Baylor Proud

Just in time for Valentine’s Day earlier this week, some of the most famous love letters ever were made available for viewing in their original handwritten form, thanks to a joint digitization project between Baylor and Wellesley College. Nearly 600 letters from poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, owned and housed at Wellesley, are now available for viewing online (along with some 800+ other Browning letters owned by BU) through Baylor Libraries’ digital collection.

An Associated Press story on the project was carried by more than 400 media outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post (with a great video), CBS News, ABC News, NPR, CBC-TV (Canada), The Guardian (UK) and the Belfast Telegraph (UK), and that coverage sent people in droves to the Baylor website.

Between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. on Feb. 14, the Browning Letters site was viewed more than 100,000 times per hour. Thankfully, Baylor’s servers were up to the barrage of traffic. Since then, several major media outlets have followed up to learn more about Baylor’s role in the digitization process.

The timing of the coverage was even more serendipitous as Baylor prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Robert Browning’s birth. The university’s Armstrong Browning Library is home to the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, works of art and other materials related to the Brownings, and as such will host an international conference in November celebrating the Browning bicentennial.

Sic ’em, Baylor Libraries and the Armstrong Browning Library!

What might seem obvious to some — that humble people are more likely than arrogant people to give of their time to help someone in need — wasn’t a given for Dr. Jordan LaBouff, BA ’05, MA ’08, PhD ’11.

“While it certainly seemed possible that humble people might be more focused on other people’s needs and thus more willing to help a peer in need, it also seemed possible that traits associated with humility (like modesty) might discourage helping a peer in need,” says LaBouff, who conducted his research on the subject while a doctoral candidate at Baylor. Furthermore, he adds, “in nearly 30 years of research on helping behavior, very few studies have shown any effect of personality variables on helping.”

LaBouff, Baylor psychology and neuroscience professors Dr. Wade Rowatt and Dr. Jo-Ann Tsang, doctoral candidate Megan Johnson, BA ’07, MA ’09, and undergraduate student Grace McCullough Willerton, BA ’07, collaborated on the study in Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences. The results of their work, recently published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, have caught fire in media outlets all over the country and even internationally. See these headlines, for example:

• MSNBC: “Need a hand? Find someone humble”
• National Geographic: “Humble People Are Helpful People”
• United Press International: “Humble people more likely to help”
• United Kingdom Press Association: “‘Tis the season to be humble…”

And so it goes… From the Huffington Post to Technorati, MSN Health to CBC/Radio-Canada, the quintet’s research has carried the Baylor name into countless reports  — even into Spanish over on the National Institutes of Health website.

Sic ’em, Baylor researchers!