Staff Spotlight: Caden Jackson Publishes Research
Student Success Center Coordinator and Class of ’23 graduate Caden Jackson has completed and released his first research project in Carolina Crosstalk, USC's student-led undergraduate research magazine. While taking African American Psychology with Prof. Brandon Simpson, Jackson decided to further investigate the causes behind police brutality against African American men. “I wanted to understand while these tragedies were happening, so Professor Simpson encouraged me to do research beyond the classroom,” he said.
Jackson began to work with Prof. Branson and Dr. Randy Lowell to conduct experiments on implicit bias in policing in the Psychology Lab. For the experiment, participants were recruited from the USC-Union student body and randomly assigned to 1) meditation, 2) control attention, or 3) control condition. The meditation group underwent a brief mindful meditation training via a 10-minute meditation exercise while wearing a Muse EEG mind-sensing headband to record levels of mental calm. In between lab visits, this group was also instructed to practice this meditation on their own daily. The control attention group engaged in a 10-minute task of attending to a story to listen for each occurrence of a target word but was not instructed to engage in this task in between lab visits. Finally, the control group listened to a 10-minute story, but was not instructed to attend in any particular way. Next, eye-tracking was used via an EyeLink 1000 Plus system while the participant completed a computer-generated shoot/no-shoot (threat/no-threat) task, with areas of interest around the person’s face and hands. The eye-tracker functions by focusing on the pupil of the participant to track where and what the participant focuses on during the experiment.
“Learning about the psychological and sociological processes that create, and dismantle, racial implicit biases has been fascinating,” said Jackson. “It is my hope, with continued research, that new implicit bias trainings can be created and implemented by police departments to reduce incidents of police brutality rooted in racial implicit bias.” He plans to continue this research in graduate school. “I would encourage every student to get involved in undergraduate research in their respective fields of interest,” he said. “There are so many benefits to conducting research: increasing knowledge, funding opportunities, internships, graduation with leadership distinction, and presenting and publishing your work.” Jackson won the Magellan Scholar Award for his work. “Undergraduate research at USC Union was a great experience for me, that truly transformed my college experience,” he said.
