6 ACUMEN • SPRING 2023 PSYCHOLOGY SHARED DECISION MAKING Visiting your doctor can be stressful, regardless of the issue, but patients with chronic conditions such as Type 2 diabetes have the added pressure of working with their physician on a treatment plan and remaining vigilant about their blood sugar levels. How patients view their disease can impact their health, and patients’ beliefs about their health are the focus of research by cognitive psychologist Jessecae Marsh. Marsh, associate professor of psychology, is currently exploring how patients and doctors work together to make shared decisions concerning patient care, prevention and management. Funded by the National Science Foundation, she is collaborating with computer scientist Samantha Kleinberg and engineer Onur Asan at Stevens Institute of Technology in an effort to improve the shared decision-making process for doctors and patients with Type 2 diabetes by better linking evidence to knowledge. Kleinberg is developing machine learning methods to generate personalized causal models for individual patients based on health network data related to insulin dosage, blood sugar levels, activity levels and diet. Marsh examines how people’s beliefs about the causal relationships that create diabetes influence decisions regarding their health. The divide between how patients think about their disease and scientific evidence on diabetes can be an obstacle to shared decision making, she says. The goal is to help patients describe what they believe causes their diabetes and provide the information to a doctor, so the doctor can help them make a better decision. “The point of shared decision making is the physician and the patient discuss, share and make the decisions for treatment together,” she says. “So, it shouldn’t be the doctor saying, ‘You should do this. Are you on board?’ It should be, ‘Let me Bush notes that this negative imagery tends to affect audiences’ ideological perceptions because it impacts them emotionally. “It feeds their imaginary relationship with the region as this place that needs to be kept at bay,” he says. “That’s the overarching theoretical perspective of the book, but it starts out with me thinking about, How did I first learn about Latin America? What do I know about, or what was my exposure to, Latin America?” The United States and Latin America at large—and, very specifically, Mexico— have long historical relations. One can’t live without the other, Bush adds. He is interested in delving deeper into works that are portraying border spaces, the space of contact between the two regions, between the two cultures. “If nothing else,” he says, “I want to highlight not only what’s being told, but also what’s left out of that purview. How does telling the story in this way influence our understandings of the cultures that make up Latin America and its immigrants in the United States?” MODERN LANGUAGES OTHER AMERICANS Matthew Bush’s research explores contemporary Latin American narrative and culture. His latest book, Other Americans: The Art of Latin America in the US Imaginary, examines the representation of Latin America across a host of media, in works that have been highly successful in the United States. Bush, associate professor of Spanish and Hispanic studies in the department of modern languages and literatures, studies contemporary literature, film and Netflix serials. He argues that these widely consumed works about Latin America are loaded with fear, anxiety and shame, which have an impact that surpasses any receptive story framing. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America run the risk of becoming common beliefs for American audiences, ultimately shaping their ideological relationship with the region. Bush studies the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that portray Latin America as an implicit other and a process of affective thought that encourages an us/them, or north/ south binary paradigm in the reception of Latin America’s globalized art. “When you have shows, films and books that produce fear or anxiety and shame about Latin America, that impacts the audience and it affects their ideological relationship with the region,” he says. “If you are only consuming Narcos, and you don’t know anything else about Colombia, you get the one-sided version of the story. Notably, in those shows, there’s next to nothing about the United States’ underlying role in the situation.” ALAMY STOCK PHOTO A poster promotes Netfix’s television series Narcos. BRIEFS
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