Faculty Bibliography

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

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

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

"Depression is an illness that feeds upon itself," said Dr. William Beardslee, professor of child psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who has spent his career studying depression in children and developing family interventions. "Very often people who are depressed don't seek the care they need." "There is a high burden of maternal depression, anxiety," among mothers bringing children to an emergency room, said Dr. Jacqueline M. Grupp-Phelan, a pediatric emergency room specialist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. "It influences their own perception of how well they can deal with their kids' problems." "They are open to doing something about their own issues because it could help their kid, and that's a very strong hook for mothers," Grupp-Phelan said. And when the "doing something" includes a focus on the whole family, those routines and rituals and routines can be rebuilt, and there's plenty of research to show that children are resilient

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.

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.

[...] one recommendation in particular has been the subject of much controversy within the pediatric profession: that pediatricians screen all children for cholesterol by doing a blood test in 9- to 11-year-olds. [...] only children considered at high risk for cholesterol problems were to be routinely screened.

He wants us to understand the potential importance of the body's inflammatory response, which, he argues, is at the root of much pathology: "Take charge of hidden, sneaky sources of chronic inflammation that can trigger illness and disease by wearing comfortable shoes daily, getting an annual flu vaccine, and asking your doctor why you're not on a statin and baby aspirin if you're over the age of forty." [...] he wants readers to assist their bodies' homeostatic and anti-inflammatory systems by avoiding stress and shocks to the system: "Keep a strict, predictable schedule 365 days a year that has you eating, sleeping, and exercising at about the same times day in and day out."

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.