Gender parity review of psychological science shows progress and problems

Emory psychologists Sherryl Goodman and Stella Lourenco were among the 59 researchers, from nearly 40 different institutions, who co-authored a review of gender parity in psychological science.

 
By Carol Clark

When Sherryl Goodman joined Emory’s Department of Psychology in 1977, she was the sole female member of the faculty. “I was typically the only woman in the room,” recalls Goodman, now Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Psychology. 

Things have changed over the decades, both nationally and at Emory — where the percentage of women faculty in the Department of Psychology is approaching half. Despite the great gains in numbers of women in the profession, much more work is needed to achieve true gender parity, Goodman says. 

Goodman and Stella Lourenco, Emory associate professor of psychology, are among the authors of a report on gender parity in psychological science, based on an extensive review of peer-reviewed studies. Perspectives on Psychological Science published the review, entitled “The Future of Women in Psychological Science,” co-authored by 59 researchers from nearly 40 different institutions from across the United States, Canada and Australia. 

The authors found that women are attracted to psychology in record numbers and earn more doctoral degrees in the field than men. And women who choose to enter the academy as assistant professors of psychology are even more likely than men to get hired and are as likely as men to obtain tenure. They also found, however, that women are less likely to apply for tenure-track positions. And fewer women attain the rank of full professor than men. 

Women also remain underrepresented in more senior ranks in psychology departments and they are less likely to receive salaries comparable to those of men in these senior positions. And women across their careers are less likely to submit, renew and hold grants or to have publication and citation rates comparable to their male colleagues. 

“When I was a graduate student, my adviser used to tell me about the gender discrimination she faced as a woman in science and how I had it so much better,” recalls Lourenco, who joined the Emory faculty just over 10 years ago. “She was right. There has been much progress in the field. At the same time, there is still much more to do.” 

Some well-intentioned policies may have even backfired for women, Lourenco notes. For instance, parental leave is now available for both female and male faculty. “There is evidence that men may benefit more from parental leave than women, with relatively more publications than their counterparts at institutions without parental leave,” she says. “To be sure, parental leave is a good thing. But if women take on more of the burden of childcare, they will publish less than men on parental leave. Institutions need to be aware of such issues when later evaluating women for tenure and promotion.” 

The review cites a 2016 survey in which U.S. mothers reported spending 75 percent more hours per week on childcare than fathers did. 

Academic careers are still not seen as “woman friendly,” Goodman notes. “We still lose a number of talented Ph.D. graduates who don’t even bother applying because they don’t see viable careers in academics for women. That’s sad and a loss to the field of psychological science, and to the academy more broadly,” she says. 

Among the recommendations that the review urges universities to consider are: Offer high-quality, affordable childcare; supplement the cost of egg freezing to expand women’s fertility windows; and provide support through more partner hires or benefits packages that include employment for a spouse outside the university. 

The authors also called for enabling women to improve salary negotiation skills and for greater transparency related to compensation. They cite a 2018 National Science Foundation report that found, across all institutions, women’s full professor salaries were 88 percent that of men, and their associate professor salaries were 92 percent that of men. 

The review focused on women in general in psychological science, while noting that women of color and people who are a minority in terms of gender orientation face extra challenges that also need to be addressed. 

Although the review did not include the impact of COVID-19, the pandemic highlights the problem of gender disparity more broadly, Goodman says. 

“Women tend to share more of the burden of taking care of a family, and suddenly, many of them also had to become teachers of their children,” she says. “The pandemic compounds the impact of an already existing problem. It may be another factor that causes some women to have to opt out of the workforce or to become less productive in their jobs.” 

The review authors sum up their findings in a concluding statement: “The need to address the issues facing women in psychological science coincides with a particular cultural moment in U.S. and global social history, one in which women are speaking out and taking action in an unprecedented way to address sexual harassment, financial and social inequality and gender biases. As a field committed to the science of equality, psychology has the opportunity to lead other disciplines in how best to create and maintain a culture of inclusion.”

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'Firefly' method makes cellular forces visible at molecular scale

The image on the left shows the force activity of a cell at a resolution of about 250 nanometers. The image on the right shows how much clearer the image becomes with the resolution of 25 nanometers that is now possible with the new technique. (Microscopy photos by Alisina Bazrafshan)

Scientists have developed a new technique using tools made of luminescent DNA, lit up like fireflies, to visualize the mechanical forces of cells at the molecular level. Nature Methods published the work, led by chemists at Emory University, who demonstrated their technique on human blood platelets in laboratory experiments.

"Normally, an optical microscope cannot produce images that resolve objects smaller than the length of a light wave, which is about 500 nanometers," says Khalid Salaita, Emory professor of chemistry and senior author of the study. "We found a way to leverage recent advances in optical imaging along with our molecular DNA sensors to capture forces at 25 nanometers. That resolution is akin to being on the moon and seeing the ripples caused by raindrops hitting the surface of a lake on Earth."

Almost every biological process involves a mechanical component, from cell division to blood clotting to an immune response. "Understanding how cells apply forces and sense forces may help in the development of new therapies for many different disorders," says Salaita, whose lab is a leader in devising ways to image and map bio-mechanical forces.

The first authors of the paper, Joshua Brockman and Hanquan Su, did the work as Emory graduate students in the lab. Both recently received their PhDs.

Read the full story here.

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Experiments reveal why human-like robots elicit uncanny feelings

"At the core of this research is what we perceive when we look at a face," says Emory psychologist Philippe Rochat, senior author of the study. (Getty Images)

By Carol Clark

Androids, or robots with humanlike features, are often more appealing to people than those that resemble machines — but only up to a certain point. Many people experience an uneasy feeling in response to robots that are nearly lifelike, and yet somehow not quite “right.” The feeling of affinity can plunge into one of repulsion as a robot’s human likeness increases, a zone known as “the uncanny valley.”

The journal Perception published new insights by Emory psychologists into the cognitive mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.  

 

Since the uncanny valley was first described, a common hypothesis developed to explain it. Known as the mind-perception theory, it proposes that when people see a robot with human-like features, they automatically add a mind to it. A growing sense that a machine appears to have a mind leads to the creepy feeling, according to this theory.

 

“We found that the opposite is true,” says Wang Shensheng, first author of the new study, who did the work as a graduate student at Emory and recently received his PhD in psychology. “It’s not the first step of attributing a mind to an android but the next step of ‘dehumanizing’ it by subtracting the idea of it having a mind that leads to the uncanny valley. Instead of just a one-shot process, it’s a dynamic one.”

 

The findings have implications for both the design of robots and for understanding how we perceive one another as humans.

 

“Robots are increasingly entering the social domain for everything from education to healthcare,” Wang says. “How we perceive them and relate to them is important both from the standpoint of engineers and psychologists.”

 

“At the core of this research is the question of what we perceive when we look at a face,” adds Philippe Rochat, Emory professor of psychology and senior author of the study. “It’s probably one of the most important questions in psychology. The ability to perceive the minds of others is the foundation of human relationships. ”

 

The research may help in unraveling the mechanisms involved in mind-blindness — the inability to distinguish between humans and machines — such as in cases of extreme autism or some psychotic disorders, Rochat says.

 

Co-authors of the study include Yuk Fai Cheong and Daniel Dilks, both associate professors of psychology at Emory.

 

Anthropomorphizing, or projecting human qualities onto objects, is common. “We often see faces in a cloud for instance,” Wang says. “We also sometimes anthropomorphize machines that we’re trying to understand, like our cars or a computer.”

 

Naming one’s car or imagining that a cloud is an animated being, however, is not normally associated with an uncanny feeling, Wang notes. That led him to hypothesize that something other than just anthropomorphizing may occur when viewing an android.

 

To tease apart the potential roles of mind-perception and dehumanization in the uncanny valley phenomenon the researchers conducted experiments focused on the temporal dynamics of the process. Participants were shown three types of images — human faces, mechanical-looking robot faces and android faces that closely resembled humans — and asked to rate each for perceived animacy or “aliveness.” The exposure times of the images were systematically manipulated, within milliseconds, as the participants rated their animacy.

 

The results showed that perceived animacy decreased significantly as a function of exposure time for android faces but not for mechanical-looking robot or human faces. And in android faces, the perceived animacy drops at between 100 and 500 milliseconds of viewing time. That timing is consistent with previous research showing that people begin to distinguish between human and artificial faces around 400 milliseconds after stimulus onset.

 

A second set of experiments manipulated both the exposure time and the amount of detail in the images, ranging from a minimal sketch of the features to a fully blurred image. The results showed that removing details from the images of the android faces decreased the perceived animacy along with the perceived uncanniness.

 

“The whole process is complicated but it happens within the blink of an eye,” Wang says. “Our results suggest that at first sight we anthropomorphize an android, but within milliseconds we detect deviations and dehumanize it. And that drop in perceived animacy likely contributes to the uncanny feeling.”

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Study shows how a single gene drives aggression in wild songbirds

White-throated sparrows come in two different morphs, the white-striped (left) and the tan-striped (right). The morphs have both different plumage and behaviors, making these wild songbirds a good model organism for the genetic basis of behavior. (Photo by Jennifer Merritt)

By Carol Clark

A new study shows how differentiation of a single gene changes behavior in a wild songbird, determining whether the white-throated sparrow displays more, or less, aggression. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the research, led by neuroscientists at Emory University.

The researchers singled out an estrogen receptor from a complex of more than 1,000 genes known as a “supergene,” or genetic material inherited together as a block. The work provides a rare look at how genomic divergence can lead to behavioral divergence in a vertebrate.

“Evolution has tinkered with the DNA sequence of a gene of this songbird, and we demonstrated that those little changes affect both the expression of the gene and the bird’s behavior,” says Emory graduate student Jennifer Merritt, first author of the paper.

Merritt is a PhD candidate in the lab of Donna Maney, senior author of the paper and an Emory professor of psychology.

“White-throated sparrows are common backyard birds found through most of North America,” Merritt says. “What’s remarkable about them is that they occur in two different morphs that have not only different plumage, but also different strategies for maximizing reproductive output. Both types of differences are caused by genetic differentiation of only one region of a single chromosome, and we know exactly where it is.”

At some point during the evolution of a species, a chromosome can break and flip. This process, called an inversion, isolates the genes that are trapped inside, producing a supergene. In some cases, supergenes have led to distinct morphs within a single species — individuals with the supergene and those without it.

In the case of the white-throated sparrows, the white-striped morph sports bright yellow, black and white stripes on its crown while the tan-striped morph has more muted, tan and grayish stripes. The white-striped birds, which all possess at least one copy of the rearranged chromosome, tend to be more aggressive and less parental than the tan-striped birds, which do not have the rearranged chromosome.

“Scientists have hypothesized for 100 years that inversions are important for the evolution of some of the complex behaviors that we see in nature,” Maney says. “But inversions are challenging to understand because, when they turn into supergenes, all of the genes are inherited together. We already knew a lot about the natural history of the white-throated sparrow, as well as the biological mechanisms underlying its aggression. Using that knowledge, we were able to finally show the evolutionary role of a supergene at the molecular level.”

The current paper builds on previous work by the Maney lab, a leader in connecting gene sequence with behavior in free-living animals. In 2014, the lab identified a hormone receptor —estrogen receptor alpha (ER-alpha) — that appeared connected to the differences in the sparrows’ aggression and parenting behaviors in the wild. The white-striped birds express this receptor at much higher levels than the tan-striped birds, and the more the expression, the more aggressive the bird.

“For this paper, we wanted to follow the genetic variation of ER-alpha all the way up to where it’s expressed in the brain, and then to behavior, to see if we could trace the behavioral variation to variation in this one gene,” Merritt says.

The birds sing to establish a territory. The rate at which they sing gives a measure of their level of aggression, along with the frequency at which they charge, or “attack,” animals encroaching on what they consider their territory.

In field studies of white-throated sparrows in their natural habitat, the researchers showed that the more a bird expresses the supergene version of the estrogen receptor, the more vigorously it defends its territory.

The researchers then moved beyond the correlational work by taking an experimental approach. White-throated sparrows in the lab were given a substance to block expression of the ER-alpha gene and their aggression levels were measured. The results showed that when expression of that one gene was blocked, the aggression of the white-striped birds went down so they behaved like the tan-striped ones.

“We believe this is the first demonstration of how a single gene within a supergene drives changes in a social behavior in a wild vertebrate,” Merritt says. She gives an analogy for the challenge involved: “Imagine each of the genes within a supergene as tributaries converging into a river, the behavior. And then taking a sample of water from the river and determining which tributary the sample came from.”

The Maney lab is continuing to investigate a suite of other neuroendocrine genes captured by the chromosome rearrangement in the white-throated sparrow that are thought to be important players in the regulation of social behavior.

Co-authors of the PNAS paper include Eric Ortlund, a biochemist and an expert in the ER-alpha gene at the Emory School of Medicine; Kathleen Grogan and Wendy Zinzow-Kramer, former post-doctoral fellows in the Maney lab; and Dan Sun and Soojin Yi, from Georgia Tech. The work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

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Emory students win Amazon's Alexa Prize for AI with strategy of caring about others

Jinho Choi (center), the faculty advisor for the Emory Alexa Prize team, with graduate students James Finch (left), and Sarah Fillwock, the team leader.

A team of Emory University students won Amazon’s 2020 Alexa Prize, a global competition to create the most engaging chatbot to advance the field of artificial intelligence. The team earned $500,000 for taking first place with their chatbot named Emora.

The students designed Emora to provide comfort and warmth to people interacting with Amazon’s voice-activated Alexa-enabled devices, whether they wanted to discuss movies, sports and their pets or their concerns for themselves and their families amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Emory team consisted of 14 students led by graduate student Sarah Fillwock and faculty advisor Jinho Choi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. They christened their chatbot Emora because it sounds like a feminine version of “Emory” and is similar to a Hebrew term for a sage skilled in eloquence.

Even as they celebrate their win, the Emory team is looking ahead to how they can apply the concepts they developed to benefit everything from education to people suffering from depression and social isolation.

The annual Alexa Prize, launched in 2016, challenges university students to make breakthroughs in the design of chatbots, or social bots — software apps that simplify interactions between humans and computers by allowing them to talk with one another. Emory used a unique strategy to beat out nine other universities and take the top spot in this year’s competition, the most hotly contested ever. 

“Normally people think of a chatbot as being an intelligent assistant, to answer questions or provide a customer service,” Fillwock says. “We designed a more socially oriented chatbot that could actually show interest in an individual user and provide comfort to people if they wanted it.”

Read the full story.

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