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Prejudice Fuels Opposition to Obama’s Health Care Plans
Individuals’ implicit racial prejudices corresponded with a reluctance to vote for President Barack Obama and with opposition to his health care reform plan, according to a study coauthored by Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Brian Lowery. Subjects were more likely to support a health care reform proposal attributed to former President Bill Clinton than the same proposal from Obama.

Does racism affect voters' responses to President Barack Obama’s policies? In September, former president Jimmy Carter argued yes in an interview with Brian Williams of NBC. A Democracy Corps focus-group study published on Oct. 16 disagreed, concluding that racial issues do not affect voters' beliefs, and that it was time for those who think otherwise to "get over it."

Recent research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business finds that Carter is correct –– race does matter. People's implicit racial prejudices corresponded with a reluctance to vote for Obama and with opposition to his health care reform plan, the study finds. In fact, when a description of a health care reform proposal was attributed to former President Bill Clinton rather than Obama, reactions suggested that individuals high in nonconscious antiblack prejudice tended to oppose Obama, at least in part because they dislike him as a black person.

"Many people are influenced by race, and either will not admit it or don't know it," says Brian Lowery, an associate professor of organizational behavior. To find evidence for "implicit," or nonconscious prejudice, he and two other investigators ran a computer-based test on more than 200 subjects prior to the 2008 presidential election. Individuals were asked to quickly pair "black" names (Aisha, Jamal, and so forth) and "white" names (Brett, Jane) with good words such as "beauty" and "friendly," or bad words such as "evil" and "hate."

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Nonconscious prejudice was measured according to how quickly and easily people could identify the "bad" words after seeing African-American names (Aisha, Jamal, and so forth) as opposed to Anglo names (Brett, Jane). Lowery and his coauthors found that fewer errors, when African-American names (as opposed to Anglo names) were paired with a negative word, indicated that individuals had internalized negative associations with black people –– and served as a measure of nonconscious prejudice.

In the month after the election, participants were asked how they had voted. Those who made few errors on the black/bad pairings were nearly 43% less likely to have voted for Obama than those with average scores. "As implicit prejudice increased, the likelihood of voting for Obama decreased," explains Lowery.

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Nearly a year later, in October 2009, some of the same participants rated their attitudes about Obama's approach to health care reform. Others were randomly assigned to read a description of health care reform framed either as being President Obama’s plan or Bill Clinton's plan.

Once again, increasing implicit prejudice was associated with negative attitudes toward Obama and decreasing support for his health care policy. Prejudice scores did not correlate with favorability toward the plan when it was described as coming from Clinton, but they did result in a more negative assessment when it was described as coming from Obama.

"This study represents a powerful demonstration of the fact that racial attitudes still operate in the political arena," says Lowery, who conducted the research with Stanford doctoral student Rebecca Schaumberg and Eric Knowles, assistant professor at the University of California at Irvine. "It also suggests that Obama is likely to encounter some degree of prejudice-fueled opposition to his policies across the board."

Clearly, the president has his work cut out for him.

–– by Marguerite Rigoglioso

Week Ending FRIDAY November 20, 2009---------------------News Archive
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Boosting Learning and Memory in Down Syndrome

Boosting the level of a brain chemical reverses learning impairments in a mouse model of Down syndrome, researchers report. The work adds to emerging evidence that cognition-enhancing drugs may one day help humans with Down syndrome lead more independent lives.

Down syndrome is the most common cause of mental retardation, affecting approximately one in 800 babies at birth. People with the disorder have an extra copy of chromosome 21, giving them additional copies of hundreds of genes. This somehow alters brain development and causes mild to severe learning disabilities.

To investigate what goes wrong in the brain of someone who has Down syndrome, researchers led by neurobiologist Ahmad Salehi of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, turned to a genetically modified strain of mice that has three copies of more than 100 of the genes found on human chromosome 21. These so-called Ts65Dn mice exhibit learning and memory deficiencies and other symptoms of Down syndrome. When Salehi and colleagues examined the brains of Ts65Dn mice under a microscope, they discovered degeneration in a region near the base of the brain called the locus coeruleus. This region contains neurons that extend armlike axons all the way to the hippocampus, a key memory center tucked deep inside the temporal lobes. These neurons release the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which promotes learning and memory in the hippocampus.

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Reasoning that the loss of the locus coeruleus neurons might undermine learning and memory by causing a deficit of norepinephrine in the hippocampus, the researchers gave Ts65Dn mice drugs that boost levels of this neurotransmitter throughout the brain. A few hours after delivering the drugs, the researchers tested how well mice were able to learn and remember an enclosure in which they'd received a mild electric shock. Without the drug, Ts65Dn mice performed miserably on this memory test, but with the drug they were as good as normal mice, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine.

Because this type of learning depends on the hippocampus, the findings suggest that's where the norepinephrine boost exerts its beneficial effect, Salehi says. Several drugs that enhance norepinephrine are already approved or are in advanced clinical trials for treating low blood pressure and other disorders in humans, which should make it easier to launch a trial in people with Down syndrome if additional animal studies support that approach, Salehi says.

"It's a very positive development," says Roger Reeves, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He notes that other recent rodent studies have suggested that drugs that target the neurotransmitter GABA, among others, may also help improve cognition in Down syndrome. Although some researchers have begun to test such cognitive-enhancing drugs in people with Down syndrome, Reeves says the studies to date have been small and fraught with methodological problems, so he doesn't consider them to be reliable. Even so, he says, "5 years ago I never would have believed we would be looking at this kind of fundamental therapy for Down syndrome."

The Developing Child: Rating Aggressive Behavior

In a study published in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry researchers show that over reactive parenting, such as heavy criticism or yelling as a response to a child’s negative behavior, can produce higher levels of aggression or rule-breaking in a child who is normally introverted, non-benevolent, non-conscientious, or imaginative.

Children who are extraverted, benevolent, conscientious, or not that imaginative by nature are least adversely affected by this parental response.

The research (taken from 586 families) shows that rule-breaking and aggressive behavior is influenced by the inherent personality traits of a child. The study also shows that aggression-related behavior generally decreases as the children grow but on average the rule-breaking behavior does not change, and both genders exhibit these behaviors between the ages six to fifteen. When examining both personality and gender boys and girls are not different affected by parenting methods.

To view the abstract for this article, please click here.


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