Publications by authors named "Debbie Ma"

The explosive growth of individuals identifying as multiracial in the U.S. population has motivated significant interest in multiracial face perception.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Face individuation involves sensitivity to physical characteristics that provide information about identity. We examined whether Black and White American faces differ in terms of individuating information, and whether Black and White perceivers differentially weight information when judging same-race and cross-race faces. Study 1 analyzed 20 structural metrics (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper serves three specific goals. First, it reports the development of an Indian Asian face set, to serve as a free resource for psychological research. Second, it examines whether the use of pre-tested U.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The rise of the multiracial population has been met with a growing body of research examining multiracial face perception. A common method for creating multiracial face stimuli in past research has been mathematically averaging two monoracial "parent" faces of different races to create computer-generated multiracial morphs, but conclusions from research using morphs will only be accurate to the extent that morphs yield perceptual decisions similar to those that would be made with real multiracial faces. The current studies compared race classifications of real and morphed multiracial face stimuli.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Depression is a complex psychiatric disorder that is a major burden on society, with only ~33% of depressed patients attaining remission upon initial monotherapy with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). In preclinical studies using rodents, chronic stress paradigms, such as chronic corticosterone and social instability stress, are used to induce avoidance behaviors associated with negative affective states. Chronic fluoxetine (FLX; an SSRI) treatment reverses these chronic stress-induced behavioral changes in some, but not all mice, permitting stratification of mice into behavioral responders and non-responders to FLX.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Multiracial individuals represent a growing segment of the population and have been increasingly the focus of empirical study. Much of this research centers on the perception and racial categorization of multiracial individuals. The current paper reviews some of this research and describes the different types of stimuli that have been used in these paradigms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Increased category salience is associated with increased stereotyping. Prior research has not examined the processes that may account for this relationship. That is, it is unclear whether category salience leads to increased stereotyping by increasing stereotype activation (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Participants typically process same-race faces more quickly and more accurately than cross-race faces. This deficit is amplified in the right hemisphere of the brain, presumably due to its involvement in configural processing. The present research tested the idea that cross-race contact tunes cognitive and perceptual systems, influencing this asymmetric race-based deficit in face processing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Researchers studying a range of psychological phenomena (e.g., theory of mind, emotion, stereotyping and prejudice, interpersonal attraction, etc.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Two cross-temporal meta-analyses find large generational increases in psychopathology among American college students (N=63,706) between 1938 and 2007 on the MMPI and MMPI-2 and high school students (N=13,870) between 1951 and 2002 on the MMPI-A. The current generation of young people scores about a standard deviation higher (average d=1.05) on the clinical scales, including Pd (Psychopathic Deviation), Pa (Paranoia), Ma (Hypomania), and D (Depression).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Regular tobacco use in the enclosed environment of a car raises concerns about longer-term contamination of a car's microenvironment with residual secondhand smoke pollutants. This study (a) developed and compared methods to measure residual contamination of cars with secondhand smoke, (b) examined whether cars of smokers and nonsmokers were contaminated by secondhand smoke, and (c) how smoking behavior and restrictions affected contamination levels. Surface wipe, dust, and air samples were collected in used cars sold by nonsmokers (n = 20) and smokers (n = 87) and analyzed for nicotine.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Secondhand smoke (SHS) causes premature death and disease in children and adults, and the scientific evidence indicates that there is no risk-free level of exposure to SHS. Smoking tobacco in a car can pollute the microenvironment of the car with residual SHS, leaving telltale signs to potential buyers (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In four studies, we investigated the role of person construal on the implicit ascription of a national identity. Participants completed Implicit Association Tests (Studies 1 and 3) or Go/No-go Association Tasks (Studies 2 and 4) assessing the extent to which the concept American was linked to an Asian American celebrity (Lucy Liu) and to a White European celebrity (Kate Winslet). In contrast to explicit responses, the Asian American target was implicitly regarded as being less American than the White European target.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF