Faculty Bibliography

Dr. [Nancy Eisenberg] draws a distinction between empathy and sympathy: "Empathy, at least the way I break it out, is experiencing the same emotion or highly similar emotion to what the other person is feeling," she said. "Sympathy is feeling concern or sorrow for the other person." While that may be based in part on empathy, she continued, or on memory, "it's not feeling the same emotion." "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. But she points out that the effect is small. "There is no gene for empathy, there is no gene for altruism," she said. "What's heritable may be some personality characteristics." Parental modeling is important, of course; sympathy and compassion should be part of young children's experience of the world long before they know the words. "Explain how other people feel," Dr. Eisenberg said. "Reflect the child's feelings, but also point out, look, you hurt Johnny's feelings."

"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

"It's actually been a remarkable change in practice from the mid-'90s on," said Dr. Jonathan Finkelstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital who studies antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance, "and we did that by physicians and patients recognizing that antibiotics are quite effective, quite safe, but there's no such thing as a free lunch, and as with any other medical decision, we have to weigh the risks and benefits of every treatment." "When antibiotics were developed, they were miraculous for all the reasons that you know," said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, the chairman of medicine at New York University School of Medicine. "With few exceptions, there was almost no long-term toxicity that was identifiable, and so everybody thought that if you took an antibiotic, it could produce some immediate upset -- it could produce a rash, loose bowels -- and then everything would return to normal, bounce back to normal. But in fact there was no real exploration of that. It just became an article of faith." Every one of these researchers started with an antibiotic pledge of allegiance. "We clearly have to use antibiotics and are lucky to have them around," said Dr. Matthew P. Kronman, lead author on the bowel disease study, who is a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Seattle Children's Hospital. "It's just that we are still learning what all of their effects are."

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

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

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

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

In the first book of "The Odyssey," Homer described Odysseus as "straining for no more than a glimpse of hearth-smoke drifting up from his own land." Millenniums later, during the Civil War, homesickness (or "nostalgia") was viewed as an affliction so serious that it could kill stricken soldiers. The third inducement to homesickness may be a surprise: parents' expressing their own anxiety over a separation, or as Dr. [Christopher Thurber] described them, "parents who express ambivalence; well-intentioned, loving parents who say, 'Have a wonderful time at camp, I don't know what I'll do without you."' "People make that mistake all the time," Dr. [Edward Walton] said. "Every kid is going to ask, 'What if I feel homesick?' With a pickup deal, the subtext is, 'I have so little confidence in your ability to cope with this normal feeling."'