Want kids who are smarter and thinner? Keep them away from the television set as toddlers. A shocking study from child experts at the Université de Montréal, the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center and the University of Michigan, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, has found that television exposure at age two forecasts negative consequences for kids, ranging from poor school adjustment to unhealthy habits. “We found every additional hour of TV exposure among toddlers corresponded to a future decrease in classroom engagement and success at math, increased victimization by classmates, have a more sedentary lifestyle, higher consumption of junk food and, ultimately, higher body mass index,” says lead author Dr. Linda S. Pagani, a psychosocial professor at the Université de Montréal and researcher at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center.

The goal of the study was to determine the impact of TV exposure at age 2 on future academic success, lifestyle choices and general well being among children. “Between the ages of two and four, even incremental exposure to television delayed development,” says Dr. Pagani.

A total of 1,314 kids took part in the investigation, which was part of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development Main Exposure. Parents were asked to report how much TV their kids watched at 29 months and at 53 months in age. Teachers were asked to evaluate academic, psychosocial and health habits, while body mass index (BMI) was measured at 10 years old.

“Early childhood is a critical period for brain development and formation of behaviour,” warns Dr. Pagani. “High levels of TV consumption during this period can lead to future unhealthy habits. Despite clear recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics suggesting less than two hours of TV per day – after the age of two – parents show poor factual knowledge and awareness of such existing guidelines.”

According to the investigation, watching too much TV as toddlers later forecasted:

• a seven percent decrease in classroom engagement;
• a six percent decrease in math achievement (with no harmful effects on later reading);
• a 10 percent increase in victimization by classmates (peer rejection, being teased, assaulted or insulted by other students);
• a 13 percent decrease in weekend physical activity;
• a nine percent decrease in general physical activity;
• a none percent higher consumption of soft drinks;
• a 10 percent peak in snacks intake;
• a five percent increase in BMI.
  

“Although we expected the impact of early TV viewing to disappear after seven and a half years of childhood, the fact that negative outcomes remained is quite daunting,” says Dr. Pagani. “Our findings make a compelling public health argument against excessive TV viewing in early childhood and for parents to heed guidelines on TV exposure from the American Academy of Pediatrics.”

Since TV exposure encourages a sedentary lifestyle, Dr. Pagani says, television viewing must be curbed for toddlers to avoid the maintenance of passive mental and physical habits in later childhood: “Common sense would have it that TV exposure replaces time that could be spent engaging in other developmentally enriching activities and tasks which foster cognitive, behavioral, and motor development.”

“What's special about this study is how it confirms suspicions that have been out there and shown by smaller projects on one outcome or another. This study takes a comprehensive approach and considers many parental, pediatric and societal factors simultaneously,” she adds.

University of Montreal News
4 May 2010

A study that will be published in a forthcoming journal adds to the mounting evidence that self-regulation – or children's ability to control their behavior and impulses – is directly related to academic performance. A key finding in that study shows that at-risk children who can self-regulate have higher reading, math and vocabulary achievement.

The study was conducted by then-Oregon State University graduate student Michaella Sektnan, who did the research as her master's thesis working with Megan McClelland, an associate professor at OSU and a nationally recognized leader in the areas of self-regulation and early childhood development. Sektnan is now a faculty research assistant for OSU Extension Family and Community Health.

In her paper to be published in a fall edition of Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Sektnan used data on 1,298 children from birth through the first grade from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. "Family risk" in the data was defined by ethnic minority status, low maternal education, low family income and chronic depressive symptoms in the mother. "We know that these risk factors can lead to a gap in academic achievement," Sektnan said. "The relationship to risks such as poverty, ethnic status, and maternal education has been well-documented. What we wanted to know was, controlling for these factors, does self-regulation make a difference?"

It turns out the answer to that question is yes. Controlling for these risk factors, Sektnan found that children whose parents and teachers reported that they had strong self-regulation in preschool and kindergarten did significantly better on math, reading and vocabulary at the end of first grade. "For all outcomes, higher self-regulation was related to higher reading, math and vocabulary, regardless of which risk factor was present," Sektnan said. "This builds on the increasing body of knowledge about the need to develop self-regulation skills in young children."

To give an example, McClelland points to the test scores of the children in this national survey. At-risk children with stronger self-regulation in kindergarten scored 15 points higher on a standardized math test in first grade, 11 points higher on an early reading test, and nearly seven points higher on a vocabulary test than at-risk children with weaker self-regulation. "These were pretty impressive increases in children's achievement," McClelland said. "I'm a proponent of building self-regulation in children but even for me, these results were surprising. The discrepancy between these children, tested at a very young age, and their academic scores compared to their peers who were not as able to regulate their behavior was larger than we anticipated."

McClelland, who has developed simple games such as the Head-to-Toes task to measure self-regulation and predict academic achievement, said it is obvious that in the case of at-risk children, merely focusing on self-regulation skills won't be enough. "Obviously, these issues – poverty, educational status, maternal depression – are extremely serious and must be addressed," she said. "But we now know that we can also help children be successful by teaching them how to self-regulate."

McClelland added that the data is clearer now than ever: a child that can listen, pay attention, follow instructions, and persist on a task, even if faced with what seems to be giant hurdles at a very young age, will achieve greater success in school. "Self-regulation is not just about compliance or being obedient," McClelland said. "It's about a very basic, but very necessary skill: being able to listen and pay attention, think, and then act. The message to parents may be to put down the flash cards and see if another approach, like playing a simple game of 'Simon Says' works better."

New study examines if the gender of parents matter

The presumption that children need both a mother and a father is widespread. It has been used by proponents of Proposition 8 to argue against same-sex marriage and to uphold a ban on same-sex adoption.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Barack Obama endorsed the vital role of fathers in a 2008 speech: "Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation."

The lead article in the February issue of Journal of Marriage and Family challenges the idea that "fatherless" children are necessarily at a disadvantage or that men provide a different, indispensable set of parenting skills than women.

"Significant policy decisions have been swayed by the misconception across party lines that children need both a mother and a father. Yet, there is almost no social science research to support this claim. One problem is that proponents of this view routinely ignore research on same-gender parents," said sociologist Timothy Biblarz of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Extending their prior work on gender and family, Biblarz and Judith Stacey of NYU analyzed relevant studies about parenting, including available research on single-mother and single-father households, gay male parents and lesbian parents. "That a child needs a male parent and a female parent is so taken for granted that people are uncritical," Stacey said.

In their analysis, the researchers found no evidence of gender-based parenting abilities, with the "partial exception of lactation," noting that very little about the gender of the parent has significance for children's psychological adjustment and social success.

As the researchers write: "The social science research that is routinely cited does not actually speak to the questions of whether or not children need both a mother and a father at home. Instead proponents generally cite research that compares [heterosexual two-parent] families with single parents, thus conflating the number with the gender of parents."

Indeed, there are far more similarities than differences among children of lesbian and heterosexual parents, according to the study. On average, two mothers tended to play with their children more, were less likely to use physical discipline, and were less likely to raise children with chauvinistic attitudes. Studies of gay male families are still limited.

However, like two heterosexual parents, new parenthood among lesbians increased stress and conflict, exacerbated by general lack of legal recognition of commitment. Also, lesbian biological mothers typically assumed greater caregiving responsibility than their partners, reflecting inequities among heterosexual couples.

"The bottom line is that the science shows that children raised by two same-gender parents do as well on average as children raised by two different-gender parents. This is obviously inconsistent with the widespread claim that children must be raised by a mother and a father to do well," Biblarz said.

Stacey concluded: "The family type that is best for children is one that has responsible, committed, stable parenting. Two parents are, on average, better than one, but one really good parent is better than two not-so-good ones. The gender of parents only matters in ways that don't matter."

Curiosity plays a big part in preschoolers' lives. A new study that explored why young children ask so many "why" questions concludes that children are motivated by a desire for explanation. The study, by researchers at the University of Michigan, appears in the November/December 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers carried out two studies of 2- to 5-year-olds, focusing on their "how" and "why" questions, as well as their requests for explanatory information, and looking carefully at the children's reactions to the answers they received from adults. In the first study, the researchers examined longitudinal transcripts of six children's everyday conversations with parents, siblings, and visitors at home from ages 2 to 4. In the second study, they looked at the laboratory-based conversations of 42 preschoolers, using toys, storybooks, and videos to prompt the children, ages 3 to 5, to ask questions.

By looking at how the children reacted to the answers they received to their questions, the researchers found that children seem to be more satisfied when they receive an explanatory answer than when they do not. In both studies, when preschoolers got an explanation, they seemed satisfied (they agreed or asked a new follow-up question). But when they got answers that weren't explanations, they seemed dissatisfied and were more likely to repeat their original question or provide an alternative explanation.

"Examining conversational exchanges, and in particular children's reactions to the different types of information they get from adults in response to their own requests, confirms that young children are motivated to actively seek explanations," according to the researchers. "They use specific conversational strategies to obtain that information. When preschoolers ask 'why' questions, they're not merely trying to prolong conversation, they're trying to get to the bottom of things."

The moderate sample size means that the study cannot be generalized to all children, but the research clearly suggests that by age 2, children contribute actively to the process of learning about the world around them.

A new study from the University of New Hampshire finds that U.S. children are routinely exposed to even more violence and abuse than has been previously recognized, with nearly half experiencing a physical assault in the study year. "Children experience far more violence, abuse and crime than do adults," said David Finkelhor, director of the UNH Crimes against Children Research Center and the study director. "If life were this dangerous for ordinary grown-ups, we'd never tolerate it."

The research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The research results are presented in the journal Pediatrics and an Office of Justice Programs/OJJDP bulletin titled "Children's Exposure to Violence: A Comprehensive National Survey."

UNH researchers asked a national sample of U.S. children and their caregivers about a far broader range of exposures than has been done in the past. According to the research, three out of five children were exposed to violence, abuse or a criminal victimization in the last year, including 46 percent who had been physically assaulted, 10 percent who had been maltreated by a caregiver, 6 percent who had been sexually victimized, and 10 percent who had witnessed an assault within their family.

The authors contend that earlier studies of violence exposure only inquired about individual crimes – looking only at bullying or child maltreatment or sexual abuse. In contrast, this study asked about all such exposures as well as additional ones that are rarely, if ever, covered such as dating violence and witnessing domestic violence.

The study found that more than a third of the children had had two or more different kinds of exposures in the past year and 11 percent had five or more. "Studies have missed the fact that there are a surprisingly large group of very repeatedly and variously victimized kids whom we should be doing a better job to help and protect," Finkelhor said.

The researchers urge teachers, police, doctors, counselors, and parents to ask children about a broader range of possible victimization experiences, especially children who had been identified as victims already. They also call for new efforts to create safer schools, homes and other youth environments.

The study was conducted in 2008 and involved interviews with caregivers and youth about the experiences of a nationally representative sample of 4,549 children ages 0-17. In addition to Finkelhor, the authors include Heather Turner, professor of sociology at UNH, Richard Ormrod, research professor of geography at UNH, and Sherry Hamby, research associate professor of psychology at Sewanee, the University of the South.

New study shows parents use deception to influence their children

Parents say that honesty is the best policy, but they regularly lie to their children as a way of influencing their behavior and emotions, finds new research from the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Diego.

Surprisingly little scholarship has been published on the subject of parental lying, so Gail Heyman, professor of psychology at UC San Diego, Diem Luu, a former UCSD student, and Kang Lee, professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Institute of Child Study at OISE, set out to explore the under-researched phenomenon. They asked U.S. participants in two related studies about parents lying to their children – either for the purpose of promoting appropriate behavior or to make them happy.

In one of the studies, many parents reported they told their young children that bad things would happen if they didn't go to bed or eat what they were supposed to. For example, one mother said she told her child that if he didn't finish all of his food he would get pimples all over his face. Other parents reported inventing magical creatures. One explained, "We told our daughter that if she wrapped up all her pacifiers like gifts, the 'paci-fairy' would come and give them to children who needed them...I thought it was healthier to get rid of the pacifiers, and it was a way for her to feel proud and special."

In the other study, the researchers surveyed college students' recollections about their parents' lying and obtained similar results: parents often lie to their children even as they tell them that lying is unacceptable. The researchers refer to this practice as "parenting by lying." "We are surprised by how often parenting by lying takes place," said Lee. "Moreover, our findings showed that even the parents who most strongly promoted the importance of honesty with their children engaged in parenting by lying."

Though Heyman thinks that there are occasions when it is appropriate to be less than truthful with a child – "telling a two-year-old you don't like their drawing is just cruel," she said – she urges parents to think through the issues and consider alternatives before resorting to the expedient lie. "Children sometimes behave in ways that are disruptive or are likely to harm their long-term interests," said Heyman. "It is common for parents to try out a range of strategies, including lying, to gain compliance. When parents are juggling the demands of getting through the day, concerns about possible long-term negative consequences to children's beliefs about honesty are not necessarily at the forefront."

The research also examined "parenting by lying" among Asian-American and European-American parents. Asian-American parents were more likely to report lying to their children for the purpose of influencing their behavior. According to the researchers, one possible explanation for this finding is that as compared to European-American parents, Asian-American parents tend to place a greater emphasis on the importance of teaching children to be respectful and obedient, and they use a range of parenting strategies to meet these ends.

The research is published in the current edition of the Journal of Moral Education and was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Heyman and Lee are now preparing an international study to explore the subject further, and they are also beginning to study the possible consequences of "parenting by lying": Does it create confusion about right and wrong? Does it undermine a child's trust?

Being seen as either well behaved or naughty at school is never entirely in the hands of the individual child, this study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council shows. The research demonstrates that being good is not a simple matter. Once some children acquire poor overall reputations among teachers and other school staff, classmates and parents, it becomes difficult for them to be regarded as good. When young children start school they also have to develop interpretive skills to decode and negotiate mixed messages about how to behave.

This study of four and five year olds in reception classes was undertaken by Professor Maggie MacLure and Professor Liz Jones of Manchester Metropolitan University. They found that two broad types of behavior in school cause particular concern: physical actions such as kicking and punching and persistent failure to comply with adults' requests. Repeatedly calling out or not sitting properly in class, failing to listen or being noisy in queues are all examples of conduct likely to arouse the concern of teachers and other staff.

Yet such behavior does not always result in children gaining poor reputations. This is most likely to happen when a child's immediate conduct is regarded as a sign of a wider problem. Children's reputations may be linked, for example, to teachers' views of their home background. Some parents risk being judged as neglectful, indulgent, anxious, uncooperative or interfering, and therefore as failing to adequately prepare their son or daughter for school. This in turn feeds into teachers' perceptions of that child's behavior as a 'problem'. Medical explanations such as undiagnosed autism or deafness are sometimes applied to explain behavior, as are characterisations of particular children as lazy or manipulative.

The research shows that once such reputations are formed they will be used to read children's day-to-day behavior and, when the reputations spread to classmates and other parents, it becomes very difficult for such children to be recognized as good. "Once children's reputations have started to circulate in the staffroom, dining hall and among parents, their behavior easily becomes interpreted as a sign of particular character traits," says Professor MacLure. "One of the main functions of the reception year is to form a crowd of individual children into a class and tolerance of diversity is generally low. Classroom discipline is a very public activity and children who do not conform to the rules will be publicly marked as different."

Young children must learn to perform emotions that are valued in the reception class – such as happiness, sadness, fairness, sharing, kindness and being nice – and accept that other emotions are regarded as less appropriate. They need to be able to negotiate mixed messages. Reporting the misbehavior of classmates is an example of the type of mixed message which circulates in classrooms – while it sometimes earned teachers' approval it might also be interpreted as telling-tales, an unpopular practice with both children and adults. "The research shows that classroom culture is an important factor in generating problematic reputations for some children, says Professor Jones. "Disciplinary practices that produce social order and forge a collective identity may marginalize a minority. Some cherished principles of early years education may also have unintended consequences. The principle of strong home-school links, for instance, may contribute to certain families being identified as sources of their children's problematic behavior."

Researchers say smoking, binge drinking need to be addressed together in adolescents

As teens head back to school, health teachers may want to revise their lesson plans. Temple researchers have found that kids who engage in heavy drinking will more than likely also engage in heavy smoking, and they say educators can help combat the trend by addressing both topics as one health risk. "These are important findings because they emphasize the need for education and intervention programs that target the co-occurrence of these two health risks," said Brian Daly, assistant professor of public health in the College of Health Professions and Social Work.

Daly and colleagues in the department of public health and psychology determined rates of smoking and binge drinking through the collection of anonymous survey data from 2,450 African-American, Hispanic and Caucasian students in grades 9-12 at Philadelphia public high schools. Students' responses were compiled from the 2007 Philadelphia Youth Behavioral Risk Survey (YRBS).

Respondents were asked how many cigarettes they'd had per day over 30 days, and how many days over a 30 day period they'd had 5 or more drinks in a row. Data was broken down by race/ethnicity and gender. Researchers found that while Caucasian adolescents were more likely than African-Americans to engage in either binge drinking or smoking, both groups were equally likely to engage in both at the same time.

"In the past 30 years or so, African Americans have traditionally had the lowest instance of smoking and binge drinking," said Daly, who presented his research at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting this week. "Those low numbers resulted in very few studies which looked at both smoking and binge drinking in a diverse sample; most focused only on instances of these in Caucasian or Hispanic adolescents." Daly says that the equal instances of smoking and binge drinking among both groups highlights the need for a multi-pronged approach to education and intervention. "We can't just focus on educating adolescents about the dangers of just smoking or drinking," he said. "We need to address both as one health risk, and we need to do that for all adolescents, not just one particular group." For example, Daly says that when health education teachers talk about the dangers of smoking, they should also touch on the dangers of binge drinking too, illustrating the connection.

The next phase of Daly's research will break down these rates by grade level to determine exactly when binge drinking and smoking start. "The difference in the mindset of a ninth grader versus a 12th grader is pretty vast," he said. "And if we can determine when kids start this behavior — whether it's the summer after 8th grade, or when they're a sophomore or a senior — it can help us tailor education and treatment plans even more."

Daly directs the YRBS in Philadelphia, a survey that focuses on six major areas, including unintentional injuries and violence, tobacco use, alcohol and other drug use, sexual behaviors, dietary behaviors, and physical inactivity, to determine health risk factors among young people.

It's easy to explain why we act a certain way by saying "it's in the genes," but a group of University of Iowa scientists say the world has relied on that simple explanation far too long. In research to be published today in Child Development Perspectives, the UI team calls for tossing out the nature-nurture debate, which they say has prevailed for centuries in part out of convenience and intellectual laziness.

They support evolution -- but not the idea that genes are a one-way path to specific traits and behaviors. Instead, they argue that development involves a complex system in which genes and environmental factors constantly interact. "You can't break it down and say there's a gene for being jealous, there's a gene for being depressed, there's a gene for being gay. Those types of statements are simplistic and misleading," said UI psychologist Mark Blumberg, a co-author of the paper. "There is no gene for any of those things. At most, one can say there's a system of which that gene and many others are a part that will produce those outcomes."

The UI team believes genes are expressed at every point in development and are affected all along the way by a gamut of environmental factors -- everything from proteins and chemicals to the socioeconomic status of a family. These ideas are unified by a perspective called developmental systems theory. "The nature-nurture debate has a pervasive influence on our lives, affecting the framework of research in child development, biology, neuroscience, personality and dozens of other fields," said lead author and UI psychologist John Spencer. "People have tried for centuries to shift the debate one way or the other, and it's just been a pendulum swinging back and forth. We're taking the radical position that the smarter thing is to just say 'neither' -- to throw out the debate as it has been historically framed and embrace the alternative perspective provided by developmental systems theory."

The UI researchers illustrate the inadequacies of the debate by examining recent studies of imprinting, spatial cognition and language development that support the nature point of view. Imprinting is a rapid form of learning in which animals develop preferences through brief exposure to things early in life. Nativists (researchers who align themselves with the 'nature' perspective) attribute the quick learning to a genetic predisposition, pointing to examples like ducklings following their mother's call as soon as they hatch. But research has shown that embryonic ducks, while still in the egg, are exposed to sounds from their embryonic siblings as well as sounds that they themselves make. When these so-called 'talking eggs' are deprived of these embryonic experiences, they do not show a preference for their mother's call upon hatching. Clearly, Blumberg said, to say that imprinting in ducks is innate does not come close to capturing the elegance and complexity of the real process.

UI researchers also raised issues with studies proposing that children and animals have a built-in sense of direction as they move through the world around them and thus exhibit an innate reliance on geometric cues. In a 2007 experiment, fish reared in a circular tank were placed in a rectangular tank to see if they would know where to find food when it was hidden in the diagonally opposite corners. They did -- which was presented as evidence of an innate ability to use geometry -- but the UI team pointed out that each fish had eight to 12 days of experience in the rectangular tank prior to the experiment and could have learned the behavior then.

"Researchers sometimes claim we're hard-wired for things, but when you peel through the layers of the experiments, the details matter and suddenly the evidence doesn't seem so compelling," Spencer said. "The problem is that it's much more complicated to explain why the evidence is on shaky ground, and often the one-liner wins out over the 10-minute explanation" [emphasis added] The challenge young children face when they encounter a new word has also been used to bolster nativist claims. When children are told a new word and shown a visual scene that contains unfamiliar objects, there are an infinite number of possible meanings for the word. But children are very good at figuring out which object in the scene the new word refers to. Given this amazing ability, researchers have suggested that kids have an innate ability to consider only some of the possible meanings of the word.

But in 2007, researchers at Indiana University placed cameras on children's foreheads to examine, from the child's perspective, how they found the correct referent for the word. They learned that a child's view of the nearby world -- which is limited by her small size and short arms -- is much more focused than originally thought. With few possibilities in sight, it's easy to figure out which object matches up with a novel word. "When people say there's an innate constraint, they're making suppositions about what came before the behavior in question," Spencer said. "Instead of acknowledging that at 12 months a lot of development has already happened and we don't exactly know what came before this particular behavior, researchers take the easy way out and conclude that there must be inborn constraints. That's the predicament scientists have gotten themselves into."

UI psychologist Larissa Samuelson, a co-author of the paper, points to the "shape bias" as evidence that word learning is a cascading developmental process -- not an ability that's there from the beginning. Babies and toddlers learn to recognize solid objects with standard shapes -- things like ball, car, or book -- and those easy-to-distinguish objects typically become their first words. "Language is so complex that people can't imagine how kids could do it so well without it somehow being innate," Samuelson said. "But if we steer clear of the nature-nurture debate and consider it from a developmental systems perspective, we can see how pieces of knowledge -- which may not even seem related to language -- build over time. It gets us closer to understanding the full complexity of language learning."

The UI authors realize their paper is raising eyebrows -- it has spurred several responses from other researchers that will be published in the same issue of the journal. And they understand that getting scientific peers to buy into their ideas will be a challenge -- after all, the debate dates back to Aristotle and Plato, and many scientists are passionately rooted on one side or the other. "This is one attempt at getting the ideas out there and starting a dialog, continuing to educate the public and the scientific community, especially the younger generation of researchers," Blumberg said. "We know we don't have a sound bite that's as clean and simple and sexy as saying 'it's genetic.' But we're working on it."

Early childhood development researchers have discovered that a simple, five-minute self-regulation game not only can predict end-of-year achievement in math, literacy and vocabulary, but also was associated with the equivalent of several months of additional learning in kindergarten.

Claire Ponitz from the University of Virginia and Megan McClelland of Oregon State University assessed the effectiveness of a game called the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) task, which is a new version of the Head-to-Toes task developed by researchers at the University of Michigan. Both tasks have proved effective at predicting academic skills among preschool age children. Their results were published in the newest issue of the journal, Developmental Psychology.

The researchers assessed a group of 343 kindergarteners from Oregon and Michigan. Their self-regulation, or ability to control behavior, was measured with the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, a structured observation requiring children to perform the opposite of a response to four different oral commands. For example, children were instructed to touch their toes if told to touch their head, and vice versa. They found that students who performed well on his behavior task in the fall achieved strong scores in reading, vocabulary and math in the spring, compared to students who had low performance on the task. In addition, the research showed that the children who performed well on the task scored 3.4 months ahead of peers who performed at average levels on mathematics learning. "It's amazing that this game works as well as it does," McClelland said. "It is simple to administer, fun for the kids, and predicts children's academic achievement."

One area where the task did not make a difference was assessing children's interpersonal skills. McClelland explained that the game is not "emotion-oriented," meaning it is not set up to trigger an emotional response. Instead, the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task tests children on important classroom-related behavior such as listening, following directions and remembering instructions. "We know this task predicts end-of-year achievement," she said. "Now we want to take the game to the next level."

McClelland is planning to do an extensive evaluation of the task for her next research project, testing the task with an even larger group of children. She also has a number of research projects under way with OSU graduate students, including one that uses a variety of fun games to improve a child's ability to regulate their behavior. She said she has made a simple DVD that demonstrates the task, and in response has received requests from around the world from researchers who want to use the task with young children. "The evidence strongly suggests that improving self-regulation is directly related to academic achievement and behavior," McClelland said. "If we can make a difference early in a child's life, they have that much more of a chance at success."

Children entering first grade with signs of depression and anxiety or excessive aggression are at risk of being chronically victimized by their classmates by third grade. That's the finding of a new longitudinal study that appears in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Victoria, looked at more than 400 Canadian children beginning in the autumn of first grade. The children were asked about their experiences being bullied (such as being hit, pushed, and shoved, or being teased and excluded from play). Their teachers were asked to report on the children's symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as on their displays of physical aggression. The researchers returned at the end of first, second, and third grades, at which time they asked the children and their teachers to report on the same issues.

Most children (73 percent) showed few symptoms of depression and anxiety over the three years. But 7 percent of the children showed continuously high levels. The remaining 20 percent showed moderate symptoms at first, but these increased over time. Victimization by depressed and anxious children wasn't evident until third grade.

Children with more depressed and anxious symptoms in first and second grade were more likely to be victimized by third grade. Surprisingly, children who were more aggressive at the start of first grade also were prone to depression and anxiety by third grade. These children also were more likely to be victimized by their peers, perhaps in retaliation for their own acts of aggression.

"Children's early mental health problems can set the stage for abuse by their peers," according to Bonnie J. Leadbeater, professor of psychology at the University of Victoria, who led the study. "Just as some children learn to read with greater difficulty than others and require extra assistance when they begin to lag behind their peers, young children with mental health problems show signs that they cannot manage the complex social world of elementary school. Treating children's mental health problems may go a long way toward reducing bullying."

Sexual abuse in childhood increases the risk of suicide in men by up to ten times, say researchers from the University of Bath. A recent study of Australian men has found that those who were sexually abused as children are more likely than women to contemplate taking their own lives. Whilst gender and mental health problems are the most important risk factors for contemplating suicide, it is increasingly acknowledged that traumatic experiences such as childhood sexual abuse may be a significant risk factor.

Dr Patrick O'Leary and Professor Nick Gould from the University's Department of Social & Policy Sciences conducted a series of surveys and face-to-face interviews with men in a study funded by the University of South Australia. The findings have been published online in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Social Work.

They found that men who were sexually abused as children were up to ten times more likely to have suicidal tendencies; many of these men had not been clinically diagnosed as depressed. Dr O'Leary said: "Childhood sexual abuse is an under-recognised problem in men - most of the studies exploring the link with suicide have been in women. "Men are particularly vulnerable because they don't like to talk to others about their problems. It's difficult for anyone to come to terms with traumatic experiences such as childhood sexual abuse, but for men the stigma is worse because they don't tend to confide in their friends as much.

"Many suffer feelings of failure and isolation and think that it is a sign of weakness to discuss their past abuse with others. Men also tend to visit their doctors less frequently, so those who are at risk of suicide often slip under the radar of the healthcare system. Men are particularly vulnerable to suicide and are three and a half times more likely than women to end their own lives, with more than 2,000 men dying as a result of suicide in the UK each year. However it is estimated that for every suicide, there are between 20 and 25 failed attempts. We carried out the study in Australia, which shares a similar 'stiff upper lip' culture that we see in the UK. We're planning to do our next study in the UK to see if there are any differences."

Dr O'Leary suggested that lives could be potentially saved if abuse victims are identified earlier. He explained: "The abuse that these men have suffered as children often sees them attempting to cope by suppressing the experience through substance abuse, alcohol abuse and obsessive behaviour, with many ending up in the criminal justice system. "Greater awareness in the healthcare and criminal justice systems will help identify those who are at risk and give them treatment before it is too late."

Maybe you have an 85-year-old grandfather who still whips through the newspaper crossword puzzle every morning or a 94-year-old aunt who never forgets a name or a face. They don't seem to suffer the ravages of memory that beset most people as they age. Researchers at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine wondered if the brains of the elderly with still laser sharp memory -- called "super aged" -- were somehow different than everyone else's. So, instead of the usual approach in which scientists explore what goes wrong in a brain when older people lose their memory, they investigated what goes right in an aging brain that stays nimble.

Now they have a preliminary answer. Scientists examined the brains of five deceased people considered super aged because of their high performance on memory tests when they were more than 80 years old and compared them to the brains of elderly, non-demented individuals. Researchers found the super aged brains had many fewer fiber-like tangles than the brains of those who had aged normally. The tangles consist of a protein called tau that accumulates inside brain cells and is thought to eventually kill the cells. Tangles are found in moderate numbers in the brains of elderly and increase substantially in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients.

"This new finding in super aged brains is very exciting," said Changiz Geula, principal investigator of the study and a research professor of neurology at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern's Feinberg School. "It was always assumed that the accumulation of these tangles is a progressive phenomenon through the aging process. But we are seeing that some individuals are immune to tangle formation and that the presence of these tangles seems to influence cognitive performance." Individuals who have few tangles perform at superior levels, while those who have more tangles appear to be normal for their age, Geula noted. Geula will present his findings Sunday, November 16, at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

The number of plaques in the brains of the super aged was similar to that in the brains of the normally aging group. The plaque is an aggregation of protein called amyloid that becomes deposited outside the brain cell and disrupts communication between neurons. Like tangles, plaques also are found in modest numbers in the brains of aged individuals and show a dramatic increase in number in Alzheimer's disease. Geula said the lower number of tangles in the super aged appears to be the critical difference in maintaining memory skills.

Some of the super aged in the study performed memory tasks at the level of people who were about 50 years old. For example, after being told a story, they were able to remember it immediately after and still accurately recall its details 30 minutes later. They also remembered a list of 15 words and recalled these words equally well when tested after 30 minutes.

Geula said new research will focus on what makes cells in super aged brains more resistant to tangle formation. "We want to see what protects the brains of these individuals against the ravages that cause memory loss," he said. " Understanding the specific genetic and molecular characteristics of the brains that makes them resistant, someday may lead to the ability to protect average brains from memory loss. "

Geula's research is part of a larger super aging study at Northwestern's Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center (CNADC). The study's goal is to identify high functioning individuals over 80 and investigate what factors are important to maintain this ability into old age. A number of super aged individuals have been identified and are being followed up annually with tests of cognitive abilities. Recruitment continues for the study.

Adverse experiences early in life can lead to minor childhood behavior problems, which can grow into serious acts of teen violence, according to new research. This "cascading effect" of repeated negative incidents and behaviors is the focus of an article in the November/December edition of the journal Child Development.

Using a novel approach that went beyond simply identifying risk factors, a research team led by a Duke University psychologist measured how violent behavior develops across the life span, from early childhood through adolescence. The researchers tracked 754 children from preschool through adulthood and documented that children who have social and academic problems in elementary school are more likely to have parents who withdraw from them over time. That opens the door for them to make friends with adolescents exhibiting deviant behaviors and, ultimately, leads them to engage in serious and sometimes costly acts of violence. The developmental path toward violent outcomes was largely the same for boys and girls, said Kenneth A. Dodge, the lead author of the study and director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.

Dodge and his colleagues in the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group also found that the cascade could be traced back to children born with biological risks or born into economically disadvantaged environments, both of which make consistent parenting a challenge. They determined biological risk by assessing the temperaments of the children in infancy, based on mothers' reports; those at risk were irritable, easily startled and difficult to calm. These children are more likely to exhibit minor social and cognitive problems upon entering school. From there, the behavior problems begin to "cascade," he said.

"The findings indicate that these trajectories are not inevitable, but can be deflected at each subsequent era in development, through interactions with peers, school, and parents along the way," said Dodge, who is the William McDougall Professor of Public Policy and a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. "Successful early intervention could redirect paths of antisocial development to prevent serious violent behavior in adolescence," Dodge said. Fortunately, successful interventions, such as parent training and social cognitive skills training for children, are available, he said.

Youngest citizens say exclusion due to voter prejudice

Challenging the idea that children live in a color or gender blind world, a new study from The University of Texas at Austin reveals most elementary-school-age children are aware there has been no female, African-American, or Hispanic President of the United States. And, many of the children attribute the lack of representation to discrimination. Rebecca Bigler, professor of psychology, and a team of researchers at the university and the University of Kansas have published their findings in the October issue of the journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.

During 2006, more than a year before Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama entered the presidential race, the researchers interviewed 205 children between the ages of five and 10 about their knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about the similarities among U.S. presidents. In three studies, children from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds answered questions about the absence of female, African-American and Hispanic presidents.

The researchers found most children are aware that women and minorities have been excluded from the U.S. presidency. Although most of the children believed people of all races and genders should be president, they offered surprising answers as to why only white males have held the nation's highest political office:

• One in four participants said it is illegal for women and minorities to hold the office of president;
• One in three children attributed the lack of female, African-American and Latino presidents to racial and gender bias on the part of voters;
• While some children expressed the belief that prejudice shapes how adults vote, another third of the participants said members of the excluded groups lacked the skills to hold the position.

"The U.S. presidency is a high profile case of racial and gender exclusion," Bigler, director of the Gender and Racial Attitudes Lab at the university, said. "And because this topic is not typically explained to children, they appear to create their own explanations for the exclusion."

Children generally were optimistic about the possibility that they could become president, the researchers found. However, girls who attributed the lack of female presidents to discrimination were more likely to report they could not become president. In contrast, African-American children who identified discrimination as the reason for the lack of diversity showed an increased interest in becoming president.

"Perhaps the increased interest in becoming president is a result of the long and well-known history of African-Amercans' struggle to achieve equality in the United States," said Bigler. "Young girls are not as aware of the women's rights movements and are less likely to be knowledgeable about women's struggles to achieve political power." Bigler notes the 2008 presidential election has the potential to significantly alter children's view. "If Obama loses his bid for the presidency, there may be little change in children's attitudes, but it could fuel their perception that American voters are racially prejudiced," Bigler said. "In contrast, if Obama wins children may believe that exclusionary laws and racial prejudice no longer shape the outcomes of the presidential elections."

Society holds that when it comes to aggression, boys hit and punch, while girls spread rumors, gossip, and intentionally exclude others, a type of aggression that's called indirect, relational, or social. Now a new analysis of almost 150 studies of aggression in children and adolescents has found that while it's true that boys are more likely to engage in physical aggression, girls and boys alike take part in social aggression.

"These conclusions challenge the popular misconception that indirect aggression is a female form of aggression," according to Noel A. Card, assistant professor of family studies and human development at the University of Arizona and the study's lead author.

The analysis of 148 studies, which comprised almost 74,000 children and adolescents and were carried out largely in schools, looked at both direct aggression, which is usually defined as physical, and indirect aggression, which includes covert behavior designed to damage another individual's social standing in his or her peer group. Conducted by Card and researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Kansas, the analysis appears in the September/October 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers suggest that the myth that girls are more likely to be indirectly or socially aggressive than boys has persisted among teachers, parents, and even other researchers because of social expectations that develop early in life and recent movies and books that portray girls as mean and socially aggressive toward one another.

Based on the analysis, the researchers suggest that children who carry out one form of aggression may be inclined to carry out the other form; this is seen more in boys than in girls. They also found ties between both forms of aggression and adjustment problems. Specifically, direct aggression is related to problems like delinquency and ADHD-type symptoms, poor relationships with peers, and low prosocial behavior such as helping and sharing. In contrast, indirect aggression is related to problems like depression and low self-esteem, as well as higher prosocial behavior—perhaps because a child must use prosocial skills to encourage peers to exclude or gossip about others.

Study reveals important gaps in teens' understanding of factors that can lead to trauma-related injuries

Most teens' attitudes regarding trauma-related injuries, particularly those due to motor vehicle crashes, reflect an sense of invincibility and focus on fate rather than choice, according to new research published in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Teenage drivers have the highest motor vehicle crash and fatality rate of any demographic group. Injury prevention programs, which educate the public about the link between injury and high risk behaviors such as infrequent seatbelt use, impairment because of alcohol abuse, and speeding, are a requirement for accredited trauma centers. However, researchers say existing injury prevention initiatives often fall short of countering flawed beliefs and must better demonstrate – especially to teens – how and why their young age puts them at greater risk for injury.

"Students need to comprehend that it is lack of judgment, not only lack of skill, that increases the risk of injury to one's self and others. 'Not wanting something bad to happen' is simply not enough," said Najma Ahmed, MD, PhD, FACS, assistant trauma director, St. Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto. "In addition to giving teens the knowledge and teaching them the technical skills, injury prevention programs must also address teens' attitudes about being immune to illness and death as a means of changing high-risk behaviors, such as driving while impaired."

To study the effect of injury-prevention programs on injury-related knowledge and risk assessment, researchers evaluated 262 high school students participating in a one-day injury prevention program sponsored by the Toronto District School Board and St. Michael's Hospital's injury prevention program. In addition to didactic sessions, the program included a tour of an intensive care unit, where students met a young person who had either suffered a mild traumatic brain or a spinal cord injury. Students were divided into three groups: participants who completed a questionnaire eight days after participating in the program (n=85); participants who completed the questionnaire 30 days after attending the program (n=81) and a control group of students who completed a questionnaire prior to the program (n=96). One-third of the students were randomly selected to participate in a second qualitative phase four to six months after participation in the program.

The study found that teenagers consistently underestimate risk in motor vehicle situations and believe that vehicle and highway design are more likely to cause crashes than human error does. Study participants thought that because of their age and agility, they were better able to overcome the effects of poor driving conditions or intoxicants compared with more experienced drivers. Additionally, teens participating in the study believed strongly that medical care, particularly in young people, is virtually always effective.

Program participation was associated with increased ability to identify safer options (p < 0.05). However, acquired knowledge decayed substantially by day 30, with participants who completed the questionnaire on day eight performing significantly better than those on day 30 (p < 0.05). This finding stresses the need for repeated participation in injury prevention initiatives. Risk perception scores improved considerably among program participants, and this improvement was more durable over time than the acquisition of didactic knowledge. Researchers attributed this outcome to the strong emotional responses evoked during the visit to the trauma center, engagement with an injured peer, and an active reflection component embedded into the study design.

Despite the fact that pediatricians recommend no screen media exposure for children under age 2, three-quarters of very young children in America live in homes where the television is on most of the time, according to research. A new study has found that leaving your TV set on disrupts young children while they are playing, even if the channel is tuned to adult shows. This means that simply having the TV on, even in the background, may be detrimental to children's development. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, is published in the July/August 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers looked at 50 children ages 1, 2, and 3. Each child came to a lab with a parent and was invited to play for an hour with a variety of age-appropriate toys. For half the time, a television was on in the room, showing an episode of the adult game show Jeopardy!, with commercials; during the other half hour, the TV was turned off.

Researchers observed the children as they played to determine whether background TV—defined as adult-oriented television that is on and may be watched by older members of the family, but which very young children don't understand and to which they pay little attention—affected the children's behavior during play.

Background TV was found to disrupt the toy play of the children at every age, even when they paid little attention to it. When the television was on, the children played for significantly shorter periods of time and the time they spent focused on their play was shorter, compared to when the TV was off.

"Background TV, as an ever-changing audiovisual distractor, disrupts children's efforts to sustain attention to ongoing play behaviors," according to Marie Evans Schmidt, who is now a research associate at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston and is the lead author of the study. "Background TV is potentially a chronic environmental risk factor affecting most American children. Parents should limit their young children's exposure to background television."

Stories about the “terrible twos” abound in parenting lore. New research published in the March/April 2008 issue of the journal Child Development finds that the way mothers and their 2-year-olds relate to each other affects the quality but not the frequency of conflicts when children are two, and that children’s temperament also plays a role.

Researchers at Lehigh University and the University of California-Davis recruited 60 mothers and their children through birth announcements in local newspapers, then observed them in two sessions: one 50-minute lab visit when the children were 30 months old, and one 90-minute home visit when the children were 36 months. During each observation, the researchers looked at all episodes of conflict, and examined whether they contained compromise, justification, or aggravation (i.e., simple insistence without explanation or threats) by both mothers and children. They also examined whether the conflicts were resolved. Mothers provided information about the children’s temperament and attachment security, or the degree of trust that children have in their mothers’ responsiveness and availability.

The study found that mother-child conflict during both observations was frequent (about 20 times an hour), and there was a lot of variation in the frequency of conflict (from as many as 55 times an hour to as few as 5 times an hour) and in the quality of conflict between mothers and children.

Furthermore, children’s temperament was related to the frequency and quality of conflict, that is, children who were highly active and who had problems controlling their behavior had more conflict with mothers than less active children and children who did not have trouble controlling their behavior. In addition, highly active children and children who frequently and intensely experienced negative emotions had less constructive conflict with their mothers, involving less resolution, more aggravation, and less justification, than children who did not have these qualities.

Attachment security was not related to the frequency of conflict between mothers and their children, but to the quality, the study found. Mothers and children who had secure relationships had constructive conflict involving high levels of resolution, compromise, and justification. In sum, both the quality of children’s relationships with their mothers and children’s personality types were found to shape the nature of conflict between mothers and their children at age two.

“Children with difficult temperaments tend to have more frequent and less constructive conflict with mothers,” according to Deborah Laible, associate professor of psychology at Lehigh University and the lead author of the study. “High-quality relationships between mothers and children were associated with more constructive conflict between mothers and children. In secure relationships, both mothers and children seem committed to maintaining relational harmony by resolving conflict, compromising, and justifying their side of an argument.”

Students who bully others tend to have difficulties with other relationships, such as those with friends and parents. Targeting those relationships, as well as the problems children who bully have with aggression and morality, may offer ideas for intervention and prevention. Those are the findings of a new study that was conducted by scientists at York University and Queens University. It appears in the March/April 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers looked at 871 students (466 girls and 405 boys) for seven years from ages 10 to 18. Each year, they asked the children questions about their involvement in bullying or victimizing behavior, their relationships, and other positive and negative behaviors.

Bullying is a behavior that most children engage in at some point during their school years, according to the study. Almost a tenth (9.9 percent) of the students said they engaged in consistently high levels of bullying from elementary through high school. Some 13.4 percent said they bullied at relatively high levels in elementary school but dropped to almost no bullying by the end of high school. Some 35.1 percent of the children said they bullied peers at moderate levels. And 41.6 percent almost never reported bullying across the adolescent years.

The study also found that children who bullied tended to be aggressive and lacking in a moral compass and they experienced a lot of conflict in their relationships with their parents. In addition, their relationships with friends also were marked by a lot of conflict, and they tended to associate with others who bullied. The findings provide clear direction for prevention of persistent bullying problems, according to Debra Pepler, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Senior Associate Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Pepler, who is the study’s lead author, calls bullying “a relationship problem.”

“Interventions must focus on the children who bully, with attention to their aggressive behavior problems, social skills, and social problem-solving skills. A focus on the child alone is not sufficient. Bullying is a relationship problem that requires relationship solutions by focusing on the bullying children’s strained relationships with parents and risky relationships with peers,” according to Pepler. “By providing intensive and ongoing support starting in the elementary school years to this small group of youth who persistently bully, it may be possible to promote healthy relationships and prevent their ‘career path’ of bullying that leads to numerous social-emotional and relationship problems in adolescence and adulthood.”

Scientists have revealed what may well be the first pervasive ‘rule’ of evolution. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers have found evidence which suggests that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex.

Looking back through the last 550 million years of the fossil catalog to the present day, the team investigated the different evolutionary branches of the crustacean family tree. They were seeking examples along the tree where animals evolved that were simpler than their ancestors. Instead they found organisms with increasingly more complex structures and features, suggesting that there is some mechanism driving change in this direction.

“If you start with the simplest possible animal body, then there’s only one direction to evolve in – you have to become more complex,” said Dr Matthew Wills from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at the University of Bath who worked with colleagues Sarah Adamowicz from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and Andy Purvis from Imperial College London.

“Sooner or later, however, you reach a level of complexity where it’s possible to go backwards and become simpler again. What’s astonishing is that hardly any crustaceans have taken this backwards route. Instead, almost all branches have evolved in the same direction, becoming more complex in parallel. This is the nearest thing to a pervasive evolutionary rule that’s been found. Of course, there are exceptions within the crustacean family tree, but most of these are parasites, or animals living in remote habitats such as isolated marine caves. For those free-living animals in the ‘rat-race’ of evolution, it seems that competition may be the driving force behind the trend. What’s new about our results is that they show us how this increase in complexity has occurred. Strikingly, it looks far more like a disciplined march than a milling crowd.”

Dr Adamowicz said: “Previous researchers noticed increasing morphological complexity in the fossil record, but this pattern can occur due to the chance origination of a few new types of animals. Our study uses information about the inter-relatedness of different animal groups – the ‘Tree of Life’ – to demonstrate that complexity has evolved numerous times independently.”

Like all arthropods, crustaceans’ bodies are built up of repeating segments. In the simplest crustaceans, the segments are quite similar - one after the other. In the most complex, such as shrimps and lobsters, almost every segment is different, bearing antennae, jaws, claws, walking legs, paddles and gills.

The American biologist Leigh Van Valen coined the phrase ‘Red Queen’ for the evolutionary arms race phenomenon. In Through the Looking-Glass Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen advises Alice that: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

“Those crustacean groups going extinct tended to be less complex than the others around at the time,” said Dr Wills. “There’s even a link between average complexity within a group and the number of species alive today. “All organisms have a common ancestor, so that every living species is part of a giant family tree of life.”

Dr Adamowicz added: “With a few exceptions, once branches of the tree have separated they continue to evolve independently. Looking at many independent branches is similar to viewing multiple repeated runs of the tape of evolution. Our results apply to a group of animals with bodies made of repeated units. We must not forget that bacteria – very simple organisms – are among the most successful living things. Therefore, the trend towards complexity is compelling but does not describe the history of all life.”

Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control
In a preschool in Bridgeton, New Jersey, children are learning to develop important cognitive and self-regulation skills -- through play.

NPR Morning Edition (28 Feb 2008)
by Alix Spiegel

Very young brains process memories of fear differently than more mature ones, new research indicates. The findings appear in the Feb. 6 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The work significantly advances scientific understanding of when and how fear is stored and unlearned, and introduces new thinking on the implications of fear experience early in life.

“This important paper raises questions that are the ‘tip of the iceberg’ related to the very complex series of events that occur as we learn to fear something. In the real world, we become fearful, extinguish that fear, reacquire it at another time, and then conquer it yet again,” says John Krystal, MD, of Yale University and director of the clinical neuroscience division of the VA National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “Typically, we think about long-term, negative impact of fear learning, such as lifelong problems with anxiety. But this work highlights an avenue for adapting to early stresses that apparently can occur only early in life: to erase a learned fear from memory.” Krystal was not affiliated with the research.

Study co-authors Jee Hyun Kim and Rick Richardson, PhD, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, homed in on the amygdala, using anesthesia to temporarily inactivate it and therefore isolate its role. The amygdala is critical for emotional learning and plays a central role in dulling the memory of a fear. Kim and Richardson trained rats that were 16 and 23 days old—the human equivalent of children and budding adolescents—to associate a specific sound with a mild shock to the foot. After subsequent training, when the sound was not followed by a shock, the animals’ fearful reaction to hearing the sound faded. Technically, this is known as “extinction,” and depended on the function of the amygdala.

In a second round of training, the researchers reintroduced the fear and tried to re-extinguish it. This time around, they found, only the older rats were able to do so without the amygdala. The researchers concluded that the age at which the initial extinction training occurred was critical to whether or not the rats’ fear faded the second time independently of the amygdala. The authors suggest that in the very young, it is primarily the amygdala that extinguishes fearful memories, but that mechanisms independent of the amygdala develop later.

This raises the possibility that fears unlearned at an early enough age are, in fact, erased. As brains develop, however, and related structures near the amygdala mature, these structures take on a greater role. Thus, fear in adolescence and later in life may not be erased, but instead be, for example, inhibited by a process of overlaying neutral memories on top of the initial fear reaction. The initial memory could still exist and be called on again. “Extinction in the young brain might forever erase early traumatic learning—but accepting this hypothesis will have to wait for more research,” says Mark Bouton, PhD, of the University of Vermont, who did not participate in the esearch. “What might change as the brain develops is where and how fear learning and extinction are stored and how they can be retrieved.”

Children learn by imitating adults—so much so that they will rethink how an object works if they observe an adult taking unnecessary steps when using that object, according to a Yale study today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Even when you add time pressure, or warn the children not to do the unnecessary actions, they seem unable to avoid reproducing the adult’s irrelevant actions,” said Derek Lyons, doctoral candidate, developmental psychology, and first author of the study. “They have already incorporated the actions into their idea of how the object works.”

Learning by imitation occurs from the simplest preverbal communication to the most complex adult expertise. It is the basis for much of our success as a species, but the benefits are less clear in instances of “over-imitation,” where children copy behavior that is not needed, Lyons said.

It has been theorized that children over-imitate just to fit in, or out of habit. The Yale team found in this study that children follow the adults’ steps faithfully to the point where they actually change their mind about how an object functions.

The study included three-to-five-year-old children who engaged in a series of exercises. In one exercise, the children could see a dinosaur toy through a clear plastic box. The researcher used a sequence of irrelevant and relevant actions to retrieve the toy, such as tapping the lid of the jar with a feather before unscrewing the lid.

The children then were asked which actions were silly and which were not. They were praised when they pinpointed the actions that had no value in retrieving the toy. The idea was to teach the children that the adult was unreliable and that they should ignore his unnecessary actions.

Later the children watched adults retrieve a toy turtle from a box using needless steps. When asked to do the task themselves, the children over-imitated, despite their prior training to ignore irrelevant actions by the adults.

“What of all of this means,” Lyons said, “is that children’s ability to imitate can actually lead to confusion when they see an adult doing something in a disorganized or inefficient way. Watching an adult doing something wrong can make it much harder for kids to do it right.”

Timing of media exposure plays a vital role in outcomes

Daily television viewing for two or more hours in early childhood can lead to behavioral problems and poor social skills, according to a study of children 2.5 to 5.5 years of age conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The Hopkins researchers found that the impact of TV viewing on a child’s behavior and social skills varied by the age at which the viewing occurred. More importantly, heavy television viewing that decreased over time was not associated with behavior or social problems. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under age 2 watch no television while children age 2 and older are limited to no more than two hours of daily viewing. The study is published in the October 2007 issue of Pediatrics.

“A number of studies have demonstrated negative effects of heavy television viewing. However, timing of exposure is an important consideration as reducing viewing to acceptable levels can reduce the risk of behavioral and social problems,” said Kamila Mistry, MPH, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health.

For the study, the research team analyzed data for 2,707 children collected from the Healthy Steps for Young Children national evaluation. Parents were surveyed about their child’s television viewing habits and behavior at 2.5 and at 5.5 years of age.

Sixteen percent of parents reported that their children watched two hours or more of television daily at 2.5 years of age (early exposure), while 15 percent reported that their children watched two hours or more of television daily at 5.5 years of age (concurrent exposure). One in five parents reported that their children watched two hours or more of television daily at both 2.5 years and at 5.5 years of age (sustained exposure). Sustained exposure to television was associated with behavioral problems. However, early exposure that was subsequently reduced was not a risk for behavior problems. Concurrent viewing was associated with fewer social skills, while sustained and early viewing had less of an impact on social skill development.

The study also found that having a television in the child’s bedroom at 5.5 years of age was associated with behavioral problems, poor social skills and poor sleep. Forty-one percent of the children included in the study had a television in his or her bedroom.

“Children who reduced their viewing by 5.5 years of age were not at greater risk for behavior and social problems,” said Cynthia Minkovitz, MD, MPP, senior author of the study and associate professor with the School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. “It is vital for clinicians to emphasize the importance of reducing television viewing in early childhood among those children with early use.”

While the government spends billions of dollars on educational and prevention programs to persuade teens not to do things like smoke, drink or do drugs, a Temple University psychologist suggests that competing systems within the brain make adolescents more susceptible to engaging in risky or dangerous behavior, and that educational interventions alone are unlikely to be effective.


Laurence Steinberg, Distinguished University Professor and the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology at Temple, outlines his argument in, “Risk Taking in Adolescence: New Perspectives from Brain and Behavioral Science,” in the April issue of the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Science. [read more]

Although intelligence is generally thought to play a key role in children's early academic achievement, aspects of children's self-regulation abilities—including the ability to alternately shift and focus attention and to inhibit impulsive responding--are uniquely related to early academic success and account for greater variation in early academic progress than do measures of intelligence. Therefore, in order to help children from low-income families succeed in school, early school-age programs may need to include curricula designed specifically to promote children's self-regulation skills as a means of enhancing their early academic progress.

Those are the findings of a new study conducted by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University and published in the March-April 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

Although there is currently a focus on teaching specific content and factual information in pre-kindergarten and early elementary education, these findings indicate that without a simultaneous focus on promoting self-regulation skills, many children are likely to struggle to keep pace with the academic demands of the early elementary classroom.

The study examined the role of self-regulation in emerging academic ability in 141 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income homes who attended Head Start, the federal preschool program for children living in poverty. The researchers sought to determine the extent to which distinct but overlapping aspects of children's developing self-regulation (cognitive, social-emotional, and temperament-based) are associated with emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten.

The researchers found that all aspects of children's self-regulation are uniquely related to their academic abilities, over and above their intelligence. They also found that one particular aspect of self-regulation—termed the inhibitory control aspect of brain function used in planning, problem solving, and goal-directed activity—is predictive of all academic outcomes but was particularly associated with early ability in math.

"Children's ability to regulate their thinking and behavior develops rapidly in the preschool years," according to Clancy Blair, associate professor of human development and family studies at the Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the study. "By the time children start school, they are expected to be able to sufficiently regulate attention, impulsivity, and emotion so as to communicate effectively and to jointly engage in learning experiences with teachers and classmates.

"For some children, however, particularly children from low-income homes or facing early adversity, self-regulation abilities may be slow in developing, leading to problems in the transition to school and increased risk for early school failure. In the attempt to improve educational achievement and decrease inequities in educational progress associated with socioeconomic status, it is important to understand the nature of multiple influences on early progress in school."

People who were abused and neglected during childhood have a higher risk of major depression when they become young adults, according to a report in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Child abuse has been linked to depression in clinical populations and community surveys, according to background information in the article. But few prospective longitudinal studies have examined the relationship between abuse or neglect in childhood and depression in adulthood.

Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D., then of the New Jersey Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, and now of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, and colleagues conducted a prospective study to determine whether abused and neglected children were at elevated risk of major depressive disorder (MDD) and psychiatric illness, compared with matched control subjects, when followed up into young adulthood. The study included 676 children with substantiated cases of physical and sexual abuse and neglect before the age of 11. They were matched based on age, race, sex, and approximate family social class with 520 non-abused and non-neglected children. All were followed up into young adulthood (average age: 28.7).

"The current results show that childhood physical abuse was associated with increased risk for lifetime MDD," the authors write. "We also provide new evidence that neglected children are at increased risk for depression as well."

Child abuse and neglect were associated with a 51 percent increased risk for current MDD in young adulthood. Children who were physically abused had a 59 percent increased risk of lifetime MDD. Those who experienced multiple types of abuse had a 75 percent increased risk of lifetime MDD. The risk of current MDD was 59 percent higher for those who were neglected.

Childhood sexual abuse was not associated with an elevated risk of MDD. "However, childhood victims of sexual abuse reported significantly more depression symptoms than controls," the authors point out.

"In addition, these findings reveal that onset of depression began in childhood for many of the children," they write. "Our age-at-onset findings reinforce the need to intervene early in the lives of these abused and neglected children, before depression symptoms cascade into other spheres of functioning."

The children's stories are distressing: They had been left alone and hungry for days, were physically abused, forced to get high, told to steal from loved ones and to lie to authorities, and they had seen their parents "hyper" and delusional.

They had been traumatized, many of them, but they had also been resourceful and resilient. All had been taken from their rural homes and were now in foster care, with some struggling to adjust and some doing remarkably well.

They are the children of methamphetamine users, and they were the subject of a study, apparently the first, to get a child's-eye view of what happens in these families and how it affects the children.

"We're not aware of other studies that look at the effects of being reared in a methamphetamine-involved family on children's psychological development," said Wendy Haight, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the lead researcher.

The study will be published in the journal Children and Youth Services Review (CYSR) and is available online at http://www.childwelfare.com/kids/cysr.htm. [read more of review]

EurekAlert!
12 June 2006

First evidence for altruistic behaviours in human infants and chimpanzees

According to a Yiddish proverb, ‘if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm’. A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany offers another place to find one - children and chimpanzees. Researchers developed several helping scenarios in which an adult was struggling with a problem and needed help. In one such scenario, an adult accidentally dropped objects on a floor and was unable to reach them. Human infants at 18 month of age helped spontaneously in several of the tasks. Also, chimpanzees displayed similar helping behaviours, although only in easier tasks. These new findings show that rudimentary forms of altruistic behaviours are present in our closest evolutionary relatives. As recent findings by other researchers from the same institute show, these seem to be restricted to particular situations.

2 March 2006