Graduate School and Emory News
Faculty and Students in the News
National Geographic News
EARLY HUMANS WERE PREY, NOT PREDATORS, EXPERTS SAY
James K. Rilling directs the Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience at Emory University in Atlanta. His brain-imaging studies have revealed a potential connection between the act of cooperating and the brain's reward centers. If prehistoric humans got instant gratification from cooperating, he says, that may have aided group survival.
Indianapolis Star
OF HUMAN INTEREST STUDY: STRONG FAMILY TIES LINKED TO WIRELESS BOOM
Marshall Duke, a clinical psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta, suggests that life in the 21st century seems to pull families apart. He says with members going in so many different directions, efforts to stay connected are important.
New York Times
Michael A. Elliott, an associate professor of English at Emory University, writes a letter to the editor in response to David Brook's Feb. 19 column "Questions of Culture."
NPR "Talk of the Nation"
Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, is interviewed about the sentencing of Holocaust denier David Irving to three years in Austrian jail.
National Geographic News
BABOONS GRIEVE OVER LOST RELATIVES, STUDY SUGGESTS
Researchers have physical evidence that female baboons experience grief. Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University, was not involved in the study. He says this hormone research in baboons is "wonderful work." "This is an important study, the sort of thing that needs to be done more often," de Waal said.
Scripps Howard News Service
IS PARTISANSHIP A BIOLOGICAL DYSFUNCTION?
Using scanners to measure brain activity, researchers at Emory University have found that rigid liberals and conservatives simply shut down the reasoning portions of their brains when exposed to facts that don't square with their prejudices. "Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," Drew Westen was quoted in the New York Times before presenting results to a gathering of psychologists in January.
Emory Report Articles
Talk to the hand: Cienki observes thought in gesture
Can metaphor, used by artists innumerable for creative expression, also reflect deep thought processes? First posed by cognitive linguists in the 1980s, this question has spurred researchers to examine the use of conceptual metaphor in several domains: speech, advertising, film, music and dance. But what’s fascinating to Alan Cienki, associate professor jointly appointed in the Institute of Liberal Arts and the linguistics program, is the communication of metaphor through gestures. Emory Report, 5/1/06
Erskine book explores Rastafari From Garvey to Marley
Growing up in Jamaica, Noel Erskine would often see them: The Rastafari, with their dreadlocks and “Dread Talk,” decrying the ways of “Babylon” and preaching the divinity of a black king in faraway Ethiopia. Decades later, Erskine, associate professor of theology in the Candler School of Theology, was moved to write about the Rastas, whose elders, he admits, nurtured and nourished not only him but other people in his hometown of Trinityville who were willing to listen to the Rasta creed of a black God living inside all Africans. Erskine’s From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology (University Press of Florida, 2005) is his way of honoring the contributions Rastas made. Emory Report, 4/17/06
The Art of Connections
I study relationships,” said Stephen Nowicki, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology. That may sound simple, but it isn’t, as anyone who’s been in one—a relationship—can attest. Emory Report, 4/17/06
The Rarest Element
Several years ago a construction crew rolled into my backyard and built a pond that was more than a pond. It lies at the bottom of a slope and is fed by water rushing down a gently curving artificial streambed lined with four tons of rocks. From my deck I can watch water still and serene, and water noisily cascading among the rocks. I’m seeing two aspects of the remarkable state of matter called liquid, which on our planet is mostly inhabited by water, H2O.
From Sidney Perkowitz’s “The Rarest Element” (published in Writing On Water, MIT Press, 2001). This essay was reprinted with permission in the Emory Report, May 1, 2006.
Ready or not, Millennial Generation on the way
Molly Epstein and Andrea Hershatter, faculty members in the Goizueta Business School, compare the Millennial Generation, those born since 1982, to previous generations and explain why they appear to be different. Emory Report, 2/27/06
Aussie journalist-turned-novelist to visit
Geraldine Brooks began her career as a reporter but decided to switch to fiction writing partly because of flatulent sheep. She will explain the connection when she vists campus March 6-7. Emory Report, 2/27/06
Interdisciplinary conference to examine song
Scholars from the classics, music and religion will hold a seminar March 3-5 to stimulate discussion across disciplinary lines about music, ritual and cultural identity. Emory Report, 2/27/06
Emory Celebrates 100 Years of Samuel Beckett
Emory University and Atlanta are celebrating the centennial of Irish writer Samuel Beckett's birth with a yearlong collaborative festival of films, workshops lectures and theater productions of most of Beckett's dramatic canon.
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa will deliver the 2006 Richard A. Ellman Lectures
