Many of us learn a foreign language when we are young, but in some cases, exposure to that language is brief and we never get to hear or practice it subsequently. Our subjective impression is often that the neglected language completely fades away from our memory. But does "use it or lose it" apply to foreign languages? Although it may seem we have absolutely no memory of the neglected language, new research suggests this "forgotten" language may be more deeply engraved in our minds than we realize.

Psychologists Jeffrey Bowers, Sven L. Mattys, and Suzanne Gage from the University of Bristol recruited volunteers who were native English speakers but who had learned either Hindi or Zulu as children when living abroad. The researchers focused on Hindi and Zulu because these languages contain certain phonemes that are difficult for native English speakers to recognize. A phoneme is the smallest sound in a language—a group of phonemes forms a word.

The scientists asked the volunteers to complete a background vocabulary test to see if they remembered any words from the neglected language. They then trained the participants to distinguish between pairs of phonemes that started Hindi or Zulu words.

As it turned out, even though the volunteers showed no memory of the second language in the vocabulary test, they were able to quickly relearn and correctly identify phonemes that were spoken in the neglected language.

These findings, which appeared in a recent issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that exposing young children to foreign languages, even if they do not continue to speak them, can have a lasting impact on speech perception. The authors conclude, "Even if the language is forgotten (or feels this way) after many years of disuse, leftover traces of the early exposure can manifest themselves as an improved ability to relearn the language."

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."

Students will have to use their brains to get good grades at school this year, according to new University of Toronto research that relates brain activity to undergraduate academic performance.

In the first study ever to link academic performance to a neural signal, participants performed a Stroop task – a well-known test of cognitive control – while hooked up to EEG electrodes that measured their brain activity. U of T researchers monitored a brain signal known as the error-related negativity (ERN) in each participant's brain while they completed the task. ERN signals are observed approximately 100 milliseconds after a mistake is made, and are involved in cognitive control and self-regulation. Large ERN signals indicate a participant is responding strongly when they've made a mistake; smaller ERN signals indicate they are less responsive to their mistakes.

The researchers then compared the size of each participant's ERN signals to their official university transcript grades. "Those students with larger ERN signals did significantly better in school, showing that these neural signals have important real world implications," says doctoral researcher Jacob Hirsh.

Hirsh says students with large ERN signals are more responsive to their own errors than are students with smaller ERNs. Those with large ERN signals are more likely to slow down in order to correct their mistakes and avoid future errors, which could contribute to better grades. Because the size of the ERN is only 50 per cent determined by genetics, though, Hirsh says students may be able to improve their ERN signals by attending to their mistakes, thereby helping to improve their academic performance. "The ERN is not set in stone," he says.

It's also key to note that having extremely large ERN signals is not ideal either, says Dr. Michael Inzlicht, UofT Psychology Professor and co-author on the paper. "Students with a small ERN may have more trouble in school, but people with a large ERN can suffer from crippling anxiety because they respond strongly to the smallest perceived errors in their own behaviour," says Inzlicht. "It all comes down to this: what is the optimal response to an error?"

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."

College students with depression are twice as likely as their classmates to drop out of school, new research shows. However, the research also indicates that lower grade point averages depended upon a student's type of depression, according to Daniel Eisenberg, assistant professor in the University of Michigan School of Public Health and principal investigator of the study.

There are two core symptoms of depression -- loss of interest and pleasure in activities, or depressed mood---but only loss of interest is associated with lower grade point averages. "The correlation between depression and academic performance is mainly driven by loss of interest in activities," Eisenberg said. "This is significant because it means individuals can be very depressed and very functional, depending on which type of depression they have. I think that this can be true for many high achieving people, who may feel down and hopeless but not lose interest in activities. "Lots of students who have significant depression on some dimension are performing just fine, but may be at risk and go unnoticed because there is no noticeable drop in functioning."

Students with both depression and anxiety had especially poor academic performance. "If you take a student at the 50th percentile of the GPA distribution and compare them to a student with depression alone, the depressed student would be around the 37th percentile -- a 13 percent drop," Eisenberg said. "However, a student with depression and anxiety plummets to about the 23rd percentile, a 50 percent drop."

In the study, Eisenberg and his colleagues conducted a Web survey of a random sample of approximately 2,800 undergraduate and graduate students about a range of mental health issues in fall 2005, and conducted a follow-up survey with a subset of the sample in fall 2007. The dropout rate for University of Michigan students is about 5 percent per year, which is much lower than the national average, Eisenberg says. This likely reflects the type of high-achieving students Michigan attracts, along with U-M's support network for students experiencing emotional problems or depression. "Michigan does seem to be a leader in many respects in terms of things the university has done related to student mental health," said Eisenberg, who noted that the next step in the research is a large scale study. "I see this study as suggesting that there is value in a large randomized trial of screening and treating depressed students, in which the academic outcomes are measured carefully. That's what it will take to really see what the value is in reducing the dropout rate and improving GPA. As far as I know this has not been done."

Many students with depression -- as with the general population -- remain untreated. "Maybe the biggest reason is only about 50 percent of people with depression say they think they need help," Eisenberg said. "College students in particular may feel that stress is normal." According to Eisenberg's research, certain types of students have higher levels of stigma. Males, students from lower-income backgrounds and Asian students, in particular, report higher levels of stigma about mental health.

To Get Good Grades, Get Good Sleep.

You’d think that college students would be experts at sleeping.  But odd hours, parties, cramming for tests, personal problems, self-medication with drugs or alcohol and general  can wreck a student’s sleep habits. Which can be bad for the body and the mind.

60-Second Psych from Scientific American podcasts
8 December 2008

Have you grown weary of reading the same favorite dinosaur or bug book over and over again to the youngsters in your life? Are you ready to shake up the regular line-up of bedtime stories? In time for holiday shopping, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced 19 finalists in the annual science book awards, which include science books for young children up to young adults.

In its fifth year, the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books is intended to promote science literacy. The list of 19 finalists in the 2009 competition appeared in the 5 December issue of the journal Science. Librarians selected the finalists from over 100 entries across the four award categories. Scientists will help choose a winner in each category. The winning entries will be announced 1 January 2009 and honored during a ceremony at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago. Winners will receive $1,500 and a plaque.

Carolyn Phelan, a librarian at Northbrook Public Library in Northbrook, Ill., served as a judge for the children's science picture books category. Since she began her career as a children's librarian 30 years ago, Phelan has noticed that she now gets more requests for science books for younger children. The quality of the science books has also improved greatly during that time, she said. "There are better illustrations than in the past, more remarkable photos, more use of color. All of this makes the books more attractive to young children," Phelan said.

Engaging design is important for books intended for older children, too. "We look for books that are engaging, appealing and written with a layout that would appeal to teens," said Maren Ostergard, who has judged the young adult category since the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize began five years ago. "The books have to hold interest right off the bat or teens won't commit to the whole story," she said. Size also matters: can the book fit in a backpack? Is it too heavy to carry around? These are things that can also make a difference when marketing books to teenagers, Ostergard said.

Ostergard is an early literacy and outreach librarian in King County Library System in Seattle. She talks to school groups, provides library materials and resources to children in after school care and is "always trying to find good science books." Finding science books for young adults "takes some looking," Ostergard said. "They hear about fiction from their peers and the media, but I may be the only one who markets quality non-fiction to them. It's important to find good science and tell teens about it, because they don't get it otherwise."

The list of finalists is sent to libraries to encourage librarians to put the science books on display. "It's another way to get the word out about good science books," said AAAS' Malcomson.

Children's Science Picture Books (links to amazon.com/prices also amazon.com)

• Eggs. Marilyn Singer, illustrated by Emma Stevenson. Holiday House, New York, 2008. 32 pp. $11.53
  Eggs provide a shelter in which a developing animal can breathe, be nourished with food and drink, and grow. They are laid by birds, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and even some mammals. Singer presents examples of their innumerable shapes, sizes, colors, and patterns. She also discusses how burial, brooding, and nests protect eggs, and she describes varieties of hatching. Stevenson's detailed gouache paintings convey the eggs' allure.
  
  
• Sisters and Brothers: Sibling Relationships in the Animal World. Steve Jenkins (illustrator) and Robin Page. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2008. 32 pp. $10.88
  Animals and families always fascinate children, but the facts about siblings that fill this book will also engage adults. For example, young shrews line up holding each others' tails, with the mother leading the way. Female termites lay 30,000 eggs a day, whereas giant anteaters are always single offspring. Nile crocodiles cooperate even before they hatch, but hyena cubs can fight to the death. The authors' collages are sure to appeal to young readers.
  
  
• Spiders. Nic Bishop. Scholastic, New York, 2007. 48 pp. $12.23
  Spider enthusiasts and arachnophobes alike will be drawn to the amazing, up-close photographs in this informative introduction to these eight-legged predators. The concise, well-written text offers numerous interesting facts about spiders. For example, they were among the earliest terrestrial predators, having arisen more than 350 million years ago. And although "silk is the secret of spider success," many of the more than 38,000 species do not use webs. Fishing spiders dart over the water's surface, and some jumping spiders can leap 20 times their body length to pounce on prey.
  
  
• Wings. Sneed B. Collard III, illustrated by Robin Brickman. Charlesbridge, Watertown, MA, 2008. 32 pp. $13.73. Paper, $7.95
  Insects, birds, and bats all move through the air on wings. Collard introduces the diversity of these appendages and their uses. Wings can be covered with scales, feathers, or bare skin. They allow peregrines to twist and turn in a dive, leaf-nosed bats to lazily flap over the ground, milkweed bugs to move short distances among patches, and Arctic terns to migrate between the polar regions. They help animals chase, catch, flee, and mate. To illustrate this variety, Brickman sculpted painted paper into colorful collages.
  
  
• The Wolves Are Back. Jean Craighead George, illustrated by Wendell Minor. Dutton Juvenile, New York, 2008. 32 pp. $16.95
  The wolves of Yellowstone were once shot until they were eliminated. However, with changed values and the yearning to again hear howls in the wild, wolves were reintroduced to the national park in 1995. As the wolves multiplied, wildflowers reappeared (wolves chased away the mountain sheep that had eaten them) and birds returned (wolves hunted bison and elk that had trampled young aspen needed for perches and grasses needed for food). By following along as a wolf pup wanders the Lamar Valley, readers learn how wolves are even important to halting riverbank erosion. George's simple text and landscape artist Minor's beautiful illustrations convey the importance of maintaining all parts of ecosystems.
  

Middle Grades Science Books

• Cold Light: Creatures, Discoveries, and Inventions that Glow. Anita Sitarski. Boyds Mills Press, Honesdale, PA, 2007. 48 pp. $11.53
  This book's theme is make light not heat. Sitarski offers an information-packed but reader friendly account of chemical and biological sources of luminescence along with important discoveries from 1602 through to today's light-emitting diodes. Of course there are photos of fireflies and jellyfish, but the intriguing images also include a glowing chicken and art by Montana State University students who covered the walls of a darkened gallery with dishes containing luminescent marine bacteria.
  
  
• George Washington Carver. Tonya Bolden. Abrams Books for Young Readers (Abrams), New York, in association with the Field Museum, Chicago, 2008. 40 pp. $15.16
  Peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans (and the products made from them) were key interests of horticulturist, educator, and inventor Carver. The ex-slave's research and teaching, which stressed scientific farming and soil conservation, helped improve agriculture in the South. Bolden's eloquent telling of Carter's life and accomplishments is enhanced with quotes from him and his contemporaries. The historical photos; evocative artifacts; and Carter's own drawings, paintings, and scientific illustrations will help entice young readers.
  
  
• How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming. Lynne Cheery and Gary Braasch. Dawn, Nevada City, CA, 2008. 66 pp. $12.89
  The authors survey a wide range of indications that Earth's climate is changing. These clues include the earlier spring arrivals of migrating birds, earlier blooming by wildflowers and Washington, D.C.'s cherry trees, melting glaciers and icecaps, microfossils from cores of mud from the ocean floor, and bubbles of ancient air retrieved from cores of glacial ice. In his earlier Earth Under Fire, photojournalist Braasch visited climate researchers in the field to document their discoveries. Here he and Cherry (a seasoned author of environmental books for children) also spotlight citizen science and (especially) data that can be, and is, collected by children.
  
  
• Life on Earth - and Beyond: An Astrobiologist's Quest. Pamela S. Turner. Charlesbridge, Watertown, MA, 2008. 112 pp. $15.56. Paper, $10.16
  Turner approaches astrobiology through the experiences of Chris McKay. Most chapters resemble a travelogue, as she describes his traipsing around the world. He visits Antarctica's Dry Valleys, the Atacama and Sahara deserts, permafrost-covered tundra in Siberia, and the bottom of an Antarctic lake permanently capped by ice. Weaving the underlying science into her narrative, she explains how studying microbes from these extreme environments helps us understand whether life can exist in similar situations on Mars or other planet.
  
  
• What's Eating You? Parasites - the Inside Story. Nicola Davies, illustrated by Neal Layton. Candlewick, Cambridge, MA, 2007. 60 pp. $10.39
  This account of animals that live on or in other animals is more likely to delight than disgust. Zoologist Davies explains the advantages parasites find in being small and able to change body form during their lives. He describes the challenges they face in moving among hosts-a point reinforced in a playable "two-host tapeworm game." He also discusses parasites' amazing life cycles, their effects on hosts (including some benefits and examples of "mind control"), and some of the ways the hosts fight back. Layton's clever drawings complement the informative text.
  

Young Adult Science Books

• Dinosaur: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages. Thomas R. Holtz Jr., illustrated by Luis V. Rey. Random House, New York, 2007. 432 pp. $23.09
  Anyone with even a passing interest in dinosaurs should not miss this journey into their diverse and truly weird world. Holtz and his colleagues fill the book with fascinating details ranging from discoveries of new species (e.g., a sauropod, Amphicoelias, with a mass of 18 elephants) to old favorites (e.g., Tyrannosaurus rex, which may have lived and hunted in packs). They cover major and minor groups, predator-prey relations, social interactions within species, habitats and habits, and evolutionary trends. With its conversational tone and Rey's engaging illustrations, the book should appeal to young adults and a general audience alike.
  
  
• The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. Rachel Herz. Morrow, New York, 2007. 288 pp. $9.99
  Far from a prissy survey of perfumes and odor-it starts with the suicide of a rock singer who had lost his sense of smell-this book explores how and why smell is such a central component of our lives. Explaining basic neurobiological principles in clear language, Herz intermixes them with stories and personal accounts of her research and experiences. She describes olfactory technologies, such as the development of electronic noses, which are already beginning to be used in the food industry and might even help diagnose diseases. She also dreams of a gel that would boost olfactory receptor function and restore sensation to older individuals. Her account will stimulate readers' interests in psychology and neuroscience.
  
  
• The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret. Seth Shulman. Norton, New York, 2008. 256 pp. $16.47. Paper, $10.17
  Who invented the telephone? Most people would answer Alexander Graham Bell-recall "Mr. Watson, come here!" In this well-researched and well-written account, Shulman argues that Bell furtively copied crucial aspects of his device from a patent application by Elisha Gray. The author weaves science, intrigue, and romance into a fast-paced narrative. He lays his evidence out clearly while carrying readers through the steps he took to build his thought-provoking case.
  
  
• Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life. Sandra Aarnodt and Sam Wang. Bloomsbury, New York, 2008. 240 pp. $16.47. Paper, $10.20
  The neuroscientist authors offer a highly accessible and richly informative "user's guide" to our brains. They cover a broad range of topics, offering up-to-date information directed to answering questions of the curious public. They supplement their charming narrative with frequent and quite extensive sidebars that debunk myths, focus on specific issues, and offer practical tips. Eschewing didactical lecturing, their friendly and informal writing effectively engages the reader in a comfortable, interesting, and informative dialog.

Hands-On Science/Activity Books

• Animal Tracks and Signs. Jinny Johnson. National Geographic, Washington, DC, 2008. 192 pp. $16.47
  Whether they inhabit backyards, local fields or woods, or wilderness parklands, most animals can be hard to sight. But they do leave clues to their activities: tracks, nests, feeding remains, and dung. Johnson gives pointers on how to notice, record, and interpret such signs. In addition, she includes basic facts about the animals themselves. Mammals garner the most attention, while amphibians, reptiles, birds, insects, and other invertebrates are discussed in shorter sections. Although the book's global scope limits its coverage to some 400 selected examples, the information can often also be applied to closely related species. This enticing introduction should lead nature enthusiasts to seek additional details in field guides with a more restricted focus.
  
  
• The Brook Book. Jim Arnosky. Dutton Children's, New York, 2008. 32 pp. $12.47
  Budding naturalists who have access to any narrow, shallow stream will find this an inviting guide to the variety of observations they can make. It begins with appropriately simple explanations of the sources and fates of the water in a brook. There are plenty of activities to satisfy young explorers, including sketching flowers, collecting smooth stones, examining aquatic insects, watching birds, and looking for animal tracks. Parents will appreciate the emphasis on safety, while children should be attracted by Aronsky's alluring text and charming illustrations.
  
  
• Sound Projects with a Music Lab You Can Build. Robert Gardner. Enslow, Berkeley Heights, NJ, 2008. 128 pp. $31.93
  Gardner lays out hands-on experiments that explore such topics as how sounds form and travel; properties of standing waves and harmonics; and aspects of string, wind, and percussion instruments. He adroitly balances open-ended questions and necessary background information thus enticing students to actually investigate phenomena to obtain answers. Many of the 35 experiments offer intriguing ideas for elementary or middle school science fairs. The book will reward self-motivated students who are seeking challenges in problem solving.
  
  
• True Green Kids: 100 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet. Kim McKay and Jenny Bonnin. National Geographic , Washington, DC, 2008. 144 pp. $27.90. Paper, $10.85
  Youngsters who wish to join the green movement will enjoy this book. The 100 activities range from the obvious (use cloth bags, turn down your heat) to the creative and fun (set up a local carbon trading card system, help organize a trash-free lunch day at school). Each is described on a single page, which makes the book perfect for browsing. For those who want to do still more, the authors suggest ways to learn about jobs that will help our environment.
  
  
• The Ultimate Guide to Your Microscope. Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone. Sterling, New York, 2008. 144 pp. Paper, $9.95
  Most students find their introduction to microscopes boring. They are shown a diagram of parts and given a couple exercises that demonstrate the instruments' capabilities. The authors offer a lively alternative. After covering the basics and how to make various types of slides, they describe 41 projects involving easy-to-obtain objects such as pet hair, dead bugs, food molds, and clover. Their instructions, discussions of what is likely to be seen, and color photomicrographs should inspire readers to explore the tiny facets of our world.

Paul Boxer’s large-scale study shows conclusive link between media violence and real violence in adolescents.

You are what you watch, when it comes to violence in the media and its influence on violent behavior in young people, and a new paper, lead-authored by Rutgers University, Newark, researcher Paul Boxer, provides new evidence that violent media does indeed impact adolescent behavior.

The research, to be published in February/2009 in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, shows that even when other factors are considered, such as academic skills, encounters with community violence, or emotional problems, “childhood and adolescent violent media preferences contributed significantly to the prediction of violence and general aggression” in the study subjects.  The study is available online at http://www.springerlink.com/content/4788773215243487/fulltext.html.

Boxer, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University in Newark, has been involved since 2004 in research funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) into media violence and its relation to serious youth violence and criminal behavior.  Although a relationship between media violence and violent behavior has been acknowledged for some 40 years, much of the research was usually done in a laboratory setting rather than in the field, with very little emphasis on documenting links between media violence and actual engagement in serious violent and antisocial behavior, explains Boxer.

What’s more, many studies did not sufficiently address other influences on the children’s behaviors, such as exposure to violent or aggressive behavior at school or in the community, academic difficulties, and psychopathic tendencies or other emotional problems, according to Boxer.

Because violence is a “multiply determined behavior,” Boxer and the research team collected data on several risk factors for aggression, to examine whether violent media exposure has an impact on behavior even when those other influences are present. “Even in conjunction with other factors, our research shows that media violence does enhance violent behavior,” Boxer states.  “On average, adolescents who were not exposed to violent media are not as prone to violent behavior.”

Boxer was the lead author on the paper, the first paper produced through the CDC project. It reports the results of the research team’s extensive interviews of 820 adolescents from the state of Michigan – 430 high school students from rural, suburban and urban communities, and 390 juvenile delinquents held in county and state facilities.  The adolescents were about evenly split between male and female, minority and non-minority. Parents or guardians of 720 of the youths also were interviewed, as were teachers/staff of 717 of them.  Each subject was asked about favorites TV shows, movies and video/computer games, both as a child and as a teen, and questioned to determine if they had engaged in specific antisocial behaviors, such as throwing rocks or using a weapon.

Interviewers also investigated the youths’ exposures to aggression or violence, as well as other risk factors for aggressive behavior, such as emotional disorders or being victimized.  The parents, guardians, teachers and staff also were interviewed about the behaviors they had observed in their children or students.

After collecting the data, researchers analyzed findings by integrating “violent media exposure scores” into cumulative risk totals.  Their findings: high violent risk scores “added significantly to the prediction of both violence and general aggression.”  What’s more, “even for those lowest in other risk factors, a preference for violent media was predictive of violent behavior and general aggression,” according to the findings.

Boxer believes the study results can be used to assess, intervene and treat young people displaying aggressive behavior.  He also knows more detailed research is needed, such as analyzing the impact on behavior when violent interactive video games are banned.

Boxer is co-investigator on the CDC grant;  Principal Investigator is Dr. Rowell Huesmann, University of Michigan; the other co-investigator is Dr. Brad Bushman, University of Michigan.

Boxer and his team also are in the process of analyzing data collected through interviews with pre-school children and their parents to determine how violent media consumption impacts very young children. “Young children react to what they see and they mimic behavior,” but are unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, or right and wrong, says Boxer.  By investigating the mechanisms that influence their development, researchers can try to learn how to intervene in potentially aggressive or anti-social behaviors, and effect change at a very young age, he notes.

Boxer’s research into media violence and its impact is only one aspect of his overall work, which “focuses on the impact of violence in all aspects of the social environment on child and adolescent development.” Boxer is currently working on research that emphasizes the role of family violence and community violence in children's aggressive behaviors. Boxer also is involved in federally funded research investigating the role of political violence in childhood adjustment, as part of a team directing research with children growing up in Israel and the Palestinian Territory.

Lack of sleep, excessive computer screen time, stress and more hurt college students' GPAs

Lack of sleep, excessive television/computer screen time, stress, gambling, alcohol and tobacco use and other health-related issues are taking a toll on college students' academic performance, according to a study released by the University of Minnesota Boynton Health Service. "Our study shows that there is a direct link between college students' health and their academic achievement. This is the first time that anything like this has been published where Grade Point Average is linked to all these behaviors," said Dr. Ed Ehlinger, the director and chief health officer of the University of Minnesota Boynton Health Service. [view a video about the study]

Today's report, "Health and Academic Performance: Minnesota Undergraduate Students," is part of one of the most comprehensive studies of college students' health in the nation. About 24,000 students from 14 Minnesota colleges and universities were randomly selected to participate in this study and 9,931 completed the 2007 College Student Health Survey Report. The results only include undergraduate students from two-year and four-year institutions. All five University of Minnesota campuses were included in the survey.

In the results, 69.9 percent of college students reported they were stressed and 32.9 percent of those students said that stress was hurting their academic performance. In fact, the mean GPA for students saying stress impacted their academics was 3.12, compared with the 3.23 mean GPA for students who didn't believe it was affecting their academics. "While this may seem like a small difference in GPA, when you are looking at over 9,000 students the impact of this difference is huge," Ehlinger said. Twenty percent of students reported that sleep difficulties impacted their academics. In fact, those students who reported getting fewer nights of adequate sleep had a mean GPA of 3.08 compared with a 3.27 mean GPA for those who do not report sleep deficiencies. "The more days students get adequate sleep -- the better GPAs they attain," Ehlinger said. "There is a direct link between the two."

When it comes to excessive television and computer use (not including academic use), 30.4 percent of students surveyed reported excessive screen time. Thirteen percent of those with the issue reported that it impacted their studies; these students had a lower mean GPA of 3.04 compared with a mean GPA of 3.27 for those who said the problem did not impact them. "Turning off the computer or TV and going to sleep is one of the best things our students can do to improve their grades," Ehlinger said.

Students who reported that they had smoked during the past 30 days had a 3.12 mean GPA compared with a 3.28 mean GPA for students who reported not smoking. The study revealed surprising information for students who even smoke infrequently. "Even students who smoked once or twice in a month had lower GPAs than those who didn't smoke," Ehlinger said. "Using tobacco to calm down or 'to be social' is lowering students' grades."

Ehlinger hopes that this study's results will spur college students to change behavior and for colleges to pay more attention to the health of their students. "We hope this information helps students make wise decisions," Ehlinger said. "If you're investing a lot of time and money in your education, do you really want to waste your investment on behaviors that interfere with your academic success?"

The report also includes information on mental health, health insurance, physical activity levels, financial issues, drug use, injury, sexual assault and alcohol use. Members of the public, along with students and health officials, should pay attention to the results of this report, because the health of college students is important to society, Ehlinger said. "College students are so important for our economic development -- the development of our society," Ehlinger said. "One way to protect that investment in our future is to help them stay healthy."

Content analyses demonstrate that TV programming is highly saturated with sexual content and risky sexual behavior. A new study in the Journal of Communication shows that people with direct experience with such behavior are not influenced by its portrayal on TV. However, those without direct experience are more likely to participate in the unsafe behavior in the future, regardless of the consequences displayed.

Robin L. Nabi and Shannon Clark of the University of California conducted two studies to assess whether or not televised depictions of risky sexual behaviors alter viewers' expectations of their own future sexual behaviors, regardless of their consequences

In the first study, researchers examined the contents of TV programming schemas and found that viewers expect main characters to ultimately survive and thrive despite the adversity they face. In the second study, college women were exposed to various portrayals of promiscuous sexual behavior, such as one night stands, that were edited to display more or less positive or negative outcomes.

Portrayals of the risky behavior were likely to affect only those without direct experience with the target behavior. The portrayal of outcomes—good or bad—did not affect attitudes or intentions regarding that behavior.

Specifically, for those who had not previously had a one night stand, viewing fictional depictions of this behavior significantly increased expectations of the likelihood of having one in the future, regardless of the positive or negative outcomes portrayed.

"Even when behaviors are negatively portrayed, audiences may be motivated to model them anyways," the authors conclude. "We hope this research stimulates greater care in the application and testing of psychological theories to the study of media content and effects."

Hundreds of thousands of Australians count snakes and spiders among their fears, and while scientists have previously assumed we possess an evolutionary predisposition to fear the unpopular animals, researchers at UQ's School of Psychology look to have proved otherwise. According to Dr Helena Purkis, the results of the UQ study could provide an unprecedented insight into just why the creepy creatures are so widely feared.

“Previous research shows we react differently to snakes and spiders than to other stimuli, such as flowers or mushrooms, or even other dangerous animals….or cars and guns, which are also much more dangerous,” Dr Purkis said. “[In the past, this] has been explained by saying that people are predisposed by evolution to fear certain things, such as snakes and spiders, that would have been dangerous to our ancestors. [However], people tend to be exposed to a lot of negative information regarding snakes and spiders, and we argue this makes them more likely to be associated with phobia.”

In the study, researchers compared the responses to stimuli of participants with no particular experience with snakes and spiders, to that of snake and spider experts.

“Previous research has argued that snakes and spiders attract preferential attention (they capture attention very quickly) and that during this early processing a negative (fear) response is generated… as an implicit and indexed subconscious [action],” Dr Purkis said. “We showed that although everyone preferentially attends to snakes or spiders in the environment as they are potentially dangerous, only inexperienced participants display a negative response.”

The study is the first to establish a clear difference between preferential attention and the accompanying emotional response: that is, that you can preferentially attend to something without a negative emotional response being elicited. Dr Purkis said the findings could significantly increase understanding about the basic cognitive and emotional processes involved in the acquisition and maintenance of fear.

“If we understand the relationship between preferential attention and emotion it will help us understand how a stimulus goes from being perceived as potentially dangerous, to eliciting an emotional response and to being associated with phobia,” she said. “[This] could give us some information about the way people need to deal with snakes and spiders in order to minimise negative emotional responses.”

UQ News Online

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.”