Abstract
Surveying a campus community about sexual harassment can be a daunting task during normal times. It’s especially daunting during a pandemic. Institutional leaders may balk at committing scarce resources to survey efforts. Some may wonder how to interpret results that look dramatically different from prior assessments. Also, they may worry about adding to the burdens of already stressed staff, faculty, and students. Indeed, these concerns and complexities came up recently within the work of the National Academies’ Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education (1). This Action Collaborative grew out of the 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) consensus study report on sexual harassment in academic science, engineering, and medicine (2). Over 60 academic and research institutions and key stakeholders sought to work together to identify, develop, implement, and evaluate ways of preventing and addressing sexual harassment in higher education. Action Collaboratives are a relatively new type of activity at the National Academies [others include Clinician Well-Being and Resilience (3) and Countering the US Opioid Epidemic (4)]. Building on the National Academies’ long history of convening stakeholders and gathering research to inform decision makers and the public, Action Collaboratives provide a space for organizations and individuals to exchange information, ideas, and strategies around topics of mutual interest and concern, create new and innovative solutions, and take collective action. When COVID-19 disrupted plans for learning and work in higher education, representatives from member institutions in our Action Collaborative asked whether they should continue campus climate surveys, and if so, how they should proceed. Here we address these questions using our extensive experience with sexual harassment research and policy. Three of us are members of the Action Collaborative’s Advisory Committee (K.J.H., L.M.C., and V.J.M.) and specialize in the psychological study of sexual harassment and violence. Two … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: kholland4{at}unl.edu or FBenya{at}nas.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1
Highlights
Major cognitive and emotional faculties are dominantly lateralized in the human cerebral cortex
A lidocaine injection into the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of the observer mice decreased their freezing level compared with the control mice that were treated with saline (Fig. 1C), indicating that the right ACC is involved in observational fear learning
A similar inactivation of the left ACC did not affect observational fear learning (Fig. 1E) and the 24-h contextual memory recall (Fig. 1F) compared with control mice. These results indicate that the right ACC but not the left is responsible for observational fear learning
Summary
Major cognitive and emotional faculties are dominantly lateralized in the human cerebral cortex. Right and left hemispheric inactivation impaired learning and expression in spatial navigation, respectively [4] These data are indicative, evidence for the lateralization of complex emotional behavior is still needed. The processing and expression of negative emotions such as fear display a right hemispheric dominance in humans, as suggested by neuropsychological studies on stroke patients, EEG, and brain functional MRI [8,9,10]. The mechanisms that lead to hemispheric asymmetry are largely unknown owing to the obvious limitation in experimental manipulations that can be carried out in human subjects It is not known whether hemispheric lateralization is a cortical process or is already in place at the subcortical level, driving the hemispheric differences in complex information processing. We present evidence that control of observational fear is lateralized to the right ACC, whereas it is distributed at the thalamus
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