Articles on the Web

Articles on the Web

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Emotions -- particularly those provoked by negative events -- can cause distorted, inaccurate memories, but less often in children than in adults, according to a new Cornell study.

The findings, published online in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, contradict prevailing legal and psychological thinking and have implications for the criminal justice system, report Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna, professors of human development and co-authors of the 2005 book "The Science of False Memory." Read More

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Children have always fascinated Evalyn Edwards Milman '60, who recently made a gift of $2 million to endow the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professorship in Early Childhood Development in the College of Human Ecology. Read more

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It's the last place you want to be judged on your looks. But in a court of law, it pays to be attractive, according to a new Cornell study that has found that unattractive defendants tend to get hit with longer, harsher sentences -- on average 22 months longer in prison. Read more

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Teens and young adults who self injure -- such as by biting, cutting, burning, head banging, punching and scratching themselves -- often do so as a coping mechanism, independent of other mental illness, according to a Cornell study. Read more

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Haiti still needs help, teen leaders from the Community Improvement Through Youth (CITY) Project in Broome County said, as they hosted a multicultural Haitian Appreciation benefit at Binghamton High School, May 22. Working through the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Broome County, the teen leaders partnered with local youth and Binghamton University's Liberty Partnership Program to plan and hold the benefit. Read more

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Karene Booker

Adapted from "Researchers Develop Simple Tools to Predict Cognitive Decline in Aging" by Lauren Gold, Cornell Chronicle, 1/26/10.

For most people, misplacing the car keys or forgetting a name is an occasional annoyance of normal aging. But sometimes forgetfulness can signal the beginning of deterioration in language, attention, reasoning, judgment or memory. With large numbers of aging baby boomers, the need for simple, accurate clinical tools that identify memory changes associated with cognitive impairment is increasingly important.

In a collaboration between Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and Cornell's Ithaca campus, Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna, professors of Human Development and of Psychology, have teamed up with Dr. Cary Reid, Weill Cornell geriatrician and investigator with CITRA, on a project that will improve tools for predicting and diagnosing  memory loss.

The Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA), brings together community based organizations, social scientists, and medical researchers to address pressing problems in the field of aging. The contribution of CITRA's expertise and infrastructure was pivotal in securing national support.

Now, with a two-year grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act via the National Institutes of Health, the team is investigating whether a decline in a particular type of memory, called reconstructive memory, predicts cognitive impairment in the elderly. If the hypothesis bears out, it could lead to a breakthrough in our ability to detect cognitive decline years before the onset of major symptoms.

According to data from other studies, healthy elderly adults become mildly cognitively impaired at a rate of about 10 percent per year after age 70. Clinicians use a variety of neuropsychological tests to predict and diagnose the condition. However, the most reliable single test -- a basic verbal recall task in which a subject hears a sequence of words and then is asked to recall them – does not accurately predict future impairment.

That could be because people use three distinct strategies -- verbatim recall, reconstruction and familiarity judgment -- to retrieve information from memory. Earlier studies by Brainerd and Reyna have shown that verbatim recall, in which subjects mentally picture or hear the actual word, declines with age. To compensate, older adults use reconstruction, in which they remember something about the word (it was an animal, for example; or it started with the letter "p"), and then familiarity judgment, in which they sift through possible candidate words until they identify the right one. Since reconstructive memory relies on associations and experiences, which can be accessed through multiple pathways and networks in the brain, it is more robust and usually spared in healthy aging, Brainerd said.

But a decline in reconstructive memory could be an important and more accurate indicator of the extensive deterioration throughout the brain that causes cognitive impairment. To test the hypothesis, Brainerd and Reyna developed a mathematical model that analyzes data from verbal recall tests and estimates the amount a subject relies on each of the three memory processes.

In the first phase of the study, the researchers are using the model to analyze data from more than 800 previously tested adults -- some healthy and others already diagnosed with cognitive impairment -- and examining whether a decline in reconstructive memory is more closely linked with cognitive impairment among groups of people.

In the second phase, the researchers are testing and tracking 200 older adults over 18 months to see if performance in reconstructive memory predicts later emergence of impairment on an individual level. Recruitment and testing of study participants is now underway at sites in Ithaca and New York City and will gain momentum this summer as undergraduate and graduate students join the project. Dr. Reid is facilitating recruitment of study participants through the Irving Sherwood Wright Center on Aging in New York City and has been very helpful in advancing the project, said Reyna.

The findings could improve testing and treatment for impairment dramatically, Brainerd said. "Like any disease, the sooner you can identify it the better."

"The project is a model for integrating teaching and research and demonstrates the critical role of research-community infrastructure to facilitate and inform the research."

Human Development Outreach & Extension

Human Development Today e-News

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Karene Booker

Alzheimers is a devastating disease, the more so because the onset can be confusing and difficult to detect.

Barbara Lust, professor of Human Development at Cornell University, and her colleagues want to discover and define changes in language function that occur in early and preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in order to contrast these changes with those that may occur normally with aging.

With a grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences, and seed grant funding from both CITRA (Cornell Institute for Translational Research) and  BLCC (Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center), the interdisciplinary team will complete collection and analysis of pilot data and share their initial findings. In addition to Barbara Lust, the team includes Janet Sherman, Massachusetts General Hospital; Suzanne Flynn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Alexander Immerman, Cornell Language Acquisition Lab. For the study, the researchers will administer a set of language and thought tasks to participants and look for differences among three groups: a healthy aging group, a group of patients with early Alzheimers’ Disease, and a group of young adults, 20-29 years old. In addition, a study of the role of bilingualism will be initiated.

Results from the cognitive and linguistic tasks will be correlated to data from a detailed background questionnaire, designed to gather information about potential mediating social and personal factors. This will allow them test a wealth of hypotheses regarding the development and impairment of language and thought in normal aging and clinical AD.

If they find changes in language function in early and preclinical AD, it may facilitate the development of sensitive preclinical diagnostic tools that could aid in early detection of AD and assessment of its progress. In doing so, this project aims to contribute to the  development of appropriate clinical and social interventions.

Human Development Outreach & Extension

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Karene Booker

Would  rewards or penalties work better for encouraging people to buy healthy food?  Will involving a person's family or faith-based social network improve an obesity intervention? How can state-of-the-art technologies be leveraged to measure people's exposure to stressors reliably and effectively, to help researchers study the links between stress exposure and health outcomes?

These are but a few of the questions that Elaine Wethington is tackling with her colleagues. She is playing a central role in three new prestigious grants which bring together accomplished interdisciplinary teams of scientists from economics, psychology, sociology, nutrition, marketing, epidemiology, and statistics. Wethington is a medical sociologist who is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Human Development and of Sociology. She is an expert in the study of stress and health and in translational research methods. Her major research interests are in the areas of stress and the protective mechanisms of social networks. She is co-director of the new Translational Research Institute on Pain in Later Life (funded by the National Institute on Aging and directed by Dr. Cary Reid of the Weill Division of Geriatrics), as well as the director of its Pilot Studies program.

A five-year, $6 million dollar grant will fund the Cornell Center for Behavioral Intervention Development to Prevent Obesity, a collaboration between Cornell University in Ithaca and the Weill Cornell Medical College. The goal of the new Center will be to translate basic behavioral and social science discoveries into effective behavioral interventions that reduce obesity and obesity related diseases in Black and Latino communities. The team will focus on behavior changes, not dieting - testing personalized strategies aimed at reducing weight and increasing physical activity in a way people can maintain over time.

In this project, Wethington will contribute her expertise to developing and designing the interventions, analyzing the results of participant interviews, and examining the impact of stressor exposure on the success of interventions. Dr. Mary Charlson, professor of integrative medicine at Weill leads the project. Other team members include Carol Devine, Division of Nutritional Sciences; Brian Wansink, Department of Applied Economics and Management; Martin Wells, Statistical Sciences; and Drs. Carla Boutin Foster, Erica Phillips-Cesar, Walid Michelen, and Bala Kanna from Weill Cornell. Harlem and South Bronx community health clinics affiliated with the Weill health system are participating as full partners in the development studies.

Another new study will team up researchers from the College of Human Ecology and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to explore strategies for influencing eating behavior. The work is supported by a nearly $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The research team will study how how shoppers respond to having easy to understand nutritional information available and to food pricing. Answers to these questions will shed light on the potential effectiveness of pricing policies designed to curb America’s appetite for “junk food.” Brian Wansink, Professor of Applied Economics and Management, leads the project. Wethington will focus on analyzing findings, as well as on developing the sampling, recruitment, and retention efforts for the study.  Other team members include John Cawley, Policy Analysis and Management; Jeffery Sobal from the Division of Nutritional Sciences; and David Just, William Schulze and Harry Kaiser from the Department of Applied Economics and Management.

In an existing 4-year grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse, Wethington is collaborating with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University to develop valid, reliable, yet cost-effective instruments to measure chronic stress exposure in field studies. The instruments include hand-held devices for assessing chronic stress exposure and a web-based retrospective interview to assess stress exposure over a one-year period.  These instruments are being developed to support research on how stress affects health outcomes and how such effects are influenced by genetic factors. In this study, Wethington's contribution is focused on developing the web-based retrospective interview.  The team is led by Prof. Thomas Kamarck of the University of Pittsburgh Psychology department; team members include Drs. Barbara Anderson and Saul Shiffman at the University of Pittsburgh, and Drs. Daniel Sieworek and Asim Smailagic at Carnegie-Mellon.

These and other recent grants demonstrate the interest funders have in research that spans disciplines and translates basic behavioral and social science discoveries into effective behavioral interventions.

"The National Institute of Health recognizes that the 'team approach', involving established experts from multiple disciplines, has proven effective for tackling tough problems in health care and delivery, such as health disparities" states Wethington. "For some issues, such as reliable measurement of stressor exposure, social and psychological scientists are being encouraged to collaborate with computer scientists and engineers are developing health promotion and tracking devices. Social scientists who measure and study population health are being encouraged to collaborate with community health workers, health clinics, and frontline service agencies."

Effective collaboration strategies are the keys to success.Wethington adds: "No one discipline has the answer to every question. This is an exciting and rewarding time to be a health researcher.  You feel like you may be making a long-lasting contribution to the well-being of the population, while also benefiting from learning new things yourself."

Further Resources

Wethington, E., Breckman, R., Meador, R., Lachs, M. S., Carrington Reid, M., Sabir, M. & Pillemer, K. (2007).  The CITRA Pilot Studies Program:  Mentoring Translational Research.  The Gerontologist, 47, 845-50.

Wethington, E. & Pillemer, K.  (2007).  Translating Basic Research into Community Practice:  The Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA). Forum on Public Policy Online, Winter 2007.

Human Development Outreach & Extension

Human Development Today e-News

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Karene Booker

That is Tamar Kushnir’s passion. She has been awarded two new grants that will build our understanding of the mechanisms of learning in young children with important implications for the study of cognitive development as well as for early childhood education and parenting.

Young Children’s Understanding of Free Will

When do children learn how not to do something they want to do? Every parent wants to know! The answer has important implications for parenting and early childhood education. Free will, the notion that someone who has performed an action could have done otherwise, plays a central role in adults’ explanations of behavior and is critical to our ability to reason about moral obligation and social responsibility. Yet, very little research has examined the development of the concept in children.

Tamar Kushnir, Assistant Professor of Human Development and her colleagues, Henry Wellman, University of Michigan and Alison Gopnik, University of California at Berkeley, propose to do just that. In a new grant from the Causal Learning Collaborative through the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the team will study preschoolers’ reasoning about their choices and actions.

Research on children’s learning shows that by the time children are 4 or 5 years old, they can reason about the psychological causes of human actions, including goals, beliefs, desires, and intentions.  They can make distinctions between actions caused by psychological states such as desires and those caused by physical forces or biological processes.  Preschoolers are also able to reason about things that might have happened.  Thus, it is plausible that preschoolers may have some concept of freedom of choice.

Preliminary work by Kushnir, graduate student Nadia Chernyak, and her colleagues has shown that 4-year-olds can already reason about freedom of choice in some circumstances, but important developmental differences exist between 4- and 6-year olds.  In particular, 4-year-olds appreciate that in some situations they would have been able to freely choose a course of action, while in other situations their actions are constrained. However, 4-year-olds cannot reason about the freedom to inhibit or not do a desired action, whereas 6-year-olds can.

The researchers have designed two studies to look more deeply at young children’s understanding of free will.  In one, the researchers will examine preschoolers’ understanding of free versus constrained actions in more depth, hoping to establish an early link between action understanding, social cognition, and moral reasoning. In the second study, the researchers will look more closely at developmental differences in children’s reasoning about not doing an action and their own inhibitory control.

Who Knows Best? How Children Evaluate Who to Learn From

In another grant, from the Institute for the Social Sciences, Kushnir will conduct preliminary studies on how 3- and 4-year-old children evaluate evidence from experts in light of their own experiences through play.

Increasingly very young children are being exposed to formal instruction, either at home or in academically-oriented preschool programs. More research is needed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this trend in early childhood education. The notion that dominates theories of young children’s learning – that they learn best through play and active exploratory experiences – suggests that that instruction may not benefit this age group. On the other hand, research on developing social cognition has shown that even preschoolers understand that some people know more than others, and this understanding guides who they choose to learn from.

These experiments involve causal learning, both because causal knowledge has been shown to be central to young children’s early concepts and because new research shows that play is critical to causal learning. One study looks at whether 3- and 4-year olds take into account another person’s level of expertise when there is ambiguous or conflicting evidence from the their own play. Another study looks at whether preschoolers know that some types of causal learning benefit from instruction whereas others may benefit more from their own play.

Findings from these studies will build on a growing body of research on the mechanisms of learning in young children with important implications for the study of cognitive development as well as for early childhood education.

“We hope studies such as these will shed light on the process by which children learn – and specifically how social cognition and social context influence early learning," said Kushhir.  "Maybe more importantly, though, we hope this research will inspire people to talk to children, answer their questions, and also to listen to them and ask them questions."

She ended with a challenge, do your own 'experiments;' find out what the young minds around us are capable of.  I promise they will amaze you.”

Human Development Outreach & Extension

Human Development Today e-News

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The NYS AYD Partnership is excited to introduce new outreach material for local, county-based AYD training teams. In an effort to attract new audiences to AYD, the professional development training for youth workers, the partnership has developed six new brochures that target specific professional and community groups that work with young people: coaches, youth ministers, staff of Probation/DSS and Youth Services, teachers, after school professionals and law enforcement.

Two sets of brochures targeting different audiences are available online. County-based AYD teams can add local contact information electronically. Below are are samples of each brochure set. A poster advertising AYD training is available as well. The poster (17”x11”) is ideal for community or workplace bulletin boards.

AYD Brochure AYD Brochure

For Further Information
AYD website

AYD Brochures

Contact Jutta Dotterweich at jd81@cornell.edu.

Human Development Outreach & Extension

Human Development Today e-News