Category: News

 

As the pandemic has led us to reassess what’s important in our lives, many people have been reevaluating their friendships, reflecting on who they really value and which relationships are healthy or balanced. Although the pandemic may have spurred these reexaminations, experts say that taking a close look at one’s circle of friends is something we should do from time to time, because our friendships can have a substantial effect on our health and well-being, for better or worse.

“We’re seeing more and more research about how beneficial it is to your health to have healthy friendships,” says Beverley Fehr, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and author of “Friendship Processes.” “It also implies the flip side: If your friendships are not healthy, you will experience negative health outcomes.” In other words, she says, “bad friendships are bad for us,” both physically and emotionally.

On the physiological front, research has found that negative or competitive social interactions are associated with increased inflammatory activity in the body. And a study involving older adults found that negative interactions with friends were linked with increases in blood pressure among women. Meanwhile, psychological research has found that friendships that have a negative emotional valence, involving frequent conflicts, can compromise someone’s self-esteem. And studies have found that negative interactions with friends — including being on the receiving end of critical behavior, privacy invasions, social undermining or failure to deliver promised help — can take a toll on mood, morale and other aspects of psychological well-being.

Despite friendships’ effects on our well-being, people often don’t think as deeply about friendships as they do about relationships with family members or romantic partners. “There’s recognition that romantic relationships require active maintenance,” Fehr says. To our detriment, however, “we don’t seem to have that same belief about friendships.” Friendship maintenance includes assessing whether a particular friendship is healthy and rewarding or detrimental to your sense of well-being — and, in the case of the latter, what you can do to return it to the positive side of the spectrum.

Evaluating a friendship and taking action

“The mark of a good friendship is it makes us feel good about ourselves and we get a sense of belonging,” says OIBR Affiliate, Richard Slatcher, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia. To determine whether a relationship meets that benchmark, Slatcher recommends asking yourself these questions when you spend time with a particular friend: Do I feel good about myself afterward? Does this person make me feel like I’m understood or do they get where I’m coming from?

When you’re not getting what you want or need from a particular friendship, you’ll want to decide whether to address the issue head on, let it slide or dial back the friendship.

If you decide you want to address the issue, however, some forethought is in order. “People often want to be open and honest and get things out there about what’s going wrong, but you need to know if the friend you’re dealing with will be receptive to that,” says Jan Yager, a sociologist based in Connecticut and author of “Friendgevity: Making and Keeping the Friends Who Enhance and Even Extend Your Life.” If you choose to address the issues directly, Yager recommends asking yourself: What do I want to get out of this? Do I want to engage in a back-and-forth dialogue about these issues?

Once you’re clear about your goals and willingness to have a dialogue, the first step is to validate the connection between the two of you and be clear that you’re bringing this up because you value your friendship, advises Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist and friendship expert in Ottawa. Then, “focus on the dynamic — what you find working versus not working — and invite the other person’s input.”

Ultimately, “friendships are not chiseled in stone,” Yager notes. “Not only do friendships shift over time, but your definition of friendship and your needs can change.” Although letting go of a particular friendship may make you feel sad initially, doing so may also free you up to develop new ones or to spend more time with the positive connections in your life.

Read the full article here.

More Information: Richard Slatcher

Korean pastor training program has created a paradigm shift against domestic violence

For immigrant women, escaping domestic abuse can be difficult. Language barriers and complex laws don’t help.

A year after eight Asian women were murdered in Atlanta, we’re still grappling with the objectification and stereotypes that sparked that rampage.

But conversations about violence perpetrated against Asian American women are happening. One program focused on faith leaders is helping them address domestic violence in the Korean American community.

For decades, places of worship have played a central role in immigrant communities in the United States helping them find jobs, housing and social programs.

“Whether that’s a mosque or a temple or a church. And for the Korean American population, that is exactly the same,” said OIBR Distinguished Scholar, Joon Choi, an associate professor of Social Work at the University of Georgia.

For Korean Americans, about 70% to 80% percent associate with protestant churches.

It’s why Choi who was researching domestic violence prevention, focused on houses of worship.

“From my experiences working as a counselor for domestic violence survivors and American domestic violence survivors, I found that many of them reach out to their ministers for help,” said Choi.

But Choi found only 16% of pastors she surveyed felt confident in addressing the needs of domestic violence victims.

“A lot of time these religious leaders would like to help these women and these survivors. However, they don’t know how to do that,” said Choi.

“Many pastors and many of the Korean community doesn’t exactly realize what is domestic violence,” said Reverend Paul Joo, a priest at One in Christ Episcopal Church in Prospect Heights, Illinois.

Joo says one obstacle he’s seen is the cultural embarrassment and stigma attached to issues of domestic violence.

“When we talk about it’s a shame for me. It’s a shame our family. Shame not only me. Shame to my husband and wife, too. So, we keep the secret,” said Joo.

Using a half-million-dollar grant from the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, Choi worked with partners like fellow public health professor, OIBR Distinguished Scholar, Pamela Orpinas, experts in domestic violence prevention and the Korean American faith community to develop a pastor training program.

“Addressing this from a Korean perspective with the language, with the Korean pastors, feedback was very important,” said Orpinas.

Taught in Korean, the online module portion presents the trainee with virtual case simulations allowing them to learn and make choices on how to confidently proceed.

“It really helps them to see what type of responses they provide to these survivors, how they can be helpful or unhelpful for them,” said Choi.

Over the last three years, more than 100 pastors from Chicago and Washington D.C. have gone through the program. It’s also helped them join hands with Asian American violence prevention organizations like KAN-WIN.

“This really made an opportunity for us to connect with them, dispel the myths surrounding gender-based violence, and also talk about options and resources for survivors, which is not many people know about them,” said Ji Hye Kim, executive director at KAN-WIN.

For Reverend Joo, the training has created a paradigm shift.

“It changed the concept of the domestic violence. And secondly, how do we approach how do we solve the problem?” said Joo.

But Choi says much more needs to be done.

“This is really a campaign that’s targeting people to speak up against domestic violence and also when they see survivors reaching out and then actually helping survivors to connect to services,” said Choi.

With another DOJ grant, she plans to expand the training to more pastors, spouses and partners in Korean American communities across the country.

For more information about this research: https://bit.ly/3MG8ffS

 

In May 2020, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard virtual arguments about the state’s stay-at-home order, Gov. Tony Evers pointed to a tenfold Covid surge in Brown County, home to a meatpacking plant whose workers are mostly Black and Latino according to The Washington Post.

Chief Justice Patience Roggensack said, then, that spikes in cases “were due to the meatpacking, though. That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the grassroots organization Voces de la Frontera, which advocates for the meatpacking workers, told WISN in May 2020 that Roggensack made “a racist comment and an elitist comment,” and suggested the judge did not believe the workers — who are mostly Black, Latino and immigrants — to be “’regular folks’ who deserve protection.”

Roggensack did not respond to the backlash publicly and a spokesperson for the justice told NBC News that she will not be commenting on the matter.

But her comments served as an early illustration of a pattern of attitudes about the pandemic, according to researchers from the University of Georgia. A new study from the school’s psychology department published in Social Science & Medicine, found that white people surveyed in the United States in fall 2020 cared less and were even more likely to shun pandemic safety precautions after learning about the disproportionate ways it impacts Black communities and other communities of color.

“When white people in the U.S. were more aware of racial disparities in Covid-19, they were less fearful of Covid-19,” said OIBR Affiliate, Allison Skinner-Dorkenoo, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and co-author of the study. “We found evidence of less empathy for people who are vulnerable to Covid-19 and we also found evidence of reduced support for safety precautions to prevent the spread of Covid-19.”

She added that the findings show that white people tend to care less about Covid and its impact when they believe it is “not a white people problem.”

Covid has ravaged Black communities since it began to spread in the U.S. The illness and its economic fallout have affected Black people more than others through everything from health and unemployment to education. Meanwhile, experts have consistently asserted that the negative impact is due not to biology, but to systemic racism. A fall study led by researchers with the National Cancer Institute found that Covid deaths among Black, Latino and Native Americans were up to four times higher than in white populations.

The plight of Black people during the pandemic is well-documented, and headlines about the health disparities have appeared since the early months of the crisis. But researchers of the recent study said attempts to inform the public of these persistent inequalities could “backfire.”

Instead of the news of vulnerable populations leading to empathy and care, it has largely prompted white people to consider themselves less vulnerable to the virus and, thus, fail to support safety precautions, the study implied.

The research included at least 2,000 white people under the age of 65 from across the country. There was, however, a small portion of participants for whom the articles about disparities had the opposite effect. White people who were aware of and knowledgeable about structural inequalities were more empathetic, fearful of the virus, and more likely to accept Covid safety precautions.

This, Skinner-Dorkenoo said, highlights perhaps one way of combating Covid apathy.

“I think there is potential to think about educating people about the structural and systemic inequalities. Contextualizing this, but giving more information and … really highlighting the injustice” of these vulnerabilities, she said. “This didn’t just happen, it wasn’t just random. It was socially designed to happen this way.”

Over 20 years of research by OIBR Distinguished Scholar, Robert Vandenberg, the Robert O. Arnold Professor of Business and head of the department of management at the Terry College of Business, at the University of Georgia indicates workplace-based health and wellness programs can offer a variety of positive effects for both workers and their employers.

Author: J. Merritt Melancon
More info. about this research: Robert Vandenberg

The Team Impact Award recognizes the critical contributions made by crosscutting teams in addressing today’s complex challenges. Specifically, the award recognizes a team for excellence in innovative and impactful scholarship that either has or soon promises to fundamentally advance knowledge, understanding and/or applications in ways not achievable by individual investigators or single disciplinary approaches alone.

The members of Team RISE—Resilient Infrastructure for Sustainability and Equity—are Brian Bledsoe, Jon Calabria, Shana Jones, Don Nelson, J. Scott Pippin and Mark Risse. RISE includes both academic and public service faculty from the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, Marine Extension-Georgia Sea Grant, the College of Engineering, the College of Environment and Design, and the Department of Anthropology. Over the past several years, they have demonstrated exceptional collaboration and synergy, leading to significant academic research, applied research and technical assistance, as well as generating an impressive number of funding awards. Collaborating through the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, the members are advancing the integration of natural and conventional infrastructure systems to strengthen society’s long-term resilience to flooding, sea level rise, drought and other disruptions. By collaboratively integrating interdisciplinary research and outreach expertise, they are empowering communities to discover wise infrastructure solutions that deliver a broad array of social, economic and environmental benefits.

Don Nelson, an affiliate with the Owens Institute and a professor in the Department of Anthropology, has over 20 years of national and international experience in drought risk management, social vulnerability and participatory approaches to natural resource management. His work focuses on the human dimensions of climate variability, the role of scientific information in resource management, and how social and political relations shape decision-making and policy outcomes. A member of IRIS’s leadership team, Nelson co-leads project development and directs and conducts team research. He leads the team’s development of the NSF’s coastlines and people proposal to develop a resilience hub using the military-community interface as study areas. He is a key faculty member for the recently funded Research and Development Cooperative Agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers. Nelson also is central to the NSF proposal to establish an Engineering Research Center for Sustainably Engineered Riverine-Coastal Systems at UGA.

Jennifer L. Gay, OIBR affiliate and associate professor of Health Promotion and Behavior in the school of Public Health, has been awarded the 2022 Creative Teaching Award.

The UGA Creative Teaching Awards are presented annually on behalf of the Office of Instruction to faculty who have demonstrated exceptional creativity in using either an innovative technology or pedagogy that extends learning beyond the traditional classroom or for their creative course design or implementation of subject matter that improves student learning outcomes in their courses.

Dr. Gay uses supportive coaching and small learning milestones to help students learn needed skills. In her inclusive class, students can “choose their own adventure” for project topics. They set the knowledge, skills and degree of competence they would like to pursue. In each module, students submit practice assignments that prime them for the successful completion of a semester-long project. Each assignment receives extensive feedback, and if competency has not been reached, the student can try again, incorporating the feedback into their revision, until they establish competence. By learning from revisions, students establish a mastery of the subject matter.

 

Jeremy Gibbs, OIBR affiliate and assistant professor in the School of Social Work, has received a 2022 First-Year Odyssey Teaching Award in recognition of his success for teaching a FYO Seminar.

The FYO Teaching Award recognizes outstanding instructors who have demonstrated creativity or innovation in instruction, connection to the instructor’s research and incorporation of FYOS program goals into the seminar. This year’s recipients have been fully engaged with their students, provided them with a strong connection to the university through their research and other activities and tied their curriculum directly to FYOS program goals.

Dr. Gibbs emphasizes critical thinking and innovative learning processes in his First-Year Odyssey Seminar, “Queer Voices: LGBTQ Social Issues Through the Lens of Movies and TV.” In the course, students watch LGBTQ-related films and have meaningful discussions. One week the class focuses on “coming out,” where Gibbs shares research findings related to the risks and benefits of coming out, acceptance, rejection and depression. The class is not about having the “correct” answer, but about critical thinking. The goal is to engage students intellectually and emotionally to illicit cognitive curiosity. One popular assignment is for students to present a music video to the class and analyze the content. The seminar also features in-class quizzes and surveys students can complete using smartphones. Instead of a lecture on terminology, students compete in a Kahoot online quiz game—that makes learning fun and exciting.

 

OIBR Distinguished Scholar Julie Stanton has been selected for the 2022 Russell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

The Russell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching recognize excellence in undergraduate instruction by faculty members in their early academic careers. The awards were first presented in 1992 by the Richard B. Russell Foundation to honor Richard B. Russell, a distinguished Georgian and University alumnus who had a love for new knowledge and appreciation of our nation’s youth.

 

 

2022 Charles B. Knapp Early Scholar awarded to Man Kit “Karlo” Lei.

This award is named in honor of the University of Georgia’s 20th president, and recognizes outstanding accomplishment and evidence of potential future success in scholarship, creative work or research by an early career faculty member in the social and behavioral sciences.

Man Kit “Karlo” Lei, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and an OIBR affiliate, combines interdisciplinary theories and methods to examine the social determinants of health and aging across the lifespan, with a particular focus on minority populations and disadvantaged communities. His research focuses on two research questions: How do social stressors “get under the skin” and affect well-being? Why do some people, but not others, thrive despite facing adversity? He is a rare triple-threat scholar skilled in sociological theories, genetic and biological data, and advanced statistical models. His research has made advances in understanding and addressing social and environmental factors that can become embedded biologically via gene expression and, in turn, foster pathological physiology and onset of illness. A co-investigator on three NIH grants totaling more than $7 million, his revolutionary research blends rigor in basic science and novel approaches to treat and prevent chronic illness.

Gregory Strauss receives 2022 Creative Research Medal. This medal is awarded for outstanding research or creative activity within the past five years that focuses on a single theme identified with the University of Georgia.

OIBR distinguished scholar, Greg Strauss, and an associate professor of psychology, utilized a new assessment technique called “digital phenotyping” to characterize and improve treatment of anhedonia, a symptom of schizophrenia. Scientists have long believed that anhedonia is an incapacity to experience pleasure. Strauss and his team tested that assumption by having study participants carry smartphones and other devices fitted with sensors that record physiological and other responses to events. Participants recorded videos of their facial and vocal emotions and responded to daily surveys. Strauss and his team pioneered complex algorithms for analyzing this data to understand how participants reacted when exposed to potentially enjoyable activities and how their pleasure persisted over time. Results show that participants do experience pleasure. However, they have difficulty anticipating pleasure, and their pleasurable experiences degrade rapidly. Pharmaceutical companies are adopting these technologies in psychiatric trials, and the tools could provide better ways to identify and assess features of this disease.

 

OIBR director and psychology professor, Lillian Eby, Ph.D., received the 2022 Distinguished Research Professor award.

The title of Distinguished Research Professor is awarded to UGA faculty who are internationally recognized for their original contributions to knowledge and whose work promises to foster continued creativity in their discipline.

Dr. Eby is one of the world’s leading industrial-organizational psychology scholars. She studies employee health and well-being, addressing workers’ relationships inside and outside the workplace. She is best known for her groundbreaking, enduring studies of workplace and other types of mentoring relationships. She contributed some of the first and most highly cited research on the dynamics of mentoring relationships and published three large-scale meta-analyses of the literature, integrating hundreds of primary studies. A leading expert on the occupational health of substance abuse treatment workers, she conducted large-scale, longitudinal and methodologically rigorous studies of occupational health among this high-stress population. She translated her empirical findings about major drivers of burnout and turnover into actionable recommendations for organizations and individual workers. She is the author of 110 peer-reviewed journal publications and 28 book chapters and the co-editor of three influential books. Her works average almost 3,000 citations per year.