame Street is distinctive and valuable because it is one of very few projects that is based on observations of transnational interactions on the ground in real time. The vast majority of research can only offer guesses about why an adaptation mimics or strays from its original.

“If you as the researcher are not in the room as these negotiations happen, you cannot trace the nature of the interactive process that resulted in an adaptation’s final form,” Kay said. “For example, how McDonald's and its Indian franchisees made decisions together about food options there. But I was sitting in the room, observing the discussions and negotiations among organizational partners in real time that shaped the decisions that were made about Sesame Street adaptations.”

Kay observed that what it takes to engage in successful coproduction is for both Sesame Workshop and the partner team to set their goals and their non-negotiables, and then discuss these aspects. For the former, “programs have to be educational, utilize a ‘whole child’ curriculum and promote key values of nonviolence, tolerance and respect, equality and inclusion,” Kay said. “In terms of content and form, almost all else is negotiable, including whether it will even be a television program … partners must decide whether they can agree to these terms.” For the latter, the local context is the guiding star; will the program meet local goals and needs, and will they have control over the content? Aligning interests is key at this stage, Kay noted.

As she witnessed at a number of meetings, it’s exactly this give and take and flexibility that makes coproduction possible. Kay’s data demonstrate that “Sesame Workshop is very willing to find agreeable common ground – even on core issues,” she said. “And Sesame Workshop realizes its partners are willing to do the same.” This creates allyship between the teams, which is extremely important as the power dynamic between a team backed by a large, universally known and unquestionably beloved nonprofit and a small team of local experts, is wide.

“Many transnational projects, from public health and vaccination campaigns to agricultural experiments, fail,” Kay said. “It is often because participants who hold the most power in what is meant to be a collaborative dynamic don’t engage in deep localization of the project that values and prioritizes partners’ knowledge, vision, and decision making from start to finish.”

The process of constructing value is not always without disagreement or conflict and not all potential partnerships are realized. Kay again stresses the open team conversations and the New York staff’s willingness to truly listen to experts on the local teams.

The HIV positive character Kami, featured on the South African version of Sesame Street called “Takalani Sesame,” was years in the making and came only after the first season and much criticism from South Africans that the program wasn’t addressing one of the country’s biggest issues: the HIV/AIDS health crisis that left one in ten South African children without a caregiver. Some New York staff were wary because they were not experts in the topic and the South African government’s stance was that HIV did not lead to AIDS. It was the South African team that ultimately convinced many New York-based staff that developing an age-appropriate South African curriculum about HIV/AIDS focused on destigmatization, and managing the grief from the loss of caregivers, was crucial to addressing the health crisis.

“The more I learned about it and the more devastating the numbers became, the more I realized it just wasn’t even a conversation I had the right to have anymore. It was something we needed to try,” said one of the writers on the New York staff.

Even after the New York writers agreed to it, there were many contentious meetings with other experts to develop the character who would be the vehicle for the curriculum. Portraying a character with HIV would bear consequences. If an adult actor portrayed someone with HIV, he or she would never act again. If a child who had HIV in real life played the character, he or she would eventually die due to lack of treatment. In fact, at the time, “no child in this country with HIV will survive to seven,” Kay wrote. Other options were explored and dismissed in the context of South African culture or the desire to avoid sugar coating reality. Ultimately, a female monster Muppet named Kami was created, whose name means acceptance in various local languages.

In India, the first foreign country to have a subsidiary and local office, the managing director of Sesame Workshop India, Sashwati Banerjee, and her team developed a plan to create a for-profit franchise of preschools called “Sesame 91��Ƶs” that would support their nonprofit work. The preexisting Sesame Street television program in India was called “Galli Galli Sim Sim,” and those in the New York office thought the school system should bear the same name.

The trouble was, Banerjee explained, “that ‘Galli’ in India means — it does not even mean a street — it means literally an alley. Gallis are what is associated with slums in India.” Because middle-class families would be more likely to embrace schools that referenced Sesame Street, the solution in India was a dual brand strategy – branding everything under the umbrella of Sesame Street, including the show “Galli Galli Sim Sim.”

Few other large corporations engage in coproduction the way Sesame Workshop does. “Disney, for example, employs cultural consultants and advisors for its films, including ‘Coco’ and ‘Encanto.’ These films were not co-produced as a transnational team with Mexican and Colombian partners,” Kay wrote. Sesame Workshop transnational collaborations, on the other hand, rely entirely on the model of coproduction to build a hybrid program.

“My theoretical model shows how teams located in different countries who do not share collective representations are able to create them through transnational interaction by constructing value to align their interests, and exchanging complex cultural knowledge to customize and build alliances together,” Kay wrote. “It is about the coproduction of a cultural object that leads to multiple, different and unique hybrid cultural products. Each program resembles Sesame Street as an exceptionally abstract U.S. cultural product, however each program looks very different and cannot be substituted for another.”

By shifting to analyze the process of transnational coproduction, Kay provides a new framework for understanding the factors that constrain and spark adopters’ resistance to cultural globalization. The Sesame Workshop cases that populate Kay’s framework are good examples of coproduction that could set a standard for creating hybrid products in other critical fields.

Kay’s framework is novel because most of the existing research fails to analyze the building of collaborative transnational organizational ties, particularly among economic development organizations.

“It misses the cultural environment in which transnational partnerships are constructed and their impact on outcomes,” Kay said.

Karrie Koesel to testify before Congressional-Executive Commission on China

2022-09-09T14:09:45-04:00

University of Notre Dame Associate Professor of Political Science Karrie Koesel will testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday (Sept. 13) before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s hearing “Control of Religion in China through Digital Authoritarianism.”

Koesel was invited to offer her expertise by Sen. Jeffrey A. Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. James P. McGovern (D-Mass.), respectively chair and co-chair of the commission. The hearing will be accessible via this link.

Koesel will testify on the People’s Republic of China’s current and long-term strategies for asserting party control over religion, especially through sinicization, which calls on religious believers to integrate party loyalty into all aspects of religious life. She will also offer recommendations for how Congress and the Biden administration can effectively advocate for freedom of religion in China.

Earlier this week, The Associated Press reported on the tribulations of the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church that fled China as the state increased crackdowns on unofficial Christian churches. While the 61 members of the congregation have been outside mainland China for the past three years, members of their families who remain have been harassed and threatened with the “confiscation of state benefits or the closure of their businesses if the congregants didn’t return to China.”

The article notes that people in China are allowed to worship at Christian churches approved by the Communist Party. “However, in recent years, [independent, unregistered] house churches have come under heavy pressure, with many prominent ones shut down. Unlike previous crackdowns, such as Beijing’s ban of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement it labels a cult, the authorities have also targeted some believers not explicitly opposed to the Chinese state.”

Koesel was quoted in a 2018 Washington Post article on the persecution of religious groups under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime, noting that the state sees religious practices differently than the practitioners themselves.

“Some of these groups are growing very quickly, and that makes the government very nervous,” Koesel said. “It’s not because they’re challenging the state, but the state sees religion as an existential threat. That’s why they’re increasing political education.”

Koesel’s research focuses on religion and politics, dictatorship and democracy, political education and propaganda and contemporary Chinese and Russian politics. She is the author of “Religion and Authoritarianism: Cooperation, Conflict and the Consequences” and co-editor of “Citizens & the State in Authoritarian Regimes: Comparing China & Russia.”

Koesel, who holds a concurrent appointment in Notre Dame’s Keough 91��Ƶ of Global Affairs, is a fellow in the Public Intellectual Program for the National Committee on US-China Relations. She served as a member of the International Diffusion and Cooperation of Authoritarian Regimes (IDCAR) research network; an associate scholar of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University; and a researcher for the Under Caesar’s Sword Project at Notre Dame.

Research shows government transparency benefits special interest groups, not citizenry

2022-09-01T14:16:00-04:00

It stands to reason that, in a representative democracy, transparency would be a key component. After all, in autocracies — the polar opposite of democracies — transparency is irrelevant because one political figure holds all the decision-making power.

However, Jeff Harden, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, and his colleague Justin Kirkland (at the University of Virginia), found that, rather than state government transparency benefitting everyday citizens, it favors special interest groups. Their findings appear in their new book, “The Illusion of Accountability: Representation and Transparency in American Legislatures,” published by Cambridge University Press.

The U.S. Constitution wasn’t established in a transparent way, as the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention were not open to the public. However, since the mid-20th century —thanks in large part to journalists demanding transparency— many state and local governments have instituted open meetings requirements for state legislatures.

Scholars have demonstrated that this type of government transparency could be connected to two concepts, the first being observing the ethics and accountability of elites, or elected officials. The prevailing argument is that observation in the form of open meetings will act as a check on abuse of power and encourage legislators to act lawfully and in the best interest of their constituents.

“We tend to think of transparency as a universally good thing in lots of areas – for example, in business. However, this might not always be the case,” Harden said. “It could be problematic and there are plenty of political officials who have expressed reservations about the notion of transparency. As members of the public, we want to know what the government is doing, but some politicians don’t necessarily want us to know. For them, it’s difficult to do the job if they’re always being watched.”

Transparency is also connected to the concept of representation. When it comes time to vote, citizens must also be able to “make informed judgments of their leaders. Without this access, the logic goes, democracy does not exist in practice,” Harden and Kirkland wrote.

Using measures of the agreement between what state governments do and what citizens want, Harden and Kirkland found that whether state government meetings are closed or open, the results are the same: Public policy is equally correlated with public opinion, whether a state legislature has open meetings or not.

On the citizens’ side, Harden and Kirkland used survey data on several hundred policy issues over many decades. Despite the fact that citizens repeatedly express serious interest in their state governments being open and accountable, open meetings don’t change them much – they don’t increase their knowledge or their political lives, the researchers found.

The authors don’t see open meetings as a straightforward way of increasing transparency; in fact, it changes the circumstances substantially, they noted.

“Opening the legislative process is not simply an innocuous decision that facilitates civic participation and keeps politicians honest,” they wrote. “Rather, it is a significant change to the political bargaining environment that alters the incentives and decisions of actors on both sides of the electoral connection.”

Harden and Kirkland found that the effect of instituting more open governments creates more satisfaction among voters, but they are, in fact, less knowledgeable about what is actually going on in their statehouses.

Using data from the Cooperative Election Study from 2012 to 2020, their analyses indicated that certain respondents in states with open meetings laws are actually less likely to be able to name the party in control of their lower state legislative chamber. Therefore, the effect of openness is “illusionary” as a less attentive public provides legislators with no incentive to change their behavior or how they create policy.

This, Harden said, allows interest groups to slip in and pressure lawmakers to create policy thatis beneficial to them.

“Turns out open meetings are actually making it easier for interest groups and lobbyists to do their jobs,” Harden said. “There are more groups that register to lobby in states with open meetings and they donate more to incumbent politicians. This leads to an ironic conclusion: The laws don’t make citizen representation better, they make it better for interest groups, which aren’t representative of the general public. Because citizens are not fulfilling their role in that relationship, lobbyists are coming in.”

While the goals of open meetings reformers were laudable, in reality they don’t function in the interest of the public, even if citizens are partially to blame. Open meetings, the authors noted, are “essentially neutral toward democracy, which is itself problematic.” They do not achieve the goal to improve the democratic process.

“By falsely reassuring the public while exerting no effect on legislators, open meetings laws have largely failed to live up to their stated goal of improving political representation,” the pair wrote. “They do not strengthen accountability, but instead facilitate the capacity of unrepresentative interest groups to seek access and influence in state governments.”

Based on their research, Harden and Kirkland suggest that those who wish to reform the system accept that the U.S. public at large might actually be disinterested in politics, or might view it as a game or hobby without a real investment in it. They believe proponents of reform should refocus their efforts toward securing dynamic and engaging state and local elections.

“The real key to quality representation is a robust and competitive electoral environment,” they wrote. “Thus, advocates seeking to improve representation are likely best served by concentrating less on transparency in legislative operations and more on ensuring the strength and competitiveness of subnational elections.”

Harden and Kirkland worked with the graphic design team Sequential Potential to create a comic that explains their research visually. The comic can be viewed here.

Comprehensive investment in people improves social services, Heather Reynolds testifies

2022-08-02T10:53:00-04:00

Experts from the University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) are no strangers to testifying before congressional committees. On Thursday (July 28), Heather Reynolds, LEO’s managing director, shared her deep knowledge and expertise in social work and assessment of social programs with the House Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth.

The committee chairman, Congressman Jim Himes, opened the hearing by noting that 70 percent of Americans report having benefited from social programs at some point in their life. “I’m particularly interested in seeing what the federal government can do to improve these programs for those who need it the most,” he said.

Congressman Bryan Steil echoed Himes’ concern and stressed that policy has a real impact on people getting back to work, but he is concerned with how to raise people into the middle class and keep them there in a sustainable way.

“Before we look at simply spending more money, we should look at evidence-based solutions that already exist,” Steil, the ranking member of the committee, said.

Conquering poverty with evidence-based solutions is exactly LEO’s wheelhouse. Reynolds drew from her personal experience as a social worker witnessing comprehensive case management make all the difference for many clients. “It is very difficult to be poor. I am a big fan of case management because I’ve seen it work and I’ve seen it through my own practice.”

Reynolds talked about real clients she and her colleagues worked with at Catholic Charities Forth Worth over her nearly 20 years at the agency. Each client’s situation was unique, because “the faces of poverty all look a bit different,” she said. In Marsha’s case, for example, she was working a $10 per hour job trying to keep her and her three kids’ heads above water. They lived in an unsafe rental with no running water. Marsha needed child care and other supports so she could get credentialed to earn higher wages. The scenario was different for Randy, a client whose disability rendered him unable to drive but wouldn’t interfere with his ability to do many jobs. His mother was unable to provide transportation for him to go to and from work. Reynolds and her colleagues were able to focus on finding him a job and a way to get there and back.

What LEO offers, Reynolds emphasized, is the ability to do real research to determine effectiveness of programs while social work experts continue to do their vital work to help those most in need.

“I’m talking about causal, not correlational evidence — the kind that tells us the direct effect of programs on the intended outcomes they are attempting to change. The evidence points to comprehensive services,” she said.

She shared some of the best examples of LEO’s research including Goodwill Excel Centers that aim to help adults earn a high school diploma and provide them with child care, transportation, life coaches and jobs. In comparison to those not enrolled, students are 11 percent more likely to be employed in the formal sector and earnings are 39 percent higher. Catholic Charities’ Padua program provides holistic case management over multiple years to move a family out of poverty. People who participated in Padua experienced a 25 percent increase in work. For those not working at time of enrollment, there was a 67 percent increase in work and a 46 percent increase in earnings.

Witness Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, compared the United States’ social systems with countries that have a similar number of children living in poverty like Australia and Canada. “We do less and our children pay the price.”

Parrott also pointed out that our nation’s current economic security programs lift a much larger share of people out of poverty than in the past, which, importantly, has narrowed the gaps between poor white people and poor people of color. She advocates expanding the child tax credit, strengthening unemployment insurance and establishing universal health care.

Looking back on the government response to economic issues caused by the pandemic, Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, praised the Biden administration and Congress for “meeting the moment” with quick and broad relief measures. However, with the cutback or elimination of some pandemic-related relief, Morial worries about the most vulnerable yet again.

Two-thirds of Americans’ wages haven’t kept up with inflation, he noted, threatening to push people into poverty once again. He champions programs that help people not just survive, but thrive. He underscored, however, that many people cannot even access the programs that help them meet basic needs because they don’t know about them or how to access them and they might not have internet access.

“This is not just a question of the poorest Americans, but working-class Americans and even into the middle class,” Morial said. “They’re forced to seek assistance through these social programs. These programs serve a broader section of Americans. One of the pillars of a great nation is the respect and care for her people. We cannot leave people behind.”

Millions of Americans benefited from the expansion of unemployment insurance during the height of the pandemic. Although the staff at the Department of Labor was able to pivot quickly and provide service, Michele Evermore, deputy director for policy at the Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization at U.S. Department of Labor, said it wasn’t without a cost. There has been a lot of staff turnover at the agency due to being overworked when serving clients. She noted that strengthening staff to ensure readiness for any future crises is paramount.

“We must invest in staff and systems. There is hope,” she said, while calling for reform in unemployment insurance and sustained funding.

Bringing the conversation back to wages, Congresswoman Gwen Moore asked the expert witnesses if there is any dignity in working a minimum-wage job (or two or three of them) when that leaves no time to do anything else except work.

Indivar Dutta-Gupta, president and executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy, pointed out that the U.S. has now gone through the longest stretch in its history of not raising the minimum wage since it was established.

“All the while, housing costs have been rising exponentially. It’s a policy choice to have a lower minimum wage,” Dutta-Gupta said.

Most of the witnesses and legislators agreed that the best practices are those that “trampoline” people out of poverty in sustainable ways so they remain in the middle class.

“We scratch our heads and wonder why upward mobility isn’t possible for a good number of Americans,” Reynolds said. “Policy must demand that we test what we are doing for the poor, to understand the causal impact of every dollar. Use that evidence to double down on what works and stop doing what doesn’t work. And, where we find gaps, keep building evidence until we get the right solutions. People living in poverty deserve programs that work. Evidence honors their dignity.”

Heather Reynolds to testify before House Select Committee on Economic Disparities and Fairness in Growth

2022-07-27T16:49:00-04:00

Heather Reynolds, managing director of the University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, will testify before the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth on Thursday (July 28). The hearing, “Building a Modern Economic Foundation: Economic Security and Income Support for 21st Century America,” begins at 10 a.m. and will be livestreamed via the committee’s YouTube channel here.

This hearing will focus on evaluating the effectiveness of current safety net programs, with an emphasis on how these programs helped Americans during the pandemic. Committee members and experts will also discuss potential innovations to improve the efficacy of these programs and ways to ensure pathways to economic opportunity for all Americans.

Committee members and their invited guests will discuss the benefits of social programs like the earned income tax credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment insurance, and will focus particularly on how these programs fared during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

LEO’s mission is to partner with service providers who want to disrupt the anti-poverty space. These providers realize that decades of “business as usual” have not sufficiently turned the tide on poverty and have left us with scant understanding of what works to lift lives up. LEO matches top researchers with passionate leaders in the social service sector to conduct impact evaluations that identify the innovative, effective and scalable programs and policies that help people move permanently out of poverty.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Reynolds served as the CEO of Catholic Charities Fort Worth for 14 years. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work and her executive MBA all at Texas Christian University. She will speak to the need for comprehensive poverty solutions backed by evidence.

“I serve at LEO because I believe in the vision of the University of Notre Dame to be a force for good in the world. LEO makes good on this commitment as we work to reduce poverty in our country through evidence-based programs and policies,” Reynolds said. “During the years I spent in the poverty-fighting field as a service provider, I found one of the areas we were sorely lacking was evidence of what works. Being at LEO allows me to help our partners pair their work with our amazing research team here at Notre Dame, allowing their impact to show and scale.”

Chloe Gibbs to serve on Council of Economic Advisers

2022-07-18T13:59:39-04:00

Chloe Gibbs, assistant professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, has been appointed to a one-year term as a senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The council is charged with offering the president of the United States objective economic advice based on data, research and evidence to support the formulation of both domestic and international policy.

“We are obviously facing economic challenges in the wake of the pandemic. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to serve in this capacity, and hope I can use my skills and expertise to solve problems that affect people’s daily lives, particularly those of children and families,” said Gibbs, whose tenure begins this month.

The CEA is led by a chair who is appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate, and two members who are appointed by the president. With a staff of senior economists, staff economists, research assistants and supporting administrators, the council analyzes and interprets economic developments and formulates and recommends economic policies that advance the interests of the American people.

A labor economist who specializes in the economics of education, Gibbs focuses on measuring the effects — both intended and unintended — of policies and programs targeted at helping disadvantaged children and families. Much of her research investigates early childhood care and education, parenting, and successful transitions into and out of formal schooling.

One of the most pressing issues for working parents in the U.S. is the availability and cost of child care. Along with seven other economists, Gibbs recently conducted a study that modeled two different policy scenarios that involved expanding federal funding for early child care and education subsidies — one narrow and one broad. While child care costs have increased over the past 15 years, the authors find that “a broad expansion of childcare subsidies would substantially reduce the costs that households pay on average for childcare.”

Indeed, their research showed that a broad expansion would lower average household expenditures significantly from about $8,100 per year to approximately $5,000 — a decline from nearly 18 percent to 6 percent of after-tax income. Under the narrow subsidy expansion, the reduction in household costs is more modest, with average household expenditures (for full-time care) falling from approximately $8,100 (close to 18 percent of income) to $7,700 (12 percent of income). The study also predicts increases in maternal employment and improvements in care quality under both subsidy schemes, with the most pronounced benefits among low-income families.

Gibbs has also studied various aspects of the federal Head Start program that launched in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Her most recent related research (with colleague Andrew Barr from Texas A&M) was the first to show large-scale intergenerational effects of the program. Their study documented effects in the second generation — the children of those who went through Head Start — including decreases in teen parenthood (by 8 percentage points) and criminal engagement (by 13 percentage points) and increases in educational attainment (high school graduation by 11 percentage points and college enrollment by 18 percentage points). The study also found shorter-term effects for the second generation that may explain the long-term effects, such as better home environments, greater preschool participation, higher self-esteem, lower likelihood of repeating a grade and less criminal engagement in adolescence.

“Chloe is a recognized academic leader in the areas of schooling and education,” said Michael P. Grace II Professor and Department Chair of Economics Eric Sims. “We are fortunate that she will be putting her expertise on these and related topics into practice in service to our country on the Council of Economic Advisers. We are extremely proud of her and are lucky to count her as a member of the Notre Dame family.”

Gibbs earned her BA in government and international studies at Notre Dame in 2000. She is also an affiliate of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities and serves as the director of Notre Dame’s Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research at the Institute for Educational Initiatives.

First multigenerational study of Head Start shows significant gains for second generation

2022-06-21T10:52:22-04:00

New research is the first to show large-scale intergenerational effects of the federal Head Start program that launched in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. The program continues to this day and serves children from low-income families and disadvantaged circumstances.

When assessing the children of the first generation of Head Start participants, researchers Chloe Gibbs, assistant professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and Andrew Barr at Texas A&M saw decreases in teen parenthood (by 8 percentage points) and criminal engagement (by 13 percentage points) and increases in educational attainment (high school graduation by 11 percentage points and college enrollment by 18 percentage points), which correspond to an estimated 6 to 11 percent increase in wages through age 50. The study also revealed improvement in the home environment and second-generation preschool participation that precede improvements in self-esteem, reductions in grade repetition and lower criminal engagement in adolescence. Their paper, “Breaking the Cycle? Intergenerational Effects of an Anti-Poverty Program in Early Childhood,” was published in the Journal of Political Economy.

“These results imply that cost-benefit analyses of Head Start and similar early childhood interventions underestimate the benefits of such programs by ignoring the transmission of positive effects across generations,” the pair wrote. “This finding has important policy implications for optimal investment in these types of programs. Each disadvantaged child society helps now will lead to fewer who require assistance in the future.”

As the War on Poverty began, Johnson said in his 1964 State of the Union address, “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” Gibbs emphasized that their research shows that Head Start essentially pays for itself via the progress that second-generation Head Start children have made. Gibbs and Barr used data from the 1979 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in addition to data from the National Archives and Records Administration on the early Head Start program.

“It’s important to study this kind of intergenerational impact to understand how programs affect the cycle of poverty,” Gibbs said. “Head Start set the first-generation kids on a different trajectory, and now their kids are better off. I think this is exactly what we hope to do through these kinds of social programs.”

Child Development Group of Mississippi Head Start Program, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

The evaluation of this program is significant because it is an example of federal resources going to those most in need. The population Head Start served in the 1960s was extremely vulnerable, with median incomes less than half the national average. Up to 17 percent of families reported having no running water inside the home. Approximately 25 percent of Head Start participants lived in female-headed households and 65 to 70 percent of mothers had less than a high school education and were unemployed. Few children in general participated in any kind of structured preschool, and publicly funded kindergarten was not established nationwide. Head Start has grown from 400,000 initial participants to nearly a million today.

“It is a rare policy opportunity for us to both enhance equity by targeting resources to the most disadvantaged and to generate these kinds of social returns,” Gibbs said. “More education, less crime and less likelihood of teen pregnancy creates more stable, tax-paying citizens. It produces a substantial return on investment for the individual participants and families, and for our whole society.”

Many researchers have highlighted the importance of development in early childhood and the value of intervention during that critical time. Researchers know that children who meet established benchmarks through adolescence are more likely to become middle-class adults. Disadvantaged children, on the other hand, fall behind, missing benchmarks and the chance at rising in economic and social status.

“We demonstrate that our evidence, coupled with other work on the long-term effects of the Head Start program and the long-term and intergenerational effects of model preschool programs, reinforces the importance of early childhood investments for both those exposed to the programs and their children,” Gibbs and Barr wrote. “The existence of such spillovers suggests that a concerted effort to invest in one generation of impoverished youth could break the cycle of poverty and reduce the need to provide similar services to future generations.”

Multi-decade research links fathers’ testosterone production to their adolescent experiences with their own fathers

2022-05-31T15:10:09-04:00

University of Notre Dame Associate Professor of Anthropology Lee Gettler and his collaborators have drawn on data collected over more than 30 years from almost 1,000 men in the Philippines to help shed light on the importance of adolescence and father-son experiences to sons’ adult testosterone patterns. The team found that adolescence is a sensitive period during which social relationships influence later hormone production. Specifically, boys whose fathers were present and involved with caring for them when they were adolescents had lower testosterone when they later became fathers. Their results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today.

Just over a decade ago, Gettler and his team made headlines when they showed that the transition to committed parenting led to a large decline in new dads’ testosterone levels. Those results helped scientists and the public understand how new fathers’ bodies can biologically adjust to the demands of parenting. In fact, Gettler noted that men are, to a certain degree, hardwired to care for their children.

However, many questions remained about why testosterone might differ between dads. Gettler later proposed that boys’ early family experiences might play an important role in shaping the biology that relates to later parenting, like testosterone levels. Adolescence may be a key period to track lasting social influences on biology because of the body’s changes with puberty but has been largely understudied.

“There are very few studies that have looked at how early-life social experiences with family — and dads especially — are related to future testosterone production in men, including when they become fathers,” Gettler said. “There are none that have considered the potential role of the adolescent time period and take into consideration what boys have experienced with their dads. The longitudinal part of this large study is really key because it has tracked participants since they were infants. In adolescence, the boys began to contribute their own perspectives, whereas their mothers were answering surveys in their younger years. This way we know who each teenage boy credited for his upbringing. We also get their perspective when they later become fathers regarding how involved they are with caring for their own children.”

Gettler argues that this new research helps show how fathering can have lasting effects across generations, not just through behavior but also through biology. “We found that teenage boys whose dads were more involved had lower testosterone when they became dads, themselves. Boys who lived with their dads and felt they helped raise them also had lower testosterone as future fathers.” He went on to say, “In evolutionary biology, testosterone is studied in humans and other animals because it plays an important role in how organisms dedicate resources to pursuing competition and status or investing in parenting. In humans, testosterone is linked to long-term health, including for cardiovascular disease and immune function. So, these findings are showing us new ways that family experiences before adulthood can shape later biology that, in turn, can affect later behavior and health.”

Dads can have other important effects on kids’ social and cognitive development at earlier life stages, but that may not be the case for testosterone production, Gettler explained. The adolescent period is when children are becoming reproductively mature and, for males, when their bodies are starting to ramp up testosterone production. “It may be that the social effects are more intense due to these biological changes with puberty,” Gettler said.

Gettler and his team found that boys whose dads were present but not described as being involved with childcare grew up to have higher testosterone, on average, than sons whose dads were involved in their care. It is important to note, however, that there are many different cultures around the world that emphasize or teach different values and societal norms, including for the roles fathers play in families. For example, when the study began in the 1980s, many fathers worked as farmers, fishermen and skilled tradesmen, and a core, culturally valued role for fathers was to be a provider. Fathers also often acted as moral guides and disciplinarians.

“Some activities, like playing sports or teaching skills — the things that involve more direct interaction —would fall under the designation ‘dad was involved with care’ in our study. Other domains, like being a role model or a moral guide, might be categorized as ‘the presence of a dad’; they are still present and contributing to the sons’ lives. There’s not just one way to be a good dad.”

Fathers remain understudied when it comes to contributions they make to their kids’ health and well-being overall, Gettler noted. Most of the work that’s been done has been around social and academic outcomes in roles dad can play.

“There’s a lot of interest in how dads and other caregivers can help shape the future health of children, and this new work provides insights about the biology that may contribute to those outcomes,” he said. “In our work, dads’ close involvement with their sons seems to be a key generational pathway, in that it can have lasting biological signatures, including on their sons’ future production of testosterone, as well as their fathering styles.”

Class of 2020 Graduate 91��Ƶ degree recipients encouraged to ‘embrace the uncomfortable middle’ and to ‘seek joy’

2022-05-29T13:26:21-04:00

This weekend, hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students of the University of Notre Dame Class of 2020 returned to their alma mater for long-awaited in-person Commencement Ceremonies. The returning students completed their studies in 2020 and had their degrees conferred virtually in the first year of the pandemic. In total, more than 800 students from the Graduate 91��Ƶ earned degrees during the 2019-2020 academic year and nearly 80 returned for their on-campus ceremony on Saturday (May 28) in Leighton Concert Hall in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. The event was hosted by Laura Carlson, vice president, associate provost and dean of the Graduate 91��Ƶ and a professor of psychology.

Professor of theology Joseph Wawrykow, the 2020 winner of the Rev. James A. Burns, C.S.C., Award, began the ceremony by giving the invocation. He implored the Virgin Mary to intercede in the lives of the graduate students and grant them the gifts of wisdom and prudence.

“Within and across their chosen fields and specializations, may they be women and men who foster peace and justice, who nurture harmony and reconciliation, and who build up the human community,” Wawrykow said. “And may Mary of Nazareth, Notre Dame, our Mother, continue to watch over and protect both this University which bears her name, and all of us who have been entrusted with the sacred task of forming the minds and hearts of those who study here.”

Chris Maziar, vice president and interim provost, introduced the commencement speaker, Robert J. Bernhard, vice president for research and a professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. Maziar explained Bernhard’s long and winding road to Notre Dame, waylaid first by a lack of funds to study at the University, and then by a blizzard that prevented his visit to interview for a professorship. Ultimately, after working for Westinghouse while completing his graduate studies at the University of Maryland and then his doctorate at Iowa State University, he landed at nearby Purdue University. At Purdue, he held leadership roles at the Institute for Safe, Quiet, and Durable Highways and the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories before being named associate vice president for research for center and institutes. He joined Notre Dame in 2007 to help bring to life the vision of Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., for the University to be one of the preeminent research institutions in the world, while remaining true to its Catholic identity.

Bernhard urged the graduates, some of whom he noted had involuntary gap years due to the pandemic, to embrace “the uncomfortable middle” following graduate school and other life transitions. He noted some might be contemplating further schooling, while others had already accepted and been working at their first postgraduate job. Either way, he encouraged all to examine their paths in the hope that they would truly be fulfilled.

“This uncomfortable middle is one time in particular when I hope that your Notre Dame experience will make a difference. Decisions in this uncomfortable middle are life-changing and should be made based on your values,” Bernhard said. “The third leg of the transition process is the new beginning. The literature says, and my observations confirm, that if you are conscientious about your ending and the discernment of the uncomfortable middle, you will start the new phase of life with enthusiasm and commitment.”

Using his own career, his observations of others and scholarship on leadership as examples, he underscored that life and career decisions and transitions are not always linear. Assessment of one’s path requires true self-awareness, authenticity, integrity and inclusiveness.

“Whenever I’ve had the opportunity, I’ve asked about the life story of people I admire — people who are accomplished, fulfilled and contented … sort of serene and self-confident. I have yet to hear anyone say that things went anywhere close to plan. They all pretty much describe a sequence of transitions — some involuntary, some invited or enabled by a mentor, some opportunistic and some deliberately sought,” he said. “My observation of these highly successful and fulfilled people is that they didn’t make this entire sequence of correct decisions by accident; they were consistently making values-based decisions. They chose to work for a company with clear values and a culture of inclusiveness and support. They chose to work with selfless people with clear values. They consistently chose the option that used their God-given talents or the option to which they were called.”

Bernhard, who has announced plans to retire next month, wanted to leave the graduates with a “short, pithy phrase” they could take with them to help guide them to align their aspirations with their individual calling.

“The best term I can think of is ‘joy,’” he said. “Joy seems like a good term for the combination of happiness, satisfaction, pride and well-being. So the catchphrase I offer today consists of two words: Seek joy. Remember to be patient and deliberate with the uncomfortable middle. And when you are looking for the North Star to help you make the right decision among various potentially good options, seek joy!”

At the conclusion of the commencement speech, Carlson, who will soon leave Notre Dame to become provost at the University of Delaware, transitioned to the celebration of degrees previously conferred, beginning with recipients of doctoral degrees. Each graduate, having already received their diploma by mail in 2020, was gifted a diploma holder with an image of the Hesburgh Library overlaid with the words: “On this day: we acknowledge adversity beyond your control. We recognize your resilience. We honor your dedication to scholarship. We celebrate your long-overdue commencement ceremony.”

After a special prayer for the graduates, deans of the colleges announced the honorees as advisers hooded doctoral candidates. Carlson then announced awards for exceptional achievements in scholarship and mentoring. Winners of the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate 91��Ƶ Award in attendance were Tyler Curtis from the graduate program in bioengineering, honored for his work on biomedical imaging and spectral computed tomography; Paola Uparela from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, honored for her research on transatlantic early modern literary and cultural studies; and Dustin Stoltz from the Department of Sociology, honored for his research on inequalities in wealth and politics. Wawrykow was, again, acknowledged as the 2020 winner of the James A. Burns, C.S.C., Graduate 91��Ƶ Award for his many contributions to mentoring and supporting graduate students. Lastly, graduates who earned master’s degrees were recognized.

Father Jenkins closed the program, acknowledging that it was a long time coming and praising graduates for their ability to continue with their studies and research amidst a global pandemic. He also reminded the graduates to thank their families and others who supported them while they pursued graduate studies. Father Jenkins reiterated Bernhard’s advice to “seek joy,” then stressed service beyond self.

“A critical part of living a good life is finding the way in which you are called to use your learning for a purpose beyond yourself. As Pope Francis has said, ‘We must not forget that true power, at whatever level, is service.’ My hope for each of you is that you find and direct your learning and efforts to service,” he said. “Graduates, we congratulate you, we celebrate you and we wish you every success. Thank you for your presence here with us. The class of 2020 will always hold a special place in the history of Notre Dame. We look forward to hearing of all the great things you will do with what you have learned here at Notre Dame.”

Team researches how COVID pivot affected students and faculty at more than 80 universities

2022-05-24T15:20:00-04:00

The Association for Psychological Science has selected studies from the University of Notre Dame for a flash talk at the association’s annual meeting May 26-29 in Chicago. In these studies, the researchers focused on how the shift to mostly online, off-campus environments affected testing for both students and faculty at universities.

The studies were led by Teresa Ober, assistant research professor of psychology, and Ying (Alison) Cheng, professor of psychology and associate director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society. Based on a survey administered to 996 undergraduate students throughout the U.S., the research team found that even after accounting for demographic variables (gender, race/ethnicity, parental educational attainment), undergraduate students who reported greater pandemic-induced stress tended to have greater test anxiety and were less confident in their computer skills. Female students also reported being less confident in computer skills and having greater pandemic-related stress when completing assessments. Students from underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups in STEM were more confident in their computer skills.

The team also surveyed 145 faculty members teaching at more than 80 different U.S. institutions. Instructors provided feedback on how they dealt with the shift to online learning during the 2020-21 academic year in assessing student knowledge and learning. They shared how they prioritized content, adjusted their grading, prepared students for exams, navigated the difficulties administering assessments online and handled issues of academic integrity. These insights will help create recommendations for best practices for creating more equitable online and remotely administered testing.

Below, Ober and Cheng share more about their research.

It seems as if the pandemic offered the opportunity for impactful applied research. Is that what prompted you to do this research on students and faculty?

The COVID-19 pandemic certainly disrupted conventional research and teaching practices. Events such as a pandemic raise a lot of questions about how people naturally cope or adapt to a new set of circumstances. As educational and quantitative psychologists, some of our recent collaborative work together has started to examine different dimensions of online learning and assessment. Given our work in this space, we were interested in understanding the assessment experiences of college students and practices of college instructors during a period of disruption that not only affected the conventional process of administering in-person assessments, but also was likely to have affected their capacity to concentrate and process information (e.g., cognitive load). We use the term “assessments” to refer broadly to tests, quizzes and exams, as well as other assessment formats.

You found that females appeared to assess themselves as having lower computer efficacy and greater pandemic-related stress in assessment contexts and that underrepresented minority students assessed themselves as having greater computer self-efficacy. Please explain the significance/ramifications of this.

It may be helpful to note that self-efficacy is a belief about one’s ability on a task or in knowledge domain, and while it tends to be related to one’s performance, there are still many other factors that explain differences in performance.

The results of our survey found that female students compared with male students were more skeptical about their ability to use computers effectively, and also more likely to report experiencing greater stress when completing assessments during the pandemic than male counterparts. This is an unfortunate finding, but one that is in keeping with past research that suggests female students are more inclined to underestimate their abilities to use technology and to experience greater test anxiety. Both factors are associated with lower performance, with some evidence even suggesting that low confidence and great anxiety can actually decrease performance.

In terms of underrepresented minority students rating themselves higher in computer self-efficacy, at first glance, this seems a promising finding — that students from these historically underrepresented and underserved groups in STEM (based on estimates of participation within the STEM workforce by the National Science Foundation) are confident in their ability to use computers. However, an implication of this is that such students may be less inclined to ask for help completing a task on a computer when in fact they could benefit from seeking help.

For surveyed faculty, can you give examples of notable answers regarding how they pivoted?

Concerns around academic integrity and cheating clearly emerged in the responses gathered from students and teachers. It was interesting that we found two general perspectives about handling academic integrity in tests administered online. Some instructors described specific methods for detecting cheating (e.g., deriving correlations between test-takers’ answers), while others described ways to mitigate cheating (e.g., administering more conceptual and open-ended exam questions). In addition, some instructors noted it was very difficult to balance the aim of assessing student learning while mitigating the likelihood of cheating in a practical and respectful way, with some responses even stating that the experience caused them to re-evaluate their purpose and intent in administering class assessments.

Based on this research, will you make recommendations for best practices?

There are several possible implications of these findings. One implication might be that exposing college instructors to a range of online and remote teaching skills may be most beneficial. Another implication concerns assessment design principles. It might be beneficial for faculty to recognize the situational nature of learning, which could include considering how different test formats affect test-takers’ experiences and performance.

Interestingly, many of the same general themes emerged between instructors and students from slightly different angles. Such themes included the issues related to academic integrity and cheating and the appropriateness of administering assessments online (with respect to such factors as the time allocation, and device access or internet connectivity, ability to get assistance when needed, etc.). In this regard, receptivity to the needs of test-takers should help in developing more valid and useful assessments of their learning. It’s also important to acknowledge that our studies have not fully considered how the circumstances affected students with disabilities and may have needed accommodations. This obviously deserves further attention in follow-up research.

Are there other assessment scenarios that this research could be applicable to?

Within the field of education, there is growing interest in the feasibility of administering standardized assessments for licensure, certification or credentialing purposes in online and remote contexts, or using the test-taker’s own device to complete assessments that are proctored in-person. Clearly there are concerns about doing so in a way that remains consistent between test-takers and doesn’t jeopardize the validity or fairness of the assessment and score interpretation.

There is also evidence that medical assessments are increasingly shifting to online, computerized formats. The issue of computer efficacy and technology divide, especially for patients in impoverished areas, is another concern that deserves close investigation.

Paolo Carozza named to Meta Oversight Board

2022-05-19T11:00:00-04:00

Paolo G. Carozza, professor of law and concurrent professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, has been added as a member of the Oversight Board for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, among the most valuable firms in the world with the social media and messaging apps Instagram and WhatsApp among its properties.

The board is composed of 23 members, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkol Karman, Internet Sans Frontières Executive Director Julie Owono and former prime minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

In addition to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta also owns the virtual reality platform Reality Labs (formerly Oculus VR), which produces virtual reality and augmented reality hardware and software.

“The work of the Oversight Board is a fascinating and trailblazing effort to foster responsible corporate self-regulation in the world today,” said Carozza, who served for a decade as the director of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International 91��Ƶ at the Keough 91��Ƶ of Global Affairs. “I am grateful to have this opportunity to collaborate with such an exceptional group of colleagues to secure freedom of expression in the challenging and complex context of global online media.”

The Oversight Board addresses a variety of issues related to freedom of expression and human rights. The complexity and real-world implications of these cases is why the board is composed of diverse, global leaders with expertise in a range of areas. Board members bring with them experiences and perspectives that enrich the board’s work and help it improve how Meta treats people and communities around the world.

In making its decisions, the board reviews whether content is consistent with Facebook and Instagram’s policies and values, as well as a commitment to upholding freedom of expression within the framework of international norms of human rights. The board makes decisions based on these principles, and the impact on users and society, without regard to Meta’s economic, political or reputational interests. Meta must implement the board’s decisions, unless implementation could violate the law.

Carozza founded and directs the Notre Dame Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law Lab, and he is currently the U.S. member of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission). His scholarly books and articles in the areas of comparative constitutional law and human rights law have been published widely in four languages. Formerly he served as president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s independent, nonpartisan advisory Commission on Unalienable Rights.

Anna Haskins testifies at National Academies session on intergenerational poverty

2022-05-02T09:15:00-04:00

Anna Haskins, the Andrew V. Tackes Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, was one of eight experts asked to testify at a public information-gathering session on policies and programs to reduce intergenerational poverty. The April 14 webinar, sponsored by the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, was centered on outcomes resulting from current child welfare and justice systems.

Haskins is a former elementary school teacher, and much of her academic work focuses on the intersection of family and the educational and criminal justice systems, and how these institutions preserve and mitigate social inequality. She kicked off the panel dedicated to perspectives from the criminal justice system.

“I want to start us today with a brief overview of the racial disparities present in our criminal legal system, as they are essential to understanding intergenerational impacts and connections to poverty,” Haskins said. “It is well documented that the American criminal legal system has massive racial disparities. These are present in who is targeted by police, who interacts with the criminal legal system, who is arrested and who is ultimately incarcerated. Black, Latino and Indigenous men and women are much more likely to be incarcerated in both prison and jail than their white counterparts, and these disparities are doubly relevant as they also have intergenerational implications, as many who experience incarceration are parents.”

Data show parental incarceration has increased fivefold between 1980 and 2012. In 2012, 1 in 25 children had a parent who was incarcerated. Today’s numbers are similar, Haskins said, adding up to 10 million children who have experienced parental incarceration — including those who had a parent in jail (not prison), previously incarcerated or on parole. “This is a relatively new phenomenon and unique to the United States,” Haskins said.

Racial disparities in mass incarceration translate into racial disparities in exposure to parental incarceration, Haskins noted. According to a number of studies, risk of exposure to parental incarceration is estimated to be 1 in 4 for Black children, 1 in 10 for Latino children and 1 in 25 for white children.

Anna Haskins

The educational system in the U.S. can offer a chance for upward mobility, Haskins remarked, but she has found a detrimental impact on educational success for children who experience parental incarceration, especially for Black boys. Using data from the national Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey that has been tracking a group of nearly 5,000 children born to mostly unmarried parents from 1998 to 2000, she found the first educational drawback for children who experience paternal incarceration is lack of readiness for school at age 5. In the middle of childhood (around age 9), affected children have higher rates of grade retention and being placed in special education classes.

“These two indicators — grade retention and special education placement — are actually key indicators for educational detainment in the U.S.,” Haskins said. “In the end, it [parental incarceration] takes kids and puts them on lower educational trajectories instead of higher ones as early as third grade. Paternal incarceration was also associated with lower scores on cognitive assessments and higher reports of problem behaviors for boys and girls of all backgrounds. A lot of literature talks about problem behaviors leading children to having increased likelihood of suspension or expulsion, which also leads to increased likelihood of being involved in the criminal legal system themselves. Also, paternal incarceration increased the likelihood that [affected] elementary school children were attending more contextually disadvantaged schools.”

In addition to early educational outcomes, Haskins has also conducted research from the year 15 data of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey that shows that paternal incarceration is also associated with diminished post-secondary expectations among Black teens. “The negative credential of a father’s incarceration shapes college expectations for 15-year-olds to the same degree as the positive credential of a father’s post-secondary education does,” Haskins said. “When it comes to shaping academic expectations, paternal incarceration is not only the most common among Black youth, but is also the most consequential.” Other scholars in the field, she said, have found that children who have experienced parental incarceration are more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to enroll in and graduate from college.

Researchers in the field have identified four main effects felt by children and families of incarcerated parents: trauma, stigma, stress and ambiguous loss. For example, affected children experience more material hardship and residential mobility than their peers and this stress, strain and instability impacts them emotionally, developmentally and socially, resulting in schooling setbacks, Haskins said. She underscored that policies that work toward crafting ways to address financial hardships and instability created by parental incarceration should be championed.

In further investigating policies that could improve intergenerational educational outcomes for affected families, Haskins is reviewing college-in-prison programs. She stressed that this is an ideal time to invest in research assessing program effectiveness, especially with the reinstatement of federal Pell grants and funding for college in prison coursework like the Moreau College Initiative (a joint Notre Dame and Holy Cross College program, formerly known as the Westville Education Initiative).

“So exploring these intergenerational impacts of a parent’s participation in college in prison programs flips on its head the directionality of the school-to-prison pipeline, and really opens up the idea of engagement with college in prison can maybe lead to increased positive benefits and a reconnection to the education system for children,” she said. “It’s much cheaper to educate than to incarcerate.”

Rise in trust of institutions led to boost in entrepreneurial intent, especially among STEM undergraduates

2022-04-06T11:00:00-04:00

Many factors go into the decision of whether to become an entrepreneur. One component that hasn’t received much academic scrutiny is potential entrepreneurs’ trust in institutions. Yong Suk Lee, assistant professor of technology, economy and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough 91��Ƶ of Global Affairs, studied how former South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s 2016 impeachment due to corruption and abuse of power affected people’s trust in government institutions.

“We find that the impeachment ruling increased people’s trust in government, and increased trust in government is associated with an increase in entrepreneurial intent,” Lee and his co-author Charles Eesley at Stanford University wrote in their recently published paper in the journal Organization Science. “High levels of corruption and rent-seeking in the government may deter talented people from taking risks and investing in potentially productive entrepreneurial activities. Corruption and rent-seeking may reduce the expected returns from entrepreneurship and increase uncertainty. Increased trust in the institutions of government could therefore increase the entrepreneurial intent of potentially productive entrepreneurs, especially those that engage in high-risk and high-investment entrepreneurship.”

Park, the first female president of South Korea, had a longtime connection to her aide Choi Soon-sil, the child of an infamous cult leader. Some characterized their relationship as comparable to that of Rasputin and Russian Czar Nicholas Romanov. Park was accused of granting Choi and her family special favors and of creating fake foundations to accommodate extortion. Millions of South Koreans took to the streets to demand her removal as president, and the National Assembly voted in line with the people. Ultimately, the Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment. In the end, Park was sentenced to 24 years in prison and fined nearly $18 million after being found guilty of coercion and abuse of power.

Lee and his colleague were able to use this real-life scandal as a kind of natural experiment to gauge trust. The team surveyed 2,000 random individuals in South Korea between 20 and 60 years of age and an additional 1,000 college students who intended to enter the job market soon after graduation. In the end, more than 2,700 of those contacted completed and submitted the survey with an almost even split between male and female respondents.

In their pre-impeachment survey, Lee and Eesley found that 31.34 percent of respondents had the intention of starting a business in the next five years. The researchers asked specifically about trust in different entities and people including government, politicians, civil servants, the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, prosecutors, police, media and chaebols (large conglomerates). On average, people’s entrepreneurial intent did not change post-impeachment. However, they found that intent increased for those whose trust in the government increased after the impeachment.

Lee has previously studied entrepreneurship potential among Asian Americans and non-American Asians studying in the U.S. He found that, among Stanford alumni, Asian Americans have a higher rate of entrepreneurship than white Americans. However, non-American Asians have a substantially lower (by about 12 percentage points) start-up rate than Asian Americans.

“I had this overarching question: Who becomes entrepreneurs? At Stanford, entrepreneurship is big, with a relatively high share of entrepreneurial students of Asian heritage. The world is buzzing and trying to find out how entrepreneurship works in Silicon Valley,” Lee said. “One thing that’s pretty common in East Asia is that talented people go into very safe jobs — for example, in the government or as doctors or lawyers. There’s more hesitancy against entrepreneurship compared to the U.S.”

This drove him to want to examine which fields at South Korean academic institutions foster the most entrepreneurial intention. Lee and Eesley hypothesized that the benefits to entrepreneurship would need to be substantially higher for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors to consider entrepreneurship given the opportunity costs and better, often high-paying options outside of entrepreneurship. Correspondingly, trust in government institutions must be higher; otherwise, such individuals are likely to perceive the returns to entrepreneurship as too uncertain. The researchers found this to be true, especially among STEM majors at prominent universities.

“The relationship between trust in government and entrepreneurial intent is significantly stronger for individuals with science, technology, engineering and math degrees from top universities,” the researchers wrote. “Whereas prior literature at the intersection of institutions and entrepreneurship theorizes that institutional changes result in greater levels of entrepreneurship, relatively little work focuses on how institutions shape the characteristics of individuals becoming entrepreneurs.”

With yet another regime change underway in South Korea, opinions and motivations have likely changed. Lee and Eesley will potentially launch another survey, and they are conducting related research in China.

Political motivation often comes down to personal assessment of other races’ deservingness

2022-03-30T14:00:00-04:00

Racial Resentment in the Political Mind

While maybe not racially prejudiced, a broad swath of American citizens nonetheless do and say things that racists do, according to a new study.

“Everyday people are implicated, not because they are racist but because they possess certain values that lock in disadvantage for African Americans,” wrote Darren Davis, the Snyder Family Mission Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, and David C. Wilson, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, in their new book, “Racial Resentment in the Political Mind,” published by the University of Chicago Press. “Such ‘banality’ makes racial resentment frightening. While the overwhelming focus has been on the overt and blatant racists parading in hoods and capes, the ordinariness of racial resentment works in the same way as racial prejudice. As a comparison, lynchings were spearheaded by blatant racists, but thousands of everyday citizens were willing participants who cheered, posed for photographs, and departed with souvenirs as if they were state fairs.”

The term “racial resentment” has been around for decades and originally referred to a less blatant kind of racism in which Black people are seen as violating traditional norms and values like individualism. However, Davis and Wilson disagree with the way the term is defined and measured and, instead, looked to factors like deservingness and defense of the status quo across many years of data.

“The underlying theory is that people who are high in racial resentment are more likely to possess attitudes that reject special racial treatment and amelioration because they benefit African Americans and other minorities unjustly and unfairly,” they wrote.

“The book is predicated on this idea that whites perceive that the American way of life is changing; they perceive that they are being cut in line and that their status is being threatened — and being threatened by undeserving African Americans and other minorities — and that this costs them, thus legitimizing racial myths. It’s a little bit more sophisticated than just holding racial stereotypes,” Davis said.

Wilson added that racial attitudes can have many causes and can be motivated by a host of needs, including the need for security, the need for safety or the need to not feel like the world you see as fair is disrupted.

“Whenever someone receives something, they go through the automatic judgment of whether or not it’s deserved. When people perceive that someone is getting something they don’t deserve and they think that something is very important — a cherished outcome like a scholarship to a university or the ability to buy a house, or even being the first person in line because you got there early — whenever that system of fairness is disrupted, it produces resentment,” Wilson said. “What we’re saying is that that resentment becomes racialized because of the ways in which people think about systems of merit and beliefs that capitalism is fair.”

Wilson pointed out that some of these issues about deservingness are motivated by what might be called racism or prejudiced ideas, but it could be the inverse. “It may be the actual opposite — that racial attitudes like prejudice are motivated by holding certain values that undeserving people should be in a certain place, for example, or that they haven’t paid their dues.”

He stressed that people are not naturally born as racists or with prejudice, but that these are evolutionary traits that manifest because people are part of self-enhancing groups that they want to protect. These groups make people feel good and lead them to the conclusion that they are good people.

“So, if we’re good people and we have negative attitudes about African Americans, we can do two things: We can realize that we’re not good people, or we can blame African Americans,” Wilson said. “It’s easier to say that ‘it’s your fault and you should work harder’; that’s the deservingness mechanism that’s at play. The myth is that African Americans are not working hard and playing by the rules so, even when they do work hard and play by the rules, those [negative] values persevere and get applied more broadly.”

The authors note that it is fair for whites (and any other dominant group) to realize that society is changing, but they say that doesn’t mean it must be resisted and should not be misconstrued as reverse racism.

“I think that there are things taking place in society today that can actually give the perception that the status quo for whites is actually changing. For instance, trigger warnings; we have this renewed emphasis on diversity and inclusion; we have this reaction, this backlash toward political correctness; Barack Obama was elected for two terms; and we also have job outsourcing and immigration issues,” Davis said. “However, another argument that we make is that it is not unreasonable for whites to perceive that; these things are actually occurring. However, the extent to which African Americans and other minorities are benefiting from these things is misperceived.”

Davis and Wilson also tested how racial resentment relates to campaign appeals as well as schadenfreude as retribution. They found that campaign slogans that “convey a threat to the status quo and privilege have a special resonance.” In their related experiment, participants overwhelmingly interpreted President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rallying cry as African Americans forgetting their place.

“Many whites believe they are being left behind and disadvantaged by racial groups and policies, and reacting to this threat, they will gravitate toward candidates and campaign appeals that seek to protect and defend the status quo or their privilege,” Davis said. “‘Make America Great Again’ becomes a code for returning an era in which whites were more well off.”

The authors also found that high levels of racial resentment correlated with delight in the failure of those not in the majority who — as perceived by the white majority — have received unearned or undeserved perks at the expense of whites. They asked if people would be happy or sad when responding to things related to Obama, such as whether or not he would be identified as the best or worst president in history or his economic successes or failures. They found that “individuals with higher levels of racial resentment are more likely to express sadness in the face of African Americans’ accomplishments and happiness in the face of African Americans’ failures because they perceive African Americans as undeserving of success, and such success thus challenges their notion of justice and fairness.”

African Americans’ racial resentment toward whites is infrequently studied and, when done, Davis and Wilson noted, has been flawed and not equivalent to measurements applied to white racial resentment. The authors applied their same framework of deservingness and justice to African Americans and found that higher levels of racial resentment in African Americans translated into greater support for Obama and for increased spending on welfare and health care. It also manifested as lower support for Trump and decreased spending on law enforcement.

The Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government and the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy will host a book launch for “Racial Resentment in the Political Mind” from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Friday (April 1) in Room B101, Jenkins Nanovic Halls. It is open to the public, with limited seating. Lunch will be provided. The book launch will also be available via Zoom. For more information, click here.

Novel study linking undocumented immigrants with primary care services significantly reduces emergency department use

2022-03-14T14:00:00-04:00

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) allowed many in the U.S. who had never before had health insurance to finally be able to acquire that vital benefit. However, undocumented immigrants – who often turn to emergency rooms for care – are not eligible for coverage under the ACA.

Wilson Family LEO Assistant Professor Adrienne Sabety and a colleague from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) partnered with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to determine how access to primary care would affect both undocumented immigrants’ health and the use of emergency departments for routine care.

The intervention study provided nearly 2,500 undocumented immigrants access to nine primary care clinics in New York City. The 14-month project showed that average-risk patients increased their doctors’ office visits by 17 percent, which lowered emergency department visits by 21 percent, saving emergency departments nearly $200 per person. The results for high-risk individuals was even more dramatic, with a 42 percent decrease in emergency room use, which led to a 68 percent reduction in costs for non-admitted high-risk patients (equaling a savings of almost $500 per patient). The results of their research are available today as a NBER working paper.

Prior research shows that undocumented immigrants make up nearly a quarter of the uninsured in the U.S., and they have little chance of obtaining coverage. This lack of healthcare is not only affecting the current generation of undocumented immigrants, but also their children, many of them citizens by birth. While undocumented immigrants largely do not have access to health insurance, they can access primary care at safety-net clinics, like federally qualified health centers and community health clinics, although these care options are underused.

Sabety and her colleagues wanted to test their idea—of making initial appointments for patients at primary care, safety-net clinics—to relieve stress on already overburdened emergency departments. This provides access to healthcare while avoiding issues with insurance expansion.

“Formally insuring undocumented immigrants remains politically untenable; direct access programs may be a more politically palatable method for expanding access outside of the typical ‘insurance’ framework,” Sabety and her co-author wrote. “Expanding access to undocumented immigrants is even more relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a disproportionate impact on low-income and immigrant populations, exacerbating longstanding healthcare disparities.”

According a 2017 report from the New York City Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, just over 1 million New Yorkers live in a household with at least one undocumented immigrant, and about 88 percent of the 276,000 children in these households are lawfully resident New Yorkers. The same report specifies that median annual earnings for undocumented immigrants ($25,300) is significantly lower than earnings for U.S.-born citizens ($45,500) and, since they are not eligible for most public benefits, their poverty rate is high relative to other immigrants (the foreign-born poverty rate is 22.1 compared to 28.8 for undocumented immigrants).

The 14-month study was too brief to confirm a substantially decreased long-run mortality, but the results are very promising. Individual patients who visited participating clinics were 16.2 percentage points more likely to receive a chronic condition diagnosis, 33.8 percentage points more likely to receive a diabetes screen and 45.4 percentage points more likely to receive a blood pressure screen. According to several studies conducted by other academics from 2010-2019, the increase in diabetes and blood pressure screens alone translates into a 12 percent reduction in long-run mortality from cardiovascular disease.

The data collected by Sabety and her co-author is a vital addition to the body of work focused on better characterizing the demographics of undocumented immigrants, as well as their healthcare and economic situations. Their baseline survey –translated into 32 languages– consisted of 75 questions and established that only one-quarter of undocumented immigrants have access to a primary care physician. This is a striking deficiency compared to the 60 percent of Medicaid-eligible individuals with access to care. Their study also inspired similar programs in Los Angeles and San Francisco that have been popular among those cities’ undocumented populations.

“The belief that undocumented immigrants don’t use healthcare services because they are unable to obtain insurance is wrong,” Sabety said. “Instead, by providing undocumented immigrants better access to primary care, they decrease their use of more costly settings, like the emergency department. This is a win-win.”

The team’s research perfectly exemplifies the mission of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), based on the belief that academic researchers, service providers and policymakers all play a critical role in ending poverty. LEO matches top researchers with passionate leaders in the social service sector to conduct impact evaluations that identify the innovative, effective and scalable programs and policies that help people move permanently out of poverty.

It is a long-established fact that undocumented immigrants have high poverty rates. “A higher percentage of immigrant New Yorkers live in poverty despite working more hours and participating in the labor force at the same or greater rates than U.S.-born New Yorkers,” according to the 2020 New York Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) annual report.

“We are incredibly grateful to our partner, New York City’s Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, which worked with us on this project,” Sabety said. “Together we’ll be able to take these results to other cities to guide their thinking around caring for their own undocumented populations.”

With no political home, ‘seamless garment Catholics’ still hold ‘paramount importance’

2022-03-10T14:00:00-05:00

Although the Catholic Church is the largest individual denomination in the United States, the political behavior of Catholic voters has received relatively little attention from political scientists.

Now, new research from the University of Notre Dame looks at so-called seamless garment Catholics (SGCs), or those Catholics who embrace the Church’s policy positions on both sides of the political spectrum.

A biblical phrase referencing the seamless robe Jesus wore before his crucifixion, the term “seamless garment” is attributed to Catholic activist Eileen Egan, who said, “The protection of life is a seamless garment. You can’t protect some life and not others.” Politically, the seamless garment perspective is associated with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life,” which called for not only opposition to abortion, but also support for anti-poverty programs, immigrant rights and care for the elderly.

The research team, consisting of Notre Dame Professor of Political Science Geoffrey Layman along with Notre Dame doctoral candidate Levi Allen and University of Maryland, Baltimore County Associate Professor of Political Science Laura Antkowiak (a 2000 Notre Dame alumna), found that younger Catholics are more likely than older Catholics to hold seamless garment perspectives. Latino Catholics, the fastest-growing group in American Catholicism, are more likely than white Catholics to be in the SGC camp. Church attendance and commitment to the Catholic faith also work to make people who hold seamless garment views more likely to stay in the SGC fold. These results were recently published in the journal Advances in Political Psychology.

Neither major U.S. political party represents Cardinal Bernardin’s consistent ethic. Republicans are staunchly pro-life on abortion, but oppose social welfare spending, loosening of immigration restrictions and environmental protection programs — an emphasis of the Catholic Church since Pope Francis issued his 2015 encyclical on the environment. Democrats support social welfare, immigrant rights and environmental protection, but are adamantly pro-choice on abortion.

Given the two parties’ dominance of American political life, it is no wonder that SGCs are a small and shrinking group. The researchers found that SGCs make up just under 9 percent of American Catholics, down from about 16 percent in the 1980s.

However, Antkowiak, Allen and Layman say that SGCs’ political influence still can be significant. For more than four decades, Catholic votes have been evenly split. In 2020, for example, 50 percent of Catholics voted for Trump and 49 percent supported Biden. In that context, SGCs “may be of paramount importance.”

How, then, does this important set of American Catholics decide how to vote?

The authors contend that SGCs are politically “cross-pressured” because each party represents only part of the Church’s policy positions. And unlike other religious voters, who may be pulled in one direction by their faith and in another direction by their other social ties, the researchers argue that “the cross-pressures that Catholic voters are subjected to are unique because the Catholic Church itself espouses policies that fall on both sides of the political spectrum.”

Layman and the other researchers believe that SGCs will persist despite the partisan pressures working against them. They find that SGCs get around this political dilemma in two ways. One approach many take is not solving the dilemma at all. They choose not to choose between the Democrats and Republicans by being more likely than other Catholics to either abstain from voting or vote for third-party candidates.

The other, more common way that SGCs address their political paradox is by using what the researchers call a “select-and-project” strategy. First, they select political candidates based on which set of issues is more important to them. Second, SGCs project their own views on policy issues they deem less important onto the candidates they support.

Catholics with seamless garment views essentially fool themselves politically, the researchers say. SGCs who vote for Republicans because of abortion perceive those Republicans to be more liberal on social welfare issues than they really are. SGCs who vote for Democrats because of their support for anti-poverty programs believe that those Democrats are more pro-life on abortion than they really are.

In the end, however, most seamless garment Catholics prioritize social welfare issues, immigration and the environment over abortion. Accordingly, they tend to vote Democratic. The authors believe that is likely to remain true even if the abortion issue grows in importance as the Supreme Court wrestles with challenges to Roe v. Wade. Based on their research, “it appears that as long as social justice issues are at least equal with abortion in importance, Seamless Garment Catholics are unlikely to flock to the GOP.”

Antkowiak, Allen and Layman contend that this study and the questions they posed for future research could help political scientists track the influence of the Catholic Church in American politics. Also, because SGCs’ “maintenance of partisan-incongruent policy preferences bucks prevailing political trends, they may be more broadly interesting to political psychologists and scholars of voting behavior.” The authors’ findings “also may offer food for thought for Catholic religious and political leaders as they battle for the allegiance of the laity.”

New book addresses dangers of technological warfare, provides recommendations for avoiding rush into conflict

2022-03-10T11:15:00-05:00

Amid a devastating war in Ukraine that has already claimed thousands of lives and forced nearly 2 million Ukrainians to become refugees, retired Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff, an adjunct professor at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values at the University of Notre Dame, offers context and advice on modern warfare and how to “step back from the brink” of war in his book “Future Peace: Technology, Aggression, and the Rush to War.” Published by University of Notre Dame Press, it is a sequel to his 2017 book, “Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield.”

He found that his first volume surfaced many unanswered questions, particularly about the justification of war, known as “jus ad bellum” in Latin. In “Future Peace,” Latiff, who received his doctorate and M.S. in materials science and his bachelor’s degree in physics from Notre Dame, questions our overreliance on technology.

“Unlike the past, today’s weapons are too complex to understand even by those who employ them,” he wrote. “More concerning still is the fact that modern weapons and the decisions to use them are increasingly computer controlled, with human decision-making receding into the background and being replaced by automation. Unproven technologies incorporating artificial intelligence and autonomous behavior are being rushed into weapons and decision aids.”

He noted that the public has been led to believe that technology will make wars easier to fight, but that is untrue. “Worse yet, those same new technologies that so enthrall us may actually increase the chances of war.”

Latiff also examines the pressure-cooker scenario created by the growing animosity between the U.S. and its adversaries. He points out the sheer amount of time and resources the U.S. spent on fighting the global war on terror while other countries reimagined their own military might.

“Following the attacks of 9/11, we spent more than a decade focusing almost solely on the global war on terror,” Latiff wrote. “During that time, China, Russia, and others who had seen our amazing technological superiority in Kuwait and Iraq in the First Gulf War and who had seen the U.S. use of overwhelming force in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 determined that they would not want to be dominated in such a way by the U.S. in the future. While we chased terrorists, China and Russia aggressively modernized their military forces and equipment.”

He also addresses the U.S.’s globally deployed and thinly stretched military, writing, “Nonstop deployments are taking an enormous toll on our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. Our special operations forces, in particular, are being stretched to the breaking point. The tempo of operations and the lack of downtime increase the incidence of mistakes, some deadly.”

Because the American public is intentionally kept unaware of many troop deployments and other military actions and the wars the country is involved in are geographically far, many people have become “fairly blasé” about conflicts, Latiff said. He cites lack of civics education (prompted by education funding cuts) in high schools and a sort of closed-circuit conversation between high-level experts as some of the reasons many in the U.S. remain uneducated about the military and its actions. He calls for more experienced practitioners to be involved in teaching the next generation of leaders, and he asks the American public to demand answers from Congress.

“If they are uninterested, then Congress will be equally uninterested in reining in their profligacy or putting a check on the executive. Perhaps if the public had an understanding of the real costs of and reasons for war, there might be more resistance to U.S. involvement in numerous conflicts.”

Latiff teaches a popular course at Notre Dame called The Ethics of Emerging Weapons Technologies, which he believes is filling undergraduates’ unmet need for information on the topics of war and peace. He writes that young people are “vitally interested in questions of ethics and morality.”

Young and old from around the world are watching in horror as some of the consequences of war Latiff outlines in the book are illustrated as Russian President Vladimir Putin carries out his brutal assault on Ukraine.

“If the unprovoked attack on Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that massive stocks of armaments and new high-tech weapons embolden autocrats and invite their own use and that, sadly, it is innocent non-combatants who suffer most as a result,” he said. “Civilized countries can do better.”

The book was the focus of Latiff's research when he served as a faculty fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study during the 2019-2020 academic year. It is available now, and the John J. Reilly Center and the Notre Dame International Security Center will co-host a book launch from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. April 11 (Monday) at Foley’s in O’Neill Hall at Notre Dame. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, click here.

Ukrainian Byzantine priest leads prayer service at Basilica of the Sacred Heart in solidarity with Ukraine

2022-03-02T10:00:00-05:00

The United Nations estimates that more than half a million people have fled Ukraine since the unprovoked Russian invasion began on Thursday (Feb. 24). The University of Notre Dame enjoys a special relationship with Ukrainians, including the presentation in 2019 of the Notre Dame Award to Archbishop Borys Gudziak, president of the Ukrainian Catholic University, for his work for religious and academic freedom and for his courageous and visionary leadership of the first Catholic university established in the territory of the former soviet Union.

In a show of solidarity with Ukraine, a prayer service for the people of Ukraine was held Monday evening at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. The Basilica was filled to capacity for the vigil, led by Father Andrij Hlabse, S.J., a theology doctoral candidate and Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic priest.

The service was a molében for the Virgin Mary, a supplicatory prayer service used within the Orthodox Christian Church and various Eastern Catholic Churches that honors Christ, the Virgin Mary or a specific feast, saint or martyr.

Father Hlabse welcomed the congregation in English, Ukrainian and Russian, expressing solidarity with the people of Ukraine. He then reflected on his time as an undergraduate at Notre Dame when he would look to the Golden Dome and pray. He noted the numerous golden domes that likewise adorn many churches in Ukraine.

“We can imagine how many people looked at those domes against the broad and bright Ukrainian sky with feelings similar to ours when we see Notre Dame’s Golden Dome gleaming against the firmament. And yet today, that consoling and inspiring sight is occluded from Ukrainians’ eyes,” he said. “Instead of glistening domes and bright blue draping, the sky is filled with the roar of the aggressor’s machines of war, the thick black smoke emanating from a city attacked below the specter and even the stench of death. This cloud of material and human destruction hovers over the whole nation, obstructing its sight. We can thank God that here in the West, here at Notre Dame, such ominous clouds do not hang over us and the Golden Dome just next door. But, even if these literal hazes of pain and suffering are not here, further west, the no-less-real clouds of moral consequences and fallout loom. We cannot flee from them. We cannot close our eyes and wish them away. And these clouds are as thick and dire as those that envelop the Ukrainian capital.”

Referencing the 2014 Maidan Revolution and the rebirth of civil society in Ukraine, Father Hlabse noted that a space was opening up “for a truly humane civilization, marked by respect for human dignity — a dignity so loved and longed for because it had been denied for so long.” The Ukrainian people’s desire to look westward and to become a part of Europe has been cut short, first by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces invading and annexing Crimea, initiating an ongoing war, and now with all-out invasion.

Students draped in the Ukrainian flag listen to Father Andrij Hlabse, S.J., during the prayer vigil for peace in Ukraine at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. (Photo by Barbara Johnston/University of Notre Dame)

Father Hlabse emphasized that there is still room for hope and that by offering the evening’s service to the Virgin Mary, the congregation was asking her for Pokrova, meaning “Mary’s protection” in Ukrainian. Her protective mantle, he said, “pushes away the clouds of egotism and materialism. It saves from the mere complacency of words — strong as they may be — that otherwise permit any one of us to continue comfortably, totally undisturbed, making a mockery of real virtue which has to sacrifice. Mary’s mantle helps us realize that solidarity is a virtue which must be exercised in order not to atrophy, or even die.”

Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., closed the service by asking participants to look to the Virgin Mary’s example as the world witnesses the horror of war.

“Our hearts ache for the people of Ukraine in their time of uncertainty and suffering. We so want to help, but feel helpless at this time,” said Father Jenkins. “In our reading for tonight, we hear that Mary stood at the foot of the cross, utterly helpless to prevent the suffering and death of Jesus. Yet her presence there spoke powerfully and meant everything. So we at Notre Dame must be present to the suffering of our sisters and brothers in Ukraine, even if we cannot prevent their suffering.”

He urged all to pray for an end to the war and encouraged people to donate to relief agencies.

“Let us pray for a just peace, for an end of the fighting, bombing and forced migration. Let us join with the suffering of the Ukrainian people in a small way with our self-denial this Lent,” Father Jenkins said. “And let us give alms, by donating to a relevant cause, such as Catholic Relief Services, Caritas Internationalis or other agencies that are listed on the ND International website. Let us stand with Our Lady and the people of Ukraine in their time of need.”

Brain shortcuts may be partially to blame for vaccine and mask non-compliance

2022-02-03T13:00:00-05:00

If close friends and family members who contracted COVID-19 had mild cases and recovered quickly, or if they had an adverse reaction to the vaccine, your brain might convince you that you’d have the same experience. This phenomenon, known as “availability heuristic,” is one of a handful of cognitive shortcuts, which conserve brain energy and are generally understood to be positive and beneficial. For example, an alternative route to work could save you time and fuel, or a mathematical method could aid you in solving an equation more efficiently.

However, “these cognitive shortcuts can be deadly during a pandemic,” warn Theodore Beauchaine, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, and his co-authors.

Beauchaine and his colleagues break down the cognitive shortcuts that can affect how we assess risk and decide to behave in the face of the pandemic in a recent paper in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. A second shortcut is known as “representativeness heuristic.” When the brain relies on this cognitive shortcut, it might tell you only elderly people are at risk of contracting COVID-19, despite an abundance of empirical evidence to the contrary.

“We may ignore or fail to account for basic facts about SARS-CoV-2 and decide to engage with people who we believe are unlikely to be infected, even though we are all at risk of exposure and infection with this novel pathogen,” the researchers wrote.

Within this shortcut are two important subsets that can result in putting ourselves and others at risk. We may make erroneous assumptions via the “insensitivity to predictability” heuristic when, for example, we believe a friend who currently has COVID-19 but is only experiencing mild symptoms isn’t spreading the virus and won’t suffer long-term health consequences.

Throughout the pandemic, authorities in many communities have sought to limit social gatherings to slow the spread of the virus. When our brains use the “insensitivity to sample size” shortcut, we assume that infection rates among small gatherings is indicative of the overall population infection rate, which is false.

“In the context of infectious disease, small groups may deviate exponentially from the population infection rate given that members of small groups are non-random, often sharing social contacts and high-risk occupations,” Beauchaine and his colleagues wrote.

The “anchoring heuristic” refers to humans’ tendency to cling to initial information we receive about something, even when presented with updated information. The authors give the example of people continuing to cite the inaccurate statement by the surgeon general early in the pandemic that masks are ineffective, despite subsequent studies that proved their effectiveness.

In the 1970s, studies conducted by Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that everyone’s brains — even doctors and mental health professionals — take these mental shortcuts to preserve cognitive resources. They also found that extensive life experience can’t override — and might even accentuate — cognitive shortcuts.

“Education, awareness and further research on the role of heuristics in the spread of infectious disease should help to improve decision-making and reduce risky behavior during a pandemic. To make accurate risk assessments, engage in safe behaviors and stop the spread of COVID-19, we must account for heuristics and their influence on our perceptions and behaviors,” the authors concluded.

Contact: Colleen Sharkey, assistant director, media relations, 574-999-0102, csharke2@nd.edu

Supportive early childhood environments can help decrease effects of trauma, study finds

2022-01-18T13:00:00-05:00

Researchers know that experiencing a high number of adverse events in childhood correlates with worse health outcomes in adulthood. These studies have led to an emphasis on trauma-informed practice in schools and workplaces in an attempt to mitigate the harm of early adversity.

At the other end of the spectrum, focusing on wellness, Darcia Narvaez, emerita professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, has helped identify humanity’s baseline for childhood care. She has developed the breakthrough concept of the evolved nest (or evolved developmental niche; EDN). EDN represents common practices for our species over its 6-million-year history that bear on child development, child raising and adult behavior.

In a first-of-its-kind study conducted by Narvaez and doctoral student Mary Tarsha and published in the journal Anxiety, Stress and Coping, results show that positive childhood experiences can help buffer the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on physiological health in adult women.

Narvaez and colleagues have been measuring EDN experience in children and adults to find out its relation to well-being, sociality and morality. The adult measure, EDN-history, is a self-reported measure of the adult’s perception of their childhood experiences — e.g., how responsive their relationships were and how much free play, affectionate touch, family togetherness and positive climate they experienced. The measure also asks about corporal punishment and negative home climate, which are reverse scored. The more positive aspects and fewer negative, the higher the EDN-history score will be.

After study participants self-reported on their EDN and ACE histories, Narvaez and Tarsha measured the women’s physiological regulation by monitoring vagus nerve functioning. The vagus nerve is a central component of the nervous system and manages many important bodily functions including digestion, respiration and heart rate. It also plays an important role in healthy functioning, including social functioning, with its impairment a sign of psychopathology.

Vagal tone (or vagal activity) was measured during relaxing tasks — e.g., watching a serene video with butterflies — and during a more stressful task — putting together puzzles while being timed.

“Vagal tone is a measure of the heartbeat intervals correlated with respiratory cycles or spontaneous breathing,” said Narvaez. “Vagal tone is highly influenced by early life experience, with stable responsive care supporting its healthy development.”

Narvaez and Tarsha were able to show that during both relaxing and stressful conditions, EDN-history scores buffered the negative effects of ACE scores, helping women adapt to the changing contexts in more resilient ways. During the stressful condition when women needed to ramp up their stress response to focus on a challenging task, greater EDN-history helped facilitate this in a way that was not excessive — so they were not overly stressed. Then, when women needed to relax and calm down during non-stressful conditions, strong EDN-history also helped them adapt and self-calm.

“Physiological adaptability is a key component of physical and psychological well-being and resilience,” said Tarsha, who is a doctoral candidate in psychology and peace studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace 91��Ƶ. “Experiences of EDN in childhood may not only buffer effects of adversity but also support the physiological building blocks of health and resilience.”

EDN is a way of not only promoting the positive — what children need to develop well — but also reducing the negative physiological effects of adversity and trauma, the researchers noted. It is also important because it provides an insight into a possible key path to developing adult resilience.

“You need a healthy vagal tone to allow you to get close to someone. And, if the vagus nerve is not functioning well, you aren’t going to demonstrate as much compassion,” Narvaez said. “Vagal tone has both direct and indirect effects on morality.”

Tarsha said there is a growing awareness of the impact of trauma in the peacebuilding field, but there is a massive gap in understanding how positive experiences of EDN can support wellness.

“It’s important for policymakers and peacebuilders to understand EDN, because they are wrestling with how to help families, especially those in conflict zones,” Tarsha said.

This study is part of a series of studies on the long-term effects of EDN experiences and vagal regulation. In another study in the series, 6-year-old children who experienced more self-directed play in the prior week, as reported by their mothers, had better vagal regulation.

“These findings are adding to converging evidence indicating that the evolved nest components are important for healthy development,” Narvaez and Tarsha wrote. “Human psychology research should encompass an evolutionary understanding of our species’ development by examining the evolved components that support healthy development.”

Narvaez and colleagues from other universities recently authored a separate paper published in American Psychologist that further underscores the importance of EDN. They proposed a developmental evolutionary psychology theory that orients to dynamic development in the present, rather than to the biological determinism of genetic inheritance.

“Every individual constructs their personhood through real-time engagement with the world, so it matters what kind of relational experiences the individual has,” they wrote. Taking early life experience seriously means attending to EDN, which perhaps is the best way to promote health and resilience for the long term.

Contact: Colleen Sharkey, assistant director of media relations, csharke2@nd.edu, 574-631-9958