National Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated in the U.S. from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 each year. The theme for 2024 is “Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together.”

Belinda Campos relishes that idea. Between her work as chair of UC Irvine’s Department of Chicano/Latino Studies and a faculty member with the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community in the School of Medicine, Campos takes the future of the Latino population very seriously. She helps lead a network of colleagues who endeavor to foster in students an understanding of Latino history – and how to apply that knowledge in building a brighter future.

Campos’ research examines how people develop the high-quality relationships associated with better health and longer life. Her team’s work has revealed that some classic Latino cultural components, such as an emphasis on positivity and tight-knit families, create a connectivity that can help individuals endure difficult, stressful times. Some of their findings are shared in a recent article in Greater Good magazine titled “How to Fully Appreciate Your Loving Relationships,” a collaboration with Jessica Borelli, UC Irvine professor of psychological science.

This multifaceted episode of The UCI Podcast includes detailed descriptions of Campos’ research and other undertakings in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies and discussions on the history and future of PRIME-LC and its new offshoot, UC PRIME Pre-Health Pathways; how culture can influence our interpretation of social support in times of stress; and why connecting to our families and communities is good for one’s health.

“Pioneers,” the music for this episode, was provided by Audionautix via the audio library in YouTube Studio. “Pioneers” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. 

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TRANSCRIPT

The UCI Podcast/Cara Capuano:

From the University of California Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UCI Podcast. Our guest today is Belinda Campos, professor and chair of UC Irvine’s Chicano/Latino Studies Department, and a faculty member in the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community in the School of Medicine, otherwise known as PRIME-LC. She also holds an affiliation appointment in psychological science in the School of Social Ecology.

Professor Campos centers her research on relationships, primarily examining how people arrive at the high quality relationships that are associated with better health and longer life. She studies the factors and processes that characterize high-quality relationships. She also studies positive emotions and how they’re displayed, and the effect of sociocultural contexts – such as prioritizing others before the self – on one’s psychological and physical health. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today, Professor Campos.

Belinda Campos:

Thank you so much for having me, Cara.

Capuano:

There are so many topics I want to discuss today. Let’s begin with you and your work. You recently co-wrote an article with UC Irvine professor of psychological science Jessica Borelli titled “How to Fully Appreciate your Loving Relationships.” It appeared in Greater Good Magazine, whose purpose is to share science-based insights for a meaningful life. I will definitely link that article in our show notes, but for the listeners who haven’t had a chance to enjoy it yet, how would you summarize your findings for that?

Campos:

Thank you so much for asking. I’m sure I speak for both of us when I say that we appreciate you giving that work a shout-out. This work is really, I think, foundational to Jessica Borelli’s work. So, she has been focused on interventions that can work for families and she brought me in because of my focus on Latino culture that was going to be helpful in understanding these data. So, she does an intervention called “relational savoring.” This is an intervention that takes as its foundation that it’s these moments of positive connection – when relationships are going well – that really provide the foundation for us being able to benefit from the support that relationships can provide, from the connections that relationships can provide, and be able to draw on them in times of difficulty. So, her intervention focuses on remembering and intensely thinking about those good moments as a way of helping to have better relationship quality, which is so important between parents and children, and in families.

And what she brought me on for was to help understand what she was seeing in the data, which is that the relational savoring intervention, which is what some folks were doing – and other folks were assigned to do a “personal savoring” intervention where they really thought about a more personal positive moment rather than a relational positive moment. In the relational positive moments, people were having these increased senses of well-being, but that was more true for the Latina mothers than it was for the general sample overall.

And to understand these data, I was brought in to help to contextualize that what was going on with those data is that the relational savoring intervention is actually really culturally congruent, culturally compatible, with Latino culture’s emphasis on positivity, and family relationships and other relationships, and positive emotions as the things that bind people together into relationships. So, she happened onto this wonderful intervention that just happens to work particularly well in our Latino samples.

And so, this is the work that we’ve been doing together to think through, “Why is this wonderful intervention extra wonderful for some of us, and does that help us to understand how to do well for this particular population that doesn’t always benefit from having interventions that go well?”

You know, there’s a history where people who have good intentions, but the interventions that they propose for Latino families are often rooted in assumptions of, “You are doing things wrong. Here’s how to change the way that you’re doing things so that we can do things better.” But this intervention was really different. It’s saying, “Let’s think about the positive things that are already happening in your relationships.” That is a good entry point from which to really begin to think about like, “Oh yeah, here are the things that I do well. Here are the things that connect us. Here are the things that I can focus on as a way of binding us together in a way that helps during times of difficulty.” And that’s what we find in the Latino sample and that’s what makes that, for me, such a rich collaboration that we’re both involved with.

Capuano:

So, is the research that you’re doing now an extension of that work or is your focus being pulled into a new direction?

Campos:

Yeah, so my focus, like I said, is a little bit different than that. What I’ve been focused on are these aspects of Latino culture that emphasize closeness to family and positive emotions, and to think about them in terms of whether they might be helpful in other contexts. A lot of my work in recent years has been thinking about this particular personality factor called neuroticism.

Neuroticism is one of the tendencies that any of us can have. We’re the folks who are quicker to stress out, quicker to feel negative emotions, a little bit more unstable in terms of our emotionality – quicker to stress out, slower to come back to baseline.

And that’s associated with quite a few life outcomes that are troubling, right? Those of us who are higher in neuroticism tend to have more challenged social relationships. We tend to have more psychological distress, and we tend to have profiles in our physiology that indicate a greater vulnerability to physical health, to disease. And so, what I’ve been interested in is thinking about whether what we understand as a personality factor that tells us something about what people put out into the world, does that really help us understand the response that they get from the world?

And so, that’s where culture comes in. And not all cultures are the same in the ways that we regard folks and the degree to which they should be less likely to stress out. Or what is the level of acceptance that we have for somebody who stresses out easily? What I find in my work is that in my samples of Latinas, that they actually report that if they have this personality tendency, they actually still feel pretty socially supported and they don’t feel as psychologically distressed. And they also have physiological profiles in their cortisol reactivity that indicate that they’re not suffering in the same way as other folks might.

And so, what I’m interested in is this cultural aspect. Is there something that’s being done differently in terms of like the response that people have towards one another that specifically taps into: “What’s the response that we have towards those of us who are quicker to stress out, who are slower to recover from stress?”

And what my current research is focused on is a study that’s asking that very question of: “Is there a difference in the behavior that we react to people who are easy to stress out/high in neuroticism? Or is it that there’s something about culture that helps us to interpret differently the social support that’s coming to us?”

So, whereas like I might actually be offering you a different kind of social support – if you’re stressed out, I might for example say, “Hey, can I bring you dinner if you’re studying for a test?” Or I might be able to say, “Hey, let me distract you for a little bit, and let’s like take a little break and take a little walk and then we’ll come back.” I might not even ask you to talk about the thing that’s stressing you out and that might be helpful.

So, it could be that you’re engaging in the same behavior towards your loved one, but that person isn’t interpreting the behavior in the same way. And they might be processing the offer to bring dinner, or the offer to do something as like, “They can see that I’m bothered. I’m now causing them to go out of their way to do something for me in a way that I don’t feel good about.” And it could be that not feeling good about the support that you’re getting that actually makes the difference. Are you processing the support that you’re getting in a way that makes you feel accepted and helps you to soothe and to calm down? Or are you perceiving the support that you are getting in a way that actually makes you feel like you’ve burdened somebody with your stressors?

So, I’m interested in the possibility that culture tells us a little bit about how we should either behave or interpret the social support that we get. And if so, I’m hoping that that information tells us a little bit about how, whether we have a personality that is high in neuroticism or not, that we can benefit from social support. Because we want to be thinking not just about what you’re like as a person, but about what the response is to you and how we can make sure that you, too, can benefit from the support that relationships can bring and not feel that the way that you are brings about a less supportive interaction and consequence.

Capuano:

It’s so complex because there’s the giver and their intentions, and then there’s the receiver of the support and their interpretation. And it’s like a million different permutations can happen between point A and point B.

Campos:

So, you have nicely captured the complexities of the study that we’ve been trying to run for the last five years. And one of the things that we’re doing to try to tease that apart is that we bring people into the lab – friends who have been friends for many years – and we have them come together and one of them is randomly assigned into a mildly stressful task. So, they’re separated for a little bit and then they come back together to talk about that task. Like, what was it like if I just had to do something stressful and then I come back to my friend? Is the friend supportive? Is the friend not? How does that conversation go? And what we’re hoping to get out of that study is to understand – one – what is the interaction like? And, so far, our preliminary assessment is that there’s more laughter than we expected.

And the second thing that we are interested in understanding is: “Is the behavior different in how we talk about it? Or is it that we are somehow perceiving it to be different in the way that we respond to how supported or accepted that we feel in that interaction – even though our objective coders, who are trained to understand interactions in a particular way, do they see a difference in that behavior? And we’re hoping that that highly complex, difficult to run study that has taken over five years at this point is going to be really insightful about helping us tease apart whether that aspect of culture that seems to be relevant to why we see buffering effects for people who are high in neuroticism who are Latina. So, what we think we will learn from that study is whether there is actually a difference in terms of the behavior, or whether it is that through the filter of culture, we see the behavior differently – so that you might be engaging in the same behavior, but I interpret for cultural reasons greater acceptance and greater support from the interaction that we’re having.

Capuano:

That is very complex. (Campos laughs). I’m sure that takes up a lot of time. And then, also, you’re one of the many leaders in the School of Medicine’s PRIME-LC program, which once again stands for the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community. How are you specifically involved with PRIME-LC?

Campos:

Thank you so much for asking. So, actually I’m here at UCI because of my involvement with PRIME-LC. The position that I was hired to take was one on Latino health that was being recruited in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies because of the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies’ longstanding partnership with PRIME-LC.

PRIME-LC was originated by Drs. Alberto Manetta and Leo Chavez and what they put together was a program that would be focused on training physicians who wanted to focus on underserved Latinos, who at the time – and I think still – are the largest underserved population in California. And what they brought to the table that was really unique is a curriculum that focused on really training the students into understanding what the Latino experience has historically been and what it is in contemporary times.

The contribution that Chicano/Latino Studies makes to the PRIME-LC curriculum is through the core classes that the medical students take in addition to their already-heavy medical student load. We teach the classes that they take at the beginning, before they start their first year, over the course of their first and second years, and into their third year, focusing on making sure that the students deeply understand what the history of medicine has been for Latino population.

So, all the way to pre-Columbian times where we learn a little bit about health and medicine, for example, in Aztec society or in Inca society, all the way to thinking about what the experience has been for Latinos when medicine was professionalizing – so, when we were beginning to really understand, “What does it mean to be a doctor in the United States?,” all the way to contemporary issues that are so important. Thinking about, “How is Latino health affected by environmental factors, by the lack of health insurance, by, for example, exposure to different workplaces, by the likelihood of having diabetes or the likelihood of having asthma or the likelihood of having all of these things that come along with having strong challenges, structural challenges, to being able to obtain good health.

That’s the partnership that Chicano/Latino Studies has with PRIME-LC and teaching the core classes is one of the things that our department – and me, particularly – contribute to PRIME-LC. In that role, I’ve been involved as part of PRIME-LC admissions since I’ve been here at UCI. I’ve been involved in other things that the PRIME-LC students are doing, and it’s one of the things that I find to be most, like, meaningful of the things that I do here as a UCI professor.

Capuano:

PRIME-LC celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. You’ve been a big part of that work. You’re also one of the great minds behind a related program. This is the UC PRIME Pre-Health Pathways (UC3P). Its goal is to prepare more underrepresented undergraduates for careers in medicine, not necessarily just to be a doctor, but just a career in medicine to serve communities in need. Now that program launched in summer of ‘23, so our Class of 2024 had nine Anteaters who were the first graduates to participate in the UC PRIME Pre-Health Pathways here at UC Irvine. What was the first year like with that new initiative?

Campos:

That’s right. Thank you so much for bringing this up. First of all, it was so exciting to see it really be implemented because this program is the result of many, many years of conversations about how to build on the wonderful things that were happening at PRIME-LC to be thinking about how we could bring more people who wanted to pursue a health profession career through the pipeline of getting to their career goals. We come in as 17-, 18-year olds, maybe 20-year olds, into our college educations, and we think we know what we want to do, but we’re not always certain what we want to do. And part of being at the university is seeing what all the different possibilities are and figuring out, “What’s the right one for me?”

We wanted to have a program that would encourage students who were thinking about a health profession but maybe weren’t sure how to prepare for one – maybe come from a background where they don’t easily envision themselves as being able to pursue a health profession. And we wanted to have a program that would say, “Let us help you to support you through figuring out what the landscape is of possibilities for the health professions – M.D., certainly, but also, M.P.H., also, physician’s assistant, Ph.D. There are many different ways that one can be a health professional. And can we then help you to understand what actions you have to take to be the most competitive applicant that you can be? So, we help people to get connected to research labs. We help people to get the experience that they need in terms of research, to get a clinical experience that they need, to think about what kinds of volunteer experiences will help them to understand what they could be getting into as part of the health profession that they want to get.

And we’re so excited to have our first cohort finish up this year and we were just having our end-of-year review and we’re so pleased to find out that we have students who are starting master’s in public health, who are starting master’s in social work – some of them I think at UCLA, at USC. And so, we’re starting to see that the students that we are training are moving into the next step of the health professions that they want to pursue. We have one, I think, who’s applying to an M.D. program this year, and we just look forward to seeing the program grow and grow and being able to bring to as many undergraduates as possible this additional information about the landscape of health professions and the ways that we can assist them in helping them to take the next step to becoming the competitive applicant that they want to be for their next step of training for the health professions.

Capuano:

What a wonderful resource! If they’re on the fence and they go that path and they have those valuable insights from the people that are associated with the program – such a resource.

Campos:

Yes.

Capuano:

National Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated in the US from September 15th to October 15th each year, and the theme for 2024 is “Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together.” Now, I know – and we’ve already talked about PRIME-LC and the involvement of the Chicano/Latino Studies Department in PRIME-LC – there’s a significant amount of work being done in your department that you chair in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies. Can you share just some of the highlights of the work that’s going around you that really enthuses you?

Campos:

I love the idea of the “shaping the future” because I really think that that’s something that our department takes seriously with our students. You know, we want them to have an understanding of what has been, but we want them to take that understanding to be thinking about what the future is.

So, when I think of some of the great things that are happening in our department, I think about the work of Professor Héctor Tobar with his newest book, Our Migrant Souls, which has been getting so many accolades and draws on his experiences with students here at UCI.

I think of Professor Alana LeBrón, who’s pulling together academic and community partnerships to address the important issue of lead in soils in impoverished communities. So, she’s been focusing her partnership in Santa Ana to really understand what is the evidence of lead in the soil, and importantly, I think what academic and community partnerships can do together is not just figuring out what the evidence is – that there has been contamination in the soil – but what can be done to redress that.

Another example is Professor Laura Enriquez, who’s been working on this program called “Building Bridges,” where recognizing that a lot of our young people have grown up at a time when the hardening of immigration policies means that folks don’t have easy access to like family or to cultures of heritage, the places where parents and grandparents, and maybe other family members, might have grown up, and giving them an opportunity to connect to those spaces and to build bridges – as the program says – to really better understand this part of themselves that they have not been able to be connected to before, and to embrace those complications.

And then, really relevant again to the PRIME-LC program, Professor Glenda Flores has just had a wonderful book accepted to the UC Press called The Weight of the White Coat, where she actually is tracing the experiences of Latinos into the health professions – into the M.D. professions – to understand how it is that they’ve managed to navigate these spaces where they are still one of few.

I think this October we’re going to be celebrating “6% is not enough” on Latino Physicians’ Day. “6% is not enough” being a way to understand that there are only 6% of physicians in the country today that identify as Latino and the need for there to be more, especially as the patient population is increasingly Latino. I think those things are coming up in a way that’s really important. I’m sure my PRIME-LC students, in particular, and my UC3P students are going to want to know about The Weight of the White Coat. So, those are some of the great things happening in the department.

Capuano:

That’s amazing. What is it about the Latino culture specifically that … it’s that connectivity that we were talking about earlier. If you’re a Latino person, being able to be treated by someone that shares some semblance of your culture, it seems like – from what I’ve read with PRIME-LC – it’s just really crucial to that population.

Campos:

Yes. I think that the connectivity that you mentioned – the idea that you can see somebody who understands you and who maybe even speaks your language – is a really important part of what PRIME-LC is doing and is a really important part of what Chicano/Latino Studies is doing.

And so, I think of my own particular work. I think about how my key contribution in research, the work that I’m most proud of, is the work that shows that ways of managing relationships  –  especially family relationships and our emotions in those relationships – that these ways of doing family and emotions that have really historically been seen as deficits, as something that has to change about Latino folks, about gente Latina, in order to do well in the United States, that actually turns out to be a good way to do things.

And the data show that those of us who do things – the tight families and the positive emotions – whether we’re of Latino background or whether we are of East Asian background, that actually has good effects. It’s good for relationships and it’s good for our physical health. And I think that’s amazing. And so, I am so excited that you asked about how these things come together because we started talking about the shaping the future. And what I hope is that as these data come out, as this work comes out, is all of the things that are happening at UCI – in terms of Department of Chicano/Latino Studies, in terms of PRIME-LC, in terms of UC3P, in terms of all the individual projects that our faculty are working on – that they are all shaping a future that highlights the good things that can come from the Latino experience, from Latino culture, and that it helps to inform the future in like these ways of recognizing all the good that it can bring. So, I’m excited about that.

Capuano:

That is amazing. Cultures that have been long criticized for the way that they do things are all of a sudden, we’re reevaluating it and saying, “Hmm, actually they know what they’re doing here.”

Campos:

I love the way that you say that. That is absolutely right and that’s what the evidence shows, right? And for me, it is still the case that when I teach my large undergraduate class, which I last did in the winter of 2020, there will come a point where I ask the students – and there’s a hundred and something of them in the class – to say, how many of you had the experience, at some point in K through 12, where somebody well-meaning, and totally well-intended, said to you, “You need to make decisions that take you a little bit more independent from your family. You need to not be so close to your family in order to do well.” And I’m waiting for the day when students don’t raise their hand to say that anymore. Then I’ll feel that like the future is here.

But it is still the case – as of 2020 – that the grand majority of my Latino students raise their hands to say that somebody told them that they need to be more separate from their families in order to do well. And so, I hope that these data, all the things that are happening – not just in terms of our families, but in terms of giving back to our communities – are highlighting that we shouldn’t be separating ourselves from our families or our communities. We should be connecting to our families or our communities. It’s good for our health. It’s good for communities. It’s good on many levels.

Capuano:

Well, hopefully some of the listeners today are taking that message home. Thank you so much for your time.

Campos:

Thank you so much for interviewing me, for taking the time to ask such good questions.

Capuano:

This was very enjoyable. I really appreciate it. I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation. For the latest UC Irvine news, please visit news.uci.edu. The UCI Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.