News Bureau

New research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, performed an algorithmic audit to examine if YouTube’s recommendation system acted as a “rabbit hole,” leading users searching for vaccine-related videos to anti-vaccine content

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers investigated the relationship between historical traumatic events experienced by Alaska Native communities and epigenetic markers on genes that previous studies have linked to trauma. The new study found a similar pattern among Alaska Native participants, with specific epigenetic differences observed in those who reported experiencing the most intense symptoms of distress when reflecting on historic losses. 

The study also found that individuals who strongly identified with their Alaska Native heritage and participated in cultural activities generally reported better well-being. The new findings are detailed in the International Journal of Health Equity.

New research led by Bo Zhang, a professor of labor and employment relations and of psychology at Illinois, points to a better way of assessing noncognitive abilities such as personality and career interests.

African American studies professor Bobby J. Smith II tells the overlooked story of how food was used as both a weapon and a tool of resistance during the Civil Rights Movement in his new book “Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.”

Families that perceived themselves as members of a team working for their collective benefit were more likely to improve their family's well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, U. of I. professor  Allen W. Barton found in a new study.

New research shows that a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others during brief, zero-sum-game competitions. Generous people tend to reward generous behavior and selfish individuals often punish generosity and reward selfishness – even when it costs them personally. The study found that an individual’s own generous or selfish deeds carry more weight than the attitudes and behaviors of others.

According to two psychologists who study memory and perception, fraudsters tend to exploit the common habits of thought and decision-making that make us susceptible – and often oblivious – to their fabrications. Their book, “Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It,” gives readers an overview of dozens of types of scams, hoaxes and strategies used by cheaters to deceive, and explains how to evaluate their ploys and avoid becoming a victim.

Fifteen years of archaeological work in the Tam Pa Ling cave in northeastern Laos has yielded a reliable chronology of early human occupation of the site, scientists report in the journal Nature Communications. The team’s excavations through the layers of sediments and bones that gradually washed into the cave and were left untouched for tens of thousands of years reveals that humans lived in the area for at least 70,000 years – and likely even longer.

Teens who live in Illinois ZIP codes with medical cannabis dispensaries are significantly less likely to use the drug, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found in a new study.

Some people's sex lives sizzled, while others' fizzled, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. New research by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scholar Liza Berdychevsky may explain why.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are part of the Doris Duke Native Oral History Revitalization Project, which aims to make ethnographic materials collected from Native American tribes accessible online and to return materials to those communities.

Posting videos about intimate relationships to social media platforms may affect offline relationships, according to a case study of the “couch guy” video by Emily Mendelson, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Benjamin J. Lough will be the next dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. 

History professor Teri Chettiar said emotional well-being was seen as a key factor for a stable democracy in the period following World War II.

The new book “Crisis in the Professions: The New Dark Age” examines the social, political and economic forces that are changing the practice and public perceptions of elite professions such as law, medicine and higher education.

The Illinois Neurodiversity Initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is accepting applications from neurodiverse students who will be incoming freshmen in the 2023 fall semester.

Sociology professor Kevin Leicht is co-leading the development of a software app that will alert clinicians to medical misinformation that's circulating on social media so they can address it with their patients if desired.

Black and Latina women had high rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms during the pandemic, but prayer had differing effects, kinesiology and community health professor Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo found in a study.

Public transit systems offering broad coverage of stops and routes may still underserve the communities that rely on them the most, according to a new University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign study. The study, by former civil and environmental engineering student Dale Robbennolt and Applied Research Institute senior research scientist Ann-Perry Witmer, applies contextual engineering to help determine lapses in equity in public bus transportation access using data from the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District as a case study.

Since its inception, the internet has been viewed by technology experts and scholars as a way to access information at a global scale without having to overcome hurdles posed by language and geography. However, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign  found that how people around the world use the same popular social media platforms and websites remains vastly different based on their language and geography.

The School of Social Work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is offering two new degree-completion programs – the iBSW and the iMSW – that aim to address racial and gender disparities in the school’s student population and the social work profession.

Adolescent girls who engage in more moderate and vigorous physical activity each day have better attentional control, a new study finds. The study focused on girls and boys aged 15-18.

The New Philadelphia National Historic Site in western Illinois, commemorating the first U.S. town to be legally founded by African Americans, is the nation’s newest national park. Several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors were among those leading the effort seeking national park status for the site.

Anthropology professor Erin Riggs has been awarded a 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

A strong commitment to their ethnic identity may be a double-edged sword for young sexual minority Black men when they encounter sexual racism online, according to a study by U. of I. social work professor Ryan Wade.

Using the term “fake news” does not help audiences distinguish false information or sources and may be doing more harm than good, according to resarch by U. of I. communication professor Emily Van Duyn.

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research’s Coup d’État Project initially categorized the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as an “attempted dissident coup.” But that classification has evolved to include the additional classification “attempted auto-coup d’état,” said Scott Althaus, the center’s director and a professor of both political science and communication at Illinois.

Communication professor Charee Thompson studied implicit bias in health care and women’s prolonged struggles to obtain treatment and emotional support for a variety of mental and physical health problems.

In a study of U.S. adults’ social media activity and polarization of their views on the Black Lives Matter movement, communication professor Stewart Coles found that people low in racial resentment who expressed themselves more frequently on these media were less supportive of BLM.

Diagnoses of suicidal ideation and depression increased dramatically among pregnant Black women from 2008-2018, according to a study led by University of Illinois social work professor Karen Tabb Dina.

A study by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign team explored the impact of health care providers’ COVID-19 mitigation policies on women of color who were pregnant or gave birth during the pandemic.

Nine U. of I. researchers have been named to the 2022 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes research scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence – reflected through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade. This year’s list includes 6,938 individuals from around the world whose papers rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in the Web of Science.

Gratitude may be a powerful tool for couples, increasing relationship satisfaction and protecting against common stressors, says research by human development and family studies professor Allen W. Barton.

Studies led by social work professor Moses Okumu found that teens in Uganda who "sexted" were more likely to use condoms and that the online media they use may be means of providing sexual health interventions.

People who viewed sex as a leisure activity used their pandemic downtime to engage in more  frequent, creative and satisfying sex, U. of I. professor Liza Berdychevsky found in a recent survey. 

Girls with a history of adversity may be especially sensitive to situations that threaten their self-worth, according to new research by psychologists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and an interdisciplinary team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign experts have developed a statewide registry on the use of lethal force by police officers in Illinois.

It can be challenging to distinguish between a paid political ad and one that is not in today’s media environment, especially on social media. News Bureau editor Lois Yoksoulian spoke with advertising professor Michelle Nelson about the topic. New research from Nelson and her colleagues found that most adults – even those who are politically engaged and educated – do not fully understand online targeting, sources and funding for political ads, or the unique regulatory environment for political speech that is different from commercial speech.

While sexual racism abounds on dating apps, Black men who are sexual minorities reported differing forms of it on the popular apps Jack’d and Grindr, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found.

An Indigenous languages collective at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is helping local Maya learn to read and write Q’anjob’al and working with interpreters for the community.

U. of I. sociology professor Tim Liao's analysis of the protest slogans about the federal COVID-19 vaccine-or-test mandate in November 2021 found three distinct themes.

New research suggests that exploring one of the darkest chapters in mankind’s history – the Holocaust – may inspire tourists to act on human rights and social change. 

By comparing geographic patterns of nonhuman primate biodiversity and human land-use, researchers discovered that areas managed or controlled by Indigenous peoples tend to have significantly more primate biodiversity than nearby regions. They also found that lorises, tarsiers, monkeys and apes whose territories overlap with Indigenous areas are less likely to be classified as vulnerable, threatened or endangered than those living fully outside Indigenous lands.

Black adolescents who lived in poverty as children and were pessimistic about their future had accelerated immune cell aging and greater levels of insulin resistance in their mid- to late twenties, according to a study by Allen W. Barton, a professor of human development and family studies.

The ancient North American city of Cahokia had as its focal point a feature now known as Monks Mound, a giant earthwork surrounded on its north, south, east and west by large rectangular open areas. These flat zones, called plazas by archaeologists since the early 1960s, were thought to serve as communal areas that served the many mounds and structures of the city.

New paleoenvironmental analyses of the north plaza suggest it was almost always underwater, calling into question earlier interpretations of the north plaza’s role in Cahokian society. The study is reported in the journal World Archaeology.

Young children’s development of the higher-level cognitive skills called executive function may be adversely affected by household chaos and poor nutrition, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scholars found.

Having high levels of compassion satisfaction buffered some temporary medical workers at a New York field hospital from stress disorders during the early days of the pandemic, a new study found.

Grassroots organizing efforts strengthen their campaigns for economic policy changes by collaborating with racial justice groups, says urban planning professor Marc Doussard in his new book “Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities.”

The closures of gyms and other facilities to contain COVID-19 negatively affected the mental and physical health of some people with disabilities, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found.

A new study finds that the more a person stares at themself while talking with a partner in an online chat, the more their mood degrades over the course of the conversation. Alcohol use appears to worsen the problem, the researchers found.

Reported in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, the findings point to a potentially problematic role of online meeting platforms in exacerbating psychological problems like anxiety and depression, the researchers said.