Department News – Page 118 – GWU Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Psychology Undergraduate Research and Service Grant (URSG) Awards, January 2018 Competition

cgeeFebruary 2, 2018February 8, 2018

Congratulations to the First Psychology Undergraduate Research and Service Grant (URSG) Award Recipients, January 2018 Competition. The next competition deadline will be in mid-April!

Katie Allison: Funds to cover transportation costs for her work with the Metropolitan Police Department as a Domestic Violence Liaison. This internship will place Katie in the community, engaging in an outreach/support program in her area of interest, law enforcement. Specifically, she will go with police on domestic violence calls and assist with survivors; she is doing this in conjunction with Dr. Lambert’s Psyc 3592 (Field Internship).

Ashley Cheng: Work-study funding to allow her to be actively involved in developing, designing, and conducting a study within Dr. Shomstein’s lab. She will work with graduate student Joe Nah and Dr. Shomstein to develop, carry out, and analyze a study examining how semantic knowledge can affect visual attention—e.g., how presentation of the word “mixer” affects processing of baking-related items in a kitchen scene. Ashley has been learning how to program in Python in preparation.

Jacqueline Mai: For transportation costs to allow her to participate in a Research Assistantship at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) Laboratory for the Treatment of Suicide-related Ideation and Behavior. She will be working on a randomized clinical trial for military psychiatric inpatients. And will also carry out a literature review on humanistic cognitive behavioral therapy in conjunction with this work and a Psyc 3591 supervised research course co-mentored by Margaret Baer of USUHS and Dr. Sigelman.

John “Jack” Venezia: Funds to assist in paying for additional research participants in graduate student Meagan Ryan’s dissertation research in Dr. Rohrbeck’s lab. Jack assisted Meagan in identifying measures for her dissertation and also added a "Meaning of Life" Questionnaire to her research protocol with the goal of carrying out his own substudy of how "meaning of life" moderates associations between trauma exposure and mental health outcomes among undergraduate veterans.

Sidney Holt wins 2017 Outstanding Student Abstract award at the American Public Health Association (APHA) conference

cgeeFebruary 1, 2018

Congrats to Applied Social Psychology doctoral student Sidney Holt on the 2017 Outstanding Student Abstract award at the American Public Health Association (APHA) conference! Her abstract was entitled, “I Live in this Neighborhood Too, Though”: Psychosocial Effects of Gentrification on Black men in DC.

The abstract details analyses that Holt conducted based on focus groups with Black men from Menhood, a National Institutes of Health-funded study designed to examine the effects of neighborhood and individual-level stressors and resilience on sexual risk for Black men who live in Washington, DC. Holt’s supervising professor, Dr. Lisa Bowleg is the Principal Investigator of Menhood.

Holt’s research highlighted that gentrification led participants to experience heightened police presence within their neighborhoods and in turn, increased discriminatory encounters with police; segregation and social exclusion from their new White neighbors; restricted mobility within their neighborhoods; fear of displacement; loss of belonging and sense of community; and self-blame and a sense of powerlessness to stop gentrification. All of these experiences have the potential to negatively impact health and well-being. Holt’s work fills an important gap within the social and behavioral science literature. Holt notes that although media attention about gentrification in DC has increased in recent years —DC was the second fastest gentrifying city in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010 — it’s relatively rare that researchers seek to learn about gentrification primarily from the perspective of long-time, low-income Black residents. Holt says that she hopes that her work will prompt researchers, policymakers and health providers to consider the social and mental health effects of gentrification, and not conceptualize gentrification primarily as an urban development phenomenon with only economic and political ramifications.

How Prejudice in Medical Care Can Hinder PrEP Uptake (Dr. Calabrese)

cgeeJanuary 21, 2018January 21, 2018

Published in HIV Equal, 12/21/17, BY: GRANT SCHLEIFER

Medical trainees with highly prejudiced attitudes towards gay and bisexual men are less willing to prescribe those patients HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), according to a survey released in November, 2017.

The study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health, assessed 115 U.S. medical students for heterosexist beliefs (e.g. “Male homosexuality is a perversion” and “Sex between two men is just plain wrong”). These students then read about a hypothetical male patient with an HIV-positive male partner and were asked whether they would prescribe PrEP to that patient. Students with greater heterosexism were more likely to make negative judgments about their patient’s behavior – often assuming their patient would have poor PrEP adherence and more condomless sex.

The judgments healthcare providers make about their patients often have meaningful implications for the way they prescribe medication. In the study, medical students who assumed that patients would increase their rate of condomless sex if given PrEP, for example, were significantly less likely to be willing to prescribe PrEP to those patients. Such unwillingness to prescribe PrEP to eligible patients shows how medical trainee prejudice can spill over into the way they treat patients.

This is not the first study to reveal the effects of prejudice on medical trainees’ willingness to prescribe PrEP to gay and bisexual patients. Previous research has shown that medical students are significantly less willing to prescribe PrEP to black patients compared to white patients with identical medical needs. Racism may, therefore, help explain the limited access to PrEP among racial minority populations.

Sarah Calabrese, the lead author of the study and professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University, discussed how these findings may inform the way medical schools train their students.

“Including cultural competence training related to sexual diversity in PrEP education programs that target health service providers is warranted,” said Calabrese. “Evaluating the effectiveness of such programs with respect to both clinical and cultural competence outcomes is also needed.”

In recent years there has been increasing attention on how healthcare providers’ biases, including heterosexism and racism, may perpetuate poorer health outcomes among sexual and racial minorities. These biases are generally unconscious and are especially influential when providers are expected to use their discretion – as in the case of PrEP prescribing. Given that provider prejudices may persist despite providers’ best intentions, Calabrese pointed out that actions to address racial inequities will not necessarily translate to more equitable treatment for sexual minorities and other marginalized groups.

According to the study, PrEP education in medical school did not reduce the negative effects of heterosexism and racism on students’ PrEP decision-making. Future programs in PrEP education should directly address provider prejudice rather than simply teaching students about PrEP and its medical usage.