Faculty Bibliography

A recent book review by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker compared American children unfavorably with the self-reliant and competent children of a tribe in the Peruvian Amazon; she discussed "the notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who can't, or at least won't, tie their own shoes." Dr. Mark Bertin, a developmental behavioral pediatrician in Pleasantville, N.Y., affiliated with New York Medical College, sees a wide range of children with behavioral problems, teasing apart contributions of neurological wiring, temperament and family style

Many of us believe that babies and small children suffer from a special form of "white coat syndrome," that mix of trepidation and anxiety that some adults experience - to the point of high blood pressure - in a medical setting. Nora Newcombe, a professor of psychology at Temple University, points out that there may be evolutionary reasons that this kind of memory - semantic memory - is so strong in the early years of life, when babies are faced with learning so many facts about the world

Perri Klass discusses the Betsy-Tacy children's book series

Antibiotics represent a huge gift in the struggle against infant and child mortality, a triumph (or actually, many triumphs) of human ingenuity and science over disease and death, since the antibiotic era began back in the fourth and fifth decades of the 20th century

"There is some degree of heritability," said Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a senior research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has done some of these twin studies. "Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation," said Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism

Alexandra Parbery-Clark, a doctoral candidate in Dr. Kraus's lab and one of the authors of a paper published this year on auditory working memory and music, was originally trained as a concert pianist

According to the academy, the hallmark of serious debilitating homesickness is preoccupying thoughts, "recurrent cognitions that are focused on home (e.g., house, loved ones, homeland, home cooking, returning home)." Christopher Thurber, school psychologist at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and an author of the statement, has done extensive research on homesickness among children in settings including boarding schools, camps, colleges and hospitals