Social Sciences

American courts are significantly expanding the legal rights and privileges celebrities can command over others using their names or likenesses. And a University at Buffalo Law School professor is questioning whether these courts have gone too far.

University at Buffalo School of Social Work Professor Deborah P. Waldrop has seen people die. Too often, their lives have ended in pain and despair, spending their final days in an alienating institutional environment, just another patient in an impersonal progression that leads to what she calls "reciprocal suffering" for families who also watch their loved ones die.

"Olmsted in Buffalo and Niagara," the first history and guidebook written about the visionary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and the remarkable park systems he designed in Western New York at the end of the 19th century, has been published by The Urban Design Project, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo.

Mark Frank has spent two decades studying the faces of people lying when in high-stakes situations and has good news for security experts. "Executing Facial Control During Deception Situations," a new study he co-authored with former graduate student Carolyn M. Hurley, PhD, reports that although liars can reduce facial actions when under scrutiny, they can't suppress them all.

Which U.S. metro region is most likely to come out of the next recession, natural disaster or other regional "shock" relatively unscathed? Rochester, Minn. A little more battered might be College Station-Bryan, Texas. These two regions are ranked first and last, respectively, by a new online tool measuring more than 360 U.S. metros for their "regional resilience," or capacity to weather acute and chronic stresses ranging from gradual economic decline to rapid population gains to earthquakes and floods.

In the first study of its kind in an animal species that has not passed a critical test of self-recognition, cognitive psychologist Justin J. Couchman of the University at Buffalo has demonstrated that rhesus monkeys have a sense of self-agency -- the ability to understand that they are the cause of certain actions -- and possess a form of self awareness previously not attributed to them.

The University at Buffalo Regional Institute, known for its cutting-edge policy research, and the Urban Design Project, a key contributor across two decades to planning and place-making efforts throughout the region, are joining forces.

Frequent use of energy drinks is associated with binge drinking, alcohol-related social problems and misuse of prescription drugs among musicians, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions.

A comprehensive statewide study finds that the State University of New York is positioned to be the critical force in building a new innovation economy for New York -- with a broad and diverse array of economic development activities already in place across the 64-campus system, and with a growing potential to do more in the future.

As Rust Belt cities transform vacant lots into green space for growing vegetables, University at Buffalo researchers are using modeling to help assess the City of Buffalo's capacity for sustainable agriculture.