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Spotlight on Research

Risky Behavior and HIV

HIV infection in teenagers is a complex and growing problem. Part of solving the problem involves identifying the personality characteristics that lead young people to engage in risky behaviors that are associated with HIV infection such as drug and alcohol use and unprotected sexual intercourse. Dr Carl Lejuez has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to carry out a five year study that is designed to determine the extent to which identification of patterns of risk taking behavior in younger adolescents can be used to predict future activity that has an increased chance of exposing the person to HIV infection. If younger people who are more at risk of future HIV infection can be identified, steps can be taken early that may prevent infection later.

How Mirror Neurons Adapt

Mirror neurons in the brain fire when a person performs an action or observes another performing the same action, The mirror neurson system is thought to play a central role in people’s ability to imitate what they see other people do and learn by observing others. Drs. Amanda Woodward and Jose Contreras-Vidal have received a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study the flexibility of the mirror system to adapt to changing circumstances in both children and adults. This project requires simultaneously measuring participants' own actions, their perception of others' actions, and patterns in their brain activity that have been associated with the mirror neuron system. By investigating these processes as they change during infant devleopment and adult skill acquisition, the project will provide a first view of the ways in which the mirror neuron system is changed by experience. The data from these experiments will also be used to develop a neural net model of the areas of the brain that are involved in action and imitation.

Spatial Memory in Bats

Spatial memory is fundamental to everyone's daily life as it enables us to represent our Environment and to orient ourselves with respect to other people and places. Spatial memory operates on a broad range of time scales to serve a variety of important functions. On short time scales, working spatial memory plays an important role in representing the location of objects in a scene, and over longer time scales, spatial memory is essential for rooting oneself with respect to the environment and finding places. As we sit, stand, walk and reach, spatial working memory plays a fundamental role in guiding behaviors. Spatial memory deficits have been reported in individuals with a variety of clinical conditions, including developmental disorders, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, temporal lobe epilepsy and victims of stroke. Loss of spatial memory, through injury or disease, is devastating to mental health, but successful new therapeutic interventions can grow out of a deeper understanding of the basic mechanisms that support spatial memory that operate over different scales of time and space. With a continuing grant from the NIMH, Dr. Cynthia Moss explores these mechanisms in the echolocating bat which is an excellent model system to study spatial memory.

Finding Solutions in the Middle East

The relationships and interactions between the Middle East and the West are, in many ways, the center of mass around which the modern world revolves. Terrorism, oil, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the development of a nuclear weapon capacity in Iran, all of these and more have consumed the world's interest in recent years. Successful resolution of the problems that have arisen between the Middle East and the West depends on negotiation and collaboration between two very different worlds.

With funding from the Army Research Office, Dr. Michele Gelfand heads a team of international scholars that is focused on the problem of how negotiation and collaboration are affected by cultural differences between the Middle East and the West. The endeavor is called Project InterACTION and, in addition to the University of Maryland, it includes researchers from Harvard and Columbia Universities, the University of South Florida and the Naval Postgraduate School. The impact of culture on negotiation and collaboration is a complex and multifaceted problem. The research team reflects this complexity by including investigators from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, behavioral economics, communication, computer science, psychology, and political science. Along with this multidiscplinary approach, the project is bringing to bear a variety of research methods such as laboratory experiments, surveys, interviews, archival analyses, computer simulations, and dynamic and agent-based modeling techniques.

Some of the questions the project seeks to answer include:

• What are the relevant dimensions and cultural constructs in the Middle East that are critical for understanding how culture affects negotiation and collaboration processes across a wide range of situational contexts? For example, how do Middle Eastern ideas about honor (sharaf; irdh), shame (hashham), faith (Imam), connections (wasta), and communication (mubalagha) affect negotiation and collaboration and how do these ideas vary across different areas of the Middle East?
• How does culture affect basic psychological and social processes in negotiations and collaborations? How can two people from markedly different societies and cultures reach a level of understanding and trust necessary to carry out a successful collaboration and how can this trust be restored once it is threatened or broken?
• What are the factors that facilitate cross-cultural negotiation and how can they be enhanced? On the other hand, what are the factors that inhibit collaboration and how can they be avoided?

Project InterACTION maintains its own website which contains more detailed information about the project's goals, methodologies and research questions

Crack, Prostitution and HIV

Crack cocaine is a very powerful and very addictive drug.  It also produces a short-lived high, about 5 to 10 minutes on average, with unpleasant aftereffects including depression, irritability and paranoia.  This combination produces crack addicts who have strong physiological and psychological drives for a drug that must be replenished frequently to sustain feeling good and avoid feeling bad.  In other words, addicts on a high need fast money to buy more crack.  A common source for this money, especially for women, is street-level prostitution which typically involves high-risk sexual behavior and an increased risk for HIV.  The combination of HIV infection and crack cocaine abuse among women is a serious and growing problem in the United States.

Women who engage in prostitution to make money to buy crack often know that prostitution is dangerous and self-destructive and may express negative attitudes about the sex trade coupled with active attempts to avoid it in the future.  And yet they may well return to prostitution to make money for crack.  Why do they return to the sex trade when they know it's dangerous and wish to avoid it?  The easy answer is that the need for the drug overwhelms their good intentions.  The problem lies in understanding how this process works so we can develop the means to help these women break the connection.

Dr. Catalina Kopetz has received a post-doc grant from NIDA to examine the connection between crack addiction and prostitution using the motivation-as-cognition theory of motivation developed by Arie Kruglanski.  Motivation as cognition proposes ways in which motivations to achieve goals interact with ideas or beliefs about the world to produce behavior.  One facet of the theory draws a distinction between explicit factors (such as the knoweldge that prostitution is dangerous and the intention to avoid engaging in the sex trade) and implicit factors (such as the knowledge based on prior experience that prostitution is an effective means for getting money to buy crack.)  By detailing the ways in which these implicit and explicit factors interact, the theory offers both a conceptual background and specific investigation techniques that can be used to asses mental processes that both influence behavior and are difficult to control. Empirical support for this approach could serve as a basis for modifying current approaches and developing new techniques for treating people with substance abuse problems.