On April 25-26, eighteen Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) educators and executive directors attended an advanced Research Navigator Workshop at Cornell. The workshop was planned and facilitated by Karl Pillemer and Jennifer Tiffany.
College of Human Ecology faculty – Jane Mendle, Valerie Reyna, Nancy Wells, Tony Burrow, Gary Evans, and Rebecca Seguin – met with the group to present their “intellectual autobiographies” as researchers, describe current and future research projects, and work with the CCE educators to plan potential partnerships. The BCTR's John Eckenrode (director) and Debbie Sellers (director of research and evaluation) introduced the group to the center’s mission and resources.
By Anne Ju
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, April 4, 2013
A $100 million federal research initiative aimed at revolutionizing understanding of the human brain received key scientific direction from researchers at Cornell’s Kavli Institute for Nanoscale Science.
On April 2, President Barack Obama unveiled the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative, launched with $100 million to be allocated in fiscal year 2014.
Similar in spirit to the Human Genome Project, BRAIN will help researchers find new ways to treat, cure and prevent brain disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and traumatic brain injury, according to a White House press release. It will also accelerate development and application of new technologies to produce dynamic pictures of the brain’s cells and complex neural circuits, opening new doors to exploring the brain’s many intricate processes.
In creating the ambitious initiative, the White House called upon such agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as such private-sector partners such as the Kavli Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, to help shape the initiative’s goals.
Over the last year, Cornell’s Kavli Institute, led by director Paul McEuen, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics, and Kavli member Chris Xu, associate professor of applied and engineering physics, participated in several meetings with scientists to define challenges and opportunities related to studying the brain, which formed the basis for recommendations for the initiative, McEuen said.
“We helped to identify emergent optical and electronic techniques useful for brain imaging,” said McEuen, who attended Obama’s April 2 briefing on BRAIN.
Mapping the brain is already on the minds of many Cornell scientists. A new MRI facility in Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, for example, will facilitate cross-college collaborations in this area.
Research from Karl Pillemer's Legacy Project is quoted in the Huffington Post's Lifestyle blog.
What do older people regret when they look back over their lives? I asked hundreds of the oldest Americans that question. I had expected big-ticket items: an affair, a shady business deal, addictions -- that kind of thing. I was therefore unprepared for the answer they often gave:
I wish I hadn't spent so much of my life worrying.
Over and over, as the 1,200 elders in our Legacy Project reflected on their lives, I heard versions of "I would have spent less time worrying" and "I regret that I worried so much about everything." Indeed, from the vantage point of late life, many people felt that if given a single "do-over" in life, they would like to have all the time back they spent fretting anxiously about the future. Read the full story.
The Boston Globe quotes Deinera Exner-Cortens, doctoral student in human development who has studied teen dating abuse.
It may be the last thing that parents talk to their children about, though it might be one of the most important: a teenager’s romantic relationship.
As the recent conviction of Nathaniel Fujita, 20, for the murder of his former girlfriend, Lauren Astley, 18, illustrated, dating violence can have catastrophic consequences.
While murder may be an extreme outcome, teen dating abuse is more common and may have longer-reaching health effects than parents realize, experts say. Read the full story.
Valerie Reyna was recently interviewed for a BBCSS Member Spotlight about her area of research, how she got interested in it, greatest achievements in the field, and the future of behavioral, cognitive and sensory sciences. Read the full story.
In this post on the BCTR Translational Neuroscience blog, Barbara Ganzel, Research Scientist in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University highlights what is happening in the adolescent brain.
Reflection on our own adolescent years may include memories of excitingly risky activities or profound emotional vulnerability, or both. Risk and vulnerability are at the heart of two critical themes in research on adolescence. Adolescence is a period of heightened risk-taking behavior (Steinberg, 2008) and it is also the peak developmental period for the onset of psychological disturbance (Paus, Keshavan, & Giedd, 2008). However, a third theme in research on adolescence is at odds with these stereotypes of teenage emotional chaos and out-of-control behavior. This third theme highlights youth resilience and the ability to adapt and thrive in the expanding social world of the teenager (Crone & Dahl, 2012). Neuroscience unites these three themes by shedding light on the peculiarities of the adolescent brain and their impact on behavior. To understand adolescent behavior, it is helpful to look at what is happening in the adolescent brain – and this is a story that begins much earlier in life. Read the full story.
This story on aging and mental health in the New York Times Well blog quotes Karl Pillermer, gerontologist and professor of human development at Cornell.
Marvin Tolkin was 83 when he decided that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. Until then, it had never occurred to him that there might be emotional “issues” he wanted to explore with a counselor.
“I don’t think I ever needed therapy,” said Mr. Tolkin, a retired manufacturer of women’s undergarments who lives in Manhattan and Hewlett Harbor, N.Y.
Though he wasn’t clinically depressed, Mr. Tolkin did suffer from migraines and “struggled through a lot of things in my life” — the demise of a long-term business partnership, the sudden death of his first wife 18 years ago. He worried about his children and grandchildren, and his relationship with his current wife, Carole. Read the full story.
By Sarah Cutler
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, November 7, 2012
Tommy Rucker '13 and graduate student Nadia Chernyak, both research team members of the Early Childhood Cognition Laboratory, work with Ruby Yantorno-France, 3, at the Sciencenter in Ithaca Nov. 1. - Linsay France, University Photography
"Doggy feels sad today," Nadia Chernyak, a Cornell graduate student, recently said as she showed a dog puppet to several children at the Sciencenter, a hands-on science museum in Ithaca. Chernyak '08, M.A. '09, was conducting an experiment with the children and had given them colorful stickers, which they presumably wanted to keep.
The kids -- between 2 and 4 years old -- could cheer up the puppet only by giving him a sticker. Some faced what Chernyak called an "easy choice": either share their sticker with the puppet or hand it to Chernyak, who would throw it away. Others had a tougher decision: keep the sticker for themselves or share it with the puppet. After making their decisions, the children received three more stickers and the choice to share some with a different toy, "Ellie," a stuffed elephant.
Chernyak found that most children shared their stickers with Doggy, and the ones who made difficult choices in the first stage were more willing to share a second time with Ellie. Her findings, part of her dissertation on children's moral development, suggest that kids may learn empathy in part by making difficult autonomous choices.
Chernyak's investigation is contributing to a larger study overseen by Tamar Kushnir, the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor of Child Development and director of the College of Human Ecology's Early Childhood Cognition (ECC) Laboratory, which is investigating how young children develop a concept of choice and its influence on their behaviors and perceptions.
Through a novel partnership begun last February, undergraduate and graduate students in Kushnir's lab have conducted experiments with more than 500 children at the Sciencenter. The collaboration began after Kushnir, Michelle Kortenaar, Sciencenter director of education, and Charles Trautmann, the center's executive director and Cornell adjunct associate professor of engineering, explored a mutual interest in involving young children in research and creating more evidence-based programs at the museum focused on learning in early childhood.
"It's viewed as a benefit to our guests to have their kids take part in this research," Trautmann said.
The ECC lab's work at the Sciencenter has helped researchers share their findings, said Kushnir, who also examines how toddlers and preschoolers understand cause and effect.
"Parents are watching as you play with the kids, and they'll ask, 'What happened there?' and a researcher will explain it to them. Our researchers are disseminating directly to parents," she said. "So science gets done, museums get support, research gets support and students get trained."
The Sciencenter has shown its visitors "what research looks like," Kortenaar said, and Cornell graduate students have made two presentations on their study findings.
She also noted that parents and caretakers have largely been enthusiastic about involving their children in the experiments.
An exhibit based on the ECC lab's work and a plan to expand the partnership to include teaching along with research are under discussion. Kushnir added a service-learning component to her senior seminar to create interactive tools for young children and their parents to use the museum to learn about science in an age-appropriate way.
This partnership is part of a larger national trend encouraging informal childhood learning, Kushnir said: "We're part of a large group of museums and labs doing this kind of thing; it's happening in San Francisco, New York, Minnesota, Chicago -- every major urban center -- and tiny little Ithaca. As long as I'm around, this isn't going anywhere."
Sarah Cutler '16 is a student communications assistant for the College of Human Ecology.
By Ted Boscia
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, December 4, 2012
Mendle
Teens who date and are sexually active are known to be at elevated risk for depression, but why those associations exist is poorly understood.
Now a new Cornell study has found that casual sexual "hookups" increased a teenager's odds for clinical-level depression nearly threefold, whereas dating and sexual activity within a committed relationship had no significant impact. The effects held true for boys and girls, though younger teens (13-15 years old) who had so-called "nonromantic sex" faced substantially greater risks for depression. In contrast, dating alone was not linked to depressive symptoms, nor was sexual activity within a stable, committed relationship.
Researchers led by Jane Mendle, assistant professor of human development in Cornell's College of Human Ecology, said the study provides evidence that "context is key" when trying to understand how teen relationships and sex affect their well-being. The research is published online in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
"Many historical and media perspectives have presented adolescent sexuality as an indicator of problematic or even socially deviant behavior," Mendle said. "But this study and other recent findings are showing that's not the case, and adolescent dating and sexuality can be viewed as normal developmental behavior."
Using a novel behavioral genetics approach that compares siblings growing up in the same home, Mendle and her co-authors analyzed responses from 1,551 sibling pairs ages 13-18 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students initiated in the mid-1990s. Among other topics, teens answered questions about their mental health and dating and sexual history. Nearly two-thirds of the sample's youth had dated, and two-thirds were virgins.
By comparing siblings in their study, the authors could control for family and environmental influences that might also raise one's risk for depression.
"We designed the study to give us a purer way to isolate many of the factors that could be contributing to depression," Mendle said. "It allows us to compare specific types of social activities -- in this case, dating and romantic and nonromantic sex -- to see their overall effect."
The paper notes that not all the associations at play can be unraveled, however. For instance, some teens who have depressive symptoms or clinical depression may be more likely to engage in casual sexual behaviors.
Mendle, a licensed clinical psychologist who studies how such developmental processes as puberty and sexual maturation influence teens' emotional growth, believes adolescent sexuality is important to study because it is closely tied to how well people transition into adulthood.
"One of the hallmarks of adolescence is the formation of romantic relationships, and we know that what happens in adolescence is strongly related to your psychological, physical and financial well-being for years to come," Mendle said. "Findings like this can help shape the dialogue and public debate about how to best support teen sexual health, psychological development and other areas."
The study co-authors include Sarah Moore, a Cornell graduate student in the field of human development; Joseph Ferrero, formerly a graduate student at the University of Oregon; and Paige Harden, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas.
The study was funded in part by Cornell.
Ted Boscia is assistant director of communications for the College of Human Ecology.
By Ted Boscia
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, December 4, 2012
Whitlock
Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) -- deliberately harming one's body through such acts as cutting, burning or biting -- is a primary risk factor for future suicide in teens and young adults, finds a new longitudinal study of college students led by a Cornell mental health researcher.
The paper, published online Dec. 4 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, describes how NSSI, thought to be a coping mechanism for some individuals in distress, may also open the door to more dangerous actions by lowering one's inhibitions to suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
"While we can't conclude that self-injury leads to later suicide attempts, it is a red flag that someone is distressed and is at greater risk," said lead author Janis Whitlock, Ph.D. '03, a research scientist in the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR). "This is important because self-injury is a relatively new behavior that does not show up much in the literature as a risk factor for suicide. It also suggests that if someone with self-injury history becomes suicidal, having engaged in NSSI may make it much easier to carry out the physical actions needed to lethally damage the body."
In a longitudinal study of 1,466 students at five U.S. colleges, Whitlock, director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behavior in Adolescents and Young Adults, and co-investigators found NSSI to precede or coincide with suicidal thoughts and behaviors in slightly more than 60 percent of cases observed.
Participants, most in their early 20s, answered a confidential mental health survey annually for three years that assessed their history of NSSI and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, along with demographic information and common protective and risk factors. Researchers found that, independent of other risk factors, people who had self-injured were nearly three times as likely to attempt or consider suicide, while those with a history of five or more instances of self-injury were four times more likely to do so. The study has implications for NSSI treatment and suicide prevention. Previous studies have shown as many as 20 percent of college students and 25-35 percent of teens have a lifetime history of NSSI. Given its prevalence, Whitlock noted that physicians and others who work with youth should be better trained to spot such behaviors and assess for suicide risk.
Of many protective factors considered, the study identified two that appear to help lower the suicide risk in young people with a history of NSSI. Participants who had confided in their parents about their distress and those who perceived meaning in life were significantly less likely to show suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
"Meaning in life as a protective factor is not so surprising, because many who attempt suicide report that they feel a deep and often chronic lack of life meaning," Whitlock said. "However, considering that we studied a college population, it's a surprise that the parents emerged as having such a powerful influence in young adults' mental well-being, especially since we looked at respondents' relationships with all kinds of people, including therapists. Treatments for people at risk for suicide should focus on strengthening these relationships when feasible."
Cornell co-authors on the paper include John Eckenrode, BCTR director and professor of human development, and Amanda Purington, BCTR research support specialist.
The research was supported by a grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Ted Boscia is assistant director of communications for the College of Human Ecology.
