“Our Ohio State community suffered a tragic loss with the death of Mansfield student Skylar Williams,” said The Ohio State University President Michael V. Drake. “This senseless and shocking incident has left our campus shaken. We join Mansfield Dean Norman Jones in expressing our condolences and deepest sympathies. Our thoughts and prayers are with Skylar’s family.”

Additional counseling and consultation services have been made available to members of the university community in need of support on our Mansfield campus. Mansfield students can utilize the Student Assistance Program and support services are also available to students, faculty and staff across the university.

Law enforcement continues to investigate all circumstances surrounding this incident. Anyone with information is encouraged to call the Ohio State Highway Patrol at 419-756-2222.

Drake is joined by a group of fellow travelers including students, faculty and staff. His itinerary in northwest Ohio includes stops at some classic locations like the Wilson Football Factory in Ada and Lima’s Kewpee Hamburgers.

A visit to the university’s Marion campus will include a discussion on the new Alliance for the American Dream project. Drake will join Bowling Green State University President Rodney Rogers in Bowling Green to discuss the issues of access and affordability in higher education.

Drake and members of the Ohio State community will also go on the Roads Scholars tour in July to meet with alumni and local leaders in northeast Ohio.

The summer state tours are part of Drake’s mission to take the university’s values on the road as the flagship land-grant institution in Ohio.

Researcher Amy Brunell of The Ohio State University wondered whether narcissists are particularly attracted to would-be partners who already have a significant other and set about answering that question in a four-part study.

Amy Brunell

“I thought it was possible that there might be something appealing about the ‘game’ of mate poaching that might appeal to narcissists, because they are known to play games,” said Brunell, an associate professor of psychology at Ohio State’s Mansfield campus.

But evidence of that type of pattern didn’t emerge in the study, which appears online in the journal PLOS ONE.

Study participants with narcissistic traits reported that they have, with greater frequency than people who aren’t narcissists, attempted to pursue relationships with someone who is in an existing relationship, Brunell said. But that wasn’t necessarily because the person was taken.

“They seem to not discriminate between those in relationships and those who are single. It could be that they just go after whoever appeals to them without regard for relationship status,” she said.

Previous research has shown that people in general – not just narcissists – tend to perceive others who are in relationships as more desirable.

Combine that with the traits of narcissism, Brunell figured, and you might have a recipe for aggressive “mate poaching” – the scientific term for making a play for someone already in a relationship.

Narcissism is marked by selfishness, arrogance, an inflated sense of self and extroversion. Furthermore, narcissists believe they’re special, unique and entitled. They tend to take advantage of others and experience less guilt. And they also report more casual sex, more sexual partners and a greater desire for short-term relationships.

In the first study, Brunell and her collaborators surveyed 247 college students from introductory psychology courses and assessed them for narcissism through a commonly used 40-item test. The participants also completed a personality survey and a survey designed to assess the students’ past experiences in mate poaching. Narcissism was linked with more frequent short-term and long-term attempts to connect sexually with people in other relationships.

In a second study designed to test the results of the first, though, only narcissistic women reported more frequent attempts at mate poaching, leading the researchers to conclude that it’s possible that narcissistic women are more frequently guilty of the behavior.

A third study that included 249 students were asked to assess potential romantic partners in a manner similar to popular dating services such as eHarmony.com or match.com. Next, the participants were shown a picture of a target individual and told that they had “similar interest” with the target. Some participants were told the target was single, and some were told the target was in a relationship. Then they were asked about their level of interest in the person.

The study found no evidence that narcissists were preferentially drawn to people in a relationship.

“It is likely people are simply interested in the target and not necessarily as concerned that the target is in a relationship,” the researchers concluded.

In the last study, the researchers recruited 240 participants and again compared their narcissism scores and likelihood to mate poach a “target” individual. They found that narcissists had a greater likelihood of hooking up with the target for a short-term fling, but not for a relationship.

Taken as a whole, the studies point to a pattern: Narcissists are more likely to engage in mate poaching, but are not more interested in people who are already in a relationship – with the exception of opportunities for a low-cost sexual encounter, such as a one-night stand, Brunell said.

“Understanding the behavior of narcissists is important because it helps us better understand the people who are in our lives – and the types of people we don’t necessarily want in our lives,” Brunell said.

Other Ohio State researchers who worked on the study were Joshua Robison, Nicholas Deems and Bradley Okdie.

In fact, the belief in “racial colorblindness” unites people who range from liberal to conservative and hardened racists to egalitarians, according to Philip Mazzocco, author of The Psychology of Racial Colorblindness: A Critical Review.

“There’s never been a racial ideology like colorblindness that unites such very different types of people,” said Mazzocco, who is an associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield.

“Their beliefs are often wildly different. The only thing they all have in common is a general distaste for racial categories.”

In his book, Mazzocco outlines a new model of what it means to be racially colorblind in today’s society. He disentangles the different meanings and comes up with four categories of colorblindness: protectionist, egalitarian, antagonistic and visionary.“Their beliefs are often wildly different. The only thing they all have in common is a general distaste for racial categories.”

Mazzocco doesn’t believe that any type of racial colorblindness is good for society, although some of the four types are clearly more offensive than others. His model focuses on whites, but could be used for all races.

The fact that these different varieties have been lumped together helps explain why research findings on the issue have been so contradictory, according to Mazzocco.

“Some studies have found colorblindness is associated with higher levels of prejudice, while others have found lower levels,” he said. 

“It has been really hard to figure out. That’s because these different studies were not looking at the same construct. The point is there are four types of colorblindness and not one.”

His new model bases the four types on two variables: levels of prejudice and awareness of racial inequality. Here are the types, and where they fall on those two variables:

• Protectionist (High prejudice, low awareness): They believe interracial inequality is minimal, or the fault of minority culture. They are likely to say minorities who complain of mistreatment are “playing the race card.”

• Egalitarian (Low prejudice, low awareness): They want racial justice and think it has been mostly achieved. As a result, they believe discussion about racial issues is no longer necessary.

• Antagonistic (High prejudice, high awareness): They know there’s a problem with racial justice, but they are fine with it, because they believe it is their privilege as white people to be favored in society. They disingenuously use claims of colorblindness to oppose programs like affirmative action, saying that government policies shouldn’t favor one race.

• Visionary (low prejudice, high awareness): They agree there is a racial justice problem and believe the way to overcome it is to stop emphasizing racial boundaries and differences and to focus primarily on what people have in common.

Mazzocco conducted a small internet survey of 153 Americans through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to determine how many people may fall into each category. He cautioned that this was a preliminary survey and not necessarily nationally representative. But he said it can give a snapshot of where Americans stand.

As expected, most participants claimed to be racially colorblind – only about 27 percent said they weren’t. The egalitarian group was the largest at 29 percent, followed by protectionist at 20 percent, visionary at 18 percent and antagonistic at 7 percent.

The fact that nearly three-quarters of Americans claim to be colorblind is a problem, Mazzocco said, because claiming you don’t see race is “a conversation ender.”

As expected, most participants claimed to be racially colorblind – only about 27 percent said they weren’t. The egalitarian group was the largest at 29 percent, followed by protectionist at 20 percent, visionary at 18 percent and antagonistic at 7 percent.

“One of the implications of racial colorblindness is that we’re not going to have a discussion about the topic. You can have two people who say they’re colorblind, one of the visionary variety and one of the antagonistic variety, with wildly different sets of belief,” he said.

“But they may think they have similar viewpoints and therefore believe that many people share their opinions. If they had a true conversation, they may find out their views aren’t so common and they might need to consider other opinions.”

Mazzocco said colorblindness of any variety is harmful because it does not recognize the myriad problems minorities face in our society.

“There are real struggles and real costs. If you pretend like race doesn’t exist, you put people who are struggling at a real disadvantage.”

One alternative to colorblindness is multiculturalism – the ideal that society tolerates and even embraces differences in culture. Under multiculturalism, people don’t pretend racial differences don’t exist – they celebrate the diversity.

Some white people have bristled at multiculturalism because they believe it means they and their culture aren’t valued, Mazzocco said. But multiculturalism can be all-inclusive in a way that says all people, including whites, are valued.

“When this inclusive form of multiculturalism has been studied, whites have reported a much more positive experience.”

Mazzocco said he hopes his book will inspire more research, now that there is a clearer idea of the different meanings of colorblindness.

“We are at a crossroads regarding our willingness to discuss race explicitly. Social scientists can make a real contribution by helping us to understand what our views are and how to talk about them.”

As expected, most participants claimed to be racially colorblind – only about 27 percent said they weren’t. The egalitarian group was the largest at 29 percent, followed by protectionist at 20 percent, visionary at 18 percent and antagonistic at 7 percent.

The fact that nearly three-quarters of Americans claim to be colorblind is a problem, Mazzocco said, because claiming you don’t see race is “a conversation ender.”As expected, most participants claimed to be racially colorblind – only about 27 percent said they weren’t. The egalitarian group was the largest at 29 percent, followed by protectionist at 20 percent, visionary at 18 percent and antagonistic at 7 percent.

“One of the implications of racial colorblindness is that we’re not going to have a discussion about the topic. You can have two people who say they’re colorblind, one of the visionary variety and one of the antagonistic variety, with wildly different sets of belief,” he said.

“But they may think they have similar viewpoints and therefore believe that many people share their opinions. If they had a true conversation, they may find out their views aren’t so common and they might need to consider other opinions.”

Mazzocco said colorblindness of any variety is harmful because it does not recognize the myriad problems minorities face in our society.

“There are real struggles and real costs. If you pretend like race doesn’t exist, you put people who are struggling at a real disadvantage.”

One alternative to colorblindness is multiculturalism – the ideal that society tolerates and even embraces differences in culture. Under multiculturalism, people don’t pretend racial differences don’t exist – they celebrate the diversity.

Some white people have bristled at multiculturalism because they believe it means they and their culture aren’t valued, Mazzocco said. But multiculturalism can be all-inclusive in a way that says all people, including whites, are valued.

“When this inclusive form of multiculturalism has been studied, whites have reported a much more positive experience.”

Mazzocco said he hopes his book will inspire more research, now that there is a clearer idea of the different meanings of colorblindness.

“We are at a crossroads regarding our willingness to discuss race explicitly. Social scientists can make a real contribution by helping us to understand what our views are and how to talk about them.”

“Mizu” translates to “water” and has emerged in recent decades as a unique shade in the Japanese lexicon, new research has found.

English speakers have “light blue,” sure. But “mizu” is its own color, not merely a shade of another. It’s similar to how people in the United States use “magenta,” rather than “purplish-red.”

Researchers from Japan and The Ohio State University collaborated on the study, which examines the color lexicon in Japan over time and compares the country’s modern color terminology to words used in the United States. The study appears in the Journal of Vision.

The researchers asked 57 native Japanese speakers to name the colors on cards placed before them. The study participants used 93 unique color terms. No modifiers such as “light” or “dark” were allowed.

Identification of basic long-standing color terms came as no surprise, but the use of “mizu” by almost everyone in the group is new and strong evidence that it should be included among 12 generally accepted basic Japanese color terms, the researchers concluded.

Furthermore, they found differences between color language in the two modern, diverse societies.

Some unique and commonly described color terms in one language are missing in the other. In Japan, “mizu” is one, as is “kon” (dark blue.) In the U.S., native speakers often use the words “teal,” “lavender,” “peach” and “magenta,” none of which has a commonly used Japanese equivalent.

Angela Brown

Delwin Lindsey

“Like animal species, language is constantly evolving,” said Ohio State’s Delwin Lindsey, a professor of psychology who worked on the study with optometry professor Angela Brown and Japanese colleagues from several institutions.

Humans mostly see color in exactly the same way. But how we describe it varies widely and it tells researchers about more than just whether that pretty blouse is “mizu” or “light blue.”

“In America, we don’t have a single unique word for light blue. The closest thing we have is “sky,” but when we ask, we don’t elicit that very often,” Brown said.

“In Japan, ‘mizu’ is as different from ‘blue’ as ‘green’ is from ‘blue.’”

Lindsey and Brown said the study of color language goes beyond how we describe a blouse, car or crayon.

“We’re interested in how colors are represented through language and how that gets distributed through society. How is it that we all decide that blue is blue? We do so through interaction,” Lindsey said.

Added Brown, “The study of color naming is fundamentally the study of how words come to be associated with things – all things that exist, from teacups to love.”

The color lexicon happens to be easier to study than other aspects of language evolution. Colors are easily described, reproduced and displayed.

And there is vast difference in what colors we use from culture to culture and individual to individual.

“The visual system can discern millions of colors,” Brown said. “But people only describe a limited number of them and that varies depending on their community and the variety of colors that enter into their daily lives.”

There are areas of the world, for instance, where blue and green are lumped together – something color researchers call “grue.”

“People around the world have very different color-naming systems and that raises interesting questions about what we’re born with and what’s strongly contingent upon our culture,” said Lindsey, who teaches at Ohio State’s Mansfield campus.

“In general, the more basic the color terms, the less technologically and economically advanced the culture,” he said.

“But what’s really interesting is there are remarkable similarities in color descriptions amongst people who live thousands of miles apart. And there can be differences between next-door neighbors.”

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Japan’s Tohoku University.

Ryan Lange, now at the University of Chicago, worked on the study as a graduate student in Ohio State’s College of Optometry.

CONTACTS: Angela Brown, 614-292-4423; Brown.112@osu.edu. Delwin Lindsey, 419-755-4359; Lindsey.43@osu.edu.

Though most everyone sees color the same, people in different parts of the world have different names for different shades. New research from Ohio State shows changes in the Japanese color lexicon. The U.S. colors are from previous work.

“One of the things that I talk about repeatedly is access, affordability and excellence. It’s the triad of our approach as a university and how important the regional campuses are to that triad,” Drake said.

Drake began his day meeting with faculty to answer their questions about the role of the regional campus at Ohio State. The president worked to leave no doubt about his views.

“Regional campuses are a critical part of our one university,” he said. “It’s something important and thought of in everything we do, all of the time.”

Drake spoke about improving access to professional development for faculty. He also said faculty on regional campuses could be leaders in online learning curriculum regardless of their geographic location.

“I think by having the president here it signifies in a variety of important ways how connected we are,” said Stephen Gavazzi, dean and director of the Mansfield campus.

Community support

Following the meeting with faculty, Drake was off to Ed Pickens’ Café On Main. He posed for pictures with owner Ed Pickens and then sat down to discuss his approach to education and the benefits of the regional campus with local media.

Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof joined in the discussion with reporters. Obhof is a graduate of Ohio State and his senate district includes the Mansfield campus. He and Drake toured the region last summer and he said the campus is critical to the region.

“I think it’s great for the community because they get to see that relationship with Ohio State improve and understand that the leaders of Ohio State University are here getting to know them,” Obhof said.

Investments in the Mansfield campus have been a boon to the surrounding community. New student housing has helped grow enrollment and grow the reach of the campus. That housing has spurred businesses to develop in the neighborhood. More students attend the Mansfield campus from Cuyahoga County than Richland County.

Drake was the keynote speaker at a lunch hosted by the Richland Area Chamber of Commerce, the Richland Community Development Group and Destination Mansfield/Richland County. He discussed the future of the Mansfield campus.

One new development: The campus is adding more engineering classes with the goal of offering students a chance to earn a four-year degree in mechanical engineering without leaving Mansfield. Drake also noted the campus will be part of a data analysis project to help advisers track student performance in a way that allows them to provide struggling students help as early as possible.

“If we can interact with them right away we can help them move forward,” Drake said.

Following the speech, Drake opened the floor to questions. Arielle Gibson, a second-year psychology major, wanted to know how she will fit in on the vast Columbus campus when she heads there to finish her degree in the fall.

Drake said the experience is like moving from a small town to New York City.

“What happens, when you come to a campus where we have nearly 60,000 students, you can’t know everybody and they won’t know you. But there will be, among them, hundreds and hundreds of wonderful people who will love and support and admire you in every way you can imagine,” Drake said.

He invited Gibson to have lunch with him on the Columbus campus so he could help her understand how she could fit in – an offer Gibson accepted.

“I think it makes sense that once I get there, I’ll find a smaller group of people and I can make a lot of connections,” Gibson said.

Student success

President Drake wrapped up his day with what looked to be one his favorite moments: meeting with students.

Free cookies and snacks may have enticed some students to this event, but the opportunity to question the president one-on-one appeared to be the real draw.

Drake was asked when he knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. His ambitions include race car driver, filmmaker and medical doctor. A career path as an ophthalmologist ultimately won out.

Another student asked about the secret of success.

“I think doing a good job of being your best self is a good thing to do,” Drake said. “It gives you the greatest number of opportunities.”

Keenan Churchman, a second-year criminal justice major, appreciated the president’s visit to the Mansfield campus.

“I think it was cool. I liked how he was trying to look forward to the future," Churchman said.

Before he headed back to Columbus, Drake took time to take pictures with the students.

“One of the greatest joys of being president is being your president,” Drake told them.

Joanne Ruthsatz, assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield, is one of the first researchers to have uncovered the link between prodigy and autism.

In a new book, Ruthsatz and a co-author explain how what she has learned about child prodigies may help us not only understand autism, but could point the way to new treatments.

Joanne Ruthsatz

“Our evidence suggests that prodigies are people who should have autism, but don’t. They share many of the same characteristics of people with autism, but not the deficits,” she said.

“We believe that, for prodigies, there is a resilience gene or genes that are holding back the deficits associated with autism and allowing the talent to shine through.”

The Prodigy's Cousin

Ruthsatz discusses her research in the book The Prodigy’s Cousin: The Family Link between Autism and Extraordinary Talent, written with her daughter, journalist Kimberly Stephens.

The book highlights Ruthsatz’s 18 years of research on prodigies, which led to her discovery of a family link to autism. The first prodigy she studied, in 1998, had a cousin with autism.

She has now studied more than 30 prodigies – the largest research sample of these rare individuals every created. She has found that more than half of them have a close relative with autism. Some of them have several relatives affected by autism.

“We’ve learned this isn’t a coincidence. These prodigies and their relatives with autism have a genetic link in common,” she said.

In a study published last year, Ruthsatz and her colleagues discovered a mutation on chromosome 1 that prodigies share with their relatives with autism, but not with their other relatives.

“It’s a fascinating link, but it is just the beginning of the genetic research,” she said. “I am very excited about what the DNA studies are going to tell us.”

Ruthsatz is working with a research team from McGill University in Canada to uncover DNA evidence of a resilience gene or genes in prodigies.

Trying to learn about a disease by studying people who don’t have it is not a new thing in science, Ruthsatz said.

In the book, the authors discuss how HIV researchers learned a lot by studying people who should have had HIV, but didn’t. These scientists found a genetic mutation that doesn’t allow for receptor sites to form on immune cells that are killed by the virus. For the lucky people with this mutation, HIV literally washes right through their body.

“The people with this mutation are the prodigies of the HIV world; researchers studied them so they could help their ‘cousins’ who contracted HIV,” she said.

With their genetic link, it is not surprising that prodigies and people with autism have much in common. Prodigies have autistic characteristics, such as extraordinary attention to detail and a tendency toward obsession.

These similarities may point to new ways to think about autism, and ways to help some of the children who have it, she said.

One promising avenue involves what is called “training the talent.” When parents of prodigies realize that their child has an extraordinary talent in art or math or astronomy, they understandably try to nurture that talent, even if it seems to border on obsession.

Children with autism also often have obsessions with particular subjects or talents. But because of their troubles communicating and showing emotions, parents often don’t let them follow these obsessions.

Ruthsatz has uncovered a few instances, however, where parents have let their children with autism pursue their passions.

“Instead of focusing entirely on trying to teach the children to speak or to make eye contact, the parents let their child do the thing they love to do, whatever that is,” she said.

“In some cases, the children get excited about their particular talent, they get good at it, and they want to communicate about it. The speech and communication and social skills come along with their growing ability.”

This is treating children with autism as if they were prodigies by focusing on their strengths and ignoring the deficits, she said. In some cases, those deficits become less pronounced as they follow their talents.

Ruthsatz cautioned that this approach doesn’t work with all children with autism and has not been scientifically tested yet.

It is unlikely that any one treatment will help all children with autism because the condition seems to be a set of related but distinct disorders.

“Trying to find a treatment that works for everyone based solely on similarity of symptoms is like trying to treat all people who have trouble breathing by giving them a Heimlich: It will help those who are choking, but it’s probably not the best answer for a person having an allergic reaction,” Ruthsatz and Stephens write in the book.

While the search for treatments continues, Ruthsatz said there is still much more to learn from prodigies.

“We’re really just at the beginning of this research. I’m excited about what we will be discovering in the future.”

Many studies have found that narcissists often make volatile and risky decisions, possibly because they tend to have inflated views of their own abilities and achievements.

But in a series of three experiments, researchers found that people who scored higher on measures of narcissism were no more likely than others to make risky choices in lab-based tasks.

The results surprised Amy Brunell, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield.

Amy Brunell

“I thought that narcissists, given that they are impulsive and have high opinions of themselves, would take bigger risks. That’s what other research would have suggested,” Brunell said.

“But any association between narcissism and risk-taking that we found was very small and essentially meaningless.”

One explanation for the discrepancy may be the fact that many of the studies linking narcissism and risk-taking were based on self-reports: Essentially, narcissists saying that they took risks in certain situations.

But self-reports may not be the best way to measure risk-taking for this group, Brunell said.

“When they’re asked, narcissists may brag about taking big risks because they’re showing off,” she said. “But their own behavior in our experiments doesn’t support their claims about being risk-takers.”

Brunell conducted the study with Melissa Buelow, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State at Newark. The results appear online in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making and will be published in a future print edition.

The three experiments involved a total of 936 undergraduate students. Depending on the study, the researchers evaluated the participants with two different measures of narcissism. In one study, they also looked specifically at three narcissistic traits – grandiosity, entitlement and exploitativeness, to determine if any of them might have links to risky decision-making.

Participants completed a variety of decision-making tasks to measure risk-taking. In one task, the students played a computer game in which they pumped up 30 balloons, earning 5 cents for each pump until they decided to stop. But if the balloon popped, they lost all the money.

In the Iowa Gambling Task, participants were presented with four virtual decks of cards on a computer screen. With each card they chose, they won or lost money. Some decks were “good” decks in which they won more money and some decks were stacked with more losing cards.

In these and other tasks, the researchers wanted to know how much people who score high on narcissism were willing to risk compared to those who scored lower.

There were some slight differences in how people responded. For example, people who scored high on grandiosity (having an inflated sense of self-importance) were more likely to take risks in one of the experiments.

But none of the differences was large enough to have real practical significance, Brunell explained.

While there had been many self-report studies linking narcissism and risk-taking, Brunell said she could find only two other published papers that used lab experiments to examine whether there is such a link.

That may be because there is a bias in academic publishing toward publishing significant results, she said. Not many studies are published that find no linkages between two variables, as this study does.

“But in this case it is important to know that there is no relationship between narcissism and risky decision-making because it contradicts other research that used different methods,” Brunell said.

However, she cautioned that this research doesn’t mean that narcissists shun risky decision-making in all situations. For example, this study included college students, who may not always act the same way as older adults.

Also, in this research, the participants were taking risks that could hurt only themselves.

“Narcissists may act differently in situations where the risks of their decisions are borne at least somewhat by other people,” she said.

#

According to new research, the answer is yes.

A new study examines how a culture of nomadic hunter-gatherers names colors, and shows that they group colors into categories that align with patterns of color grouping evident in 110 other world languages.

This study population – the Hadza people of Tanzania – has relatively few commonly shared color words in its language. During the study, the most common response by Hadza participants to a request to name a color was “Don’t know.”

However, the way the participants grouped the colors they did name – regardless of what name they used – tended to match color-naming conventions of Somali-speaking immigrants and native English speakers, and of many other cultures around the world.

Delwin Lindsey

“Looking at the Hadza data, we see a relatively modern color vocabulary emerging, but the color terms are distributed across the entire population,” said Delwin Lindsey, professor of psychology at The Ohio State University Mansfield Campus and lead author of the study. “We captured a point in time culturally where the stuff for creating a complex color naming exists, but it’s not in the head of any one individual. It’s distributed in bits and pieces across the culture.”

Scientists know a lot about how the human brain responds to seeing color – and that universality of perception makes color naming a good model for studying patterns in language change.

“This study provides a very useful framework for thinking about how the terms that are used to describe things in our environment actually emerge and evolve,” Lindsey said. “You can think of the words as species that are evolving – they are competing for space in our heads. So this is an example of cultural evolution that closely mirrors biological evolution.”

The research is published in the journal Current Biology.

Lindsey said the finding suggests that color naming is not a matter of nature versus nurture, but a combination of the two. The result also suggests that both prevailing theories about color naming apply around the world: Cultures create color names, but individuals from vastly different societies (Hadza, Somali and American) share the same perceptions of colors in their mind.

Angela Brown

“Clearly, there are certain constraints within the mind that guide how colors are going to be grouped together,” said Lindsey, also a professor of optometry on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. “But this illustrates an interesting trade-off between culture and biology as determinants of human thought. There are cultural universals, but within each culture there is dramatic diversity. If the culture were playing the preeminent role, members of a society would establish conventions that they all agree on. But they’re clearly not all agreeing on anything.”

How does it play out in English? One person’s lilac shirt is called lavender by her neighbor.

Lindsey and collaborator Angela Brown, professor of optometry at Ohio State, reported in 2006 on their analysis of data of the World Color Survey, a collection of color names obtained by University of California, Berkeley researcher Paul Kay and associates from 2,616 people of 110 languages spoken by mostly preindustrial societies.

That analysis confirmed that, across cultures, people tend to classify hundreds of different chromatic colors into only eight distinct categories: red, green, yellow-or-orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green or blue).

In 2009, Lindsey and Brown published a second paper describing further analysis of the World Color Survey, in which they showed that four common, distinct groupings of color categories, which they called “motifs,” occur worldwide: black, white and red; black, white, red and gray; black, white, red and a single cool green or blue category; and black, white, red, green, blue and yellow. A surprising result was that the motifs observed within a society are nearly as diverse as those observed across cultures.

“We found that these motifs occurred with minor variations across 110 languages,” Brown said. “A person from Cameroon, Africa, can name colors more similarly to somebody from Northwestern Australia than to his Cameroon neighbor. And that Cameroon neighbor might be more similar to a different person in Northwestern Australia.”

Larger color vocabularies are generally associated in more technologically advanced societies.

“To try to get at how these motifs might emerge, we wanted to go as far back technologically as we could. That’s where the hunter-gatherers fit in,” Lindsey said.

He and Brown collaborated with co-corresponding author Coren Apicella and her colleague David Brainard, both on the psychology faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, to survey the Hadza people. Apicella has been working with the Hadza people for more than a decade.

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

“A town-gown relationship is a lot like an arranged marriage that neither partner can end,” said Stephen Gavazzi, co-author of the study and dean of The Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus.

“You have to make the marriage work regardless of how you feel about your partner. We found this marriage metaphor works very well in assessing how a college campus interacts with its surrounding community.”

Town-gown refers to the intersection of a college campus and the surrounding non-academic community.

Stephen Gavazzi

Gavazzi and a colleague used a marriage model first developed in 1965 to design a survey measuring the status of town-gown relationships.

This marriage model, developed by John F. Cuber and Peggy B. Harroff, hypothesized that the success of marriages was largely determined by two factors: how much effort the couple put into their marriage, and how comfortable each partner felt with each other.

“I realized that this kind of typology captures very well the relationship between a campus and its surrounding community,” Gavazzi said. Finding this connection was no accident: Along with being the senior administrator of a regional campus in a small metropolitan area of 50,000 residents, Gavazzi is a professor of human sciences at Ohio State and has long studied marriage and family relationships.

“I think the marital model is something everyone relates to,” Gavazzi said. In fact, he said college faculty and administrators often approach him after he talks about this research and tell him about their own marriages and how it translates into the town-gown relationships at their institutions.

With this marriage model in mind, Gavazzi and his co-author, Michael Fox, professor of geography and environment at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, developed the Optimal College Town Assessment. This 16-question survey asks a variety of questions about how people see the levels of effort and comfort in a town-gown relationship.

For example, the survey asks participants to rate how active they believe different campus groups are in contributing to the well-being of the community as a whole. (Rated on a five-point scale from “not active” to “very active.”)

Another question asks participants to rate their own personal relationships with different campus representatives, on a five-point scale from “very negative” to “very positive.”

The researchers tested the new survey with people from Mansfield, Ohio, which is the location of Gavazzi’s Ohio State regional campus, and in the nearby towns of Shelby and Ontario.

They interviewed, via a web survey, 602 community members, including teachers and school administrators, leaders of non-profits, business owners and others. They asked about their relationship with Ohio State’s students, faculty, leaders/administrative staff and board of trustee members.

Survey results, recently published in the journal Innovative Higher Education, put relationships into four categories, depending on the amount of effort and comfort shown. The best category is harmonious, with is characterized by high effort and high comfort. The least favorable relationship is called devitalized (low effort and low comfort). Traditional relationships have low effort and high comfort, while conflicted relationships have high effort but low comfort.

Results showed that Mansfield and the Ohio State campus have a mostly traditional relationship. But the important insights come from digging deeper into the results, Gavazzi said.

One of the key findings was that community members felt they had the most contact with students compared to other campus representatives.

“It was very clear that when people thought about how the campus was engaged with the community, it really had to do with the students,” Gavazzi said.

“Of course, we all knew students were important, but we didn’t realize just how important. For faculty and administrators, the message is that if you want to have an impact with the community, you really should do it through the students.”

Another key finding was the impact that distance had on the town-gown relationship.

“Shelby is only six miles away from our campus, but it might have been 100 miles away from the way they perceived us. We found that for Ohio State to connect to people who live just six miles away, we have to make a special effort to reach them,” he said.

The researchers have made the assessment freely available and Gavazzi said he hopes other campuses will use it to get a more exact picture of their relationships with their surrounding communities.

Too often, he said, college administrators rely on gut feelings and anecdotes to gauge how things are going between their institutions and local community members, rather than being data-driven.

“Now there is a way to quantify just how healthy that relationship is,” Gavazzi said. “You can use the assessment to benchmark the status of a relationship and then follow-up regularly to see how new initiatives help or hurt. You don’t have to guess anymore.”

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