New research has found that testosterone is the key hormone that drives gender-based differences in responses to social stress. The UC Davis study encompassed six separate experiments with mice to isolate what changes in the brain drive these differences between males and females.
Psychologist Ross Thompson’s new book, “The Brain Development Revolution: Science, the
Media, and Public Policy” tells the story of the 1997 “I Am Your Child” campaign with an
incisive analysis spanning how the campaign captured everyone’s attention, the backlash from
scientists and the continuing reverberations today.
Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton would have studied chemistry if not for an introductory textbook that would define his 50-year career studying greatness. Simonton will receive the 2024 Ernest R. Hilgard Lifetime Achievement Award for his work.
Students from across the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis shared their research on some of California’s most pressing policy issues in a fast-paced poster session during this summer’s UC Center Sacramento Undergraduate Research Showcase.
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.
An aspiring psychologist who aims to improve mental health care for people on the autism spectrum and a political science/English double major who plans to be a legal advocate for marginalized communities are the recipients of the College of Letters and Science’s top prizes for graduating seniors at UC Davis.
Melinda Guzman, Cathy Rodriguez Aguirre and Lydia Ramirez attended UC Davis at different times, pursued different majors in the College of Letters and Science, and followed different paths to successful careers in law, business advocacy and banking. Their paths converged at various times, most recently with a shared honor: each was named to The Sacramento Bee’s inaugural list of Top 25 Latino Change Makers for leading positive transformations in their communities.
Two faculty in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis have been recognized by their campus peers for outstanding teaching. Camelia Hostinar, associate professor of psychology, is a recipient of the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award: Undergraduate. Tim Brelinski, a continuing lecturer in classics, received the Academic Federation’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award
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.
