#YALE CHILD STUDY CENTER DOGS SERIES#

However, the educators spent significantly more time look at the black students in the videos while anticipating challenging behavior, and black educators spent much more time staring specifically at black boys. There was no challenging behavior actually depicted in the videos. The teachers watched a total of 12 clips that featured a black boy, a black girl, a white boy and a white girl. The educators were told that researchers wanted to see how quickly they could accurately detect challenging behavior. In the first part of the study, the participants watched videos of classroom behavior while the eye-tracking equipment figured out which children they were watching. Participants came from around the country and were selected from educators who participated in the 2015 annual meeting of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The majority of participants - 94 percent - were female, and most of them identified as either white (almost 67 percent) or black (22 percent). The two-part Yale study, conducted in 2015, used eye-tracking technology to discern potential bias in study subjects. “Early educators are not immune to implicit biases. 'Similar to recent findings that remembering positive experiences can lower the body's stress response, our work suggests that memory-related brain networks can be harnessed to create a more resilient emotional response to stress,' Goldfarb said.“Implicit bias is like the wind - you can not see it, but you can see the effects of it,” said Gilliam, director of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy and associate professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center. Sinha and Goldfarb speculated that these subjects might be accessing memories that help moderate their response to stressful images.

'These findings may help us tailor therapeutic intervention to multiple targets, such as increasing the strength of the connections from the hippocampus to the frontal cortex or decreasing the signaling to the physiological stress centers,' said Sinha, who is also a professor in Yale's Child Study Center and neuroscience department.Īll study subjects were healthy, she said, and in some cases their responses during the experiment seemed to be adaptive - in other words, the network connections with the frontal cortex became stronger as the subjects were exposed to the stressful images. The authors note there is also evidence from other studies that those suffering from mental health disorders such as anxiety may have difficulty receiving calming feedback from the frontal cortex in times of stress. The Yale team found that when neural connections between the hippocampus and frontal cortex were stronger, subjects reported feeling less stressed by the troublesome images.Ĭonversely, subjects reported feeling more stressed when the neural network between the hippocampus and hypothalamus was more active. The study reveals that neural connections emanating from the hippocampus when viewing these images reached not only areas of the brain associated with physiological stress responses, but also the dorsal lateral frontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions and regulation of emotions.

#YALE CHILD STUDY CENTER DOGS SERIES#

Goldfarb and co-authors, including senior author Rajita Sinha, the Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, conducted a series of fMRI scans of subjects who were asked to quantify their stress levels when presented with troubling images. 'We can't ask rats how they are feeling,' said Elizabeth Goldfarb, associate research scientist at the Yale Stress Center and lead author of the study. But the source of the subjective experience of stress experienced by people during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, has been more difficult to pinpoint. Activation of brain areas such as the hypothalamus triggers production of steroid hormones called glucocorticoids in the face of stress and threats. The brain networks that support the physiological response to stress have been well studied in animals.

Yale researchers have found a neural home of the feeling of stress people experience, an insight that may help people deal with the debilitating sense of fear and anxiety that stress can evoke, Yale researchers report May 27 in the journal Nature Communications.īrain scans of people exposed to highly stressful and troubling images - such as a snarling dog, mutilated faces or filthy toilets - reveal a network of neural connections emanating throughout the brain from the hippocampus, an area of the brain that helps regulate motivation, emotion and memory.

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