Reducing fear is key to improving trust in police

Reducing fear is critical for improving trust in law enforcement, according to a new study.

Law enforcement is a critical aspect of ensuring safety in communities. However, unjustified harm has been associated with law enforcement throughout history, resulting in tension between police and communities.

Fear of unjustified police harm remains prevalent, especially in minoritized communities. However, research on this fear has not typically focused on the importance of psychology when it comes to understanding community perceptions of law enforcement.

The new research from Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice sought to understand some of the explanations for fear of unjustified police harm.

Published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, the research suggests that the perceived likelihood and severity of an incident explain why some people fear law enforcement.

“We pursued this project in hopes of contributing to the knowledge base regarding fear of police,” says Keara Werth, lead investigator on the project and doctoral student at the MSU School of Criminal Justice.

“By seeking to understand the reasons behind differences in fear of the police, we hope our findings will be used to increase the quality of relationships between police and the community members they serve.”

Conversations about police staffing and training are important for improving trust, but perceptions rooted in fear are hard to change, especially when communities have experienced unjustified harm.

Existing research has highlighted demographic differences surrounding fear. For example, Black/African American individuals typically report the greatest fear of being killed by law enforcement. Regarding political beliefs, pro-police attitudes are usually much higher among Republicans compared to Democrats.

Working with Associate Professor Joe Hamm, the research team sought to develop a psychological understanding of fear of crime through three key factors: control, likelihood, and severity of the fear of crime. They created a survey to measure these three factors and collected data from participants who have both racial and political differences.

They found that fearful participants tended to believe that it was likely that an officer would harm them and that, if they did, the harm would be severe.

The study did not find a strong link between fear and a person’s sense of control over these situations. That may suggest people feel they have little influence over encounters involving police force, or that “control” is difficult to define in these situations. The researchers say more work is needed to better understand and measure how people perceive control during police interactions.

The researchers also examined whether these patterns differed across racial and ethnic groups. While the factors linked to fear were somewhat stronger among white participants than other groups, the overall findings were similar: Regardless of background, people tended to feel fear for many of the same underlying reasons, especially how likely or severe they believed unjustified police harm could be.

The findings highlight the need to address police violence by better preparing officers to recognize and respond appropriately to threats, while limiting the use of more harmful tactics and weapons that can escalate encounters. The researchers note, however, that even if the actual risk and severity of police violence decrease, public perceptions and fears may take longer to change.

To strengthen relationships between the public and law enforcement, trust is key. Law enforcement must consistently demonstrate to the public—in word and action—that police can do their jobs appropriately and that they are serving and acting in the public’s best interest.

Additionally, the study suggests that people may not understand how they can establish meaningful control during interaction with law enforcement, therefore, important to create opportunities to expand the public’s understanding of strategies for deescalating situations or lawfully avoiding unjustified police harm to further mitigate fear.

As police officers across the nation continue to face scrutiny for their role in escalating the severity of interactions with the public, it is essential that fear and other emotions are considered when developing methods and efforts for improving trust.

“Police and community relations have long been an important conversation, but there is a lot of attention being paid right now, especially to the expanding role of federal law enforcement in the day-to-day lives of people across our country,” Hamm says.

“For many, that is—and should be—scary. There is an important balance to strike between protecting communities and motivating fear. It is important to focus attention on the efforts that are most likely to ensure that policing is both effective and appropriately bounded.”

Source: Michigan State University

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Kratom use is on the rise in the US

A national study of kratom use in the US found rising popularity among young adults, and it is linked to addiction and mental health issues, according to new research.

This is the first known national study to examine the use patterns of kratom and its association with mental health and addiction, the researchers say.

Kratom is a plant from southeast Asia that’s sold online and in some stores in powders, liquid shots, pills, and teas. Opponents of kratom argue that it is addictive and widely available to children, while proponents say it is a safe, natural alternative for managing a host of ailments.

Given the changing policy landscape involving kratom in the US, it was an important time to conduct a national study with recent data to examine how many people—including children—use kratom, and its associations with mental health and substance use disorder, says Sean Esteban McCabe, a professor in the University of Michigan School of Nursing, and principal investigator.

The study appears in the Journal of Addiction Medicine.

Takeaways:

• More than 5 million people in the US say they have used kratom in their lifetime, including more than 100,000 children ages 12-17.
• Kratom use is at an all-time high and is increasing in the US, which is particularly notable given that about half of US states ban or regulate kratom.
• Most people who have used or currently use kratom have a substance use disorder, report cannabis use, and many have serious psychological distress and major depression.
• The findings reinforce that policy action is warranted to limit access to kratom by children and that better addiction and mental health treatment is needed.

The US Food and Drug Administration has not approved kratom for any medical use, and federal agencies have warned about potential risks, including addiction and serious side effects. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has also flagged kratom as a drug or chemical of concern, says McCabe, who is also the director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health, or DASH.

Products like 7-OH, or 7-hydroxymitragynine—a synthetic derivative of the kratom plant—are often sold in gas stations, smoke shops, and online in tablets, gummies, and drinks—can be five to 50 times more potent than regular kratom. It is sometimes marketed as legal morphine.

The researchers emphasized that the study does not prove kratom—whose main psychoactive chemical, mitragynine, comes from the plant’s leaves and stems—causes addiction or mental health problems. Because the survey captures a only a snapshot in time, it cannot determine which came first: kratom use or the mental health symptoms.

While the study examined mental health issues, a striking secondary finding was the increase in use, McCabe says. The share of Americans ages 12 and older who says they had ever used kratom rose from 1.6% in 2021 to 1.9% in 2024.

Adults ages 21-34 reported the highest use: About 3.4% says they had used kratom at least once, and about 1% says they used it in the past year.

“Policy changes regarding kratom and 7-OH products are needed in all states if we are serious about protecting our children,” McCabe says. “Five million people is more than the entire population of the six smallest states in the US combined—Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Delaware.”

Kratom use is likely under-reported in clinical settings because it does not show up on standard drug tests and requires specialized testing, McCabe says. At the same time, rules about kratom vary widely across the US—some states regulate it, while others do not—which can complicate public health and policy decisions, he says.

The study analyzed data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health collected from US households from 2021 to 2024.

Additional coauthors are from UM Medical School, DASH, Rush University, and Texas State University.

Support for the study came from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Source: University of Michigan

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Garlic works as birth control for mosquitoes

Researchers have discovered a naturally occurring compound in garlic that halts mating and egg-laying in insects.

Garlic is not a substance that most people consider an aphrodisiac. It turns out that mosquitoes agree.

In fact, the new Yale study finds that garlic also functions as a de facto birth control for mosquitoes and other winged insects. It’s an insight that could lead to eco-friendly pest control strategies.

According to research by the lab of Yale’s John Carlson, the presence of garlic blocks mating in mosquitoes and a variety of fly species. It’s not the pungent odor that’s a turnoff for these pests, the researchers found, but the taste. And the reason lies in a receptor inside their teeny taste organs.

The findings appear in the journal Cell.

“We study flies, including harmless ones like the fruit fly, to try to discover new ways of controlling species that pose danger to humans either by spreading disease or damaging crops,” says Carlson, a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale.

“In this study, we started with fruit flies and then moved on to other species. And to our surprise, we found a natural compound in garlic that shuts down the mating process in these flies.”

Their method of finding this compound, which they call a “phytoscreen,” could spur new pest control strategies that are environmentally friendly, widely available, and inexpensive. Phyto is Greek for “plant.”

In a Q&A, Carlson explains the role of an enterprising postdoc in initiating this research, how it started with a “fruit fly buffet,” and why Victorian author Bram Stoker had it right about garlic and bloodthirsty creatures:

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New map of the cosmic web is the most detailed ever

Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made.

The work traces the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.

The cosmic web is the universe’s vast, skeleton-like framework—a network of interwoven filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas that surround immense, nearly empty voids. It forms the underlying architecture of the cosmos, linking galaxies and clusters into a single, intricate, and far-reaching structure.

The study in The Astrophysical Journal used the largest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey conducted so far—the COSMOS-Web—to trace how galaxies form a network across 13.7 billion years of cosmic history.

Since its launch in 2021, JWST has transformed astronomy with its extraordinary sensitivity and sharpness. Its infrared instruments pick up faint, distant galaxies that were invisible to earlier observatories, allowing scientists to see further back in time than ever before, and through cosmic dust.

To harness this power, an international team designed COSMOS-Web, the largest General Observer (GO) program selected for JWST. The GO program is the primary way astronomers gain access to the telescope for their research. Covering a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full Moons, the survey was designed to map the cosmic web.

“JWST has completely changed our view of the universe, and COSMOS-Web was designed from the start to give us the wide, deep view we need to see the cosmic web,” says Hossein Hatamnia, a graduate student at University of California, Riverside and Carnegie Observatories, and lead author of the study.

“For the first time we can study the evolution of galaxies in cluster and filamentary structures across cosmic time, all the way from when the universe was a billion years old up to the nearby universe.”

The nearby universe refers to our cosmic neighborhood within approximately 1 billion light-years. Approximately 5.88 trillion miles, a light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year, used to measure massive distances in space.

Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and Hatamnia’s advisor, explains that the large-scale structure identified from the JWST cosmic web data is much more informative than earlier maps of the same region of sky taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. A direct side-by-side comparison, he says, shows how much the previous generation of data had been smoothing over structures.

“The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST,” Mobasher says.

“What used to look like a single structure now resolves into many, and details that were smoothed away before, are now clearly visible.”

Hatamnia explains that the improvement comes from two JWST strengths working together.

“The telescope detects many more faint galaxies in the same patch of sky, and the distances to those galaxies are measured far more precisely,” he says. “Each galaxy can therefore be placed into the correct slice of cosmic time, sharpening the map’s resolution.”

In keeping with COSMOS’s long tradition of open science, the team is releasing the large-scale structure maps publicly.

“The pipeline used to build the map, the catalog of 164,000 galaxies and their cosmic density, and a video showing the cosmic web evolving across billions of years, has been released to the public,” Mobasher says.

Mobasher and Hatamnia were joined in the study by scientists in the US, Denmark, Chile, France, Finland, Switzerland, Japan, China, Germany, and Italy.

The study was supported by grants from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Source: UC Riverside

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Air pollution tied to worse outcomes after surgery

New research on Utah’s Wasatch Front—which occasionally experiences the worst air quality in the nation—has found an association between high air pollution and risk of post-surgical complications.

The new study, encompassing nearly 50,000 surgery patients, has linked higher levels of particulate air pollution to a higher risk of a combined measure of post-surgical complications that included sepsis, pneumonia, and surgical wound infection.

“When there was an elevation in PM2.5 air pollution in the week before surgery, even for one day, we saw increased risk of major medical complications and infectious complications,” says first author John Pearson, a former U assistant professor of anesthesiology who performed the research while at University of Utah Health. Pearson is now a clinical associate professor at Stanford Medicine and remains a U research affiliate.

Fine particulate matter, which can become lodged in respiratory issues and undermine a person’s health in a number of ways, is most often associated with the Wasatch Front’s wintertime inversions when polluted air is trapped on the valley floor. When PM2.5 levels were higher than the EPA daily exposure limit in the week before surgery, the risk of post-surgical complications increased from 4.8% to 6.2%.

The results appear in Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica. Faculty from the U’s College of Social and Behavioral Science contributed to this research, which was led by the School of Medicine.

To uncover the relationship between air quality and surgical outcomes, the researchers analyzed post-surgical data from 49,615 non-emergency surgeries in the Wasatch Front. They used a combination of EPA and state-level air quality sensors, as well as satellite data, to estimate PM2.5 levels at each patient’s home address for a week before surgery.

The higher the level of air pollution, the greater the increase in risk. While a concentration of fine particulate air pollution of 35 micrograms per cubic meter is considered unhealthy, the research team found that changes in the level of air pollution above and below this limit also affect risk. Every 10 microgram increase in PM2.5 was associated with an 8% increase in the relative risk of post-surgical complications, resulting in an absolute increase in risk of 1.4% when pollution exceeded EPA daily limits.

The researchers were specifically interested in levels of fine particulate air pollution due to its systemic effects on human health.

“Particles of that size or smaller can get down to the smallest part of the lung,” explained study coauthor Nathan Pace, a U professor of anesthesiology.

“Some of it will cross into the blood and it can end up anywhere in your body: your brain, your heart, your liver, your kidneys.”

This increases overall levels of inflammation, putting stress on the lungs and heart and possibly increasing the risk of infections.

The researchers emphasize that this study used a composite measure of complications that combined many different post-surgical outcomes, which means that more research is needed to determine which specific complications are more likely to arise following high air pollution. Research in larger studies, including multiple hospitals, could also help determine which kinds of surgeries are most affected by air quality, which could help health centers time surgeries to minimize risks.

While this study found an association between air pollution and post-surgical complications, it can’t determine whether the increased risk is directly caused by air pollution or if there’s an unknown third factor that links them both.

“A caveat in any observational study is that there might be a relevant factor that affects both the exposure and the outcome,” Pace says.

While more research is needed to determine which people and surgeries might benefit from additional risk-reducing interventions, the team says that this work provides even more evidence that better air quality benefits human health. For Wasatch Front residents, the flip side of living in a place with elevated air pollution is that local changes to transit and industry can have a major impact on air quality.

For now, standard precautions—like quality home air filters and avoiding outdoor exercise during wildfire smoke or inversion days—are a healthy choice for everyone, whether or not someone will be getting surgery.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Nevada, Reno and Columbia University.

This work was supported by a University of Utah Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy seed grant, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute. Content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation or the Wilkes Center.

Source: University of Utah

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Listen: How you benefit from connecting with other people

On a new podcast episode, a behavioral scientist explores how your health and happiness benefit from conversations with strangers, family, or friends.

As humans, we have a biological need for connecting with others, but in today’s modern world, we tend to avoid it.

This paradox is something that Professor Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has been fixated on in his research.

In his new book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection (Penguin Random House, 2026), Epley shows why we consistently underestimate the positive impact of reaching out to others.

From experiments tracking commuters on the train to deep conversations with hedge fund executives, Epley reveals that our beliefs about social interaction are often “precisely backwards” leading us to choose solitude even when engagement would make us happier and healthier:

Source: University of Chicago

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What happens to your brain under anesthesia?

A new study sheds light on what anesthesia does to the brain and how closely it resembles sleep versus a coma.

People often describe anesthesia as something that puts a patient in a “deep sleep.” An anesthesiologist enters the operating room, and part of their mission is to ensure that the patient is completely unaware of what is happening around them until they wake up, often several hours later.

Scientists and doctors have long debated what happens to the brain under anesthetic drugs during a surgical procedure.

A new study by Yale School of Medicine’s anesthesiology and neurology departments in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences uncovers new insights which may change the way we describe being under anesthesia.

The study reveals that being anesthetized may be more than simply being “put to sleep.” It can potentially carry more similarities to being in a coma than we originally thought.

Janna Helfrich is an assistant professor of anesthesiology and the study’s lead author. Her team explored how anesthesia and pain control can be redesigned to limit long-term effects on cognition and behavior after medical procedures like surgery.

The brain plays an important role in keeping patients safe and comfortable during surgery, but it isn’t commonly monitored when one is under anesthesia. Most surgeries today happen without brain monitoring, because there hadn’t traditionally been an efficient way to track that part of the body.

“Surprisingly, we’ve been doing anesthesia for more than 150 years now, but we only recently started to measure the brain,” says Helfrich, when asked what inspired this research.

“Before that, [we measured] blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, maybe we would look into the pupils of our patients. But [measuring] the brain, even today, is not the standard of care. Which, I think is really strange, because that’s actually the effect site of all the drugs the patient is getting, whether it is a painkiller or the anesthetics themselves.”

The researchers studied brain wave recordings from patients sedated with propofol, a common type of anesthetic used in surgeries. They used a method called electroencephalography (EEG), which involves placing electrodes on the scalp. These discs record brain activity while under anesthesia.

The study team then compared these recordings against recorded brain activity from patients in several different states of consciousness, including deep sleep, REM sleep, coma, and normal wakefulness.

“Instead of limiting it to just the front of the head, which is what is normally done, we did a full head EEG, using 20 electrodes,” says Helfrich. “So, we had information from the front, the sides, and from the back of the head.”

The findings from this study challenge the widespread belief that anesthesia is simply a deep sleep. The reality is more complex, as the anesthetized brain can enter several states. Some states resemble sleep, while others are more like a coma. Anesthesia produces a pattern of brain activity that is unlike any other state of consciousness.

Helfrich and her team aim to uncover the nuances of anesthesia and how it affects the brain during surgery.

“The old dichotomy that it’s either sleep or coma is not true. It’s actually both sleep and coma, and can be similar to both states at the same time, depending on where you look,” says Helfrich. “And yet, there is also an element which is just anesthesia uniquely.”

When doctors place someone under deep anesthesia, that patient may have problems after surgery, which is more common in older adults and those with preexisting medical conditions. These can affect cognitive functions and cause memory deficits post-surgery.

This research highlights the need for a carefully tailored anesthesia dose that does not put the patient into a coma-like state. The goal for clinicians is to help the anesthetized patient get as close to a natural, sleep-like state as possible.

Looking ahead, Helfrich and team hope this study will help improve how clinicians monitor the brain and overall health under anesthesia. Future research could help clinicians guide the anesthetized brain toward a sleep-like state, rather than a coma-like one.

“As we know, sleep has a plethora of benefits,” says Helfrich. “It cognitively replenishes you, helps with your immune system, and helps you with metabolism. So, I imagine that there will be a way to tweak anesthesia a bit away from a coma, more in direction of sleep, so we could alleviate some of the side effects.”

The patient’s overall health before, during, and after surgery remains the top priority for every clinician. Monitoring the brain will help anesthesiologists tailor care for each patient and will allow for more sleep-related benefits during surgery.

The research reported in this article was supported by the German Research Foundation, the Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen, and the Jung Foundation for Research and Science.

Source: Yale

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