Remember that bully on the playground in elementary school?

A Rowan University study has found that it’s not uncommon for elementary school bullies to continue bullying throughout their high school and college years.

And the same apparently goes for people who have been targets of bullies, according to Rowan developmental psychologist Mark Chapell, lead author of the study, which has been accepted for publication by the journal Adolescence.

According to Chapell, the majority of people who have been bullied in college also report having been bullied in high school and elementary school.

“There is a lot of continuity,” says Chapell. “People appear to be targeted for being bullied and for being a bully as well.”

Chapell, who conducted the first-ever study on college bullying in 2004 with a sample of 1,025 undergraduates, surveyed 119 college undergrads this time and found that of 25 who were bullied in college, 72 percent had been bullied in high school and elementary school. Conversely, of 26 bullies in college, 53.8 percent had been bullies in high school and elementary school.

In yet another category, of 12 people who were both bullies and victims of bullies (bully-victims) in college, 41.6 percent had been bully-victims in both high school and elementary school, according to the study.

In the study, Chapell and his research team compared types of bullying and found that, overall, bullies used more verbal bullying than social bullying in college, high school and elementary school. Physical bullying was least common.

Chapell’s 2004 study found that bullying of college students by teachers or coaches does occur. His most recent study found that verbal bullying of students was the most common type of bullying used by both college teachers and coaches. Social bullying was the next most common.

In examining gender, Chapell found that there were no significant sex differences related to being a bully or a bully-victim. But males were bullied significantly more than female students in elementary school and high school, according to the study. Males were not bullied more than female students in college.

The study notes that there is a reduction of bullying over time—bullying decreases from elementary school to high school to college—but also supports the idea that bullying continues past the school years and into college and even the workplace, according to Chapell.

He notes that while European countries have studied bullying for 35 years, American researchers didn’t begin focusing on the issue until about 1999, after the Columbine High School shootings.

“There is a temperament and a certain aggressiveness to bullying,” said Chapell. “There are all kinds of elements that go into it. And we see a lot of bullying in the adult workplace.”

In coming years, Chapell is looking to expand the study of bullying in college in a number of universities in several states. He also wants to examine the role of ethnicity in bullying.

News & Happenings
Rowan University
25 August 2006

So your high school senior says she wants to be a doctor. Great news, right? It is if she's got the talent and the grades to back up her ambition.

Unfortunately, the goals of too many teens now outpace what they are likely to achieve, a problem that can lead to wasted time and resources, not to mention anxiety and distress, according to a new Florida State University study.

Sociology Professor John Reynolds tracked changes in high school seniors' educational and occupational plans between 1976 and 2000 and found the gap in goals and actual achievements has grown over the 25-year period. The study, co-authored by FSU graduate students Michael Stewart, Ryan MacDonald and Lacey Sischo, was published in the journal Social Problems.

"Today's teens are both highly ambitious and increasingly unrealistic," Reynolds said. "While some youth clearly benefit from heightened ambition, it can lead to disappointment and discouragement rather than optimism and success."

The study, which was supported by a $47,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is the first to show with comparable, national data how dramatically high school seniors' plans have changed since the 1970s, how these expectations are increasingly out of sync with the achievements of their peers and that there is a corresponding decline in the payoffs of student ambition for future accomplishments in school.

The researchers analyzed data from several national surveys, including the annual Monitoring the Future Survey, the National Longitudinal Study, the Digest of Education Statistics and the Current Population Survey.

They found that high school seniors in 2000 were much more ambitious than their 1976 counterparts, with 50 percent of seniors planning to continue their education after college to get an advanced degree and 63 percent planning to work in a professional job, such as doctor, lawyer, college professor, accountant or engineer, by age 30. In 1976, only 26 percent said they planned to get an advanced degree and 41 percent planned to work as a professional. Other categories were laborer, farmer or homemaker; service, sales or clerical; operative or crafts; military or protective services; entrepreneur; and administrator or manager.

Interestingly, the percentage of high school graduates between age 25 and 30 who actually earned advanced degrees has remained pretty steady, meaning only the expectations have changed, and dramatically at that. The gap between expectations of earning an advanced degree and what is realistic grew from 22 percentage points in 1976 to 41 percentage points in 2000.

The researchers attribute the high school seniors' unrealistic expectations to the declining influence of grades and high school curricula and the increase of students who plan to use community college as an educational stepping-stone to a bachelor's degree and beyond. While community college may be valuable, statistics show that these students are much less likely to earn a bachelor's degree, let alone an advanced degree, than their peers who began their college careers at four-year institutions.

So what's wrong with reaching for the stars?

"Unrealistic plans may lead to a misuse of human potential and economic resources," Reynolds said. "For example, planning to become a medical doctor while making poor grades in high school means that preparation for other more probable vocations is likely to be postponed."

Like many cultural shifts in today's society, money may be at the root of the "college-for-all" attitude. Parents, high school counselors and others are giving students the message that a college degree is the only way to get a good job when, in fact, a skilled electrician or plumber can earn as much as say, a college professor, Reynolds said.

"Also, other researchers have found that although we are making more money than in the past, what counts for happiness is making more than your peers," he said. "This might also fuel irrational plans to work in top occupations."

FSU News
28 August 2006

ABSTRACT — Writing about emotional experiences is associated with a host of positive outcomes. This study extended the expressive-writing paradigm to the realm of romantic relationships to examine the social effects of writing. For 3 consecutive days, one person from each of 86 dating couples either wrote about his or her deepest thoughts and feelings about the relationship or wrote about his or her daily activities. In the days before and after writing, instant messages were collected from the couples. Participants who wrote about their relationship were significantly more likely to still be dating their romantic partners 3 months later. Linguistic analyses of the instant messages revealed that participants and their partners used significantly more positive and negative emotion words in the days following the expressive-writing manipulation if the participants had written about their relationship than if they had written about their daily activities. Increases in positive emotion words partially mediated the relation between expressive writing and relationship stability.

Slatcher, Richard B. & Pennebaker, James W. (2006)
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words: The Social Effects of Expressive Writing.
Psychological Science 17 (8), 660-664.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German scientist has been testing an "anti-stupidity" pill with encouraging results on mice and fruit flies, Bild newspaper reported on Saturday.

It said Hans-Hilger Ropers, director at Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, has tested a pill thwarting hyperactivity in certain brain nerve cells, helping stabilise short-term memory and improve attentiveness.

"With mice and fruit flies we were able to eliminate the loss of short-term memory," Ropers, 62, is quoted saying in the German newspaper, which has dubbed it the "world's first anti-stupidity pill."

Sat Aug 5, 2006

Preuschoff, K., Bossaerts, P. and  Quartz, S.R.
Neural Differentiation of Expected Reward and Risk in Human Subcortical Structures.
Neuron, Vol 51, 381-390, 03 August 2006 || News release, Cell Press.

In decision-making under uncertainty, economic studies emphasize the importance of risk in addition to expected reward. Studies in neuroscience focus on expected reward and learning rather than risk. We combined functional imaging with a simple gambling task to vary expected reward and risk simultaneously and in an uncorrelated manner. Drawing on financial decision theory, we modeled expected reward as mathematical expectation of reward, and risk as reward variance. Activations in dopaminoceptive structures correlated with both mathematical parameters. These activations differentiated spatially and temporally. Temporally, the activation related to expected reward was immediate, while the activation related to risk was delayed. Analyses confirmed that our paradigm minimized confounds from learning, motivation, and salience. These results suggest that the primary task of the dopaminergic system is to convey signals of upcoming stochastic rewards, such as expected reward and risk, beyond its role in learning, motivation, and salience.

Don’t Talk to a Friend While Reading This; Multi-Tasking Adversely Affects the Brain’s Learning Systems, UCLA Scientists Report

Multi-tasking affects the brain's learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted, UCLA psychologists report this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn," said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.

"The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember," Poldrack added. "Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don't learn as well as if you had paid full attention."

Tasks that require more attention, such as learning calculus or reading Shakespeare, will be particularly adversely affected by multi-tasking, Poldrack said.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity and function, a technique that uses magnetic fields to spot active brain areas by telltale increases in blood oxygen.

Participants in the study, who were in their 20s, learned a simple classification task by trial-and-error. They were asked to make predictions after receiving a set of cues concerning cards that displayed various shapes, and divided the cards into two categories. With one set of cards, they learned without any distractions. With a second set of cards, they performed a simultaneous task: listening to high and low beeps through headphones and keeping a mental count of the high-pitch beeps. While the distraction of the beeps did not reduce the accuracy of the predictions — people could learn the task either way — it did reduce the participants' subsequent knowledge about the task during a follow-up session.

When the subjects were asked questions about the cards afterward, they did much better on the task they learned without the distraction. On the task they learned with the distraction, they could not extrapolate; in scientific terms, their knowledge was much less "flexible."

This result demonstrates a reduced capacity to recall memories when placed in a different context, Poldrack said.

"Our results suggest that learning facts and concepts will be worse if you learn them while you're distracted," Poldrack said.

Different forms of memory are processed by separate systems in the brain, he noted.  When you recall what you did last weekend or try to remember someone's name or your driver's license number, you are using a type of memory retrieval called declarative memory. (Patients with Alzheimer disease have damage in these brain areas.) When you remember how to ride a bicycle or how to play tennis, you are using what is called procedural memory; this requires a different set of brain areas than those used for learning facts and concepts, which rely on the declarative memory system. The beeps in the study disrupted declarative memory, said Poldrack, who also studies how the types of memory are related.

The brain's hippocampus — a sea-horse-shaped structure that plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information — is necessary for declarative memory, Poldrack said. For the task learned without distraction, the hippocampus was involved. However, for the task learned with the distraction of the beeps, the hippocampus was not involved; but the striatum was, which is the brain system that underlies our ability to learn new skills.

The striatum is the brain system damaged in patients with Parkinson disease, Poldrack noted. Patients with Parkinson's have trouble learning new motor skills but do not have trouble remembering the past.

"We have shown that multi-tasking makes it more likely you will rely on the striatum to learn," Poldrack said. "Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn."

The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don't multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember. Listening to music can energize people and increase alertness. Listening to music while performing certain tasks, such as exercising, can be helpful. But tasks that distract you while you try to learn something new are likely to adversely affect your learning, Poldrack said.

"Concentrate while you're studying," he said.


UCLA News
25 July 2006