ANN ARBOR — In the weeks after the Connecticut school shooting, as the nation puzzled over how it happened and what might prevent it from happening again, Kamal Sarabandi was listening to the news. Talk turned to giving teachers guns, and he paused.
“I said, there must be a better way,” Sarabandi recalled. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Just 20 minutes of playing a violent shooting video game made players more accurate when firing a realistic gun at a mannequin – and more likely to aim for and hit the head, a new study found.
Players who used a pistol-shaped controller in a shooting video game with human targets had 99 percent more completed head shots to the mannequin than did participants who played other video games, as well as 33 percent more shots that hit other parts of the body. (more…)
Installing a gun cabinet dramatically reduces unlocked guns and ammunition in the home, according to a study in rural Alaska villages where the residents are primarily Alaska Native people. Dr. David Grossman, Group Health Research Institute senior investigator and UW professor of health services, led the research published in the American Journal of Public Health March 8. Grossman is also a pediatrician and medical director for preventive care at Group Health.
Grossman’s research team included representatives from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, two Native health organizations (Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation and Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation), village tribal governments and faculty from UW Medicine’s Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center. They identified households in six Alaska Native villages in the Bristol Bay and Yukon Kuskokwin Delta area of western Alaska. (more…)
Your English teacher wasn’t kidding: Grammar really does matter. The verb form used to describe an action can affect how the action is perceived—and these subtle variations could mean the difference between an innocent or guilty verdict in criminal law, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
William Hart, of the University of Alabama, was inspired to conduct the study by research on how people think about narratives. “Research was showing that when you describe somebody’s actions in terms of what they’re ‘doing,’ that action is way more vivid in [a reader’s] mind” than if the action is described in terms of what the person ‘did.’ At the same time, other researchers had found that when people imagine action vividly, they were more likely to think the person performing the action was doing it intentionally. (more…)
