By Susan Kelly
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, May 7, 2012
Three years ago, Valerie Hans, professor of law, applied to participate in a Cornell project that would bring together social scientists working on how people make decisions. Her goal was to better understand how juries make decisions about damage awards -- an area that lacked a theoretical framework. "But it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams," Hans said.
That's just one success story coming out Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences' 2009-12 theme project "Judgment, Decision Making and Social Behavior." A dozen professors spanning economics, psychology, government, law, policy analysis and management, human development, and business shared office space and met weekly to advance research on decision-making.
Hans and Valerie Reyna, professor of human development and of psychology, for example, applied Reyna's model of general decision-making to how juries decide to award damages. "I've presented it to legal audiences, and there's a lot of interest in it," Hans said. "To have a theoretical model that's enriched by the kinds of new knowledge about economics and psychology that we were able to learn from our colleagues in the group was really fantastic." The pair has also co-written a scholarly article and applied to Cornell for a small grant to test the model, she added.
The project team also encouraged Hans to do something she may regret, she quipped: sign up for a 10-day neuroscience boot camp.
Research by economists and psychologists on how people make decisions is an area that has exploded with scholarly work in recent years, but Cornell is one of the few universities where top-flight economists and psychologists are talking to each other about such research, said project team leader Ted O'Donoghue, professor of economics. But the Cornell scholars, who are spread across campus, have rarely had the chance to design experiments or publish papers together.
"We said, if we put our economists and psychologists together in an environment that encourages them to engage in a more intensive way, let's see what emerges," O'Donoghue said at a recent project celebration.
What emerged were 85 scholarly publications, two major national conferences, regular seminars and public lectures with visiting scholars, two Cornell workshops, a slew of joint grant proposals and new research proposals, and countless casual conversations that advanced decision-making research.
In particular, the project fostered work at the intersection of law, economics and psychology, an area in which Cornell has many scholars, and catalyzed a major conference and a volume of research in that area. The project also laid the foundation for future research in cognitive neuroscience with a workshop on the tools of neuroscience, a major conference on the neuroscience of risky decision-making and a forthcoming edited volume, O'Donoghue said.
Other research included Peter Enns' (government) finding that public opinion influences Supreme Court decisions in real, substantive ways, even when the public is unlikely to be aware of the case before the court. David Dunning (psychology) suggested that the more a person wants an object, the closer she perceives it to be. And Benjamin Ho (Johnson School) determined that that so-called "apology laws," which make doctors' apologies for botched medical events inadmissible in court, result in the greatest reduction in average payment size and settlement time in cases involving severe patient outcomes.
"These models of decision-making have had a significant impact within political science, and you see them in sociology and other spheres as well," said Kenneth Roberts, ISS' Robert S. Harrison Director and professor of government.
ISS team members standing from left, Ori Heffetz, Valerie Hans, Peter Enns, David Dunning, Emily Owens, Ted O'Donoghue and Daniel Benjamin. Seated from left, Jeffrey Rachlinski, Benjamin Ho, Valerie Reyna, Robert Frank and Vivian Zayas.
It's the interactions among 14 affiliated graduate students that may have the deepest impact, O'Donoghue said. "This is a group that is not tied down to standard traditions and is going to be much more willing to think outside the box."
Videos are now online from the 2011 Bronfenbrenner Conference, “The Neuroscience of Risky Decision Making.”
At the conference, neuroscientists, neuroeconomists and social scientists explored scientific theories about the brain mechanisms underlying risky decision-making, paving the way for translation of basic science into policy and practice.
The conference, co-organized by Valerie Reyna, professor of human development and co-director for Cornell's new Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility, and Vivian Zayas, assistant professor of psychology, drew scholars from as far away as Europe to share research on such topics as brain maturation, neural responses to rewards and punishments at different ages, emotional regulation and self-control. Many of those who participated are founders in their field.
By Susan Kelley
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, February 13, 2012
Kushnir
The Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS) at Cornell will sponsor 12 of the university's most promising social scientists for one semester, enabling them to pursue their research, free from teaching and most departmental duties.
ISS Faculty Fellows are provided with an office in Ives Hall East and a $10,000 research grant. They will move into their offices in either fall 2012 or spring 2013.
The fellowship program is intended to nurture promising young faculty members in the social sciences. It is designed to support assistant professors during the two to three years prior to their tenure review and associate professors just prior to review for promotion to full professor. The program also aims to promote intellectual exchange and interdisciplinary scholarship.
"The Faculty Fellows program provides an opportunity for faculty members to have a quiet, collegial space in which to research and write, along with concentrated time away from other responsibilities that so often make it hard to keep up with their research," said Kenneth M. Roberts, the Robert S. Harrison Director of the ISS. "The program is also a great way for faculty to connect with colleagues in other social science departments and learn from a diverse set of disciplinary perspectives."
This is the second cohort of ISS faculty fellows, and they represent the wide range of the social sciences at Cornell. The first was chosen in 2008. A search for a third group is scheduled for fall 2013.
The new fellows, their departments, research projects and fellowship period are:
Daniel Benjamin, economics, "Understanding and Developing Survey-Based Measures of Well-Being," spring 2013;
Antonio Bento, applied economics and management, "On the Costs of Climate Mitigation: A Federal Clean Energy Standard With State-Level Distributional Constraints," fall 2012;
Benjamin Cornwell, sociology, "Social Networks Dynamics and Health in Later Life," spring 2013;
Dan Cosley, information science, "Identifying, Modeling and Visualizing Disclosure of Personal Information in Social Media," spring 2013;
Raymond Craib, history, "The Death of the Firecracker Poet: The Politics of Subversion in Early 20th-Century Santiago, Chile," fall 2012;
Saida Hodzic, anthropology, "Of Rebels, Spirits and Social Engineers: The Awkward Endings of Female Genital Cutting," fall 2012;
Lee Humphreys, communication, "Privacy and Social Media: Dialects of Personal Information Sharing Online," fall 2012;
Tamar Kushnir, human development, "Developing a Concept of Choice," fall 2012;
Karel Mertens, economics, "Escaping the Liquidity Trap," fall 2012;
Tom Pepinsky, government, "Politics, Economics and Religion in Indonesia," fall 2012;
Brian Rubineau, industrial and labor relations, "Gendered Peer Effects in Engineering," fall 2012; and
Kim Weeden, sociology, "Social Mobility and Immobility in an Age of Inequality," fall 2012.
This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a landmark warning that toxic stress can harm children for life. The policy statement, published in Pediatrics (29:1), asserts that to have a well-educated healthy workforce, we must focus on reducing toxic stress in childhood. Severe or ongoing stress in childhood can harm the emerging brain structure and result in lifelong deficits in learning, behavior and health that can even be passed down to following generations, the authors say.
In drawing their conclusions, the authors cite seminal research conducted here at Cornell by the late Urie Bronfenbrenner, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of human development and of psychology, and by John Eckenrode, professor of human development and director of the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.
The pervasive importance of decision making in our lives has made it a critical subject for research. This quick review of the historyof decision science and the scholars who made the field includes our own Valerie Reyna, professor of human development and of psychology and co-director of Cornell's Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. Read the full story
Professor of human development Ritch Savin-Williams discusses teens who are ridiculed by their peers for not conforming to traditional gender roles. Read the full story
Over the past two decades mentoring programs have become a centerpiece of youth development. One source of their attraction is that many adults think fondly of mentors they had and are pleased to be able to “pay it forward.” Another is that it sounds like an easy and inexpensive way to open new opportunities for disadvantaged children and youth. While the first is a sound rationale, the second, sadly, is not completely true.
Mentoring programs require substantial investments to work well. Mentoring stands out among youth development programs and practices for the number and depth of evaluations that have been conducted, enough to yield two formal “metaanalyses,” or statistical syntheses of multiple evaluations. (The most recent is by DuBois, Portillo, Rhodes, Silverthorn, & Valentine, 2011.) These have demonstrated consistent positive effects across a wide range of youth development outcomes. The effect sizes are modest, as is true for nearly all program evaluations, but the range of impact is impressive. DuBois and his colleagues (2011, Figure 2) found positive effects on the following broad categories of outcomes: attitudinal/motivational; social/relational; psychological/emotional; conduct problems; academic/school; and physical health.
Mentoring programs exist because the young people who most need mentors are least likely to have them. One of the ways in which parents pass advantages on to their children is by means of their “social capital,” the personal connections that help them achieve their goals. Children whose parents are better educated and better paid are naturally introduced to other adults whose knowledge and social positions make them helpful advisors and advocates. Children whose parents lack those advantages themselves also have fewer opportunities to get to know adults who can help them in these ways.
Consider a 13-year old girl who thinks she might like to become an engineer. A father who is a lawyer probably knows some engineers from his college class, his professional life, church, his fitness club, or the neighborhood. And he can easily ask an engineer acquaintance to talk with his daughter about the work and the kind of education it takes. A girl of the same age growing up in a neighborhood where many people are unemployed and none are professionals may have no idea what an engineer is or does and, if she has, no access to one or to anyone else who can mentor her about a career path. This is precisely the kind of inequality that mentoring programs are designed to overcome.
But it is important to realize that mentoring programs were invented to create and maintain relationships between young people and adults outside the family that in most cases occur naturally, without benefit of a program. When asked about adults outside the family who were important to them in their youth, few adults name a program mentor; they identify instead a teacher who took a special interest in them, a coach, a religious leader, a 4-H club leader. I have met several 4-H educators who have told me they chose their career because of their admiration for a 4-H agent they knew when they were young, which is testimony to mentoring. “Natural” or “informal” mentoring, meaning mentoring outside of a mentoring program, has not been well studied but two studies in particular have yielded hints about its potential. Erikson, McDonald, and Elder (2009) found that disadvantaged youth who had a mentor at school were nearly as likely to enroll in college as their advantaged classmates. McDonald and Lambert (2011) analyzed the data from the same source, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), and found that mentored youth also got better jobs after high school.
One limitation of mentoring programs is that simply calling someone a mentor does not make him/her one. An adult is only a young person’s mentor when the young person regards her or him as a mentor. One source of power in natural mentoring, I suspect, is that mentor and mentee choose one other. No matchmaker is involved. When mentoring programs work it is because the matchmaking worked (as it can in marriages). But failed matches reduce the impact of mentoring programs because their results (which can be negative) are averaged in with the effects of matches that worked.
While it is entirely appropriate that 4-H sponsor mentoring programs (as we do with support from the U. S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention), most of the mentoring 4-Hers receive is not formally designated as such; it happens in the context of the regular 4-H program. Recognition of this natural phenomenon can also lead to its cultivation. Mary Agnes Hamilton and I (Hamilton & Hamilton, 2004) have made the case that developmentally beneficial mentoring relationships are likely to arise when youth and adults jointly engage in goal-directed activities. 4-H projects fit that bill. We have also observed that young people are attracted to adults who convey enthusiasm and are skilled, just the kinds of adults who are likely to participate in 4-H activities, whether as club leaders or short-term advisors for special activities.
What would we do differently if we took seriously the idea of 4-H as a context for natural mentoring? I don’t know. I have some ideas, but my motivation for writing this is to find out what educators think. Volunteers will have some good ideas too. Here are some thoughts in the form of assertions that require refinement and testing.
Consider whether what makes the biggest impact on youth development in 4-H may not be the content or the activity but the relationships.
Encourage 4-H leaders to be open to forming relationships that extend beyond group activities. Adults may intentionally limit the nature and depth of their involvement with youth because they do not want to overstep boundaries.
Give 4-H leaders training and support in how to build and maintain mentoring relationships. Mentoring is a natural relationship but some people are better at it than others and some of what the “naturals” do can be learned.
Give young people explicit guidance about what mentors are, why they are important, how to identify a prospective mentor, and how to ask an adult to be a mentor, or ask one adult to ask another on the youth’s behalf. Mentoring is a twoway relationship. Some young people are mentor magnets: adults are drawn to them. Other youth could learn to perform their part as mentees more actively.
Work with parents to make sure they are open to and supportive of mentoring relationships their children might form with other adults. Mentors are sometimes thought of as substitute parents, but the research is clear that mentoring has its influence through parents, not despite them (Rhodes, Grossman, & Resch, 2000).
Parent involvement is related to a critical concern about mentoring. The tragic events at Penn State are a reminder that predators can spot vulnerability in the very young people who most need mentoring and then exploit them. Background checks have become a distasteful but essential part of youth programs, and especially mentoring programs. To the extent that 4-H encourages the formation of close relationships between young people and adults outside their families, those adults, whether club leaders or in some other role, should undergo background checks. This procedure helps shield the organization and it offers some protection to young people, but considering that the vast majority of child sexual abusers are family members (30%) or people known to the family (60%) and that most offenses are never reported, background checks are hardly adequate. More important is making sure that young people have someone they can confide in when someone they trust makes them feel uncomfortable. Fortunately abuse is rare and abuse by someone a young person regards as a mentor is unlikely. Making the benefits of mentoring more widely available requires us to see how such a relationship fits into the set of relationships in a young person’s life and how those relationships can be mutually reinforcing.
References
DuBois, D.L., Portillo, N., Rhodes, J.E., Silverthorn, N., & Valentine, J.C. (2011). How effective are mentoring programs for youth? A systematic assessment of the evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12(2): 57-91.
Erickson L.D., McDonald S., & Elder Jr. G.H. (2009). Informal mentors and education: Complementary or compensatory resources? Sociology of Education, 82(4), 344-367.
Hamilton, S.F., & Hamilton, M.A. (2004). Contexts for mentoring: Adolescent-adult relationships in workplaces and communities. In R.M. Lerner & L. Steinberg (Eds.) Handbook of adolescent psychology. New York: Wiley.
McDonald, S., & Lambert, J. (2011). The long arm of mentoring: Informal adolescent mentoring and employment outcomes in young adulthood. Unpublished paper preparedfor the U.S. Department of Labor.
Rhodes, J. E., Grossman, J. B., & Resch, N. L. (2000). Agents of change: Pathways through which mentoring relationships influence adolescents’ academic adjustment. Child Development, 71, 1662–1671.
By George Lowery
Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, August 15, 2011
Helene Rosenblatt '41, who completed her Cornell degree in 1994, chats with professor Karl Pillemer Aug. 1.
When turning 50, "I began to notice some differences in my perspective on life," says Cornell gerontologist Karl Pillemer. "The things that bothered me didn't irk me so much anymore. You begin to take a longer view of things -- you see how individual events find their place in a larger context."
This led Pillemer to ask: Is there something older people know that the young don't about how to live?
To find out, Pillemer, the Hazel E. Reed Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology and professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, and colleagues collected pearls of wisdom from more than 1,500 older Americans about living better, happier lives.
In July he launched the Legacy Project blog to share hard-won insights, recommendations and philosophies of living.
Voices of reason
"Try as much as possible to avoid thinking about yourself. ... you should put yourself out of the picture as much as possible in any situation and try to think objectively, almost as if you are a camera (with emotions and feelings) recording what goes on around you and responding to it. I think one will enjoy life to a much greater extent than if thoughts about yourself govern how you react to a problem or situation."
"Enjoy and love people."
"Enjoy animals."
"Take care of yourself physically."
"Be open-minded as much as you can."
--Frederick, 68
"More important when you look back on your life are the unselfish things you have done, the love and support you have given to others, and the sense that you have made the most of your talents and opportunities. I have learned that growing up is the work of a lifetime."
--Maurice, 77
More life lessons:
"Save your money, take care of yourself, play golf."
"Choose to be happy. I even wear my Clinique perfume called 'Happy.'"
"Don't wear a miniskirt when you're 68."
"Well, I don't think my life would have worked without God in my life because my husband is Mexican-Italian and I'm English-Irish, along that line, and if we hadn't had God in our life, we just wouldn't have made it."
"Stick with your beliefs but listen to other people's sides. A couple of times I think I even voted for Democrats."
"Learn new things, don't sit back and stagnate."
"I've learned that it's much easier to be positive than negative, it's easier to smile than to frown, and when in doubt, eat chocolate!"
"A lot of my research has been on what one might call the negative or dark side of aging -- studies on elder abuse, nursing home care, Alzheimer's disease and chronic pain," Pillemer says. "But research also shows that older people are often happier than those in middle age and younger. I wanted to understand why that is and make their advice of happier living available to younger people."
Consulting the academic literature, Pillemer found that although there have been studies on "elder wisdom," older people have not been systematically asked to share practical advice about leading a happy life. Major themes emerged from his interviews, which Pillemer distilled into a set of "life lessons" in such categories as love and marriage; child rearing; work and career; aging well; avoiding regrets; dealing with loss; and prescriptions for happiness.
Contributors have submitted lists, one-line answers and what Pillemer calls "long, existential, soul-searching answers." In-depth interviews were conducted with about 600 elders across the country.
"At 70 and beyond, studies show, many people do develop a sense of purpose and serenity," Pillemer says. "We captured that perspective in hopes that younger people could learn from it."
The Legacy Project website will continue indefinitely, Pillemer says, and it welcomes new submissions from people age 60 and up, as well as comments and discussions. A new life lesson is posted daily, with plans for audio and video content to enhance the site soon.
Reading all this advice has changed Pillemer's life, he says. "One of the strongest lessons from the elders is this principle for dealing with your adult children: Don't interfere! I have two adult daughters, and I really took that advice to heart and became much more careful to offer advice only when asked. The elders give that kind of clear advice that all of us can use in everyday life."
Other major lessons: Don't worry so much; elders say they deeply regret time spent needlessly worrying. Marry someone a lot like you, who has similar values. Avoid showing favoritism to children. And get on the road: Not having traveled enough is a source of regret for many seniors.
Pillemer says the elders he interviewed "have a unique ability to advise us. We've gotten used to motivational speakers and pop psychologists instead of individuals who are right next door or in our families. People in their 70s and beyond can teach us how to meet major challenges in life and to learn to focus more on small-scale, day-to-day happiness. People into their 90s told us they feel a kind of freedom they've never felt before; they can live as they want to; they have less responsibility and are less concerned with what people think."
Another goal of the Legacy Project, says Pillemer, is to capture this practical wisdom before this oldest generation is gone.
By Ted Boscia
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, August 31, 2011
Professor John Eckenrode, director of the new Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, which merges the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center with the Family Life Development Center, celebrates the center's opening with Alan Mathios, dean of the College of Human Ecology. Photo by Robert Barker, University Photography
In a ribbon-cutting ceremony Aug. 30 at Beebe Hall, College of Human Ecology leaders officially opened the new Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR), which aims to address pressing human needs by linking social and behavioral scientists with community practitioners and policy experts.
Named for famed researcher Urie Bronfenbrenner, a co-founder of the national Head Start program and a world-renowned developmental psychologist who died in 2005, the BCTR formed July 1 with the merger of two longstanding Cornell centers: the Family Life Development Center and the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center. Its new mission is to extend research-based knowledge to test and strengthen community-based programs, practices and policies, according to BCTR Director John Eckenrode.
"In the spirit of its namesake, the new Bronfenbrenner Center will bridge the gap between research and practice, helping to solve a problem that exists both at Cornell and in society at large," said Eckenrode, professor of human development. "Too often, practitioners view research as esoteric and irrelevant, while researchers perceive application as trivial and unscientific."
The BCTR expands the outreach mission of the College of Human Ecology to further emphasize translational research, inviting community members, practitioners and policymakers as active participants in the discovery process. By connecting researchers with multiple stakeholders, scientists come to understand the community's most urgent needs and develop studies to address those challenges.
"Many programs intended to benefit children, youth, elders and families are not scientifically tested, and insights from basic research are rarely used systematically to guide the development of new programs," Eckenrode said. "When research is translated into practice, the process is often too slow and unsystematic. It is precisely these problems that translational research is intended to address, and this is where the BCTR will make unique contributions."
More than 50 Cornell social and behavioral scientists, as well as professional and support staff members, are affiliated with the BCTR, which will seek to partner with Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Cornell Office for Research and Evaluation, Weill Cornell Medical College's Clinical and Translational Science Center, the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research, New York 4-H and many other campus research and training centers.
Examples of BCTR activities include:
systematic reviews of the scientific literature to inform new research and guide practitioners and decision-makers;
creation and rigorous testing of interventions to promote healthy development;
community outreach and community participation in behavioral science research;
research on the implementation, dissemination and sustainability of evidence-based programs, practices and guidelines; and
research and development on the translational process itself, studying how best to move research findings into practice and policy.
The center will also train the next generation of scholars in translational research methods through coursework and community projects for Cornell undergraduate and graduate students.
On Sept. 22-23, the BCTR will host the third biennial Urie Bronfenbrenner Conference, with speakers from across the country set to present research on the event's theme, "The Neuroscience of Risky Decision Making." Valerie Reyna, professor of human development, and Vivian Zayas, assistant professor of psychology, are organizing the conference.
Ted Boscia is assistant director of communications for the College of Human Ecology.
If you're experiencing emotional stress following the flood, don't try to get through it alone.
Sharing your experience with others is crucial to recovering from flood-induced damage to properties and livelihoods, according to mental health experts. One of the experts quoted is Elaine Wethington, professor in the department of human development at Cornell University. Read the full story.
Videos are now online 
