The link between cyber-bullying and an increase in violence among young women will be featured in a new book, Offending Youth: Sex, Youth and Crime, published in November. Professor Kerry Carrington, head of Queensland University of Technology's School of Justice, has collected 45 years of data and can confirm, contrary to general academic opinion, young women are fast catching up to boys in violent crime.

Professor Carrington will present her findings at a talk on Thursday, September 24 in Brisbane. At that time, Professor Carrington will discuss whether increases in cyber-bullying are related to increases in female delinquency and boys' continuing monopoly over sexually violent crimes. The book also includes chapters on the over-representation of Indigenous youth in the juvenile justice system, dispelling unfounded myths and fears about ethnic youth gangs, and key contemporary patterns of delinquency and the response to these by juvenile justice agencies.

Professor Carrington said her data backed up anecdotal reports that violence among girls was increasing. "There's been a long dispute whether it was happening, but this data shows a pattern of statistics that point to a clear trend," Professor Carrington said. "And it is not just in Australia, but across Europe, the UK and US as well."

Professor Carrington said there were different theories about why this was the case, including treating girls' crime equally with boys' crime and increasing female participation in what used to be traditional masculine roles, but these did not adequately explain the recent sharp increase. "Increases in violence began when girls began moving into drug and street cultures in the 1980s, but the most significant increases in violence was in the past decade," she said. "Girls are taking to cyber space, e-technology and mobile phones with a passion and evidence shows girls are more likely to use these to bully. These technologies massively inflame conflict between girls. Increasingly, girls are bashing other girls, and videos of these are being put onto YouTube. Bullying used to end at the end of school, but now it follows you home and can escalate over night."

Professor Carrington said a long-standing reluctance to accept increasing violence between girls meant there were few specific programs to address it. "The majority of rehabilitation programs focus on boys' delinquencies which may not be as effective in dealing with violent girls," she said. Professor Carrington said from 1960 to 2007, the ratio of young women to young men appearing before the NSW Children's Courts for criminal matters has narrowed from 1 in 14 to1 in 5, and girls continued to narrow the gap in violent crime. "Boys' crime rates are falling in overall terms, but within that, rates of sexual violence are of an increasing concern," she said. Girls' crime rates are increasing overall and girls' violence, usually directed towards other girls, is increasing."

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?

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."

We can challenge our brains or our bodies, but not both, says study

Have you ever sat down to work on a crossword puzzle only to find that afterwards you haven't the energy to exercise? Or have you come home from a rough day at the office with no energy to go for a run?

A new study, published today in Psychology and Health, reveals that if you use your willpower to do one task, it depletes you of the willpower to do an entirely different task. "Cognitive tasks, as well as emotional tasks such as regulating your emotions, can deplete your self-regulatory capacity to exercise," says Kathleen Martin Ginis, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University, and lead author of the study.

Martin Ginis and her colleague Steven Bray used a Stroop test to deplete the self-regulatory capacity of volunteers in the study. (A Stroop test consists of words associated with colors but printed in a different color. For example, "red" is printed in blue ink.) Subjects were asked to say the color on the screen, trying to resist the temptation to blurt out the printed word instead of the color itself. "After we used this cognitive task to deplete participants' self-regulatory capacity, they didn't exercise as hard as participants who had not performed the task. The more people "dogged it" after the cognitive task, the more likely they were to skip their exercise sessions over the next 8 weeks. "You only have so much willpower."

Still, she doesn't see that as an excuse to let people loaf on the sofa. "There are strategies to help people rejuvenate after their self-regulation is depleted," she says. "Listening to music can help; and we also found that if you make specific plans to exercise—in other words, making a commitment to go for a walk at 7 p.m. every evening—then that had a high rate of success." She says that by constantly challenging yourself to resist a piece of chocolate cake, or to force yourself to study an extra half-hour each night, then you can actually increase your self-regulatory capacity. "Willpower is like a muscle: it needs to be challenged to build itself," she says.

Abstract
To examine whether individuals’ achievement strategies measured during university studies would have an impact on work burnout and work engagement measured 10, 14 and 17 years later, 292 university students completed the SAQ strategy questionnaire three times while at university, and the work burnout inventory three times and work engagement inventory twice during their early career. The results showed that optimism increased during university, while task-avoidance did not change. Moreover, high and increasing optimism during university predicted a high level of work engagement and low level of burnout 10, 14 and 17 years later. By contrast, a high level of task-avoidance during university predicted a low level of work engagement and high level of burnout during the early career.

Salmela-Aro, K., Tolvanen, A., & Nurmi, J. (2009). Achievement strategies during university studies predict early career burnout and engagement. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 75 (2), 162-172.
[Article summary on Science Direct]

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious — New York Times article (login required) about the publication of Jung's Red Book (link to publisher's page) due out in October 2009.

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."

Where the Desire for Change Resides
Scientists have found an area of the brain that becomes highly active when we finally decide to explore the unknown.

60-Second Psych from Scientific American podcasts
9 November 2009

Brain activity during event, failed recollection similar

A woman looks familiar, but you can't remember her name or where you met her. New research by UC Irvine neuroscientists suggests the memory exists - you simply can't retrieve it. Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the scientists discovered that a person's brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first experienced, even if specifics can't be recalled. "If the details are still there, hopefully we can find a way to access them," said Jeff Johnson, postdoctoral researcher at UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory and lead author of the study, appearing Sept. 10 in the journal Neuron. "By understanding how this works in young, healthy adults, we can potentially gain insight into situations where our memories fail more noticeably, such as when we get older," he said. "It also might shed light on the fate of vivid memories of traumatic events that we may want to forget."

In collaboration with scientists at Princeton University, Johnson and colleague Michael Rugg, CNLM director, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of students. Inside an fMRI scanner, the students were shown words and asked to perform various tasks: imagine how an artist would draw the object named by the word, think about how the object is used, or pronounce the word backward in their minds. The scanner captured images of their brain activity during these exercises. About 20 minutes later, the students viewed the words a second time and were asked to remember any details linked to them. Again, brain activity was recorded.

Utilizing a mathematical method called pattern analysis, the scientists associated the different tasks with distinct patterns of brain activity. When a student had a strong recollection of a word from a particular task, the pattern was very similar to the one generated during the task. When recollection was weak or nonexistent, the pattern was not as prominent but still recognizable as belonging to that particular task. "The pattern analyzer could accurately identify tasks based on the patterns generated, regardless of whether the subject remembered specific details," Johnson said. "This tells us the brain knew something about what had occurred, even though the subject was not aware of the information."

Smith, Daniel B. (Autumn 2009). The Doctor Is IN. The American Scholar.

At 88, Aaron Beck is now revered for an approach to psychotherapy that pushed Freudian analysis aside.

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?"

Seizure Makes Woman Mistake Herself For a Man (LiveScience.com)
By Charles Q. Choi
03 September 2009

For the first time, scientists report an instance of a brain seizure making someone believe they underwent a sex transformation.