Since the 1960s, Oakland, California, has been represented as a predominantly African American, low-income, and high crime urbanity. In the 2000s, the municipality started to become recognized as a top green city, and by the 2010s the city began to emerge as a gentrification hot spot. This dissertation elucidates how the relationships between race, class, housing, and access to green spaces have changed from redlining—prior to the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968—to 2020, after Oakland adopted an environmental agenda and began to establish itself as a green city starting in the 1990s. I question how Oakland’s urban environmental “sustainable development” agenda has impacted residents’ access to green spaces, and to what extent and how are these policies and practices creating, exacerbating, and/or mitigating urban environmental (in)justice issues. I examine both sides of environmental (in)justice, uneven distribution of environmental harms and the uneven development of environmental goods in which low-income residents and communities of color are disproportionally exposed to environmental hazards while also being prevented from benefiting from environmental amenities. I interrogate Oakland as a 21st century sustainable green city while also examining the historical urban policies and practices embedded in legal residential segregation and the current green gentrification processes which influence and contribute to the environmental (in)justices being (re)produced today.

Empathy provides a window into another person's mind, creating a shared experience between two individuals. This intimate view of another person's emotional world often makes the empathizer feel more connected to the other person and may motivate the empathizer to respond to the other's emotional needs. While past studies have investigated the underlying psychological and neural mechanisms for this fundamental human experience, researchers have predominantly focused on examining empathy for other's negative emotions (i.e. negative empathy). Therefore, the current studies examined the neural and behavioral basis of empathy for positive emotions (i.e. positive empathy) and negative empathy.

Study 1 examined the relationship between empathy and helping, aggression, social connection, loneliness, and life satisfaction at the trait and daily level. In this two-week diary study, 102 participants completed end-of-day surveys on each of these variables, as well as trait measures. Both positive empathy and negative empathy (i.e. traditional components of empathy) contributed to prosocial behavior, but showed weak and inconsistent relationships with aggression across levels of analysis. Positive empathy, compared to negative empathy, was the strongest predictor of social functioning and life satisfaction at both trait and daily levels, suggesting that positive empathy is particularly important for enhanced social and personal well-being. While past research has not distinguished between positive and negative empathy, the results of this study demonstrate that positive empathy may be a distinct component of empathy that has important behavioral consequences in everyday life.

Study 2 measured neural responses during positive and negative empathy to help identify neural systems that support different components of empathy - perspective-taking, affective congruence, and prosocial motivation. In addition, we examined if brain regions commonly activated during positive and negative empathy would relate to real-world helping behavior. In this study, 32 participants completed an fMRI session assessing empathic responses to individuals experiencing pain, anxiety, and happiness, as well as completing a two-week daily diary in which they reported on daily helping behavior. The results suggest that empathy may be evoked through two different pathways, the mirror neuron or mentalizing systems, as well as engaging affective regions that are congruent with the target's emotion. Finally, empathy generally activated a neural region associated with prosocial motivation (i.e. septal area), and activity in this region was positively associated with prosocial behavior in the real world.