2 moral actions shape first impressions more than others

New research reveals that fairness and respect for property shape our first impressions—and our willingness to trust—more than other moral behaviors

Every day, we quietly judge the people around us. Did that coworker split the credit fairly? Did a neighbor return a lost package? Did someone cut in line or respect the rules?

According to a new study in PLOS One from researchers at the University of Michigan and University of Illinois, not all moral actions are judged equally, and two types stand out: how fairly someone treats others and whether they respect what belongs to other people.

Across a series of studies, researchers found that acts involving equality and property powerfully shape how we see someone’s character, how much we trust them, and even whether we’re willing to cooperate with them in everyday life. These judgments happen quickly, consistently, and even when our attention is stretched thin.

“Fairness and respect for property may be the moral behaviors that matter most when it comes to social trust,” says study coauthor Savannah Adams, a doctoral candidate.

Researchers says the findings’ importance is that people see fairness and respect for property as key signs of character, and we judge these things efficiently. So what does this mean in real life?

“These quick judgments might actually pick up on something important—fairness and respect for property could really be good signs that someone is trustworthy,” says study coauthor Oscar Ybarra, emeritus psychology professor. “Still, because we make these decisions so fast and with little information, it’s always worth taking a closer look.”

Psychologists have long known that morality consists of different domains—such as helping family, returning favors, respecting authority, sharing with the community, treating people equally, and respecting others’ property. What hasn’t been clear is whether these different moral behaviors leave the same kind of impression on us.

The answer came from three studies involving hundreds of US adults, who saw short descriptions of everyday behaviors performed by fictional people. Some examples included helping/refusing to help a family member; following/breaking rules set by authority; and treating people equally or showing favoritism.

Participants were asked what kind of person it was, if the behavior involved their character or situation, and if they would trust them.

In the final study, participants did all this while juggling a mental distraction task—memorizing long strings of numbers—to see whether these judgments would fall apart under pressure. They didn’t.

Equality (fairness/equal treatment) and property (respecting what belongs to others) triggered the strongest reactions, both positive and negative, the study showed. When someone acted fairly or respected property:

• They were seen as highly moral and principled
• Their behavior was attributed to their true character
• People were more willing to trust and cooperate with them

When someone violated these norms, they were judged harshly. In addition, their actions were seen as reflecting who they really are, and people were less willing to engage, share, or rely on them.

Ybarra says the research showed that other moral behaviors—such as bravery, loyalty to community, or deference to authority—mattered too, but not nearly as much in shaping first impressions.

Researchers found a surprising finding in the third study. Even when participants were mentally overloaded—trying to remember long number sequences while judging others—their reactions to fairness and property violations stayed strong.

“This suggests these judgments are automatic and intuitive, not the result of slow, careful thinking,” noted Ybarra, professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In other words, your brain doesn’t need much time or attention to decide how it feels about someone who cheats, steals, or plays favorites.

Source: University of Michigan

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Young cancer survivors age faster

Adolescent and young adult cancer survivors age faster than their peers who did not have cancer, according to a new study.

The study also describes how accelerated aging occurs both at the cellular level and in brain function, such as memory, attention, and ability to process information.

The journal Nature Communications published the research, led by University of Rochester Wilmot Cancer Institute investigator AnnaLynn Williams, and co-corresponding author Kevin Krull, from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The study builds on earlier data the team presented in 2022 at the American Society of Hematology.

Ongoing research at Wilmot holds potential good news for the future: Young adults may be able to reverse accelerated aging by quitting smoking, exercising, improving their nutrition, and making other healthy lifestyle changes, Williams says.

“Young cancer survivors have many more decades of life to live,” she says. “So, if these accelerated aging changes are occurring early on and setting them on a different trajectory, the goal is to intervene to not only increase their lifespan but improve their quality of life.”

Many cancer survivors who were treated as children or young adults are trying to finish their education, build careers, establish independence, or start a family—and defects in brain health can make those things challenging.

“It’s kind of like a perfect storm,” Williams says. “This is why we see many survivors having worse educational and employment outcomes than their siblings.”

A cancer survivor herself, Williams is an assistant professor in the surgery department and part of Wilmot’s Cancer Prevention and Control research program.

Of the approximately 1,400 patients in the St. Jude study group, all were at least five years past treatment, and some were decades-long survivors. The majority had acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) or Hodgkin lymphoma.

Researchers confirmed that the survivors aged faster on cellular/biological level no matter what treatment they received as children—even if their treatment was not directed at the brain. In fact, results showed that chemotherapy, which can change DNA structure and broadly damage tissue and cells, speeds up aging fastest.

The team also discovered that cellular aging is intricately linked to brain function. For example, survivors with higher biological age (as opposed to the age on their birth certificates) struggled the most with memory and attention.

For survivors treated with radiation directly to the brain, the goal is to stop any deficits from getting worse, Williams says.

The next steps are to determine the ideal time to intervene, and that work is ongoing at Wilmot.

For example, Williams recently conducted a pilot study including tissue and cell samples collected before and after treatment from 50 people with Hodgkin lymphoma and compared them to 50 healthy peers. She collaborated with John Ashton, director of the Genomics Shared Resource at Wilmot, to analyze the data for clues to determine when accelerated aging starts. Is it during treatment? Or a few years later?

Other Wilmot investigators are conducting similar research for women with breast cancer and in older adults with leukemia, with the goal of reversing the aging. One recent study has already shown the value of exercise to reverse aging linked to cancer.

The National Cancer Institute funded Williams’ study.

Source: University of Rochester

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AI could help spot skin cancer earlier

Researchers are exploring how artificial intelligence could help detect melanoma—the most dangerous form of skin cancer—by evaluating images of suspicious skin abnormalities

Designed as a decision-support tool rather than a replacement for medical expertise, the technology could help dermatologists more quickly identify cases that may require closer attention.

“The goal is not for AI to replace doctors and other experts, but AI can help patients with limited access to dermatologists,” Kamlendra Singh, an associate research professor in the University of Missouri’s College of Veterinary Medicine who led the study, says.

“Because earlier detection leads to earlier treatment, our research can one day play a big role in improving health outcomes.”

To move closer to that future, Mizzou researchers are developing highly accurate AI models that can examine images of patients’ skin and evaluate subtle visual patterns—including the size, shape, color, density and sharpness of moles or suspicious spots—that may indicate melanoma.

In the study, Singh and his team trained and tested AI models using a database of 400,000 images of skin abnormalities, including confirmed cases of melanoma. The images were captured using 3D total body photography, advanced technology that creates a high-resolution, three-dimensional digital map of a patient’s skin—allowing researchers to analyze subtle visual details across the entire body.

Singh was curious which of three existing AI models would be most accurate when distinguishing melanoma from benign skin conditions. Individually, each model achieved up to 88% accuracy. But when Singh combined the three models, performance improved significantly, with accuracy exceeding 92%.

As a principal investigator in the Bond Life Sciences Center, Singh is especially interested in the role AI can play in expanding access to health care, particularly in areas where patients lack access to highly specialized medical professionals and equipment. As AI models continue to be trained on larger datasets—including images representing different skin tones, lighting conditions, and camera angles—their ability to make accurate predictions will continue to improve.

“It will be some time before this can be used as a tool by doctors in a health care setting, but this research is a promising proof of concept,” Singh says.

“As researchers, if we can get better at explaining why and how AI comes to the conclusions it makes, more health care professionals will trust that it can be a helpful tool to ultimately support clinical decision-making and improve patient outcomes.”

The study appears in Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X.

Source: University of Missouri

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Higher temps may put monarch butterflies at risk

Higher temperatures may make monarch butterflies more vulnerable to parasites, according to new research.

Monarch infections with the parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha have skyrocketed, more than tripling since 2002. Discovered in the 1960s, the parasite can cause smaller wingspans, lower weight and shorter lifespans in adult monarchs. Infection can also affect the insect’s ability to complete its annual migration.

The study found that monarchs exposed to elevated temperatures were 22% less tolerant of infection.

“What does tolerance of an infection mean? If you have the flu, it’s the difference between you being in the hospital or just having a stuffy nose,” says Sonia Altizer, lead author of the study and entomology department head in the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

“Monarchs took a bigger hit if they were infected when temperatures were higher.”

Milkweeds are the only plants on which monarchs can lay their eggs and their caterpillars can feed.

In an effort to “save the monarchs,” some people have planted milkweed in their yards. But they often plant nonnative, tropical milkweed, which can grow year-round in areas with mild climates. This extended growing season enables monarchs to delay or even skip migrating in the winter, giving the parasites more time to infect the butterflies that stick around.

Tropical milkweed is also very toxic compared to most native milkweeds. Monarchs can tolerate ingesting those toxins—to an extent. The butterflies can then concentrate the toxins in their bodies, an ability that is thought to help monarchs defend against parasite infection.

Previous studies found that higher temperatures can increase the level of toxins in milkweed. Earlier research also suggests that the parasites cannot tolerate extreme heat. These lab-based findings offered hope to researchers that warmer weather may have a silver lining for the threatened species by reducing infection.

However, those experiments exposed the parasites and plants to constant high temperatures.

The present study took a more realistic approach, exposing infected and healthy butterflies to fluctuating temperatures in a natural setting. And the findings were less encouraging. The researchers raised parasite-exposed and uninfected monarchs on nonnative tropical or native swamp milkweeds in either ambient or elevated temperatures in the field.

“We thought that the parasites would do worse in the hotter treatments. We thought fewer monarchs would be infected in the hotter treatments. We thought that monarchs that fed on more toxic milkweed would also have less infection than monarchs that fed on the non-toxic milkweed,” Altizer says.

None of that happened.

Under the hotter temperatures, the protective effect of the toxic milkweed disappeared.

Most of the butterflies that were exposed to the parasite got infected. The parasites actually did better under the hotter temperatures and infected more monarchs than the researchers anticipated.

The researchers found that the toxins in tropical milkweed were slightly higher in warmer temperatures, and that could be part of the problem.

The toxins can slow development and damage cells. Sometimes, the potent toxins are excreted by monarchs. That means those monarchs lose some of the protection they may have gained from eating the toxic milkweed.

“This experiment showed that warmer temperatures cause these plants to lose their medicinal effect for monarchs. That means in areas where the temperature is warming, we might see infections increase disproportionately,” Altizer says.

“I think this could mean that a warmer world might be a sicker world for monarchs.”

The research appears in Ecological Entomology.

the study was led by Isabella Ragonese as part of her doctoral dissertation in the UGA Odum School of Ecology and Christopher Brandon as part of his undergraduate honors thesis. Ragonese is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Brandon is attending graduate school at Colorado State University.

Source: University of Georgia

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Police-related stress tied to health risk for Black women

A new study finds that worrying about police brutality and harassment is associated with physical markers of cardiovascular health risk in Black women in the United States.

The study found the association was most pronounced for Black women concerned about potential interactions between their children and police.

“There’s a substantial body of work that suggests stress associated with police brutality has significant adverse health effects on Black people in the US—but the bulk of that work has focused on Black men,” says Lori Hoggard, corresponding author of the research paper describing the study and an assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina State University.

“We wanted to see if there were associations between police-related stress and adverse health risks in Black women.”

For this study, the researchers recruited 422 Black women, aged 30-46. Study participants were asked a series of questions that captured their experiences with law enforcement, concerns about their own future interactions with law enforcement, and concerns about their children’s potential future interactions with law enforcement.

Based on the responses, the researchers classified study participants into three groups. One group, High Child Vigilance-High Personal Exposure, consisted of 235 women who—relative to the rest of the study participants—reported relatively high levels of concern about their children’s potential interactions with police and were likely, relatively speaking, to have experienced law enforcement harassment.

A second group, No Child Vigilance-High Personal Exposure, consisted of 115 women who either had no children or reported little concern about their children’s potential interactions with police but were likely to have experienced law enforcement harassment themselves.

The third group, Moderate Child Vigilance-Low Self Vigilance-Low Personal Exposure, consisted of 72 women who reported being moderately concerned about their children’s potential interactions with police, were less concerned for themselves, and were less likely than other study participants to have experienced law enforcement harassment.

The researchers also used ultrasound technology to measure carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) for all study participants. Carotid IMT refers to the measurement of the thickness of the inner layers of the carotid artery. Because thickened inner layers of the carotid artery indicate increased likelihood of cardiovascular health problems, carotid IMT serves as a marker of cardiovascular risk.

“One key takeaway here is the role that concern for children plays,” Hoggard says. “Women in the No Child Vigilance-High Personal Exposure group, who had experienced first-hand harassment at the hands of law enforcement, had lower IMT thickness than either of the other two groups. In other words, even women who had not experienced police harassment—but did have a moderate or high level of concern for how law enforcement might interact with their kids—had thicker IMT measurements than women who had experienced police harassment but did not have concern for children.”

The researchers controlled for study participant age, income, and other demographic and medical variables, suggesting that those factors did not account for the findings.

“This study can only show correlation, not causation, but it suggests that the stress caused by worrying about their children’s interactions with police may be greater than the stress that Black women are experiencing with regard to their own potential interactions with police,” Hoggard says.

“What’s more, the increased IMT thickness of both the High Child Vigilance and Moderate Child Vigilance groups was comparable. This raises additional questions about whether there is a threshold level of stress that may be related to this cardiovascular risk marker.

“Black women generally have higher rates of cardiovascular disease than their counterparts, and are diagnosed with these health problems earlier,” Hoggard says.

“This study raises the question of whether vigilance for their children may be a significant contributing factor. That question merits additional research moving forward.

“These findings also underscore the importance of developing policy solutions that can help address the underlying challenges that contribute to these concerns and related stress,” says Hoggard.

The paper appears in the journal Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine.

Additional coauthors are from Emory University, Northwestern University, The University of Texas at Austin, Drexel University, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Support for this work came from National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Source: North Carolina State University

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Listen: Is AI going to take over entertainment?

On a new podcast episode, an expert digs into whether AI is coming to a screen near you.

The role of artificial intelligence varies by industry, but as the entertainment business begins to lean into the emerging technology, with Netflix producing a show with AI, actors licensing their voices to third parties, and major corporations using AI-generated content for advertisements, are audiences and those who work in the industry willing to embrace it?

A professor in the School of Interactive Computing and the director of the Entertainment Intelligence and Human-Centered AI Labs, Mark Riedl’s research examines the relationship between AI and machine learning models and the human element of storytelling.

On the latest episode of Generating Buzz, he shares his expertise on the ever-changing dynamics of AI in entertainment:

Georgia Tech · Generating Buzz: Is AI Coming to a Screen Near You?

Source: Georgia Tech

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Why your plans to workout go wrong

You know you should exercise, but you make a solid plan to do it… and then, in the decisive moment, you opt out. Why do many people choose to forgo their planned daily exercise again and again?

University of Michigan behavioral scientist Michelle Segar suggests this all-or-nothing thinking is caused by a deeply embedded mindset that leads many people to abandon their exercise plans.

While all-or-nothing thinking has been studied in relation to eating and weight, this is the first in-depth research to investigate this phenomenon with exercise, Segar says. She and her colleagues Jen Taber, John Updegraff, and Alexis McGhee-Dinvaut, all of Kent State University, conducted four focus groups among 27 adults—ages 19 to 79—who tried to exercise but couldn’t stick with it.

“Exercise-related all-or-nothing thinking occurs when a specific exercise plan becomes unworkable,” Segar says.

“At this moment, when people cannot perfectly adhere to their plan (the ‘all’), they choose not to exercise at all rather than modify the plan.”

The study in BMC Public Health uncovered four components that collectively make up an “all-or-nothing” mindset. Study participants:

• Had rigid idealized criteria for exercising: For most participants, their “all” constituted rigid standards that had to be met to exercise “right”: “If I do something for under 15 minutes, I feel like I didn’t even exercise. Even if it had been dead-out sprints, it just doesn’t factor into my head like I did anything.”
• Sought excuses for not exercising: This component reflects participants actively trying to avoid their intended exercise. They said that exercising in the right way took a lot of effort, citing “it’s hard,” “it hurts,” and “it doesn’t feel good to do.”
• Believed exercise was expendable compared to their daily priorities: Participants said things like: “When your routine ends up getting crowded and crowded with the things that have to be done or should be done, (exercising) is an easy thing to push to the side.”
• Were baffled about why they could not stick with exercise: Participants were unable to reconcile their current inactivity given that they could also recall having had previous positive experiences exercising: “I don’t understand why I don’t exercise… I’m an educated woman… Why can’t I even make a dent in it?”

“The all-or-nothing mindset creates high costs for exercising,” Segar says.

“Most people are tired and overwhelmed, so in the moment of decision, the immediate costs of exercising feel much bigger than the benefits, making it a low-value choice. This makes doing ‘nothing’ a prudent choice and desirable exit strategy. Decisions to not exercise are often made outside of awareness—so people are likely unaware that choosing to forgo their exercise plans could be related to having an all-or-nothing mindset.”

The study is a first step toward better understanding how all-or-nothing thinking thwarts exercise among people who keep trying to exercise but find it challenging to sustain, Segar says. For those who feel all-or-nothing thinking is getting in their way, she suggested three shifts in thinking:

• Don’t blame yourself for not sticking with exercise: Our culture has taught an exercise formula that sets most people up to fail.
• Choose “good enough” over “perfect”: Nothing has to be perfect, including exercise.
• Don’t be a prisoner to your exercise past: Know that negative exercise experiences in your past can demotivate you now. Acknowledge that fact, then move forward in more positive and realistic ways.

Source: University of Michigan

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