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

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

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

In 2009, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council issued a report, "Depression in Parents, Parenting, and Children," that summarized a large and growing body of research on the ways that parental depression can affect how people take care of their children, and how those children fare. "Untreated, unrecognized parental depression can lead to negative consequences for kids," he said, ranging from poor school performance to increased visits to the emergency room to poorer peer relationships and adolescent depression. [...]there is plenty of evidence that when depressed parents get treatment and help with their parenting, families are much better off

"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

In a 2011 article in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers showed that adults hospitalized with heart attacks who had more blood drawn were more likely to develop anemia while in the hospital. Dr. Mikhail Kosiborod, one of the authors of the study, a cardiologist at St. Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., told me that the result surprised some physicians; the average volume of blood lost did not seem substantial enough to cause anemia in healthy adults.

Rebecca Johnson, director of the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction at the University of Missouri, has begun a randomized clinical trial, financed by the National Institutes of Health, of children undergoing forensic interviews for child abuse; some are given a service dog during their interviews, and physiological indicators of stress are measured. A recent review article that examined a large number of studies found evidence that in children with no family history of allergy, those exposed to dogs in the perinatal period may be less likely to develop allergies.

"It was going to bring down our society," said Megan Moreno, a specialist in adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Men would be calling women and making lascivious comments, and women would be so vulnerable, and we'd never have civilized conversations again." Researchers also are looking to online media for opportunities to identify problems, to hear cries for help, and to provide information and support. Dr. [Michael Rich], who sees many teenagers who are struggling with Internet-related issues, said it was important to step away from blanket judgments about the dangers of going online. "We should not view social media as either positive or negative, but as essentially neutral," he said. "It's what we do with the tools that decides how they affect us and those around us." "Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all harm model, one of the questions parents need to ask is, 'How is this going to interact with my child's personality?"' said Clay Shirky, who teaches about social media at New York University. "Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted."

Moreno's research approaches social media as a window, an opportunity to understand and improve physical and mental health. Since the freshman year is a high-risk time for depression, many college resident advisers already try to use Facebook to monitor students, Moreno said.