Recent advances in data analysis allowed the researchers to gain new insights about the impact of 100-year-old laws. PhotoQuest

A new study found that people who were born in “dry” counties during the Prohibition era lived an additional 1.7 years, compared to those born in “wet” counties. Because parts of the United States became dry through state and federal regulation at different times between 1900 and 1930, data from this period provided a natural basis for comparison.

Jason Fletcher MS’03, PhD’06 of the La Follette School of Public Affairs is a coauthor on the study, which was the first to look at the long-term effects of Prohibition on longevity.

“Researchers now understand that exposures during pregnancy, due to interruptions to fetal development, can have long-term cascading effects on later-life health,” Fletcher says. He adds that recent advances in data analysis allowed the researchers to gain new insights about the impact of 100-year-old laws.

The findings could have implications for public health policy during a time when the number of mothers who drink during pregnancy has risen from 9.2 percent in 2011 to nearly 14 percent in 2022.

“Our brains want our expectations to be supported,” says Cox. Eric Roman Beining Photography

A new UW study shows why letting stereotypes inform our judgments of unfamiliar people can be such a hard habit to break. It found that stereotypes self-perpetuate in our minds, growing stronger with use.

“Think back to when you were in grade school learning your multiplication tables, and you would repeat them in your mind,” says William Cox MS’08, PhD’15, a UW scientist who studies prejudice. “Going through the world making assumptions about other people with stereotypes we’ve learned is another form of mental practice. With more rehearsal, those assumptions get stronger over time, even when we have no real evidence to back them up.”

Cox, Xizhou Xie ’16, and UW–Madison psychology professor Patricia Devine put more than 1,000 people to work on a stereotyping task that involved reading social media profiles (some of them seeded with stereotypical information) and deciding whether the men in the profiles were gay or straight. Some received feedback about whether they were correct or incorrect, and others received no feedback. Then they read more profiles so researchers could see how the previous feedback affected their answers.

When the feedback mostly confirmed stereotypes, people stereotyped even more over time. Meanwhile, people who received feedback countering stereotypes didn’t seem to learn from it, continuing to stereotype at the same rate. Even more distressing, the people who received no feedback showed learning patterns like the people whose stereotypes were confirmed.

For Cox, the results support the theories behind the neuroscience of learning.

When an uncertain prediction is confirmed — like successfully guessing which number will come up on a roll of dice — that confirmation activates reward processes in our brains. The result is a pleasant little chemical release that reinforces the value of the prediction. In Cox’s new studies, this neural-reward process made stereotyping more appealing than accuracy. Participants continued relying on stereotypes even when the feedback said that they were inaccurate.

“Our brains want our expectations to be supported,” says Cox. “Because of that reward engagement, we can start becoming addicted, in a way, to stereotyping. Simply understanding that this happens is an important way to check those assumptions and not let them influence your judgment.”

Sethi: “We should remember that people at the CDC, people in our local health departments, are human beings just like us.”

For more than a decade, Ajay Sethi has been on the UW–Madison faculty in the Department of Population Health Sciences, doing the typical work of a professor with a mostly low-profile professional life. He conducted research in Uganda and Wisconsin and taught courses in epidemiology. Following the increasing occurrence of measles outbreaks in the United States, he took an interest in misinformation and conspiracy theories. He developed a course called Conspiracies in Public Health, aiming to help practitioners have conversations with clients and the community about hot-button health topics. During the pandemic, Sethi was in demand as an expert — he gave more than 400 interviews in 2020 and 2021. His low-profile days are over.

What’s it like to be featured so often in the news?

It definitely has changed how I spend my time. It certainly has made me feel like I’m part of an enterprise at the university, trying to help the public navigate the pandemic. It gives me a sense of purpose, and that’s always an important thing for anybody to have — when you wake up in the morning, to feel like what you’re doing may make a difference. But I also understand that every interview or every engagement with the community is just a tiny little drop in the bucket.

A lot of scientists became media figures. What mistakes have they made?

I’m sometimes a little dismayed when people who are part of the pandemic response are finding fault in what the Centers for Disease Control is doing. While I understand that there should be healthy debate in thinking about risk communication and how we help society navigate this, I think public arguments and finger-pointing by credentialed people only erode trust further. We should just remember that people at the CDC, people in our local health departments, are human beings just like us.

Why do you focus on misinformation?

I’ve always incorporated some element of behavioral science in most of my research — just thinking about what types of behaviors may promote the spread of infectious diseases and what kind of behaviors can prevent their becoming a burden to ourselves and to society. I don’t find that a lack of knowledge is preventing us from managing COVID-19. Really, it’s the division that we have in society that prevents us collectively from moving on. When we have that, it just generates a lot of resistance toward things that are quite normal.

What have you taken away from your public experience?

It’s been a privilege to be asked to contribute to news stories and to represent the university. I’m not out in the community as much as some people are, but when I do get those opportunities, I try my best.

Sethi is on the faculty in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH). In May 2022, SMPH and UW Health, which have partnered for more than 100 years, launched the Wisconsin Medicine campaign to raise funds in support of research, education, patient care, and health equity. Learn more at wiscmedicine.org.

UW–Madison psychology professor Paula Niedenthal ’81 recalls a conversation with a Russian journalist who had called to discuss her research. He remarked that wide, expressive American smiles are fake, unlike the smiles of other cultures.

This was during the 14-year stretch when she lived in France, working for the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Comments of this nature were common during her time abroad, and they never ceased to rankle her.

“It became clear that many people believe American smiles are inauthentic and manipulative, as well as deeply embedded in capitalism,” Niedenthal says.

How did these assumptions develop? Why are they so prevalent? What might help change them? She set out to answer these questions in 2011, when she joined UW–Madison’s faculty and founded the Niedenthal Emotions Lab. She and a team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers study the relationship between migration patterns and societal rules about expressing emotion. These unstated rules are key components of something known as emotion culture.

In addition to promoting understanding and a sense of what to expect from others, a shared emotion culture can help people from different ethnic, religious, or linguistic backgrounds find common ground. But there’s also a dark side. Outsiders may misinterpret another group’s emotion culture, breeding stereotypes, confusion, and cross-cultural conflict.

This is how a smile’s good intentions get lost in translation.

Niedenthal studies the relationship between migration patterns and societal rules about expressing emotion.

Smiling to Survive

“I don’t think some people are more emotionally expressive than others because they’re stupid or manipulative,” Niedenthal says. “There’s something else going on.”

Niedenthal’s research suggests that this special something involves the history of cross-cultural interactions in a particular place. How these interactions happened, how often they happened, and how long ago they began all matter.

In regions where people from different cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds have had to communicate and adapt generation after generation, a preference for big, clear expressions of emotion tends to develop. The process can take hundreds of years.

Niedenthal and her team have found that this attribute — historical heterogeneity — predicts how often people smile across different countries and U.S. states. They’ve also found that people from places with a long history of cross-cultural contact use smiles that signal friendliness more often than people from places where most of the population relies on the same language and customs.

Examples of this phenomenon abound in the upper Midwest, including Wisconsin, which received immigrants from a wide range of cultures in the 1800s. The influx of immigrants led to numerous cross-cultural interactions, especially in the context of farming. Trade and collaboration were vital. If the farmhand you hired didn’t speak your language, or if you needed help extinguishing a barn fire, you had to find a way to communicate your needs.

“Being more expressive with your face can help establish trust when language isn’t doing the job,” Niedenthal says. “If I know you want wheat to be unloaded at the grain elevator, but I don’t know your language well, I’m going to smile at you to show that I’m cooperative, and that I’m not a threat to you or your lifestyle.”

Ivette Colón PhDx’25 demonstrates a facial recognition study conducted by the Niedenthal Emotions Lab.

In situations like these, smiling isn’t about joy. It’s about survival.

This framework for understanding emotion culture explains why a person in present-day Norway typically wouldn’t smile at a stranger, but a Norwegian who emigrated to Wisconsin in the 1850s would have smiled at his new neighbors from Germany, Ireland, and Poland. It also explains why the immigrant’s great-great-grandchildren probably smile at strangers on American streets. Heightened emotional expressiveness became a part of Wisconsin’s regional culture because its value persisted as immigration continued, and because it began to feel familiar.

Back in Norway, people rarely needed to communicate across cultural or linguistic divides. As a result, they didn’t need to adopt big, clear facial expressions — and the thought of doing so still feels weird today.

Challenging Assumptions

Many people — especially motivational speakers and curators of inspirational Pinterest boards — would be shocked to learn that smiling isn’t a universal language or an unmistakable sign of happiness.

First of all, smiling isn’t always about joy, as much as we might want it to be. Second, assuming that all smiles are happy ones can lead to logical errors. If genuine smiles are assumed to reflect joy and someone smiles a great deal, this person would appear to be in a state of constant bliss. This just isn’t possible, even for the most devoted optimist.

Instead of concluding that the person is delusional or dishonest, we need to examine our assumptions, Niedenthal argues.

“Smiles can show a range of emotions and intentions,” she says. “You might smile because you feel superior to someone else, which is what we call a dominant smile, or you might smile to show approval, which is a type of reward smile. These two smiles look different from each other, and neither one is inauthentic.”

On the flip side, a culture that frowns upon grins isn’t necessarily dour. It’s most likely operating with a different set of rules. Learning about these rules and appreciating why they emerged can help correct misguided assumptions, Niedenthal explains.

“My lab’s research doesn’t show that a particular culture is smarter or better than another one,” she says. “It’s more helpful to think of culture as a solution to the pressures people face in their environment. Understanding that these pressures result in different cultural practices can be humbling, and that humility can help us be far less judgmental.”

Culture, in other words, is a product of adaptation. We must adapt when we enter a new environment or when our current environment changes. Certain kinds of change come easier to some of us because our culture has trained us to endure the discomfort. One of the newest findings from Niedenthal’s lab suggests why this might be.

Stress-Fighting Superpowers

Expressive displays of emotion can be exhausting to produce — and to observe. Big smiles and sustained eye contact use substantial amounts of energy, and these behaviors put us in a state of emotional arousal. The discomfort that arises when we’re surrounded by people we consider different also produces this state. And now there’s evidence that regions with a long history of cross-cultural contact confer a superpower of sorts: conserving energy by keeping this type of stress in check. Niedenthal suspected that people from such places would be better equipped to handle emotional arousal. To test this hypothesis, her team looked at vagal tone, a measure of pulse-rate variability associated with breathing. People with high vagal tone can relax faster than people with low vagal tone after a stressful event.

As predicted, the researchers found that people from Wisconsin and other ancestrally diverse U.S. states had the highest levels of vagal tone. This suggests that the residents of ancestrally diverse places are likely to find big smiles more appealing — or at least less exhausting — than residents of places where cross-cultural contact has been minimal. Plus, they’re less likely to feel overwhelmed in the presence of cultural diversity.

But how did people develop this type of post-stress resilience in the first place? Once again, Niedenthal points to adaptation.

“If you grew up in an ancestrally diverse place, you’d have to confront differences without attacking other people and interpret facial expressions without becoming too emotionally aroused,” she says.

Learning to regulate that emotional response would help you adapt to the demands of frequent cross-cultural contact. Over time, as that skill was practiced again and again, it could evolve into an automatic response.

These conclusions aren’t just fascinating to think about. They’re making a mark on the real world. People who teach others how to regulate their emotions — a list that includes psychologists, occupational therapists, and kindergarten teachers — can find all sorts of practical applications for Niedenthal’s research. So can immigration lawyers, English as a second language instructors, and other professionals who serve a diverse set of clients.

Bridging Cultural Divides

Many psychotherapists are eager to tailor their craft to the needs of clients who don’t share their cultural background. Understanding a client’s native emotion culture and applying its rules appropriately can bring a valuable new dimension to psychotherapy while strengthening trust and motivation.

May Han, a marriage and family therapist who offers cross-cultural counseling for children of immigrants and transracial adoptees, says all mental health clinicians can benefit from learning about cultural differences in emotional expressiveness.

“This gives clinicians a general idea of the rules for displaying emotions so they can meet clients where they are at and help them facilitate a better relationship with their emotions,” she says.

Han says research like Niedenthal’s matters because it acknowledges how big emotions can live inside anyone, including people from cultures that prefer stone-faced stares to smiles.

“Just because someone seems to have less intense emotions on the outside, it doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing something deep inside,” she says.

Niedenthal agrees that it’s crucial to acknowledge what may lie beneath the surface. This is especially important in international commerce and foreign affairs, where faulty assumptions can derail business deals, peace treaties, and more. Facial expressions form a wordless language that requires skillful interpretation. Gaining this skill takes time and practice, and a conscious effort to withhold judgment.

“The type of [cross-cultural] training that’s popular in the business world often relies on value-laden clichés that are wrong and have damaging effects,” Niedenthal says. “Removing those value judgments can help us establish common ground in a way that doesn’t seem superficial or fake to someone from another culture. It helps us build mutual trust and respect — and ultimately, strong relationships.” •

hooks wrestled with the issues of race, feminism, and love: “I am passionate about everything in my life — first and foremost, passionate about ideas.” UW Archives S17568

She rose at 4 or 5 a.m. each morning, prayed and meditated, and then tried to read a nonfiction book every day. This intellectual and author prepared like an athlete as she wrestled with the issues of race, feminism, and love.

bell hooks MA’76, a well-known social critic, wrote the first of her more than 30 books at age 19, and she was a provocateur ever after.

“I think of public intellectuals as very different, because I think that they’re airing their work for that public engagement,” she told the New York Times. “Really, in all the years of my writing that was not my intention. It was to produce theory that people could use.”

hooks — whose given name was Gloria Jean Watkins but who adopted the lowercase pseudonym from her great-grandmother — wrote that first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, as an undergraduate at Stanford University before coming to UW–Madison for a master’s in English literature followed by a PhD at the University of California–Santa Cruz.

In that acclaimed work, hooks said that sisterhood must encompass growth and change. “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist, and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization,” she wrote.

hooks said she worried about what she called censorship of the imagination: “When I look at my career as a thinker and a writer, what is so amazing is that I have a dissenting voice and that I was able to come into corporate publishing and bring that dissenting voice with me.”

She was known to criticize often-admired African American figures including Spike Lee and Beyoncé, and she wrote about the nature of love, bringing a fervor to her work.

“I am passionate about everything in my life — first and foremost, passionate about ideas,” she said. “And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society — not because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical-thinking society.”

Researchers showed children photos of covered and uncovered faces displaying sadness, anger, or fear. Ashley Ruba

The proliferation of face coverings to keep COVID-19 in check isn’t preventing kids from understanding facial expressions, according to a new study by UW psychologists.

“We now have this situation where adults and kids have to interact all the time with people whose faces are partly covered, and a lot of adults are wondering if that’s going to be a problem for children’s emotional development,” says Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher at the Waisman Center’s Child Emotion Lab.

The researchers showed more than 80 children, ages seven to 13, photos of faces displaying sadness, anger, or fear that were unobstructed, covered by a surgical mask, or wearing sunglasses. The kids were asked to assign an emotion to each face from a list of six labels. The faces were revealed slowly, with scrambled pixels of the original image falling into their proper place over 14 stages to better simulate the way real-world interactions may require piecing things together from odd angles or fleeting glimpses.

The kids were correct about the uncovered faces as often as 66 percent of the time. With a mask in the way, they correctly identified sadness about 28 percent of the time, anger 27 percent of the time, and fear 18 percent of the time.

“Not surprisingly, it was tougher with parts of the faces covered,” Ruba says. “But even with a mask covering the nose and mouth, the kids were able to identify these emotions at a rate better than chance. … Kids are able to adjust to the information they’re given, and it doesn’t look like wearing masks will slow down their development in this case.”

Maslow’s work was built on the premise that people have positive qualities and an inner strength to grow and heal. Bettmann / Contributor

What motivates us as human beings? Abraham Maslow ’30, MA’31, PhD’34 saw a “gaping hole in psychology” when approaching this question, believing that his field of study wrongly focused on abnormality and illness, rather than exploring human potential.

“Where was goodness? Where was nobility? Where was reason? Where was loyalty? Where was courage?” he asked.

Raised by a stern father and a cruel mother, Maslow became one of the 20th century’s most cited psychologists. “He’s the kind of person we want to understand when we want to understand human psychology,” said historian and author Jessica Grogan.

As a graduate student at the UW, Maslow studied dominance hierarchies in primates. In time, he turned away from behaviorist theories that held that human actions and attitudes are determined primarily by an individual’s environment and past experiences. He found his calling with humanistic psychology, built on the premise that people have positive qualities and an inner strength to grow and heal.

Maslow introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, his most famous theory, in the 1940s and ’50s. Human beings, he said, must fulfill innate needs, beginning with the physiological — food, water, shelter, sleep — and culminating with self-actualization. Between those two levels on the hierarchy come needs representing safety, love and belonging, and esteem.

He taught that the path to self-actualization or reaching one’s full potential varies. “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself,” he said. “What a man can be, he must be.”

Although Maslow did not use a pyramid diagram to explain his hierarchy, it has become an iconic representation in psychology textbooks and articles that describe his work. The pyramid’s lessons live on, influencing topics ranging from history to economics to classroom teaching. (School lunch programs argue that hungry students can’t concentrate enough to learn.) And it’s a ubiquitous tool for managers who seek to understand what motivates their employees.

As he taught us about human motivation, Maslow also urged continual growth. “If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim,” he said. “And I’d despise the one who gave up.”

Kohl: “Our democracy is being threatened by bitter partisanship, and the La Follette School is poised to lead by example.” Focal Flame Photography

Since former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl ’56 made a $10 million gift to the La Follette School of Public Affairs in 2019 for the Kohl Initiative, the school has undergone the largest expansion in its 37-year history.

Kohl is perhaps best known for his $25 million lead gift to fund the Kohl Center, as well as his support for education throughout Wisconsin. But his latest gift is particularly timely. “Senator Kohl’s generous and inspirational gift could not have come at a better time,” said La Follette School director Susan Webb Yackee. “Thoughtful and evidence-based policy-making is more important than ever in Wisconsin and across the country.”

To meet students’ burgeoning interest in public policy, the school has added 11 faculty members, nearly doubling its roster. They will expand opportunities for students and the broader community to learn about timely issues such as health policy, as well as the benefits of racial diversity for social relations and civic participation. Other areas of expertise among the new faculty include climate policy, state and local finance, international trade, water policy, child health policy, and public management.

The Kohl Initiative also provides wide-ranging resources for the school’s new undergraduate certificate in public policy program, which has tripled from an initial cohort of 50 students to more than 150 for fall 2020.

Kohl-funded research at the school has focused on topics such as out-of-pocket health care costs, minimum wages and immigrants’ health, social genomics, state agency leadership and policy-making, and the impact of financial aid on post-education economic outcomes.

In addition, the Kohl Initiative allowed the school to convene nearly 350 policymakers, practitioners, community leaders, and researchers for its inaugural La Follette Forum in early 2020. The forum focused on critical health policy topics and innovative solutions for improving the health of Wisconsin residents.

Kohl, a former owner of the Milwaukee Bucks who represented Wisconsin in the Senate for 24 years, has long demonstrated a deep commitment to public service and an ethos of civility in public debate and policy-making. A founding member of the La Follette School’s board of visitors, he believes the school is critically important for solving many of the country’s most difficult issues. When the gift was announced, Kohl said, “Our democracy is being threatened by bitter partisanship, and the La Follette School is poised to lead by example — fostering cooperation, respectful discourse, and service to others. The school’s commitment to be a convener of thoughtful debate and evidence-based research provides a critical path for moving our country forward.”

Stephanie Robert and Joel Berman with a photo of Sandra Rosenbaum: “I wanted her name to be associated with a place she loved.” Jason Lee

When Joel Berman lost his wife, Sandra Rosenbaum ’72, MS ’76, in the summer of 2017, he knew exactly how to honor her memory. A graduate of the UW–Madison School of Social Work, she understood that many potential social workers abandon their graduate studies due to lack of funds. So she had encouraged Berman to support scholarships to help put dedicated, well-trained social workers into the field as quickly as possible.

Berman fulfilled that promise by starting a scholarship fund, but Rosenbaum had no idea just how far he would go to fulfill her dream. Berman went on to amplify his original scholarship to a transformative commitment of $25 million, prompting UW–Madison to name its School of Social Work in her honor: the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work.

The gift, the largest in the school’s history, is another way for Berman, the founder and former CEO of Iatric Systems, a health care technology company, to honor his love for Rosenbaum.

“I felt I wanted to do more,” says Berman, who also serves on the College of Letters & Science Board of Visitors. “It makes me feel good to say to the world, ‘I love my wife,’ and I wanted her name to be associated with a place she loved.”

Rosenbaum was inspired by her mother, Harriet ’48, a UW graduate and New York social worker who spent her career helping teenage girls in the Long Island area. Although Rosenbaum worked in the field only for a short time, those years remained a key part of her life.

“Sandy used to love coming back to Madison to visit the Terrace, eat some Babcock ice cream, and drive the loop around campus over and over,” Berman says. “It was literally like sacred ground to her.”

Berman’s attachment to the school is strong. He makes a point of reading every student-essay application to the Harriet Rosenbaum Scholarship, and he meets the winners each year at a celebration for awardees. He relishes the opportunity to be part of making a difference for future generations of social workers.

“The values of helping people, which meant so very much to my wife, will be forwarded by this gift,” says Berman. “Plus, I get to see the people I’m helping.”

Stephanie Robert, professor and director of the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work, adds, “With this exciting announcement, the school becomes one of the few named schools of social work in the country.”

The gift will provide resources to endow faculty positions, bolster scholarship opportunities, assist PhD students, and benefit many other areas within the school, which works in partnership with more than 400 local community agencies. It will also allow the school to further diversify its student body, support an inclusive environment, and expand its work around issues of racial and social justice.

Jennifer Elkins provides insight into the unique trauma experienced by children in state-sponsored foster care. Courtesy of University of Georgia

On a typical day in the United States, nearly half a million children are in state-sponsored foster care. Jennifer Elkins ’97, MS’98, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, is training future social workers and lawyers to understand the unique trauma that these children and their families may experience.

Elkins has cocreated an innovative course to teach members of these two professions, which have traditionally viewed each other warily, how to work collaboratively to benefit children at risk. Through a juvenile-court trial simulation, future social workers are gaining more confidence about representing clients in court. Future lawyers are learning to understand trauma and to more effectively use social workers as expert witnesses when they are subpoenaed to testify.

Now in its second year, the course has won Elkins and a law school colleague a 2018 Award for Innovative Teaching in Social Work Education from the Council on Social Work Education.

Trauma, which has been a research focus throughout Elkins’s career, “is much more messy and complex than we realize,” she says. “This is in part because it’s an individual’s experience of the event that matters, not the objective event itself. This explains how two people can experience the same traumatic event but have very different responses to it.”

A recent mock trial at the University of Georgia involved a scenario where both parents were at risk of losing their parental rights because of the father’s alleged sexual abuse of their son. In addition, the mother was a victim of the father’s physical violence. Child welfare lawyers often seat parents at risk of losing their parental rights together. But in this case, that would have retraumatized the mother due to her own abuse, so the lawyers in the mock trial opted to seat the parents apart.

“It’s really been beneficial to work with the law students and communicate with them on ways to infuse more trauma-informed perspectives,” says University of Georgia student Avital Abraham, who is earning a master’s in social work. She expects that the mock trials will reduce stress levels if she is called to testify in the future.

Elkins concurs. “We’re increasing the comfort levels and readiness for social workers in the courtroom. It’s an arena where social workers have a lot of potential power to be heard on behalf of their clients.”

Elkins says she feels fortunate that she had the opportunity to learn from some of the pioneers in the field of social work at Wisconsin, and she waxes nostalgic about her time on campus. “I now look upon cold weather, and the strategies I used to stay warm, quite fondly,” she says. “Wearing mittens over gloves. Figuring out a path that allowed me to stop in stores to warm up [on the way to class]. I drove a 1980s Buick Regal with rear-wheel drive, so I had to drive pretty strategically, too!”