BY JACQUELINE TASCH
UCLA Today
When Eileen Anderson-Fye was offered a postdoctoral
fellowship with UCLA’s Center for Culture, Brain and Development
last fall, it was “a dream come true,” she recalled.
There were two reasons: First, with its distinctive
combination of neuroscience, psychology and anthropology, the
center could help her extend her doctoral research on the psychological
development of adoles- cent girls in Belize, located on the
eastern coast of Central America. Second, Professors M. Belinda
Tucker and Keith Kernan, both of psychiatry and biobehavioral
science, were doing a project among Belizean immigrants in Los
Angeles that paralleled her own research.
Since coming to UCLA, Anderson-Fye has been
sharing methods and information with Tucker and Kernan. “Cultural
change can happen because of cultural globalization” —
the impact of Western television and tourism on teenagers in
Belize, for example — “or because of immigration,”
Anderson-Fye said. Her unique fellowship offers an opportunity
to see if there are differences in the ways Belizean girls at
home and abroad respond to rapid change.
Anderson-Fye began to investigate the connection
between gendered psychological development and cultural context
as an undergraduate at Brown University. That interest took
her to Harvard University for graduate studies, but it was a
marine biologist’s offer of a free vacation that took
her to Belize.
Instead of spending time at the beach, Anderson-Fye
talked with the locals and explored a coastal town where a great
influx of tourists increases the impact of Western culture.
“The intellectual questions I had were the same ones that
the community was struggling with,” she said.
Working with adolescent girls in a local high
school and the surrounding community, Anderson-Fye found that,
unlike teens in other countries, Belizean girls seemed unaffected
by Western messages about body image that often lead to eating
disorders. However, after making contact with Western ideas
about physical and sexual abuse, many who were abused as children
developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Did the brain changes associated with PTSD happen at the time
of the abuse and lie dormant, Anderson-Fye wondered, or did
the changes occur only with a reinterpretation of what the girls
had experienced? She hopes neuroscience will help her find answers.
With the demands of her studies and research,
she feels fortunate to have a supportive husband, Chris, who
generously agreed “to give up our very pleasant lives
in Boston and move out here with me.” As they build new
lives in Los Angeles — lives that include year-round biking
at the beach — Anderson-Fye says that her great expectations
about UCLA have been fulfilled. “My postdoc is phenomenal,”
she said. “It’s better than I could have hoped for.”
