Almost in the U.S. lives with a mental illness. That statistic is similar worldwide, with an people currently dealing with a mental or neurological disorder. Of those, only about a third seek treatment.

Interacting with nature is starting to be recognized as one way to improve mental health. A number of scientific studies have shown that nature experiences may benefit people鈥檚 psychological well-being and cognitive function. But it has been difficult to find ways to quantify these benefits in a useful manner for cities or organizations that want to integrate nature to improve mental health.

Now, an international team led by the 91探花 and Stanford University has created a framework for how city planners and municipalities around the world can start to measure the mental health benefits of nature and incorporate those into plans and policies for cities and their residents. The was published July 24 in .

“Thinking about the direct mental health benefits that nature contact provides is important to take into account when planning how to conserve nature and integrate it into our cities,” said , lead author and an assistant professor at the 91探花School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual model of one way we can start to think about doing this.”

The study brought together more than two dozen leading experts in the natural, social and health sciences who study aspects of how nature can benefit human well-being. Their first step was to establish a baseline, collective agreement regarding the understanding of the impacts of nature experience on aspects of cognitive functioning, emotional well-being and other dimensions of mental health.

鈥淚n hundreds of studies, nature experience is associated with increased happiness, social engagement, and manageability of life tasks, and decreased mental distress,” said senior author , faculty director at the Stanford Natural Capital Project. “In addition, nature experience is linked to improved cognitive functioning, memory and attention, imagination and creativity, and children鈥檚 school performance. These links span many dimensions of human experience, and include a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life.鈥�

While this line of study is still emerging, experts agree that nature can reduce risk factors for some types of mental illnesses and improve psychological well-being. They also agree that opportunities for nature experiences are dwindling for many people around the world because of urban growth.

“For millennia, many different cultures, traditions, and religious and spiritual practices have spoken directly to our deep relationship with nature. And more recently, using other sets of tools from psychology, public health, landscape architecture and medicine, evidence has been steadily gathering in this emerging, interdisciplinary field,” Bratman said.

The study outlines how city planners, landscape architects, developers and others could eventually anticipate the mental health impacts of decisions related to the environment.

Many governments already consider this with regard to other aspects of human health. For example, trees are planted in cities to improve air quality or reduce urban heat island effects, and parks are built in specific neighborhoods to encourage physical activity. But these actions don’t usually directly factor in the mental health benefits that trees or a restored park might provide.

“We have entered the urban century, with two-thirds of humanity projected to be living in cities by 2050. At the same time, there is an awakening underway today, to the many values of nature and the risks and costs of its loss,” Daily said. “This new work can help inform investments in livability and sustainability of the world鈥檚 cities.”

The research team built a conceptual model that can be used to make meaningful, informed decisions about environmental projects and how they may impact mental health. It includes four steps for planners to consider: elements of nature included in a project, say at a school or across the whole city; the amount of contact people will have with nature; how people interact with nature; and how people may benefit from those interactions, based on the latest scientific evidence.

The researchers hope this tool will be especially useful in considering the possible mental health repercussions of adding 鈥� or taking away 鈥� nature in underserved communities.

“If the evidence shows that nature contact helps to buffer against negative impacts from other environmental predictors of health, then access to these landscapes can be considered a matter of environmental justice. We hope this framework will contribute to this discussion,” Bratman said. “Eventually, it could be developed and potentially used to help address health disparities in underserved communities.”

Other 91探花 co-authors are , , and . Other Stanford University co-authors are , and . See the for a full list of co-authors.

This study was funded by the Natural Capital Project, John Miller, the Doug Walker Endowed Professorship, Craig McKibben and Sarah Merner, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, the Winslow Foundation, the George Rudolf Fellowship Fund, the Victoria and David Rogers Fund, and the Mr. & Mrs. Dean A. McGee Fund.

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For more information, contact Bratman at bratman@uw.edu or 206-543-7591 and Daily at gdaily@stanford.edu or 650-723-9452.

Also see the from Stanford University.

Gelb studies enzymes. These are the minute but busy protein catalysts within our cells that perform a variety of tasks 鈥� such as breaking down food, shuttling away toxins and building up new molecules to keep our cells, organs and bodies in good working order.

But sometimes, due to random genetic mutation, these enzymes struggle to perform their proper roles, causing rare and often fatal diseases in babies and children. Gelb and his colleagues have worked to develop screens that can accurately test in babies how well certain types of enzymes are functioning. Using only a drop of blood, these tests can identify newborns who will need treatment, saving their lives and giving them a robust start.

Ahead of his lecture, Gelb sat down with 91探花News to discuss his research.

What types of diseases have you been working on to develop newborn screening procedures?

MG: They’re called . The lysosome is a cellular compartment in which enzymes break down large molecules and recycle their components for use by the cell. Each type of lysosomal storage disease is caused by a deficiency in a different lysosomal enzyme. The deficiency disrupts biochemical pathways and cellular metabolism 鈥� eventually leading to disease.

What are the advantages to screening newborns for these rare diseases?

MG: The main advantage is treatment. It is valuable to begin treatment for these diseases early 鈥� before the symptoms of these enzyme deficiencies emerge that would negatively impact development of these children or threaten their lives. This is really the chemistry of saving babies.

How does a tiny drop of blood tell us whether these enzymes are working properly?

MG: These enzymes are present in blood. So we use dried blood spots 鈥� which is something that can be easily collected from a newborn in a hospital or clinic. And we developed a way to use mass spectrometry to screen for how well these different lysosomal storage enzymes are working. Mass spectrometry was a very promising approach because you can easily adapt it to measure the function of many types of enzymes at once in a clinical setting.

What led you to pursue this line of research in the first place?

MG: I first got the idea in the mid-1980s, when my wife was pregnant with our second child and underwent amniocentesis. I asked the nurses what they were checking for, and they said just a few conditions such as Down syndrome. But I had this background in chemistry, and I was studying enzymes. So I thought, “Why not test for enzymes?” I’d also recently seen the film “Lorenzo’s Oil,” which is about a boy with a rare genetic disease. Those experiences planted the idea in my head, though I didn’t immediately pursue newborn screening for enzyme deficiencies.

Then what ultimately led you to develop tests for enzyme functions at birth?

MG: Well, I eventually met here at the UW, who is a professor of pediatrics and an expert in rare genetic diseases. I talked to him about my idea to develop a newborn screen for enzyme deficiencies. He liked it. I then brought in my colleague , a fellow 91探花professor of chemistry and an expert on mass spectrometry. The three of us form a good team: I’m the chemist, Ron’s the clinician and Frank’s the mass spectrometry expert.

Many lysosomal storage diseases exist. How do you and your colleagues decide which ones to target with your tests?

MG: Well, we want these tests to be informative and useful for families. So, we’ve chosen to focus on diseases for which there are treatments available.

Once you develop an accurate screen for a disease, how could it be incorporated into the standard panel of newborn tests?

MG: In the United States, individual states mandate their own array of tests for newborn babies. There are federal guidelines 鈥� but they are recommendations. It’s ultimately up to the states to decide. So, to get a particular test adopted in your state, there are two basic routes: One is to advocate for the test to be incorporated into the recommended federal guidelines, which are set up through the congressional Newborn Screening Saves Lives Reauthorization Act of 2014. The other route is to simply lobby an individual state government directly. Tests that we’ve developed for two lysosomal storage diseases 鈥� and 鈥� have gone through the federal route. A test for another lysosomal storage disease, , was first adopted by some localities on a state-by-state basis. Through these approval pipelines, newborns are currently screened for dozens of diseases, most of them rare. In Washington state, for example, out of 80,000 babies born this year, screening for one enzyme deficiency may identify four or five babies who need immediate treatment, and about a dozen who need monitoring for possible future disease. But that’s as many as 20 lives saved or improved each year in Washington state, and 20 families spared suffering.

Where would you like to see the field of newborn screening go in the future?

MG: I would like to see every severe genetic disease 鈥� one that causes massive suffering or is life-threatening, but is also treatable 鈥� added to the list. That requires doing the necessary experiments to develop screens for these diseases, and the trials needed to show that those tests are accurate. That way, these screens become a source of hope for families.

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The 42nd annual will be held at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 23 in Kane Hall, room 130.

Although modern roundworms, fruit flies and humans are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, all three species use many similar molecular strategies to control cell growth, development and function, according to research conducted by a collaboration of scientists from around the world, including several from the UW.

鈥淚f features of the genomes of these disparate organisms are the same, it is likely those features are important and fundamental to cell function,鈥� said , 91探花professor and chair of genome sciences, and a co-author on several papers on this research in the Aug. 28 Nature. The work is part of a federally funded effort to understand the genomes of two organisms common in biomedical research, Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, and Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1 millimeter-long, soil-dwelling roundworm, and to correlate findings with those of the human genome.

Read about the research at:

91探花Medicine outpatients will be able to see doctor鈥檚 notes in their medical records

Patients become more involved in their medical care when they can read their doctors鈥� full clinical notes in their online medical record. So says research accumulated over the past several years at three U.S. clinical sites, one of them Harborview Medical Center.

That finding, and the realization among most participating doctors that their initial misgivings about the open notes concept were unfounded, is leading 91探花Medicine to make that same access available in late October to outpatients at all of its clinics and hospitals.

See how open notes work:

Teaching about rapidly changing health topics like Ebola

Dr. Doug Black, an infectious-disease specialist and 91探花associate professor of pharmacy practice, describes how he teaches students about Ebola, a fast-changing health topic, by appealing to their curiosity, sense of discovery, and desire for accurate, up-to-date information.

Follow the Q & A:

Insight into successful depression care for women

In America, about a fourth of women will experience a major depressive episode in their lifetimes. 91探花research has shown that collaborative care from a primary-care provider and a mental health professional is an effective model for treating women’s depression. The聽 newest report, Aug. 26 in the online American Journal of Psychiatry, found that women with publicly funded health insurance or without insurance coverage experienced greater improvement in depression symptoms, with collaborative care, than did women with commercial insurance. The method the researchers used, called DAWN for Depression Attention for Women Now, will be offered at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Learn more:

While the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has captured the world鈥檚 attention, it’s just one of many emerging infections that we must confront in the coming years, said , 91探花professor of microbiology. He leads Ebola research at a high-level biocontainment facility at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana.

“Ebola is not the only emerging virus; it鈥檚 just the most famous one,鈥� Katze said. 鈥淭here鈥檚 West Nile, which was never in North America before and now is everywhere. There鈥檚 Chikungunya virus, which had never been in the Americas, but now has spread through the Caribbean and has reached the southern United States. There鈥檚 SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome), which spread from Asia to Toronto and Vancouver, and there鈥檚 MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) that still ongoing in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. That epidemic isn鈥檛 over.

To be more agile in responding to emerging pathogens, Katze advocates for accelerated development of new drugs and vaccines.

Read more:聽

Study helps explain why HIV causes lifelong infection

The persistence of HIV infection despite antiretroviral treatment depends partly on which human genes the virus integrates, according to a 聽by researchers at the 91探花schools of Public Health and Medicine, Seattle Children鈥檚 Research Institute, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Read more:

Back-to-school tips to reset kids sleep routines

As the new school year approaches, School of Nursing sleep expert Teresa Ward, professor of parent and child nursing, offers advice on helping your children arrive rested each day and ready to learn and play.

Learn how kids establish good sleep habits:

Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center director talks about burden of dementia

91探花epidemiologist William Kukull has devoted his public health career to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. In a personal profile, he mentions what led him to this field, and the ramifications of the disorder as more Americans live longer.

Blood sugar drives brain鈥檚 response to sight of food

Our brain鈥檚 response to the sight of food appears driven more by our blood sugar level at the moment than our upbringing or genetics, according to a 91探花study of identical twins.

鈥淭he finding suggests our brains have a way to override genetic inheritance, upbringing and habits to respond to our immediate nutritional needs,鈥� said Dr. , 91探花assistant professor of medicine, who led the research.

Harborview trauma director discusses brain-injury study, consent law exemptions

Harborview is one of 10 U.S. and Canadian trauma centers planning a study of a therapeutic drug for patients suspected of having sustained a traumatic brain injury. Harborview’s trauma director explains how the public is being notified about the study before it starts, due to consent law exemptions for trauma patients who are unconscious.

Workshop is first mind-meld of UW, Allen Brain Institute

For the first time, two Seattle brain research powerhouses are collaborating to teach the next generation of neuroscientists. The UW’s Computational Neuroscience program and the Allen Institute for Brain Science will jointly offer聽a 鈥淪ummer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain鈥� Aug. 24 through Sept. 7 at Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Physician offers advice to peers on avoiding burnout

Health professionals devoted to caring for others sometimes neglect their own needs for restorative rest and relaxation. A 91探花physician offers tips for keeping mental and emotional exhaustion at bay in a demanding career.

AIDS-free generation is aim of new guidelines for clinician

Many tools to prevent HIV are available but are not being used like they should. An interdisciplinary panel of experts created a simple framework of best clinical practices to try to achieve an AIDS-free generation. The guidelines, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, integrate biomedical advances and evidence-based behavioral interventions for people with HIV or at high risk for HIV infection.

“We can produce discrimination without having any intent to discriminate or any dislike for those who end up being disadvantaged by our behavior,” said 91探花 psychologist , who co-authored the review with of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Greenwald and Pettigrew reviewed experiments and survey methods from published scientific research on discrimination from the last five decades. They were surprised to find that the discrimination observed in those studies occurred much more often as helping rather than harming someone. But they also found that most researchers defined discrimination as based on negative attitudes and hostility, only rarely treating favoritism as a component of discrimination.

That makes sense, Greenwald said, because most people think of discrimination as the result of hostility: a white person spouting anti-black rhetoric, or a homophobe yelling slurs at a gay couple. But, he argues, it’s more subtle acts, ones people don’t even recognize as causing disadvantage to anyone, that are likely to be much more significant.

Take this hypothetical scenario: When conducting reviews of two employees, a manager finds they both fall between two performance categories. The manager gives a higher category to the employee whose child is friends with the manager’s child, leading to a promotion and salary raise, while the other employee receives a smaller raise and no promotion.

Was the manager consciously discriminating against the second employee? Or did she simply give a boost to someone to whom she had an “ingroup” connection?

“Your ‘ingroup’ involves people that you feel comfortable with, people you identify with,” Greenwald explained. “We usually think first of demographic characteristics like age, race, sex, religion and ethnicity as establishing an ingroup, but there are also ingroups based on occupation, neighborhood and schools attended, among other things. Outgroups are those with whom you don’t identify.”

Greenwald and Pettigrew propose that unequal treatment in the form of doing favors for those like you, rather than inflicting harm on those unlike you, causes the majority of discrimination in the U.S.

“This is not to say that prejudice and hostility are not related to outgroup discrimination,” Pettigrew said. “But they are not as central to most discrimination as ingroup favoritism.”

Yet, historically, social scientists have emphasized prejudicial hostility as the root of discrimination.

“We looked at how prejudice has been defined in the history of psychology. It has generally been understood as hostility toward outgroups. That’s easy to do, because inter-group conflict is an obvious fact of life,” Greenwald said. “There are international conflicts, wars, gang battles, labor-management conflicts. When such conflicts are going on it’s natural to think of them as rooted in hostility.”

Greenwald hopes researchers will change how they study discrimination, because research results have substantial implications both for how discrimination is identified and how it can be ameliorated in employment, health care, education and daily life.

He said overt acts of discrimination began to decline starting in the 1960s following civil rights laws. But prejudicial attitudes didn’t necessarily change. What changed is that people were no longer legally allowed to act on their prejudices by, for example, denying housing to blacks or jobs to women.

The co-authors say that racial ingroup favoritism can be very subtle. For instance, if you work in an office that is mostly white and you’re asked to recommend someone for a job opening, you’re more likely to recommend someone who is like you and the rest of your ingroup.

This sort of ingroup favoritism happens at all ages and in different situations. Greenwald said it can happen on the playground, where children may exhibit ingroup favoritism based on race, economic class, or the same school or sports team.

“Hostility isn’t integral to the definition of discrimination; you can treat people differently without being hostile to anyone,” Greenwald said. “But it is societally important to understand how discrimination can occur both without hostility and without any intent to discriminate.”

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For more information, contact Greenwald at agg@uw.edu or 206-543-7227, or Pettigrew at pettigr@ucsc.edu or 831-425-4777.

Note to media: For a PDF of the American Psychologist article, please contact Doree Armstrong, 91探花News Office, at doreea@uw.edu or 206-543-2580.

A selection of recent news stories from the 91探花Health Sciences and 91探花Medicine:

Cuts to maternal-child services linked to underweight infants

A two-state study demonstrated that cutbacks in maternal-child services led to a higher number of low-birthweight newborns. 91探花School of Nursing researchers聽 led聽 explorations of the health effects of budget reductions in maternal-infant programs.聽 The supposed cost-saving strategy聽 ends up being uneconomical. The costs for caring for low-birthweight babies are high, both for the health-care system and for families, the researchers said. The long-term, detrimental effects of low birthweight, they added can sometimes last well into adulthood. Read more at HS NewsBeat:

Monumental task: Keeping the U.S. water supply safe.

The cool, clear tap water filling your glass seems like a simple pleasure. 聽But behind the scene, many individuals, programs, and systems are at work to assure your drinking water is pure. 聽No one wants a repeat of the contamination that turned off the faucets in parts of West Virginia. 聽Learn how 91探花environmental health students and faculty are taking steps to protect water supplies locally and nationally.

Get the facts on MERS

As Middle East respiratory syndrome makes another U.S. appearance, this time in Florida, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Public Health Association and the World Health Organization ramp up efforts to inform people about the emerging viral infection. See their tips for routine infection control measures.

91探花 psychologist and colleagues from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania discovered that preschoolers often don’t view a copycat negatively, but they do by the age of 5 or 6. And that holds true even across cultures that typically view intellectual property rights in different ways.

“Physical property is something that can be seen, but intellectual property is something that can’t be seen, and it’s hard to understand, let alone place a value on that,” Olson said. “So it’s not surprising that it’s so hard for younger kids to understand intellectual property rights.”

The results are published in the .

The researchers wanted to know whether young children in different cultures placed more value on unique artwork or copies of someone else’s work. They evaluated 3- to 6-year-old children in the United States, Mexico and China 鈥� chosen by the researchers based on the different emphasis each country places on the protection of intellectual property and ideas.

Researchers had children watch videos of puppets producing a unique drawing or plagiarizing another character’s drawing. The videos were in the children’s native language (English, Mandarin or Spanish).

Each child watched three 30-second videos. At the beginning of each video, one puppet looked at what the other puppet was drawing. In one video, the puppet that peeked then created an identical drawing. In the second video, he created a similar drawing with the same theme but different colors and shape elements. In the third, the puppet that looked at the other’s drawing drew a completely different picture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEbUCmSM5BE

After watching each video, the children rated how good or bad the puppets were.

Five- and 6-year-olds from all three cultures rated the puppet who copied the others’ work negatively. However, 3- and 4-year-olds evaluated plagiarism much differently than the older children, as well as differently across cultures. Mexican preschoolers rated unique drawers more positively than the plagiarizers, but, American and Chinese 3- and 4-year-olds didn’t distinguish much between characters who created original drawings and plagiarized ones. And Chinese preschoolers rated copycats more positively than those who drew something similar.

“Sometimes copying is good; for example, when we learn to write, we all learn this is how you make an A, so that’s not considered plagiarism,” Olson said. “That may be confusing to children, because sometimes we tell them to come up with novel ideas but other times they’re supposed to copy. It’s interesting to think about how kids are sorting that out.”

The researchers chose to study children in the U.S., which has strong protections in place for intellectual property, and China, which did not until very recently (establishing its first patent law in 1984, more than 150 years after the U.S. and most of Europe). They also chose Mexico because it is in the middle of the spectrum in protecting intellectual property.

“This is a nice example of how we often think there are huge differences across cultures and that a lot of everyday judgments are colored by our culture. But, this study shows that even in very different cultures, the underlying psychology is sometimes quite similar,” Olson said. “By age 5 or 6 across all of these cultures you find that kids think being a copycat is bad.”

Co-authors of the study are , a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, and and Eric Garduno, formerly students at Yale. Olson conducted the research while at Yale University; she joined the 91探花 in summer 2013.

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Olson can be reached at krolson@uw.edu or 206-616-1371.

Great progress has been made in easing suffering around the world. HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence, polio is almost contained, guinea worm is being wiped out, malaria is decreasing and childhood mortality is dropping. But achieving real equity in accessing health care will take more than idealism, money, and control of diseases.

It will take political will to support policies that favor the poor and working class, according to Dr. Stephen Gloyd, 91探花professor of global health and health services. Gloyd will deliver 聽the 38^th Annual University Faculty Lecture at 7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 聽6 in Kane Hall Room 130. His talk is 聽titled, 鈥淎chieving Health for All in the 21^st Century: Globalization, Growing Inequity and Creative Responses.鈥澛� The talk is free and open to all. A reception will follow in the Walker Ames Room.

In conjunction with the Office of the Provost, members of the 91探花faculty choose one of their peers to deliver the University Faculty Lecture. This award honors faculty whose research, scholarship or art has been widely recognized by their colleagues 聽and whose achievements have had a substantial impact on their profession and perhaps on society as a whole.

Gloyd joins a distinguished roster of Nobel laureates, historians, artists, scientists and authors who have presented this series each year since 1976. On choosing his topic, Gloyd said, 聽鈥淭his is the most important topic in global health right now. We are doing a fabulous job as a global health community, especially at the 91探花and in Seattle, in developing new technologies around HIV, malaria and other diseases. But we are not addressing the really important issues involving determinants of equity 鈥� education, jobs income, nutrition, water and sanitation.鈥�

Gloyd said that many U.S. government policies are actually making it harder for people in poor countries to access public services, because these policies have imposed austerity measures and unfair trade agreements. 聽Some policies, he said, undermine local efforts to combat unequal power relationships.

Gloyd鈥檚 lecture will look at these policies systematically. In most of sub-Saharan Africa for example, Gloyd said, austerity measures 聽to reign in debt have crippled the government鈥檚 efforts to support the poor and working class. The government ends up cutting education, social safety nets, pensions and salaries. Gloyd said free trade has tied the hands of low-income countries who want to regulate sweatshops and create safer conditions for workers. The United States, he said, continues its history of targeting leaders who promote equity, for example, in Guatemala, Angola, Honduras and Venezuela, and has engaged in ways of overthrowing these leaders.

鈥淭he specifics of these policies are very clear and very well-documented,鈥� he said.

Gloyd鈥檚 lecture will look at creative responses to assuring greater equity, such as rethinking trade policies, supporting living wages and decreasing military campaigns.

Gloyd said these issues have been largely ignored by the global health community because they are 鈥渋nconvenient鈥� and require 聽taking a stand that is anti-corporate and that questions the motives of U.S. foreign policy.

He will also discuss why he believes achieving equity is more possible than ever before. One reason, he said, is that the 91探花Department of Global Health has graduated hundreds of students who understand these issues and are now working in more than 30 countries. Many of these graduates hold high-level positions.

A native of Seattle, Gloyd did his residency at the 91探花and became a faculty member in 1986. He was also active in promoting Zimbabwean music and sending material aid to Mozambique.聽 These interests 聽lead to his initial work there with the Ministry of Health in the late 1970s and 80s.

In 1987, he founded Health Alliance International. This nonprofit organization has worked for decades in solidarity with the ministries of health of Mozambique, C么te d鈥橧voire, Timor-Leste and Sudan to strengthen primary health care and to improve approaches to global health assistance.聽 Health Alliance International, now a center in the Department of Global Health, played a key support role for the Mozambique government to make AIDS treatment universal and free throughout 聽its 聽country.

Gloyd is associate chair for education and curriculum in the UW鈥檚 Department of Global Health, where he directs the M.P.H, and Ph.D. programs.

Gloyd received his bachelor鈥檚 and master鈥檚 degrees in public health from Harvard University and his medical degree from the University of Chicago. His many awards include the American Public Health Association鈥檚 International Health Mid-Career Award, the 91探花Distinguished Teaching Award and the Edward K. Barsky Award for global health activism.

 

91探花 psychologist has developed a new version of his to measure the strength of one’s support for one of several football teams. Greenwald created the original Implicit Association Test in 1998 to gauge a person’s unconscious beliefs and hidden biases. He and colleagues have since adapted it for numerous scenarios, including racial attitudes during the 2012 presidential election.

Greenwald developed the current football test with psychologist Colin Smith at the University of Florida. It is designed for fans of the four teams that played in the NFC and AFC conference championships: Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos, New England Patriots and San Francisco 49ers. The 10-minute asks participants to respond quickly to images and words on the screen. The images are versions of each team’s logo or name, and the words include self-identifiers such as “mine” and “theirs.” Fans can take three different tests: Seattle-San Francisco, New England-Denver and Seattle-Denver.

Greenwald said the psychological theory known as “” claims that support for a team rises after a win and drops after a loss, so he encourages Seattle and Denver fans to take the test before the Super Bowl and again afterward to see if there is any difference in their support for a certain team. Fans can take the test as many times as they want.

“I think on average the reflected glory theory is probably right, but I don’t think that applies to everyone,” Greenwald said. “I do think the strong fan is someone whose attachment is pretty unshakable. It’s really a test of your strength as a fan that if you still show a strong association after the team has lost, then you are a real fan.”

Greenwald says he is sometimes surprised by unexpected results from variations of the test. But when he took the Seattle-Denver test, he wasn’t surprised to learn that he had a strong identification with Seattle.

“For sports teams, the test mostly produces results that people agree reflects them,” he said. “For me, it could also be tapping into my generally positive associations with Seattle, apart from the team. But that sense of identity can fluctuate. Someone who’s more of a fair-weather fan of a team may show weaker support for the team on this test after a loss.”

Thousands of adaptations of the online Implicit Association Test have been taken by people more than 15 million times in the last 15 years, measuring unconscious attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.

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For more information, contact Greenwald at agg@uw.edu or 206-543-7227.