As of Fall 2023, Abigail Scholer is Batten Family Bicentennial Distinguished Leadership Professor of Public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she researches the dynamic, complex, and often confounding world of human motivation and self-regulation: What makes us reach for the stars, huddle in a corner, get out of bed, help others, break our diets, save for retirement, follow rules, and color outside the lines? Scholer studies fundamental and basic processes related to goal pursuit, decision-making, social regulation, motivated social cognition, and behavior change, with an aim for understanding how these basic processes can be leveraged to address societal challenges and improve people’s lives.

Maura Austin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She studies person perception, motivation, social judgment and decision making, and moral character judgment. 

In this FAB, held in partnership with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Professors Leidy Klotz (Engineering & Applied Sciences), Gabe Adams and Ben Converse (Frank Batten School of Leadership & Public Policy) share insights on what we can learn, and how we can make better decisions by subtracting, rather than adding things to our to-do lists.

This summit will provide an opportunity for participants to look back, look around and to look ahead by appreciating the complexity and taking advantage of the opportunity to address the mental health crisis -- and stress the intentionality of doing so in an equitable way.

UVA Today reached out to Batten School's Tim Davis, a clinical psychologist, to get tips for the parents of entering students. It’s time to loosen the reins and change how to interact with these young adults.

Our research demonstrates that people who had perceived a recent betrayal were significantly less likely to trust a new entity that shared nominal group membership with the previous trust transgressor. By systematically investigating whether, why, and to what extent betrayal spillover can subsequently contaminate trust development, we present a robust account of the downstream economic and behavioral consequences of observing others who have been betrayed by a similar entity, particularly in the context of charitable organizations.

How much did clinically significant anxiety and depression increase among US adults during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic? In this survey study of more than 1.4 million respondents in the US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, responses to a screening question calibrated to a 4-item Patient Health Questionnaire score of 6 or greater suggested that aggregate prevalence of clinically significant anxiety and depression increased only modestly overall among US adults in 2020 compared with 2017 to 2019.

Batten Professor Gabe Adams, whose latest research examines how sexism can be overlooked in the workplace, is the recipient of a 2022 Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Jefferson Scholars Foundation.

Even though women make up roughly half of the students enrolled in law school today, they do not take up roughly half of the speaking time in law school classes. We found that women, more than men, report backlash for speaking in class, and this difference affects their willingness to participate in the law school classroom.

In this research, we identified a barrier that makes sexism hard to recognize: rudeness toward men. We found that observers judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men.