An identity-based learning community intervention enhances the lived experience and success of first-generation college students in the biological sciences.

Working-class first-generation (FG) college students are underrepresented in higher education and STEM. Using a longitudinal quasi-experiment, we tested the impacts of a living learning community (LLC) in the biological sciences on FG students in their first year of college (Semester 1: N = 243; Semester 2: N = 199), across three cohorts (2018-2019, 2019-2020 and 2020-2021). Participation in the LLC enhanced FG students' belonging, confidence, motivation, grades, knowledge of the social relevance of biology, and reduced STEM anxiety compared to a control group of FG students not in an LLC. LLC participation also increased retention in biological science majors one-year post-intervention compared to the control FG group. Moreover, LLC participation closed the academic gap between FG students in the LLC and honors students from college-educated families in a separate honors LLC. Benefits of the LLC intervention remained stable despite the COVID-19 pandemic, when living together became impossible, producing positive effects across cohorts from pre-pandemic to in-pandemic. Our results suggest that affinity-based learning communities-with or without shared housing-in the transition to college enhance academic thriving, persistence, and reduce social class driven achievement gaps in STEM.

White parents' racial socialization during a guided discussion predicts declines in white children's pro-white biases.

Although parent-child conversations about race are recommended to curb White U.S. children's racial biases, little work has tested their influence. We designed a guided racism discussion task for U.S. White parents and their 8-12-year-old White children. We explored whether children's and parents' (a) pro-White implicit biases changed pre to postconversation, (b) racial socialization messages (color conscious, external attributions for prejudiced behavior and colorblind racial ideology [CBRI]) predicted changes in each other's implicit biases, and (c) associations varied by the type of racism (subtle vs. blatant) discussed. Children's and parents' biases significantly declined, pre to postdiscussion. Parents' color conscious messages predicted greater declines and messages reflecting CBRI and external attributions predicted smaller declines in children's bias. These patterns were observed during discussions of subtle, but not blatant bias. Effects of children's messages on parents' bias were mixed. Our findings suggest that color conscious parent-child discussions may effectively reduce implicit pro-White bias in White children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Female peer mentors early in college have lasting positive impacts on female engineering students that persist beyond graduation.

Expanding the talent pipeline of students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM has been a priority in the United States for decades. However, potential solutions to increase the number of such students in STEM academic pathways, measured using longitudinal randomized controlled trials in real-world contexts, have been limited. Here, we expand on an earlier investigation that reported results from a longitudinal field experiment in which undergraduate female students (N = 150) interested in engineering at college entry were randomly assigned a female peer mentor in engineering, a male peer mentor in engineering, or not assigned a mentor for their first year of college. While an earlier article presented findings from participants' first two years of college, the current article reports the same participants' academic experiences for each year in college through college graduation and one year post-graduation. Compared to the male peer mentor and no mentor condition, having a female peer mentor was associated with a significant improvement in participants' psychological experiences in engineering, aspirations to pursue postgraduate engineering degrees, and emotional well-being. It was also associated with participants' success in securing engineering internships and retention in STEM majors through college graduation. In sum, a low-cost, short peer mentoring intervention demonstrates benefits in promoting female students' success in engineering from college entry, through one-year post-graduation.

Psychology Doctoral Program Experiences and Student Well-Being, Mental Health, and Optimism During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In a sample of 916 doctoral students from 144 universities across the United States, we examined psychology graduate students' experiences in their programs, as well as their mental health, well-being, and optimism during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a path model, we found that students' psychological experiences in their programs (i.e., social belonging, threat, and challenge) were associated with better mental health and well-being, which in turn was associated with greater optimism about the future during the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings were also corroborated in students' open-ended responses regarding how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. Findings varied by racial, gender, and sexual identities, as racial minorities, LGBTQ+ students, and women expressed more negative psychological experiences in their programs. We outline suggestions for graduate programs to support their graduate students, which include facilitating social connection, providing encouragement, and emphasizing students' well-being over their productivity as the current pandemic persists.

Individual differences in sadness coherence: Associations with dispositional affect and age.

The current laboratory-based study examined individual differences in sadness coherence (i.e., coherence between objectively coded sad facial expressions and heart rate in response to a sad film clip) and associations with dispositional affect (i.e., positive and negative affect, extraversion, neuroticism) and age in a sample of younger and older adults. Results showed that (a) greater sadness coherence was associated with lower dispositional negative affect (i.e., greater positive to negative affect ratio; lower neuroticism) and (b) older adults had greater sadness coherence than younger adults. Findings remained stable when controlling for covariates. Results were specific to coherence characterized by an inverse association between heart rate and facial expressions of sadness (i.e., did not emerge for absolute changes in heart rate or skin conductance), specific to sad facial expressions (i.e., did not emerge for happy facial expressions), specific to stimulus (i.e., did not emerge for sadness coherence in response to a happy film clip), generalized across overall levels of emotional responding (i.e., sad facial expressions; heart rate reactivity), and remained stable when controlling for expressive suppression. These findings demonstrate that individuals who exhibit greater sadness coherence experience more favorable dispositional affect, consistent with evolutionary-functionalist models of emotion, and that sadness coherence is higher in late life, consistent with developmental accounts of heightened reactivity to loss in late life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The influence of male faces on stereotype activation among women in STEM: An ERP investigation.

Members of stereotyped groups are vigilant to situational cues signaling threats to their social identity. In one psychophysiological experiment, we examined whether mere exposure to a watching male face would increase attentional vigilance among female STEM students due to the activation of math-gender stereotypes. Male and female students performed an alleged math intelligence task while being primed with male faces or control images. Automatic responses to errors were captured with error-related negativity (ERN), a neural index of error vigilance. Women showed larger ERN upon making errors when primed with male faces compared to control images, whereas no such priming effect occurred among men. Moreover, this face priming effect was pronounced only among women highly invested in pursuing STEM careers. These findings suggest that minimalistic social cues may activate negative stereotypes early in informational processing, thereby selectively shunting attention on errors in stereotype-relevant tasks among individuals invested in the performance domain.