A research team led from the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain found that adolescent girls
who have a stronger tendency to ruminate show different patterns of brain activity when
faced with social rejection.
Funded by a three-year $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Distinguished Professor George R. Mangun, director of the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, is launching a project to better understand the cognitive mechanisms behind realistic voluntary attention, or attention directed by an individual’s free will. The project will be conducted in collaboration with engineering colleagues at the
University of Florida.
Encouraging Latinx adolescents of Mexican origin to embrace their ethnic pride, cultural values, and connections to their cultural community contributes to positive development and better adjustment during adolescence, a new University of California, Davis, psychology study suggests.
“We found evidence suggesting that increasing ethnic pride and connection to cultural values may significantly improve psychological well-being for Mexican-origin adolescents,” said Lisa Johnson, lead author and doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain.
A program that gets students into labs as early as their first year at UC Davis transforms lives — leading many to pursue careers in research. Accelerating Success by Providing Intensive Research Experience, or ASPIRE, has begun reaching out to a wider pool of students. “We wanted to find the students who, given this opportunity, would go the farthest relative to where they started,” says co-founder Steve Luck, Distinguished Professor of Psychology.
When the day is filled with news of mass shootings, police malfeasance and “me too” courtroom escapades, people turn to entertainment media, where they watch — as it turns out — more negativity, a new University of California, Davis, study suggests.
Researchers have long known that people use media to manage their emotions. But why do some people watch a Disney animated flick and others a biopic about the holocaust, asked Richard Huskey, assistant professor of communication and corresponding author of the study.
Babies learn from looking at human faces, leading many parents and childhood experts to worry about possible developmental harm from widespread face-masking during the pandemic. A new study by researchers in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science allays those concerns, finding that 6- to 9-month-old babies can form memories of masked faces and recognize those faces when unmasked.
When Queen Máxima of the Netherlands visited San Francisco this week to celebrate her country’s economic ties with California, a UC Davis couple was on hand to celebrate their own Dutch connections and to represent the campus. Husband and wife psychology professors George “Ron” Mangun, who is American, and Tamara Swaab, who is Dutch, were invited guests at a Sept. 6 royal reception at San Francisco City Hall.
Both humans and other animals are good at learning by inference, using information we do have to figure out things we cannot observe directly. New research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, shows how our brains achieve this by constructing cognitive maps.
A UC Davis psychology major who hopes to someday work as a clinical psychologist with clients on the autism spectrum has been awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the nation’s leading scholarship for undergraduates pursuing research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Lynnette Hersh is one of two UC Davis students and among 417 sophomores and juniors nationwide selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants to receive the prestigious STEM scholarship
You’re sitting at home, working at your laptop, and all of a sudden you hear the refrigerator shut off. Before you noticed its sudden silence, were you conscious it was on?
