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Q&A with psychology professor Jessica Payne: Sleep is critical for processing emotions and shoring up memory

Author: Tracy DeStazio

Categories: Research and Q and A

"If you wake up before you head into REM sleep, and there’s a little bit too much stress or too much cortisol (a primary stress hormone) in your system, then you might find yourself awake, anxious and ruminating the rest of the night," said Payne. "And sleep deprivation itself is a stressor. When you’re sleep deprived, you produce more cortisol, which then makes it harder to sleep — it becomes a vicious cycle."

 

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Economist finds upward trend in ‘deaths of despair’ linked to drop in religious participation

Author: Tracy DeStazio

Categories: Research, General News, and Faculty News

Over the past 20 years, the death rate from drug poisonings in the U.S. has tripled and suicide and alcoholic liver disease death rates have increased by 30 percent — particularly among middle-aged white Americans. Daniel Hungerman, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and his co-authors studied the connection between a sharp downturn of religious participation in the late 1980s and the swift rise in these "deaths of despair" among white Americans ages 45 to 54 in the early 1990s. 

 

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Political scientist and graduate student's research finds voter ID laws mobilize voters in both parties, rather than sway election results

Author: Tracy DeStazio

Categories: Research, Graduate Students, General News, and Faculty News

In a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jeffrey Harden, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and concurrent associate professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, and Alejandra Campos, a third-year graduate student in the political science doctorate program, found that voter ID requirements motivated supporters of both parties equally to comply and participate, but had little overall effect on the actual outcomes of the elections.

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