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Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, May 18, 2015

Fourteen Cornell scholars (11 faculty members and one faculty member-graduate student team) received 2015 awards from the Jeffrey S. Lehman Fund for Scholarly Exchange with China. The fund provides grants to initiate research projects, sponsor research-related conferences or workshops, host visitors from China or support faculty travel to China to work on collaborative research projects.

Projects and winners are:

  • Integrating Eastern and Western Medicine to Address Iron Deficiency In Rural Chinese Women. Project director: Laura Pompano, doctoral candidate in the field of nutritional sciences, and Jere D. Haas, the Nancy Schlegel Meinig Professor of Maternal and Child Nutrition, Division of Nutritional Sciences;
  • Manufacturing Revolutions: The Socialist Development of a Chinese Auto-Industrial Base. Project director: Victor Seow, assistant professor, Department of History;
  • Chinese Medicine and Healing: Translating Practice. Project director: TJ Hinrichs, associate professor, Department of History;
  • China/Cornell Media Arts Exchange Program. Project director: J.P. Sniadecki, assistant professor, Department of Performing and Media Arts;
  • Constructing the Autobiographical Self in Cyberspace. Project director: Qi Wang, professor, Department of Human Development;
  • Inflation, String Theory, and Cosmic Strings. Project directors: David Chernoff, professor, Department of Astronomy, and Liam McAllister, professor, Department of Physics;
  • Conference and Publication on Feminist Jurisprudence in Shanghai. Project director: Cynthia Grant Bowman, the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence, Law School;
  • Ricci Flow on 4manifolds and Applications. Project director: Xiaodong Cao, associate professor, Department of Mathematics;
  • Beijing Film and Digital Media Initiative. Project directors: Tim Murray, director, Society for the Humanities, and Amy Villarejo, chair, Department of Performing and Media Arts;
  • Creating China? Transnational Public Intellectuals and the Making of Contemporary Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. Project director: Allen Carlson, associate professor, Department of Government.

For more information, contact the East Asia Program in the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at cueap@cornell.edu.

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Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, May 27, 2015

Students, faculty and staff in Cornell's contract colleges have won State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor's Awards for Excellence for 2015.

Faculty and staff recipients of the award have served their campuses and communities with distinction. Students were honored as leaders, role models and volunteers, and for their academic achievements.

Those honored this year are:

  • Excellence in Faculty Service: Carol Devine, professor of nutritional sciences, College of Human Ecology (HE); Mark Sorrells, plant breeding and genetics, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).
  • Excellence in Professional Service: Lars Angenent, biological and environmental engineering, CALS; Ann LaFave, CALS Office of Academic Programs; Thomas O’Toole, executive director, Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, HE.
  • Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities: Charles Brainerd, professor and chair of human development, HE.
  • Excellence in Teaching: Anthony Burrow, assistant professor of human development, HE; Jeffrey Niederdeppe, associate professor of communication, CALS; M. Todd Walter, associate professor, biological and environmental engineering, CALS.
  • Student Excellence: Alexa Bakker ‘15, science of natural and environment systems, (CALS); Katherine Bibi, DVM ‘15, College of Veterinary Medicine; Emily Clark ’15, policy analysis and management, CALS; Atticus DeProspo ‘15, industrial and labor relations (ILR School); Owen Lee-Park ’15, human biology, health and society (HE); Rachel Harmon ‘15, industrial and labor relations (ILR); Aaron Match ‘15, atmospheric science (CALS); Patrick Satchell, DVM ’15, veterinary medicine; and Maia Vernacchia ‘15, food science (CALS).

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Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, April 6, 2015
Stephen Ceci
Stephen Ceci

Stephen Ceci, Cornell’s Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology, and 15 other scholars nationwide have been elected the newest members of the National Academy of Education (NAEd) for their outstanding scholarship on education. The NAEd advances high-quality education research and its application to policy formation and practice.

Ceci, a professor in the Department of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology, has authored or co-authored more than 400 academic publications and won numerous awards, such as the E.L. Thorndike Award for Lifetime Contribution in Research from the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award from the Society for Research in Child Development and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science.

His education-related research has focused on women and science, including numerous inquiries into the reasons for female academics’ underrepresentation in math-intensive fields, as well as his bio-ecological theory of intelligence.

Ceci joins current Cornell scholars Robert Sternberg, professor of human development, and Ronald Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, as NAEd members.

In another honor, Ceci was recently inducted in the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences Gallery of Scientists.

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By Sharon Tregaskis
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, May 15, 2015
urie460
A half century ago, Cornell developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner gave Congressional testimony that eventually led to the creation of the Head Start program.

 

Testifying before Congress in 1964, Cornell developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner urged lawmakers to fight “poverty where it hits first and most damagingly – in early childhood.”

Intrigued by his work, Lady Bird Johnson invited Bronfenbrenner to tea at the White House, where he shared his findings on early childhood programs he had observed abroad. In January 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Sargent Shriver empaneled 13 experts – including Bronfenbrenner – to develop a federally funded preschool program for the nation’s poorest children.

In May 1965, federal Head Start was born, announced in a Rose Garden speech by Johnson. “Five- and six-year-old children are inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators,” the president said. “Unless we act, these children will pass it on to the next generation, like a family birthmark.”

In its first summer, the six-week program reached 500,000 youngsters; in the 50 years since, it has provided 32 million infants, toddlers and preschoolers with health, educational and family support services. On May 18, the National Head Start Association will mark the milestone by planting rose bushes at programs nationwide and celebrating with members of Congress.

Among Head Start’s architects, Bronfenbrenner stood out for his dynamic systems theory of human development – which became synonymous with the field of human ecology and inspired the renaming of Cornell’s College of Human Ecology in 1969. A champion of field-based observations in children’s homes, schools and neighborhoods, Bronfenbrenner upended the conventions of mid-20th century developmental psychology, which had taken a decontextualized, sterilized approach.

For Bronfenbrenner, it wasn’t enough to look narrowly at children. To understand the effect of a mother’s employment on a child’s development, for example, he urged investigators to consider the child’s age, the quality of daycare in the mother’s absence, her attitude toward her work, the family’s race and income level and the father’s employment status and attitude toward his partner’s work and family duties.

On the Cornell faculty from 1948 until his death in 2005, Bronfenbrenner formulated a theory of human development that reflects not only individual personalities and potential, but also the dynamic interplay among members of the family, the family’s place in their neighborhood and community, that community’s place and the pervasive influence of macrosystem factors, including social policy, the legal system and economic trends.

“He wanted us to include the real-world messiness that we were intent on excluding, because at that time we thought of it as methodological noise,” said longtime collaborator Stephen Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology.

As the extended family of the 19th century gave way to increasingly fractured variants, Bronfenbrenner campaigned for policies to bolster and sustain the family as society’s most vital building block through programs like Head Start; minimum income programs for impoverished families; paid leave for new parents and flexible work hours for those with older children; affordable, high-quality childcare; gun control; and universal health care.

“Urie was a grand theorist whose theories were reflected in the comprehensive nature of Head Start, in the recognition of the need to support families and enrich the educational experiences of children and take care of children’s emotional and physical well-being,” says Jeanette Valentine, Ph.D ’76, co-author of “Head Start: A Legacy of the War on Poverty.”

A proponent for the power of family ties to help children reach their full potential, Bronfenbrenner saw Head Start as a buffer against the stress experienced by impoverished parents. Day care would allow parents to spend more time with their children, forming the passionate attachments he saw as a cornerstone of lifelong success.

“Every kid,” Bronfenbrenner frequently declared, “needs at least one adult who is crazy about him.”

Adapted from a spring 2015 issue of Human Ecology magazine by freelance writer Sharon Tragaskis.

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By H. Roger Segelken
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, April 29, 2015

Remember HAL, the onboard computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” struggling to sing “Daisy, Daisy…” while astronaut Dave disables older and older memory modules until just one shred of HAL’s artificial intelligence remains?

Who could forget … except that’s not how language loss really happens to humans on the verge of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a team of psychologists and linguists with a paradigm-flipping test to predict the disease.

“It is now known that Alzheimer’s disease may develop for years, silently, before appearance of symptoms leading to clinical diagnosis,” explains Cornell’s Barbara Lust. “We’re searching for early signs in the spoken language of individuals, before Alzheimer’s is actually manifest.”

Together with research collaborators at Cornell and three other institutions, Lust published surprising findings in the April journal Brain & Language, “Reversing Ribot: Does regression hold in language of prodromal Alzheimer’s disease?”

Theodule Ribot was the 19th-century French psychologist who proposed a law of regression or reversion - essentially that “structures last formed are the first to degenerate ... the new perishes before the old.” Ribot’s law predicts what is often observed in Alzheimer’s patients, that recent memories may be lost before older memories.

The new study inquired whether there are also changes in language that occur during the prodromal course of Alzheimer’s disease – changes that possibly could be predictors of the disease. Prodromal refers to the period before appearance of initial symptoms and the full development of disease. The stage of prodromal Alzheimer’s, before dementia sets in, is called Mild Cognitive Impairment or MCI.

The researchers asked whether the course of language deterioration in prodromal Alzheimer’s would systematically reverse the course of acquisition of language among children, in accord with Ribot’s prediction.

The study compared earlier research – on the course of language development of complex sentences in children under age 5 – with new research assessing language patterns of MCI adults.

Researchers also tested young adults and healthy aging adults. Adults were asked to imitate sentences with complex structures, including various types of relative clauses, just as the children had.

As hypothesized by the researchers – but contrary to common belief – the linguistic structures children develop first are the ones MCI adult subjects struggle with the most.

For example, individuals with MCI found it more difficult to repeat a sentence like, “The office manager corrected what bothered the summer intern,” often giving responses like “The officer ... uh ... inspected ... and um ... corrected the intern.”

For children, sentences like “Fozzie Bear hugs what Kermit the Frog kisses” were the earliest produced. Whereas sentences like “Scooter grabs the candy which Fozzie Bear eats” were late-developed by children – but easiest for MCI adults.

In MCI, a first-developed structure is being lost first and a last-developed structure is being retained longest – contrary to Ribot’s prediction ... and HAL’s experience.

Next, researchers hope to incorporate linguistic assessments into potential predictive tests for early-stage Alzheimer’s, as they further test their results with additional subjects for verification.

Collaborating with Lust, a professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology, were Cornell senior research associate Charles R. Henderson, Jordan Whitlock ’11, Alex Immerman ’08, Aileen Costigan and James Gair, professor emeritus of linguistics. Collaborators from other institutions were Suzanne Flynn, M.A. ’80, Ph.D. ’83, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Janet Cohen Sherman, Ph.D. ’83, and Sarah Mancuso, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Zhong Chen, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Research was funded, in part, by Hatch Grants and Federal Formula Funds, as well as grants from the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging, and Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences.

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rx12-16-TND 70x70Fuzzy reasoning by patients may lead to antibiotic resistance
Valerie Reyna's "fuzzy-trace" theory explains why patients demand antibiotics even though they may be suffering from a virus.
Ethics12-8-TNDBook urges scientists to wrestle with ethical dilemmas
A new book edited by Cornell psychologist Robert Sternberg, “Ethical Challenges in the Brain and Behavioral Sciences: Case Studies and Commentaries," offers real-world case studies.

elderabuse11-10-TND (1)Elder-to-elder abuse is common in nursing homes
Nearly one in five nursing home residents in 10 facilities across New York state were involved in at least one aggressive encounter with fellow residents during the four weeks prior to a study by researchers at Cornell and Weill Cornell.
ISSgrants12-4-TNDInstitute for the Social Sciences supports faculty research
Institute for the Social Sciences grants support several faculty research projects in human development, government, communication, engineering and anthropology.
 Karl PillemerKarl Pillemer to lead Bronfenbrenner Center
Cornell gerontologist Karl Pillemer will become director of the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research Jan. 15, taking over for John Eckenrode, who has been the center's director since it was founded in 2011.
 51CH6HgCPmL__SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Book offers advice for and by academic leaders
The new book "Academic Leadership in Higher Education: From the Top Down and the Bottom Up," co-edited by Cornell professor Robert Sternberg, offers advice for new faculty administrators.

Students in the News

young couple Trenel Francis '16 analyzes 'hook-up culture'
While many college students may be familiar with the idea of “hooking up” as a routine social interaction, Francis analyzed the phenomenon more closely in a study she performed last summer with the University of Cincinnati.

 More Stories

The hidden power of the experienced mind

 New Resources

Elaine Wethington on Cities and the Life Course

 

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great minds 3.400
Zoe Katz HD, '15
Nineteen Human Development undergraduates presented their findings at the 30th annual Cornell Undergraduate Research Board spring forum April 22.

Project topics, supported by faculty members, ranged from language acquisition in Korean infants to mother and child health in Kenya to understanding how young adults assess risk. The forum allows students to present research projects that they have designed and led during the academic year.

Read more about the event in the Cornell Chronicle.

View a slideshow of Human Ecology presenters, listed below, on Facebook.

Yeo Jin Ahn ’15, HD

Chelsea Brite ’15, HD

Ashton Conner ’15, HD

Rachel Cooper ’17, HD, and Kate Goldberg ’17, HD (presenting together)

Olivia Ellers ’15, HD

Zoe Katz ’15, HD

Aaron Lee ’16, HD, Olivia Dieni ’16, HD, Xi Richard Chen ’18, HD (presenting together)

Devin Massaro ’15, HD

Brian Meagher ’15, HD

Grace Monks ’15, HD

Catherine Liang ’15, HBHS and Kimberly Batcha ’15, HD (presenting together)

Julie Barbera ’17, HD, Jeanie Gribben ’15, HD, Masrai Williams ’15, HD (presenting together)

Colleen Sullivan ’16, HD, Azraa Janmohamed ’16, HD (presenting together)

 

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By Ted Boscia
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, April 13, 2015

For decades, sexism in higher education has been blamed for blocking women from landing academic positions in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.

But a new study by Cornell psychologists suggests that era has ended, finding in experiments with professors from 371 colleges and universities across the United States that science and engineering faculty preferred women two-to-one over identically qualified male candidates for assistant professor positions.

Published online April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper, “National Hiring Experiments Reveal 2:1 Faculty Preference For Women on STEM Tenure Track,” by Wendy M. Williams, professor of human development, and Stephen J. Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology, both in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, argues that the academic job market has never been better for women Ph.D.s in math-intensive fields.

Williams and Ceci conducted five randomized controlled experiments with 873 tenure-track faculty in all 50 U.S. states to assess gender bias. In three studies, faculty evaluated narrative summaries describing hypothetical male and female applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships in biology, economics, engineering and psychology. In a fourth experiment, engineering faculty evaluated full CVs instead of narratives, and in a fifth study, faculty evaluated one candidate (either a man or identically qualified woman) without comparison to an opposite-gender candidate. Candidates’ personalities were systematically varied to disguise the hypotheses.

The only evidence of bias the authors discovered was in favor of women; faculty in all four disciplines preferred female applicants to male candidates, with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference.

In some conditions, Williams and Ceci also matched applicants on job qualifications and lifestyle characteristics such as marital and parental status and used contrasting lifestyles in others. They examined attributes such as being a single mother, having a stay-at-home partner and past choices about taking parental leave. These experiments revealed that female faculty preferred divorced mothers over married fathers and male faculty preferred mothers who took leaves over mothers who did not.

“Efforts to combat formerly widespread sexism in hiring appear to have succeeded,” Williams and Ceci write. “Our data suggest it is an auspicious time to be a talented woman launching a STEM tenure-track academic career, contrary to findings from earlier investigations alleging bias, none of which examined faculty hiring bias against female applicants in the disciplines in which women are underrepresented. Our research suggests that the mechanism resulting in women’s underrepresentation today may lie more on the supply side, in women’s decisions not to apply, than on the demand side, in anti-female bias in hiring.”

“Women struggling with the quandary of how to remain in the academy but still have extended leave time with new children, and debating having children in graduate school versus waiting until tenure, may be heartened to learn that female candidates depicted as taking one-year parental leaves in our study were ranked higher by predominantly male voting faculties than identically qualified mothers who did not take leaves,” the authors continue.

Real-world academic hiring data validate the findings, too. The paper notes recent national census-type studies showing that female Ph.D.s are disproportionately less likely to apply for tenure-track positions, yet when they do they are more likely to be hired, in some science fields approaching the two-to-one ratio revealed by Williams and Ceci.

The authors note that greater gender awareness in the academy and the retirement of older, more sexist faculty may have gradually led to a more welcoming environment for women in academic science.

Despite these successes, Williams and Ceci acknowledge that women face other barriers to entry during adolescence and young adulthood, in graduate school and later in their careers as academic scientists, particularly when balancing motherhood and careers. They are currently analyzing national data on mentorship, authorship decisions and tenure advice, all as a function of gender, to better understand women and men’s decisions to apply to, and persist in, academic science.

Ted Boscia is director of communications and media for the College of Human Ecology.

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cancerBy H. Roger Segelken
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, March 25, 2015

The doctor says: “We offer two kinds of surgery for your cancer. Both procedures have 80 percent cure rates. After the first kind, 4 percent of patients have serious complications. In the second type, 20 percent simply die. No pressure to decide, but the sooner we start …”

Wishing you hadn’t slept through statistics class – trying to remember what went wrong with Uncle Joe’s surgery, and longing for the days when doctors knew best – you seek counsel in a decision-support tool, online or at the nearest cancer resource center.

“In fact, there are more than 40 tools to help people make informed decisions in cancer prevention, screening and treatment,” says Valerie F. Reyna, professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. “The more effective decision-support aids help with the numeracy problem – is a 10 percent chance riskier than one in a thousand? But not all tools help patients use their values, emotions and life experience to make decisions that affect their lives and their families’ future.”

Writing in the February-March 2015 special issue of American Psychologist, in an article titled “Decision Making and Cancer,” Reyna and her research colleagues want support tools to accommodate what they call “bottom-line gist options” that swirl though a patient’s mind – along with “verbatim” details about probable risk and whatever else the doctor said.

Gist is at the core of Fuzzy Trace Theory (which Reyna applied most recently to patients’ decisions to take antibiotics even though the misery is probably caused by viruses, not bacteria), and there’s nothing wrong with listening to one’s heart, Reyna says.

Reyna and her co-authors explain that “gist involves understanding meaning (insight in the gestalt sense) – integrating dimensions of information to distill its essence, not just processing fewer dimensions of information that are ‘good enough.’” Although people incorporate both verbatim details and gist in decision making, “they generally have a fuzzy processing (gist) preference” for information, the authors report.

The researchers offer this prescription for a Fuzzy Trace Theory-based cancer-decision tool: Ensure that patients understand the essential gist meaning of information; remind patients of an array of simple social and moral values that are important to them and that have relevance to the decision at hand; and assist patients in applying their values throughout the decision process.

“Every phase of the cancer continuum – from prevention, screening and diagnosis to treatment, survivorship and end of life – is fraught with challenges to our abilities to make informed decisions,” says Reyna. “People are not optimal decision makers. We struggle with complex information about benefits and risks, tradeoffs and uncertainties in cancer treatment.”

An impassionate computer could make optimal decisions on our behalf – disregarding the gist of what we think is best for us, Reyna adds. But the computer is too literal to make the best decisions for people, Reyna says: “Decision support should strive to capture the gist, the essential bottom line, of patients’ options.”

Reyna, director of the Human Neuroscience Institute in the College of Human Ecology, is the first author on the paper along with Wendy L. Nelson, National Cancer Institute; Paul K. Han, Maine Medical Center, Scarborough, Maine; and Michael P. Pignone, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Preparation of the American Psychologist report was supported, in part, by awards from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Nursing Research.

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By H. Roger Segelken
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, March 11, 2015

Bases of Adult Attachment

A new publication from two Cornell psychologists is an academic’s take on human bonding: “Bases of Adult Attachment: Linking Brain, Mind and Behavior” (Springer, 2015).

The book is edited by Vivian Zayas, associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Cindy Hazan, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology. Hazan and Zayas both have chapters in the book.

Zayas conducts research into the cognitive-affective processes that regulate behaviors in close relationships. She is affiliated with the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research and the Personality, Attachment and Control Laboratory, and is co-editor (with Valerie Reyna, Human Development) of the 2014 book, “The Neuroscience of Risky Decision Making.”

Hazan says her work on the topic began before most of today’s undergraduates were born, publishing a 1987 journal article titled “Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process.” Since then more than a dozen books and edited volumes by other academics have focused on the notion of adult romantic attachment. The new book, Zayas and Hazan explain, is unique in its emphasis on normative processes and the development of romantic attachment bonds.

When she’s not writing and editing or conducting research in her adult attachment lab, Hazan teaches the popular Human Bonding course, leading 600 undergrads each spring through the scholarly exploration of love, sex, marriage, dating and matters of adult romantic attachment. As one College of Engineering student wrote in an evaluation of the course: “It’s great to be getting credit for thinking about the things I’m thinking about all the time anyway.”

Co-authors are from McGill University, Canada; University of Virginia; Weill Cornell Medical College; University of Utah; University of Minnesota; University of Washington; Bilkent University, Turkey; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Deakin University, Australia; and University of Kansas.

©2020 College of Human Ecology, Cornell University. All rights reserved.