Religious Support Mediates the Racial Microaggressions-Mental Health Relation Among Christian Ethnic Minority Students

The author examined the mediating role of perceived support from religious sources (i.e., religious support; Fiala, Bjorck, & Gorsuch, 2002) in the inverse relation between racial microaggressions and well-being in a sample of Christian ethnic minority students. A modified version of the support deterioration model (Barrera, 1986) was used as the conceptual framework. It was hypothesized that the nature of the indirect effect would be (a) an inverse relation between racial microaggressions and religious support, and (b) a positive relation between religious support and well-being. Religious commitment was entered as a covariate. African American, Asian American, and Hispanic college students (N = 144) completed an online survey. The study design was cross-sectional. A significant indirect effect of racial microaggressions on psychological well-being through congregational support was found, with findings pointing to the empirical utility of religious support in explaining the racial microaggressions-mental health link among ethnic minority samples

Teaching Korean Cultural Constructs to American Students: Examples from a South Korea Study Abroad Course

The blend of traditional and contemporary culture in South Korea offers study abroad students a valuable setting to learn about psychological constructs. Despite South Korea’s potential as a study abroad destination, the body of literature on teaching psychology abroad in the country remains undeveloped. An immersion experience can be a valuable way to teach study abroad students about culture-specific constructs. The present article highlights how I attempted to teach three culture-specific constructs (han, jeong, and chemyon) during a short-term, intensive study abroad experience in South Korea, utilizing various excursions and activities. Examples of learning activities discussed in this article are The War and Women’s Human Rights Museum to learn about han, Baby Box to facilitate discussion of chemyon, and dining out experience to learn about jeong. As appropriate, I integrate student written assignments and results from a survey to illustrate how the learning of the culture-specific constructs took place

Visco-Node-Pore Sensing: A Microfluidic Rheology Platform to Characterize Viscoelastic Properties of Epithelial Cells.

Viscoelastic properties of cells provide valuable information regarding biological or clinically relevant cellular characteristics. Here, we introduce a new, electronic-based, microfluidic platform-visco-node-pore sensing (visco-NPS)-which quantifies cellular viscoelastic properties under periodic deformation. We measure the storage (G) and loss (G″) moduli (i.e., elasticity and viscosity, respectively) of cells. By applying a wide range of deformation frequencies, our platform quantifies the frequency dependence of viscoelastic properties. G and G″ measurements show that the viscoelastic properties of malignant breast epithelial cells (MCF-7) are distinctly different from those of non-malignant breast epithelial cells (MCF-10A). With its sensitivity, visco-NPS can dissect the individual contributions of different cytoskeletal components to whole-cell mechanical properties. Moreover, visco-NPS can quantify the mechanical transitions of cells as they traverse the cell cycle or are initiated into an epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Visco-NPS identifies viscoelastic characteristics of cell populations, providing a biophysical understanding of cellular behavior and a potential for clinical applications

Strategies for Teaching White Students About Racism During a Study Abroad Course

It is challenging to teach about racism well. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that the topic of racism is sometimes met with resistance from students. Therefore, it is important for psychology instructors to continue to identify and practice effective ways to teach about racism. I contend that the study abroad experience is a valuable opportunity for this type of teaching. Drawing from my experience as a Korean American educator teaching Cross-Cultural Psychology to American students studying abroad in South Korea, I provide some concrete examples of pedagogical tools and approaches that I have found helpful in deepening White students’ understanding of racism. My hope is that instructors who lead study abroad programs will be inspired to try some of these ideas and also implement new ones that will help White students to understand racism

Colorful Cutout: Enhancing Image Data Augmentation with Curriculum Learning

Data augmentation is one of the regularization strategies for the training of deep learning models, which enhances generalizability and prevents overfitting, leading to performance improvement. Although researchers have proposed various data augmentation techniques, they often lack consideration for the difficulty of augmented data. Recently, another line of research suggests incorporating the concept of curriculum learning with data augmentation in the field of natural language processing. In this study, we adopt curriculum data augmentation for image data augmentation and propose colorful cutout, which gradually increases the noise and difficulty introduced in the augmented image. Our experimental results highlight the possibility of curriculum data augmentation for image data. We publicly released our source code to improve the reproducibility of our study.Comment: ICLR 2024 Tiny Paper

Towards Robust Feature Learning with t-vFM Similarity for Continual Learning

Continual learning has been developed using standard supervised contrastive loss from the perspective of feature learning. Due to the data imbalance during the training, there are still challenges in learning better representations. In this work, we suggest using a different similarity metric instead of cosine similarity in supervised contrastive loss in order to learn more robust representations. We validate the our method on one of the image classification datasets Seq-CIFAR-10 and the results outperform recent continual learning baselines

Adverb Is the Key: Simple Text Data Augmentation with Adverb Deletion

In the field of text data augmentation, rule-based methods are widely adopted for real-world applications owing to their cost-efficiency. However, conventional rule-based approaches suffer from the possibility of losing the original semantics of the given text. We propose a novel text data augmentation strategy that avoids such phenomena through a straightforward deletion of adverbs, which play a subsidiary role in the sentence. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approach for not just single text classification, but also natural language inference that requires semantic preservation. We publicly released our source code for reproducibility.Comment: ICLR 2024 Tiny Paper

Internalized Model Minority Myth, Asian Values, and Help-Seeking Attitudes among Asian American Students

The present study examined cultural factors underlying help-seeking attitudes of Asian American college students (N = 106). Specifically, we explored internalized model minority myth as a predictor of help-seeking attitudes and tested an intrapersonal-interpersonal framework of Asian values as a mechanism by which the two are related. Results indicated that internalized model minority myth significantly predicted unfavorable help-seeking attitudes, and emotional self-control mediated this relationship. Interpersonal values and humility were nonsignificant mediators, contrary to our hypotheses. The findings suggest that the investigation of internalized model minority myth in help-seeking research is a worthwhile endeavor, and they also highlight emotional self-control as an important explanatory variable in help-seeking attitudes of Asian American college students