Mimi Chapman, associate professor at the School of Social Work, and Keith Payne, professor in the Department of Psychology, have been asked to co-present a national webinar that highlights the work of the Envisioning Health Research team, a trans-disciplinary group examining ways to modify implicit and explicit bias among health care providers working with new immigrant Latino youth. The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health selected Envisioning Health to be featured as part of a Minority Health Month Webinar Series. The one-hour online conference, which is slated for April 22 at 2 p.m. is titled, “Fighting fire with fire: Using implicit means to combat implicit bias,” and will focus on understanding how medical professionals display implicit bias toward Latino adolescents and interventions for decreasing this social behavior and its impact on health care.
The UNC project is part of a two-year investigation by a trans-disciplinary team of University scholars from across the campus, including the arts and humanities, medicine, public health, social work, and social psychology. The research team, led by Chapman, was awarded a $300,000 federal grant from the NIH and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2013 to investigate whether art can help to enhance the health care of Latino adolescents. The study centers on the use of visual materials, such as photographs, and structured discussions as a method for strengthening the relationship between health care providers and Latino adolescents.