Archive for category: College News

UCLA survey finds most teens reject glamorized lifestyles in entertainment media

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Less than 5% want to see aspirational content in TV or movies

Teens’ preferences for what they’d like to see in TV shows and movies have changed. 

Holly Ober | September 20, 2022

Key takeaways:
• Changing aspirations. Few Gen Zers want to watch shows about glamorized lifestyles.
• Real-world issues matter. Teens prefer content that deals with family dynamics or social justice.
• Positive storytelling, please. They want to see more hopeful, uplifting stories about people.

Not that long ago, teens binged on aspirational content, where the kinds of lives portrayed in “Gossip Girl” were what they wanted on their screens. But according to a recent study conducted by UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers, teens today resoundingly reject those kinds of stories. Only 4.4% in a survey of 662 diverse teens said they wanted to see this kind of content, which the researchers labeled “aspirational.” Generation Z, born from about 1997 to 2012, wants to watch content that grapples with real-world issues (21%), such as family dynamics or social justice. When asked to cast their own characters, a majority of teens lean toward wanting a black male hero (23.6%) and a white male villain (34.9%). But they also want fun, escapist content (37.8%), and one of the most popular topics they would like to see is hopeful, uplifting stories.

“Hollywood has built its young adult content on the belief that teens want to see glamorous lifestyles and rich and famous characters, but our research suggests the opposite is true,” said psychologist Yalda Uhls, director of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers. “The majority of respondents in our study feel isolated and upset when media lack accurate identity representations. This is an important change that Hollywood needs to take note of.”

“American adolescents value media that reflects what they know about the real world, even while they prefer to see people that are different from themselves,” Yalda said. “Teens want their media to show a world characterized by genuine diversity and heartwarming experiences.”

What kinds of storylines does Gen Z want?

Hopeful, uplifting stories about people beating the odds and stories about people with lives unlike their own topped the list of topics they’d like to see portrayed in the TV shows and movies they watch, according to the study.

Other findings include:

• Friends and social groups, superheroes and parents all made the top five topic list.

• Mental health continues to register for teens, ranking No. 4 on the list. For LGBTQIA+ teens, this was one of the top two preferred topics.

• Both older and younger teens want to see more stories about family life, including relationships with parents.

• Partying and/or drugs and drinking came in second to last.

• Content about climate change came in last.

The study concludes that teens want to see authentic, inclusive and positive storytelling, and emphasizes a need for the entertainment industry to shift away from aspirational content that does not prioritize diversity. Teens’ rejection of traditionally aspirational content that valorizes higher social status and material gains may also signal a substantial shift in contemporary teens’ evolving definition of success that is different from previous generations. It also suggests that hopeful messaging could be used to engage teens with various subjects in the future, such as climate change.

“While we do not know why teens rejected climate change storylines, we believe that the portrayal of this issue is often negative and may feel overwhelming,” said Stephanie Rivas-Lara, research coordinator at the Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

The survey also asked respondents which media space does the best job at making them feel “seen.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority (55%) said social media was the space where they felt most authentic, with TikTok being the most popular social media platform.

“These findings raise the question about what factors from social media have successfully catered to teens’ need for authenticity, and how the definition of authenticity for social media versus TV shows and movies may have changed over time,” Rivas-Lara said.

The teens came from different social backgrounds and reflected a diverse mix of ethnicities, genders and sexualities. Respondents were almost evenly split between male and female, and about 6% identified as a different or no gender. Gender identity made a significant difference in who was cast as the hero with 83% of male teens choosing a male and 50% of female teens choosing a female. Teens who identified as white males were the only demographic to choose to cast white males as the hero.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Yesenia Aguilar Silvan (left) and Lauren Ng

Mentorship enhances mental health research focused on the underserved

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Psychology professor Lauren Ng and doctoral student Yesenia Aguilar Silvan help each other make a difference for others

Portrait of Psychology professor Lauren Ng and doctoral student Yesenia Aguilar Silvan

Yesenia Aguilar Silvan (left) and Lauren Ng | Photo by Stephanie Yantz

Jonathan Riggs | September 28, 2022

According to the American Psychiatric Association, people from racial and ethnic minority groups in the U.S. may be more likely to experience long-lasting consequences from mental health issues — and less likely to seek and receive treatment.

Identifying and addressing barriers to care for underserved populations is key to the work of both Lauren Ng, assistant professor of clinical psychology and director of the Treatment and Research for the Underserved with Stress and Trauma (TRUST) Lab, and her mentee, doctoral student Yesenia Aguilar Silvan.

“We actually know little about how to provide the best care for minoritized populations, who are typically also more likely to have experienced traumatic events,” says Ng, who was honored with awards in 2021 and 2022 for her contributions to the field. “My research focuses on how we make sure that people who need care but have been systematically excluded from mental health treatment, receive it. Yesenia’s research interests fit nicely with my own, although she’s taking a very novel approach.”

Part of a newer field of study known as implementation science, Aguilar’s approach focuses on getting people interested in mental health care interventions in the first place. Right now, she’s studying how best to optimize therapist websites to increase the rate of people navigating them successfully to engage in therapy.

“I conducted a survey that found that people who were interested in mental health services needed to know who the therapist was, and not a lot of the clinic websites I studied included information like that,” Aguilar says. “I’m hoping in the next year or so we can gather even more data based on these changes to the clinic websites see if they make a difference.”

Currently, it takes about 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice; implementation science like Aguilar’s research seeks to reduce that length of time. In part due to her own experience growing up undocumented, Aguilar is personally very motivated to make a difference like this in the real world, in real time.

“I remember asking a professor once, ‘What’s the point of research?’ And he said that for him, research was just finding something that made you mad or upset and then trying to solve it with science,” Aguilar says. “I knew from my upbringing that a lot of people are not getting mental health services when they really should, and so I asked myself: ‘How do I solve that problem using science?’”

It’s a lifelong commitment that Ng shares.

“I’m a biracial person — my dad is Chinese American, my mom is Black — and I grew up in D.C., where I sometimes felt like an outside observer, trying to understand situations from different perspectives,” says Ng. “Psychology just seemed natural to me, especially when I realized I could do more than just understand, but also create treatments and interventions to help people.”

Getting the chance to work with and learn from Ng was a huge draw for Aguilar, who graduated from UCLA in 2017, to return for her doctorate. She’s flourished here, earning multiple honors, including the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship as well as awards from the Irving and Jean Stone Fund, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the Monica Salinas Graduate Student Endowed Fund. And in Ng’s lab, Aguilar has the opportunity to serve as a mentor herself to undergraduate students.

“It has been amazing to have the support system and resources here that have made it possible for me to pursue my dream. I feel as if I can ask Lauren anything, from specific research questions to advice on how to be a more effective mentor,” Aguilar says. “She also encourages me to be an independent researcher and to think about my own future, in and out of the lab. I continually learn so much from her.”

“UCLA’s department of psychology is so strong in large part due to the quality of our graduate students like Yesenia,” says Ng. “Yesenia started in community college and was able to transfer to UCLA and to receive the support and opportunities a student of her caliber deserves. That can only happen at a very unique place, one that feels like more than a university.”

For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.

Jean Jacket from the movie “Nope” chasing a man riding a horse in the desert.

How a UCLA fish scientist helped the alien in Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ seem terrifyingly real

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Doctoral student Kelsi Rutledge helped make “Jean Jacket” scientifically plausible
Jean Jacket from the movie “Nope” chasing a man riding a horse in the desert.

“Jordan Peele had a vision already, inspired by some animals, but he wanted to talk to a scientist to make it plausible and real. He wanted an animal that mesmerized its prey like a cuttlefish,” said UCLA doctoral student Kelsi Rutledge. | Universal Pictures

Holly Ober | 

When Kelsi Rutledge came to UCLA to pursue graduate studies, she didn’t expect to land a side hustle in Hollywood. But her discovery of a new fish species attracted the attention of director Jordan Peele, and she enthusiastically accepted his invitation to help create a scientifically plausible alien for his latest movie, “Nope.”

The movie, which is in theaters now, tells the story of a small group of determined people who confront a dangerous species that appears to be from outer space.

Rutledge, who will receive her doctoral degree in ecology and evolutionary biology this fall, studies how rays and other fish smell chemicals in the ocean. The project was inspired by her master’s thesis on guitarfish, a type of ray that lacks a stinger.

“Someone collected these fishes in the Gulf of California and put them on the shelf at UCLA and in the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles but never examined them further,” Rutledge said. “When I was looking at them I thought some of them looked different, but I wasn’t sure at first.”

Further study showed this was a new species, which Rutledge named Pseudobatos buthi in honor of her late thesis advisor, ecology and evolutionary biology professor Donald Buth.

Discovering a new species is a big deal for a scientist at any stage of their career, even more so for a student just getting started on their graduate research. But what Rutledge did next surpassed science. She asked a professional photographer friend to take pictures of her cradling a museum specimen of the new species on the beach, and announced the discovery on Twitter in the manner of a glossy, social media-friendly birth announcement. The tweet quickly went viral and received media coverage from several prominent outlets, including Smithsonian Magazine.

In the this video, you can get a glimpse of the squid-like alien called “Jean Jacket.” | Universal Pictures

Rutledge said that one distinct feature of guitarfishes is their “weird nose,” which has many unique flap-like structures. She began comparing it to other rays and stingrays, and the project evolved into research for a doctoral degree.

“I look at it from both a biological and engineering point of view,” she said. “Why have these noses evolved to look the way they do? What are the design principles of building an underwater nose? Answering these questions could help inform underwater sensor technology.”

One mystery of ray olfaction — the sense of smell — involves how they bring scent into their noses. Dogs, humans and most other terrestrial animals have noses connected to their throats and lungs that work like a pump to pull air, and the scent molecules it contains, into their noses. But rays, like other fish, breathe through gills that are not connected to their noses or throats and yet, without a pump, they can somehow still bring odors into their nose.

“I found that the shape of their nose correlates with how the rays swim, but how do their noses actually work?” she said.

Rutledge said she checked preserved specimens out from museums “like library books” and used a CT scanner at the UCLA hospital when it wasn’t in use to create accurate digital models of nose structures. She made 3-D printed physical models from the CT-scans that she put in a water tunnel, similar to a wind tunnel, injected with dye or miniscule, reflective glass balls to observe fluid dynamics around the nose in real time.

“The water tunnel experiments showed that the nose shape alone in some rays brings in water because there’s no pump,” Rutledge said. “If we can develop artificial sensors that don’t require a pump by just changing the sensor’s geometry, it would be an inexpensive way to increase the efficiency of the system.”

Image of bigfin squid

Bigfin squid | NOAA Ocean Exploration, Windows to the Deep 2021

To do some of this research, Rutledge partnered with John Dabiri, an engineering professor at Caltech who studies fluid mechanics and flow physics. Peele had hired Dabiri to consult on the physics of his fictional alien to learn how fast it could fly and how rain would move around the animal, among other things. When Peele mentioned he was also looking for a biologist who understood how animals behaved and who had discovered a new species, Dabiri recommended Rutledge.

“Jordan Peele had a vision already, inspired by some animals, but he wanted to talk to a scientist to make it plausible and real. He wanted an animal that mesmerized its prey like a cuttlefish,” Rutledge said. “One way he wanted to display this mesmerization aspect was designing the movie’s creature with a square eyeball but he didn’t think any animals had them.”

Rutledge informed him octopuses have square pupils, and sent him reference photos.

“There’s a lot of marine animal inspiration in the way the alien moves, especially in its unfurled form, which is very similar to a bigfin squid, which have a beautiful billowing fin on their head. The alien moves in the sky like an octopus or squid, and its saucer form is directly modeled after the sand dollar. The creature’s ability to camouflage itself as a cloud is also based on octopuses, who have special skin cells that change color to blend in with the background,” Rutledge said.

Some of the most horrifying moments in the movie occur after the creature, called “Jean Jacket,” consumes its live prey, who scream from within the creature’s guts.

“The digestive system is based on that of an ocean creature called the giant larvacean, and also on birds’ digestive systems,” Rutledge said. “Birds swallow their food whole and store it in a crop. It passes into the gizzard where it is ground up by grit and rocks the birds have swallowed. As in larvaceans and birds, food is swallowed whole and passes through a labyrinth of canals.”

Using high-powered lasers to illuminate tiny particles in water, we can visually see the fluid dynamics of odor capture, which is the green particles going into the nose of a ray. | Kelsi Rutledge

With help from Rutledge and Dabiri, Peele created a world that looked like the one we are used to but felt like a marine environment, in which a predator above hunted smaller creatures living in the sand. To escape predation, people had to learn how to predict and deflect “Jean Jacket’s” behavior, as wild prey animals must. The result is a monster that terrifies and kills without true malice, a beautiful animal simply living the life nature meant it to live.

Rutledge’s work for “Nope” is not done yet.

Together with the movie’s main characters, Rutledge will co-author a fake scientific paper about the new species. The narrative will be that the characters reached out to Rutledge at UCLA to help them describe and name “Jean Jacket” for the scientific community. Rutledge will write it exactly as a real scientific paper — she has experience publishing about a new species, after all. The fake manuscript will take the form of a coffee table book with a cover that looks like the journal “Nature,” one of the world’s top scientific journals. “Jean Jacket’s” scientific name will be “Occulonimbus edoequus,” which means “hidden dark cloud, stallion-eater” in Latin.

After finishing her doctoral studies this fall, Rutledge hopes to join Dabiri’s Caltech lab as a postdoctoral scholar. And though her first and foremost passion is science, she’s ready to step up next time Hollywood comes calling.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Related story: The nature of innovation: Marine scientist Kelsi Rutledge explores new possibilities for bioinspired design

Image of Manuscript of religious commentary. In this image, al-Taftāzānī’s sharḥ (commentary) on al-Nasafī’s al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafīyya (the creed of an-Nasafī) can be seen within the textblock. In the marginalia and between the text, glosses on this commentary and intertextual references by several different scholars can be found.

Students make remarkable finds in UCLA’s ‘Encountering Arabic Manuscripts’ course

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The collaboration between the Islamic studies program and UCLA Library continues to enrich the field and the world
Image of Manuscript of religious commentary. In this image, al-Taftāzānī’s sharḥ (commentary) on al-Nasafī’s al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafīyya (the creed of an-Nasafī) can be seen within the textblock. In the marginalia and between the text, glosses on this commentary and intertextual references by several different scholars can be found.

Scholars’ notes surround a central box containing a 14th-century Persian scholar’s commentary on a 12th-century Islamic religious tract. | UCLA Library Special Collections

Jonathan Riggs | 

If there was any question that UCLA Library Special Collections’ vast array of handwritten medieval manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and early Ottoman Turkish contained undiscovered historical gems and unique avenues for groundbreaking research, just ask doctoral student Brooke Baker.

While studying an untitled text as part of UCLA’s “Encountering Arabic Manuscripts” course, Baker found that it contained a work by Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha’rani, the 16th-century mystic and scholar who founded an Egyptian order of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. Thinking she might have stumbled onto something rare, she showed it to Associate Professor Luke Yarbrough, who teaches the course.

“On a hunch, Brooke and I shared this discovery with Adam Sabra, the King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies at UC Santa Barbara, who has worked extensively on Sha’rani,” Yarbrough recalled. The verdict? “He knew of only three other manuscripts of this type in the world — two in Egypt and one in Saudi Arabia — and was unaware of UCLA’s.”

This remarkable discovery is just one of several that have been made in the course, an ongoing collaboration between UCLA’s Islamic studies program and UCLA Library. Library Special Collections, which houses a world-class assortment of archives, books, manuscripts, photographs and other materials available to students, faculty and the public, provides an invaluable resource for such partnerships.

“The UCLA Library’s Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscripts collection is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world, totaling at least 8,000 manuscripts,” said Ginny Steel, UCLA’s Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian. “These collections encompass rare and beautiful illuminated manuscripts, poetry and literature, significant medical and scientific tracts, and works of historical importance.”

Images of Luke Yarbrough, Jet Jacobs and Ginny Steel

From left: Luke Yarbrough, Jet Jacobs and Ginny Steel. | Smadar Bergman and Elena Zhukova

The course itself began with a conversation between Yarbrough, who studies early and medieval Islamic history, and Jet Jacobs, the head of public services, outreach and community engagement for Library Special Collections.

“Since 2018, Library Special Collections has taught or facilitated over 300 classes using our materials. This means more than 10,000 students have interacted with over 25,000 rare and unique items, leading to a number of discoveries and research pathways,” Jacobs said. “The majority of these were undergraduate classes; it’s important to embed primary-source literacy into the undergraduate curriculum so that students feel empowered to conduct original research and envision themselves as knowledge creators.”

Although Library Special Collections works with faculty across campus, supporting classes in history, English, science, dance, studio art and beyond, this particular collaboration was sparked in part by the fact that the Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscripts collection has not yet been extensively catalogued — a remarkable opportunity for students and faculty to plumb its unknown depths.

Image of baker stamps - Russian stamps indicating the provenance of the paper used for a copy of a work by the 16th-century Sufi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī.

Russian stamps indicating the provenance of the paper used for a copy of a work by the 16th-century Sufi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī. | UCLA Library Special Collections

Beyond the wealth of knowledge available in each manuscript, many offer intriguing windows into the past. Marginal annotations, personal notes and even stamps from libraries across the centuries give invaluable insight to those seeking to understand specific works in their full context. Using such clues, another doctoral student in Yarbrough’s course, Hinesh Shah, was able to identify a manuscript as having belonged to specific officials of the 18th-century Mughal Empire of South Asia.

► Discover more about the unique finds by Baker, Shah and other students in the course

In fact, this research is so promising that an anonymous donor recently gave UCLA a $100,000 gift to support the preservation, cataloging and accessibility of the manuscript collection for anyone wishing to explore it. In particular, the gift will allow graduate students to further expand their cataloguing work.

“This collaboration benefits us all — we rely completely on Library Special Collections for their archival and preservation expertise, while the scholarly community can help make meaning out of the collections,” said Yarbrough. “Another important piece of the puzzle comes with members of the broader L.A. community who are interested in these manuscripts for what they represent religiously and culturally.”

After all, connecting the world with UCLA’s research and resources underpins the course, the collaboration and the work of Library Special Collections and the Islamic studies program.

“There is no end to the potential of Library Special Collections materials to encourage new areas of research and stimulate curiosity,” Jacobs said. “Our holdings consist of everything from stone tablets and medieval manuscripts to born-digital resources and contemporary artists’ books, and we are always looking for opportunities to engage our communities with these significant cultural heritage materials.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.

Image of a blue banner depicting the Bruin bear statue, with the text: UCLA #1 Public University

UCLA ranked No. 1 public university by U.S. News & World Report for sixth straight year

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‘For veterans, there are no other institutions as approachable and supportive as UCLA,’ says medical student Nam Yong Cho

Image of a blue banner depicting Royce Hall and the Bruin bear statue, with the text: UCLA #1 Public University: The number one public university in the nation, three years in a row.

Mike Fricano and Alison Hewitt | 

As a first-generation student, Alvina Zhan knew that getting accepted to a top-tier university was only the first of her challenges. Zhan wanted to find a school that offered her a huge span of education opportunities while fostering her individual success the way a small liberal arts college would.

That alignment brought her to UCLA, where she has excelled.

“Accessibility and strong academic support are everything to me,” said Zhan, a sophomore from the Bay Area city of Fremont, California, who credits UCLA’s Academic Advancement Program and specifically the program’s student, faculty and staff mentors with helping her adjust to the rigors of higher education.

“For many first-generation students like myself, we often don’t have the luxury to explore our academic interests and instead have to focus on supporting our families throughout high school,” Zhan said. “However, UCLA provided me the space I needed to realize my academic and personal goals.”

That commitment to student success has attracted the attention not only of prospective students and their families — UCLA has been the nation’s most applied-to school for several years running — but also of U.S. News & World Report, which has once again named UCLA the No. 1 public university in the United States in its annual “Best Colleges” rankings.

This is the sixth consecutive year UCLA has been ranked No. 1.

The ranking, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said, “is a recognition of the hard work of the staff and faculty, who believe deeply in our academic mission and drive it forward, even in the most difficult periods. It is a recognition of our students’ brilliance, creativity, ambition and persistence, both in their time on campus and in their lives as alumni.”

UCLA shares the top honor among public schools this year with UC Berkeley. Four other University of California campuses are among the top 10 public universities: UC Santa Barbara (No. 7), UC Irvine (8, tied), UC San Diego (8, tied) and UC Davis (10, tied).

UCLA is ranked highest among the top 20 national universities, public or private, for social mobility, a measurement of the achievement of students from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds. U.S. News considers the number of Pell Grant recipients enrolled, the six-year graduation rate for these students and how that rate compares to non–Pell Grant recipients.

For the sixth year in a row, UCLA was named the No. 1 public university for veterans. UC Berkeley also tied with UCLA in that category.

U.S. Army veteran Nam Yong Cho made UCLA his No. 1 choice twice over, first for his bachelor’s degree and then for medical school. Now studying to be a trauma surgeon, Cho moved to California from South Korea as a child. Growing up in Irvine, he was attracted to UCLA.

“Here was one of the best schools in the country, within driving distance of home,” said Cho, now 28.

He always knew he would serve in the military, he said, and to help his family with the cost of his education, he left UCLA in his junior year and enlisted in 2015. Serving in the Army took Cho to Afghanistan, where his work as a combat medic sparked his interest in trauma surgery. In 2019, he returned to complete his bachelor’s degree and in 2021 entered the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

“For veterans, there are no other institutions as approachable and supportive as UCLA,” Cho said. “Only UCLA has a specific Veteran Resource Center that guides you in using your veteran benefits and connects you with financial aid programs, instead of having to research it all yourself.”

The U.S. News “Best Colleges” rankings are based on 17 measures, including graduation and retention rates, class size and the average federal loan debt of graduates, as well as schools’ academic reputation, as determined by a peer assessment survey of presidents, provosts and deans of admissions at U.S. colleges.

While UCLA performs extremely well across the criteria, its excellence is also rooted in efforts not reflected in U.S. News rankings. For example, UCLA is the only campus in the UC system to guarantee housing to all students who seek it for the duration of their undergraduate education, and it regularly wins awards for its food and dining facilities. UCLA has earned a reputation as a place where people from all walks of life can shape their future success.

Emelin Vivar came to UCLA thanks to her mentor, Venezia Ramirez. During Ramirez’s senior year at UCLA, she encouraged Vivar, who was then in high school, to envision herself on campus in Westwood. The pair shared a similar background as young Latinas from South Los Angeles who had dreams of expanding their experiences at a university.

“I could have never dreamed of attending UCLA if I had not met a Latina student like Venezia,” said Vivar, who is now in her second year.

Vivar recalled that during their weekly talks, Ramirez would tell her that after graduating from UCLA she hoped to someday work for NASA or conduct research to address environmental inequities affecting her community. That type of aspirational talk left a huge impression on Vivar.

“It was my dream school since then.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Portrait of Dean Tracy Johnson

Dean Tracy Johnson receives grant to launch undergraduate stem cell training program

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Portrait of Dr. Tracy Johnson

Tracy Johnson, professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology in the UCLA College and holder of the Cecilia and Keith Tarasaki Presidential Endowed Chair. Effective Sept. 1, 2020, Johnson became dean of the division of life sciences in the UCLA College. | Photography by Hadar Goren


UCLA Newsroom | August 30, 2022

Editor’s note: This page was updated Aug. 31 with the correct figure for the grant.

Tracy Johnson, dean of the division of life sciences and a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, has received a $2.9 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to train students from underrepresented backgrounds in stem cell biology.

The four-year commitment from the state’s stem cell agency comes in the form of a Creating Opportunities through Mentorship and Partnership Across Stem Cell Science, or COMPASS, grant. With it, Johnson will found the UCLA COMPASS program, which will be open to sophomores and transfer students from two-year colleges.

Each UCLA student accepted into the COMPASS program will be matched with a faculty mentor from the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center and will engage in at least six quarters of laboratory research, gaining valuable hands-on experience and earning credit towards their degree. COMPASS scholars will also complete courses designed to equip them with the skills they need to build careers in the stem cell field, present their research at conferences and receive training in science communications and community outreach.

Applicants will initially be recruited from two UCLA programs: the Academic Advancement Program’s Transfer Summer Program and Pathways to Success, the latter of which was developed by Johnson. Pathways to Success is a four-year, honors-level program designed to support undergraduate students’ efforts in science, technology, engineering and math degree programs, academic achievement, sense of belonging in science and career goals.

“I am proud of UCLA’s efforts to create and maintain college and career readiness programs that help ensure the future success of undergraduate students who are determined to bring about positive change in the world,” said Johnson, who holds the Keith and Cecilia Terasaki Presidential Endowed Chair in Life Sciences and is a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology.

Recruiting for the UCLA COMPASS program will begin this fall.

Read the full news release about the UCLA COMPASS program.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Portrait of Lauren Ng, David Clewett, Bridget Callaghan

Three psychologists selected as 2022-23 UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows

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Portrait of Lauren Ng, David Clewett, Bridget Callaghan

From left: Lauren Ng, David Clewett and Bridget Callaghan. All are assistant professors of psychology in the UCLA College. | UCLA

UCLA Newsroom | 

Assistant professors Bridget Callaghan, Dave Clewett and Lauren Ng have been being selected as 2022–23 UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows.

The UCLA Hellman Fellows Program was established by the Hellman Family Foundation to support and encourage the research of promising assistant professors who show the capacity for great distinction in their research.

Callaghan studies how different early life experiences influence interactions between physical and mental health across the lifespan. She directs the Brain and Body Lab, which has a goal of using research that combines analysis of behavior, neural systems, gastrointestinal bacteria and health, and physiology to create better mental and physical health treatments across development.

Clewett’s research seeks to understand how arousal responses — particularly those elicited by emotional, stressful or motivating (rewarding/threatening) situations — influence:

  • what people remember: the information they selectively attend to and remember later on
  • how people remember: the way in which memories become organized and updated over time
  • when people remember: certain neurochemical and brain states, such as elevated norepinephrine and dopamine release, that are induced before, during or after an event.

Ng conducts translational psychological science and health disparities research for children, adolescents, and adults. The goal of her research is to reduce mental health disparities for underserved, minority communities in the Unitd States and in low- and middle-income countries. In addition, her research emphasizes bi-directional learning between global and local research and practice settings to improve access to and quality of care in the United States and around the world.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

First underground radar images from Mars Perseverance Rover reveal some surprises

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Unexpectedly tilted rock layers in the Jezero crater hint at a complex geological history

Image of Jezero crater delta

Aerial photo of the remains of a delta where a water source once fed an ancient lake at the Jezero crater. NASA’s Perseverance Rover is currently exploring the area. | NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Holly Ober | August 25, 2022

Key takeaways:

• Roving the Red Planet. NASA’s Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been gathering data on the planet’s geology and climate and searching for signs of ancient life.
• What lies beneath. The rover’s subsurface radar experiment, co-led by UCLA’s David Paige, has returned images showing unexpected variations in rock layers beneath the Jezero crater.
• Probing the past. The variations could indicate past lava flows or possibly a river delta even older than the one currently being explored on the crater floor.

After a tantalizing year-and-a-half wait since the Mars Perseverance Rover touched down on our nearest planetary neighbor, new data is arriving — and bringing with it a few surprises.

The rover, which is about the size of car and carries seven scientific instruments, has been probing Mars’ 30-mile-wide Jezero crater, once the site of a lake and an ideal spot to search for evidence of ancient life and information about the planet’s geological and climatic past.

In a paper published today in the journal Science Advances, a research team led by UCLA and the University of Oslo reveals that rock layers beneath the crater’s floor, observed by the rover’s ground-penetrating radar instrument, are unexpectedly inclined. The slopes, thicknesses and shapes of the inclined sections suggest they were either formed by slowly cooling lava or deposited as sediments in the former lake.

Image of RIMFAX subsurface readings

Top: Path of the Perseverance Rover through the Jezero crater. Middle: Subsurface radar image obtained by RIMFAX. Bottom: Diagram indicating where unexpectedly inclined rock layers were located. | Hamran et. al., 2022

Perseverance is currently exploring a delta on the western edge of the crater, where a river once fed the lake, leaving behind a large deposit of dirt and rocks it picked up along its course. As the rover gathers more data, the researchers hope to clear up the complex history of this part of the Red Planet.

“We were quite surprised to find rocks stacked up at an inclined angle,” said David Paige, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences and one of the lead researchers on the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, or RIMFAX. “We were expecting to see horizontal rocks on the crater floor. The fact that they are tilted like this requires a more complex geologic history. They could have been formed when molten rock rose up towards the surface, or, alternatively, they could represent an older delta deposit buried in the crater floor.”

Image of David Paige

David Paige, deputy principal investigator for Perseverance’s RIMFAX instrument. | Courtesy of David Paige

Paige said that most of the evidence gathered by the rover so far points to an igneous, or molten, origin, but based on the RIMFAX data, he and the team can’t yet say for certain how the inclined layers formed. RIMFAX obtains a picture of underground features by sending bursts of radar waves below the surface, which are reflected by rock layers and other obstacles. The shapes, densities, thicknesses, angles and compositions of underground objects affect how the radar waves bounce back, creating a visual image of what lies beneath.

During Perseverance’s initial 3-kilometer traverse, the instrument has obtained a continuous radar image that reveals the electromagnetic properties and bedrock stratigraphy — the arrangement of rock layers — of Jezero’s floor to depths of 15 meters, or about 49 feet. The image reveals the presence of ubiquitous layered rock strata, including those that are inclined at up to 15 degrees. Compounding the mystery, within those inclined areas are some perplexing highly reflective rock layers that in fact tilt in multiple directions.

“RIMFAX is giving us a view of Mars stratigraphy similar to what you can see on Earth in highway road cuts, where tall stacks of rock layers are sometimes visible in a mountainside as you drive by,” Paige explained. “Before Perseverance landed, there were many hypotheses about the exact nature and origin of the crater floor materials. We’ve now been able to narrow down the range of possibilities, but the data we’ve acquired so far suggest that the history of the crater floor may be quite a bit more complicated than we had anticipated.”

Rendering of Perseverance, whose RIMFAX technology is exploring what lies beneath the Martian surface.

Rendering of Perseverance, whose RIMFAX technology is exploring what lies beneath the Martian surface. | NASA/JPL/Caltech/FFI

The data collected by RIMFAX will provide valuable context to rock samples Perseverance is collecting, which will eventually be brought back to Earth.

“RIMFAX is giving us the backstory of the samples we’re going to analyze. It’s exciting that the rover’s instruments are producing data and we’re starting to learn, but there’s a lot more to come,” Paige said. “We landed on the crater floor, but now we’re driving up on the actual delta, which is the main target of the mission. This is just the beginning of what we’ll hopefully soon know about Mars.”

The paper, “Ground penetrating radar observations of subsurface structures in the floor of Jezero crater, Mars,” is one of three simultaneously published papers discussing some of the first data from Perseverance.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Image of a person in a crowd in front of the U.S. Capitol, holding a sign that reads: "Let their hearts beat."

What really drives abortion beliefs? Research suggests it’s a matter of sexual strategies

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Image of a person in a crowd in front of the U.S. Capitol, holding a sign that reads: "Let their hearts beat."

Rather than thinking that religiosity causes people to be sexually restricted, an evolutionary perspective suggests that a restricted sexual strategy can motivate people to become religious. | Maria Oswalt/Unsplash

Jaimie Arona Krems and Martie Haselton | 

Martie Haselton is a psychology professor in the UCLA College and Jaimie Arona Krems is an assistant professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University.

Many people have strong opinions about abortion — especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking a constitutional right previously held by more than 165 million Americans.

But what really drives people’s abortion attitudes?

It’s common to hear religious, political and other ideologically driven explanations — for example, about the sanctity of life. If such beliefs were really driving anti-abortion attitudes, though, then people who oppose abortion might not support the death penalty (many do), and they would support social safety net measures that could save newborns’ lives (many don’t).

Here, we suggest a different explanation for anti-abortion attitudes — one you probably haven’t considered before — from our field of evolutionary social science.

Why do people care what strangers do?

The evolutionary coin of the realm is fitness — getting more copies of your genes into the next generation. What faraway strangers do presumably has limited impact on your own fitness. So from this perspective, it is a mystery why people in Pensacola care so strongly about what goes on in the bedrooms of Philadelphia or the Planned Parenthoods of Los Angeles.

The solution to this puzzle — and one answer to what is driving anti-abortion attitudes — lies in a conflict of sexual strategies: People vary in how opposed they are to casual sex. More “sexually restricted” people tend to shun casual sex and instead invest heavily in long-term relationships and parenting children. In contrast, more “sexually unrestricted” people tend to pursue a series of different sexual partners and are often slower to settle down.

These sexual strategies conflict in ways that affect evolutionary fitness.

The crux of this argument is that, for sexually restricted people, other people’s sexual freedoms represent threats. Consider that sexually restricted women often get married young and have children early in life. These choices are just as valid as a decision to wait, but they can also be detrimental to women’s occupational attainment and tend to leave women more economically dependent on husbands.

Other women’s sexual openness can destroy these women’s lives and livelihoods by breaking up the relationships they depend on. So sexually restricted women benefit from impeding other people’s sexual freedoms. Likewise, sexually restricted men tend to invest a lot in their children, so they benefit from prohibiting people’s sexual freedoms to preclude the high fitness costs of being cuckolded.

Benefiting from making sex more costly

According to evolutionary social science, restricted sexual strategists benefit by imposing their strategic preferences on society — by curtailing other people’s sexual freedoms.

How can restricted sexual strategists achieve this? By making casual sex more costly.

For example, banning women’s access to safe and legal abortion essentially forces them to endure the costs of bearing a child. Such hikes in the price of casual sex can deter people from having it.

This attitude is perhaps best illustrated by a statement from Mariano Azuela, a justice who opposed abortion when it came before Mexico’s Supreme Court in 2008: “I feel that a woman in some way has to live with the phenomenon of becoming pregnant. When she does not want to keep the product of the pregnancy, she still has to suffer the effects during the whole period.”

Force people to “suffer the effects” of casual sex, and fewer people will pursue it.

Also note that abortion restrictions do not increase the costs of sex equally. Women bear the costs of gestation, face the life-threatening dangers of childbirth and disproportionately bear responsibility for child care. When women are denied abortions, they are also more likely to end up in poverty and experience intimate partner violence.

No one would argue this is a conscious phenomenon. Rather, people’s strategic interests shape their attitudes in nonconscious but self-benefiting ways — a common finding in political science and evolutionary social science alike.

Resolving awkward contradictions in attitudes

An evolutionary perspective suggests that common explanations are not the genuine drivers of people’s attitudes — on either side of the abortion debate.

In fact, people’s stated religious, political and ideological explanations are often rife with awkward contradictions. For example, many who oppose abortion also oppose preventing unwanted pregnancy through access to contraception.

From an evolutionary perspective, such contradictions are easily resolved. Sexually restricted people benefit from increasing the costs of sex. That cost increases when people cannot access legal abortions or prevent unwanted pregnancy.

An evolutionary perspective also makes unique — often counterintuitive — predictions about which attitudes travel together. This view predicts that if sexually restricted people associate something with sexual freedoms, they should oppose it.

Indeed, researchers have found that sexually restricted people oppose not only abortion and birth control, but also marriage equality, because they perceive homosexuality as associated with sexual promiscuity, and recreational drugs, presumably because they associate drugs like marijuana and MDMA with casual sex. We suspect this list likely also includes transgender rights, public breastfeeding, premarital sex, what books children read (and if drag queens can read to them), equal pay for women, and many other concerns that have yet to be tested.

No other theories we are aware of predict these strange attitudinal bedfellows.

Behind the link to religion and conservatism

This evolutionary perspective can also explain why anti-abortion attitudes are so often associated with religion and social conservatism.

Rather than thinking that religiosity causes people to be sexually restricted, this perspective suggests that a restricted sexual strategy can motivate people to become religious. Why? Several scholars have suggested that people adhere to religion in part because its teachings promote sexually restricted norms. Supporting this idea, participants in one study reported being more religious after researchers showed them photos of attractive people of their own sex — that is, potential mating rivals.

Sexually restricted people also tend to invest highly in parenting, so they stand to benefit when other people adhere to norms that benefit parents. Like religion, social conservatism prescribes parent-benefiting norms like constricting sexual freedoms and ostensibly promoting family stability. In line with this, some research suggests that people don’t simply become more conservative with age. Rather, people become more socially conservative during parenthood.

Restricting everyone to benefit yourself

There are multiple answers to any “why” question in scientific research. Ideological beliefs, personal histories and other factors certainly play a role in people’s abortion attitudes.

But so, too, do people’s sexual strategies.

This evolutionary social science research suggests that restricted sexual strategists benefit by making everyone else play by their rules. And just as Justice Thomas suggested when overturning Roe v. Wade, this group may be taking aim at birth control and marriage equality next.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Female monkeys with female friends live longer

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UCLA professor Susan Perry and her team of researchers reveal their findings on capuchin monkeys and social integration
Image of two white-faced capuchin monkeys

A female white-faced capuchin inserts a finger into another female’s mouth, one of several socially learned rituals. | Courtesy of Susan Perry

Elizabeth Kivowitz | 

Key takeaways:
• Strength of female-female relationships. Female capuchin monkeys who are better integrated into social networks with other adult females tend to survive longer.
• Social interactions are helpful. These include giving and receiving grooming, foraging nearby and helping each other in conflicts by fighting or making aggressive sounds and facial expressions.
• Monkeys test their friendships. Researchers observed capuchins engaging in interactions that involve risky or uncomfortable elements — such as poking a finger into a friend’s eye socket — to test the quality of their friendships.

Female white-faced capuchin monkeys living in the tropical dry forests of northwestern Costa Rica may have figured out the secret to a longer life — having fellow females as friends.

“As humans, we assume there is some benefit to social interactions, but it is really hard to measure the success of our behavioral strategies,” said UCLA anthropology professor and field primatologist Susan Perry. “Why do we invest so much in our relationships with others? Does it lead to a longer lifespan? Does it lead to more reproductive success? It requires a colossal effort to measure this in humans and other animals.”

Perry would know. Since 1990, she has been directing Lomas Barbudal Capuchin Monkey Project in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where her team of researchers document the daily life of hundreds of large-brained monkeys. While chimpanzees and orangutans are more closely related to humans, the white-faced capuchin monkey has highly sophisticated social structures that influence behavior and are passed to others.

Throughout the year, Perry’s team of graduate students, postdoctoral students, international volunteers and local researchers, trek into the forest for 13-hour days of observation to try to draw conclusions that may help us understand our own relationships, culture and other behaviors.

Female-female relationships matter

The latest findings, published recently in Behavioral Ecology, honed in on the relationship between female capuchins’ social integration and survival. The authors tracked the female monkeys’ interactions with other females, males and companions of any sex and age, based on 18 years of data. Lead author Kotrina Kajokaite earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate at UCLA while working with the monkey project data under Perry’s supervision.

Their key finding — adult female capuchins who are better integrated into social networks with other adult females survive longer.

Interactions counted in the study included giving and receiving grooming, foraging nearby, and taking part in coalitionary conflicts — intervening to help one another in conflicts by fighting, chasing, or making aggressive sounds and facial expressions.

There was no evidence that heterosexual relationships provided any survival-related benefits to females, at least regarding the types of behaviors measured in this study. But this doesn’t rule out the possibility that some adult females might benefit from social interactions with one or a few male partners who co-reside with them for long periods of time.

While there is also some evidence that females who were more socially integrated into their overall group survived longer, the overwhelming conclusion from the research is that female-female relationships had the greatest impact on survival.

Testing friendship through rituals

In a different study published in a special journal of the Royal Society, Perry’s team observed white-faced capuchin monkeys engaging in socially learned human-like rituals. Among the interactions: inserting a finger into the mouth, eye, nostril or ear of a social partner; prying open each other’s mouths or hand to conduct a detailed inspection of its contents; passing an object back and forth from mouth to mouth in a gentle tug-o-war; and clasping each other’s hands.

Other rituals observed included cupping the hand over some part of the partner’s face, sucking on an appendage belonging to the partner and using the partner’s back or belly as a drum to create loud, rhythmic noises. Some of these rituals went on for up to 30 minutes, even though some include uncomfortable elements that might be expected to annoy a partner.

How do these behaviors function in the lives of these animals and what — if anything — can they tell us about the evolution of ritual behaviors in humans?

The rituals are used to test the quality of friendships and alliances and are particularly prevalent in pairs of monkeys uncertain of the current status of their relationship, Perry said. They’re most often performed by pairs that rarely interact; the rituals are also most often used by monkeys with a history of primarily friendly interactions.

Although the capuchin rituals have nearly all the elements present in anthropologists’ and psychologists’ definitions of rituals, they differ from humans in that they are not performed simultaneously by all members of a group. Perry said the psychology behind the nonhuman primates’ bond-testing may have been an evolutionary precursor to the more group-oriented form of humans’ ritual practices.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.