Minority populations face significant barriers in accessing mental health care for depression, including language disparities, cultural stigma, and mistrust with medical systems. Prior research has shown that limited English proficiency was correlated with lower mental health service utilization and prolonged untreated illness. This study seeks to extend this work by examining how language fluency affects openness to antidepressant treatment among immigrant and minority groups. Eleven Spanish- or Mandarin-speaking participants with immigrant background participated in focus group discussions about barriers to participating in research involving biomedical treatment for depression. Participants also completed questionnaires prior to and after the focus group. Language fluency was measured as the comfort level and self-reported proficiency in English versus non-English languages. Participants provided open-ended responses regarding their openness to receiving antidepressant treatment, which was subsequently coded on a Likert scale. We hypothesized that higher comfort level with non-English language would correlate with reduced openness to receiving antidepressant treatment and that this association would be statistically explained by a lowered level of acculturation to mainstream North American culture. This study will clarify how language preferences and cultural adaptation work together to affect individuals from minoritized communities and their willingness to undergo antidepressant treatment.

Bilingualism is widely recognized for its social and cultural benefits, including advantages in professional or educational settings. Many bilinguals acquire both languages from birth, but the factors affecting a parent’s decision to raise a bilingual child remain unclear. This study investigates how personal life experiences and external factors influence perspectives on bilingual parenting, particularly among underrepresented racial and ethnic college students. We hypothesized that students with positive experiences regarding their own bilingualism are more likely to perceive bilingualism as advantageous for a child’s development. Using a mixed-method approach, this study integrates quantitative analysis of Likert-scale survey questions with a qualitative examination of free responses to assess correlations between bilingual experiences and attitudes toward future bilingual parenting decisions. Regression analysis will be conducted to identify the most influential factors on those decisions, from among family values, multilingual exposure, and perceived advantages of bilingualism in communication, cultural preservation, and relationship-building. Identifying these factors is a critical first step to finding ways to increase positive attitudes toward bilingual education in individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Aesthetic chills are intense emotional experiences characterized by physiological arousal, heightened perceptual processing, and dopaminergic release. These moments of deep engagement are thought to reflect a state of heightened salience detection, making them an ideal phenomenon for examining how emotional arousal modulates cognition. While prior research suggests that arousal enhances memory consolidation, little is known about how the specific experience of chills influences memory encoding and retrieval. Understanding this link is crucial, as aesthetic emotions are deeply embedded in cultural and artistic experiences, shaping how we process and retain meaningful stimuli. In this study, participants will be exposed to a chills-inducing video and then complete subsequent memory tests. We hypothesize that the heightened perceptual processing accompanying chills will enhance memory retention. By bridging emotion and cognition, this work will advance our understanding of how intense emotional states dynamically shape fundamental cognitive processes, offering new insights into the interaction between emotion, attention, and memory.

Empathy plays a vital role in youth socioemotional development. However, affective empathy (AE), the ability to share others' emotions, and cognitive empathy (CE), the ability to understand others' emotions, are respectively linked to internalizing symptoms. This study examines how AE and CE relate to anxiety and depression during adolescence using longitudinal data from the Development of Anxiety in Youth Study (DAYS) (n=145, Mage=11.64, SDage=1.51, 44% Female). After controlling for age and gender, anxiety and depression were moderately positively correlated (r=.49, p<.001). Overall, CE was significantly negatively related to anxiety (r=–.15, p=.01), but AE was not significantly associated with anxiety (r=.06, p=.34) or depression (r=.08, p=.17). CE and depression were not significantly correlated (r=-.02, p=.79). When examined by year, the correlation between anxiety and depression strengthened over time (Year 1: r=.35, p<.001; Year 2: r=.51, p<.001, Year 3: r=.69, p<.001). AE was significantly positively associated with depression only in Year 2 (r=.31, p=.006). Gender differences became more pronounced as youth developed, with females reporting significantly higher levels of anxiety (p=.01), depression (p=.01), AE (p=.01), and CE (p=.03) by Year 2. These patterns highlight the role of gender in empathic development and internalizing symptoms, with CE as a potential protective factor against anxiety. Future research may further examine how gender moderates the link between empathy and mental health symptoms.

The conjunction fallacy has been examined using procedures like the Linda Problem. However, such problems faced criticisms for using leading language, social contexts, and having heuristics as the underlying mechanism. To address such critiques, the current study used a novel non-verbal empirical procedure to investigate the role of learned trial-type base rates and the positive feature effect on the conjunction fallacy. We extended and validated prior research where rats showed evidence for the conjunction fallacy. Human participants (n = 455) were trained to move a digital Pac-Man left/right based on background color (green/blue) and light status (off/on). Different participant groups were trained with different light off/on ratios: 10/90, 25/75, 40/60, 50/50, 60/40, 75/25, and 90/10. After training, the light was occluded to test whether participants judged the conjunction of two events (background color + light on) was more likely to happen than a single event (background color + light off). Results showed that participants in the 50/50 condition were significantly more likely to act as if the light was on, displaying evidence for the conjunction fallacy in a learned, language-independent context. We also mapped a psychophysical function on the proportion of conjunction choices across conditions, finding systematic effects of base rates. The current study validates the non-verbal procedure and suggests that conjunction fallacy is a fundamental reasoning phenomenon influenced by base rates and positive feature biases.