Five Quick Takes

1.  Often, I get asked about sleeping issues with young children, and whether or not sleep training techniques such as cry-it-out (CIO) are damaging to young children.  Well, research suggests not, and that while consistency in technique used is the key variable of influence, CIO works most effectively.  However, using it is like ripping your heart out in pieces and throwing it down on a crowded subway somewhat difficult for most parents, and many simply can't do it.

I was pleased, by the way, to see this addressed in one of my new favorite shows, Modern Family.



2.  I used to have a crazy dog.  She not once, but TWICE jumped out of second stories windows for no apparent reason.  She was also very obsessive and would focus on one thing (like a tennis ball or a patch of light) and have a difficult time pulling away from it.  Well, as it turns out, she may have had a recently discovered gene associated with compulsive behaviors.  How does this apply to psychology?  Well, a similar gene may be responsible for these behaviors in both humans and dogs.  Either way, it kind of sucked as her owner as she was really quite neurotic.

She WAS pretty cute though.

3.  Sometimes humans can be pretty nasty.  We can be aggressive and selfish and mean.  But humans can also at times demonstrate an amazing amount of altruism and be moved to give and help others in truly significant, beautiful ways.  Well, there are some suggestions that some of this may be innate, start early, and presumably be a consequence of our hypersocial nature, as demonstrated in the linked clips to the PBS show, The Human Spark.  Check them out - they're cute and pretty cool to boot.

4.  An interesting article here on the liberal bias in academia.  What these scholars suggest is that the question is not so much why academia has a liberal bias, but why so many liberals want to be professors.  The answer, apparently, has a little to do with history, a little with our desire to fit in, and quite a bit with what could be termed a stereotype of what professors are like.

5.  You may have realized that even with the copious amounts of coffee I drink, my memory still sometimes leaves something to be desired.  Perhaps you might have experienced the same thing?  Well - here - some information on how to keep the aging mind agile.

Undergraduate Opportunity for Scholarship to Child and Family Sciences Conference

I just wanted to let you know about a professional development opportunity for students interested in child and family studies. Apparently, Arizona State University is hosting a conference focused on professional development for undergraduate seniors interested in going into a research-oriented career. There's an application link, and if you are accepted, they pay for all your expenses (except for incidentals) and you attend a two and a half day conference designed to help you get into graduate school.  It sounds like a great opportunity - check it out!

By the way, if you are interested in graduate school (in any area, really, not just child and family studies, and not just psychology) then please do talk to an advisor about how best to prepare yourself for graduate school!  It's a competitive process, and it's good to start preparing well before graduation.

It's a kid's world.

A link to Scientific American Frontiers: It's a kid's world. This has the magical events video, some fun segments (which we won't be covering) on motor development, and some segments on Theory of Mind and Language which we will watch later in the quarter.

Eye Color Calculator

As promised in class, an eye color calculator....

There is a more in-depth explanation of the genetics of eye color at the links at the bottom of the page.  As I mentioned in class, eye color is more complicated than the simple Mendelian example I gave in class.

Marketing

In many social niches in the US, there has been an effort to become more "green".  Given our population, and the vast amount of resources we consume, this is a good thing.  It's not always an easy path though.  For example, a recent article in the New York Times suggests that couples are spending more time fighting over green issues.  We are loathe to give up our cars, and continue to buy, and dispose of, large amounts of consumer goods.  We like our air conditioners and our heaters and eat far more meat than we really should.

In response to issues such as these, information is now out there to help us make decisions about what products might be a more sustainable choice.  The economic choices we make in terms of what we purchase can have larger consequences in that some companies are better than others at preserving our world's resources.  Smart companies take note of this consumer preference, and have started to respond.

But the best laid plans can sometimes fail.  A recent product roll-out by Proctor & Gamble shows that when companies fail to appreciate the power of the informational exchange afforded by the internet, things can go terribly wrong.  Proctor & Gamble has recently developed a new, greener diaper which test marketing prior to its introduction suggested would be met with positive responses from parents.

Pampers' breakthrough new Dry Max diaper is 20% thinner and way more absorbent than its predecessor or the competition in tests, leading Procter & Gamble Co. executives to hail it as the iPod of baby care.

 The key to the Dry Max diaper is a revamped, more permeable "absorbent gel material," which P&G claims absorbs more fluid faster than an unnamed competitor, i.e. Kimberly-Clark Corp.'s Huggies. Using more of the petrochemical absorbent gel allowed P&G to do away with the mesh liner in Pampers and a considerable amount of wood-based fiber, said Kerri Hailey, section head of global baby care research and development at P&G, who has been testing the diapers with her own children since 2005. The net result was considerably less environmental impact; Ms. Hailey also cited substantial reductions in packaging, trucks needed to haul diapers and energy required to harvest and process wood pulp, among other things.

Sounds great, right?  Works well, more environmentally sustainable, and more absorbent.  What could go wrong?  Well the problem was that Proctor & Gamble started releasing the diapers in certain areas of the US, without any marketing campaign.  They wanted to wait until more parents had access to the product before rolling out their advertising.  And nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of any explanation or discussion, a few, rather angry consumers quickly inundated parents' message boards and chat rooms with unfavorable reviews of the new product. Online reviews of the new diapers are predominantly negative, and despite the fact that they appear to represent a relatively low proportion of consumers (one parent, for example, has posted over 75 reviews on 50 different websites), this groundswell of criticism threatens the success of the diaper.

While certainly companies are aware of the value of research into how products will be responded to (in fact, Proctor & Gamble did extensive testing of the product before releasing it at all) the rapid informational exchange of the internet means that sometimes companies will just not be able to easily keep up with the changing landscape.  We humans are smart, very smart, but we have a habit of doing things - particularly within the realm of technological advances - without really considering the consequences.  Proctor & Gamble, by ignoring the ways in which the internet has exponentially changed the nature of word-of-mouth, potentially cost itself the success of its newest product, ironically designed in response to consumer preferences.  Advertising is littered with the detritus of such decisions, but now more than ever, companies need to take note of the ways in which information is transmitted.

The ever increasing pace of the world.

The New York Times just printed an interesting article on the ways in which technology - and the ever increasing pace of change that comes concordant with that - might be affecting our children.  This is interesting in and of itself.  We might wonder how our children's malleable young minds are shaped by the cacophony of media they are exposed to, how their understanding of the world might shift as they inhabit more and more time in electronic and online activities, and how the absence of many of the influences of the past might shape their development. Already we see some differences - younger generations expect information immediately, seem to have less privacy concerns and are better at multitasking than older adults.  These changes may not be all good.  For example, the increase in multitasking could potentially have negative effects on the ability to focus on materials for longer periods of time - such as is needed in schooling.

But there's another issue that has to do more with the increasing pace of change rather than the actual experiences themselves.  We'll be talking about research methods tomorrow, and we'll be discussing types of studies that utilize what are called "developmental designs".  I know you'll be excited to learn about won't really have a choice but to listen to me talk about cross-sectional, longitudinal and sequential designs.  All three of these are ways of looking at change over time.  Cross-sectional designs focus on looking at a group of people of slightly different ages at one point in time, with the implicit assumption often being that by looking at the differently aged people, you can figure out what changes in development due to the effects of age. Longitudinal designs focus on a single group of people over time with the implicit assumption often being that that particular group of people should be illustrative of how development generally occurs in people outside of your specific study sample.  We'll talk about why these assumptions are not always correct, but for now I will just note that sequential designs are an attempt to pin down the actual differences between age effects, cohort effects and time of measurement effects by basically combining longitudinal and cross-sectional designs.

But what happens when change gets really fast?

Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

 Already, we have to be careful in research to attend to which of our findings are driven by actual developmental change and not by cohort.  What happens when cohorts shrink in size?

Opportunity to study Psychology and Law

Hi all,
I just got an email describing a training opportunity I thought I would pass on. It's a program in which students study the intersection of law and psychology (with room and board and tuition and even a stipend) for one year at University of Nebraska/Lincoln.  It looks like a great opportunity, so I thought I would pass on the information.

http://www.unl.edu/psychlawreu/

Consumption

I mentioned today I love coffee.  I really really do.  I also mentioned that coffee, or presumably the caffeine in coffee, has been demonstrated to have a positive effect on cognitive performance.  I like this data.  A lot.

I also like this recent article.  It's an overview of some of the effects that have been found related to coffee consumption.

This month alone, an analysis in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that people who drink three to four cups of java a day are 25% less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those who drink fewer than two cups. And a study presented at an American Association for Cancer Research meeting found that men who drink at least six cups a day have a 60% lower risk of developing advanced prostate cancer than those who didn't drink any

And it gets BETTER even.

Earlier studies also linked coffee consumption with a lower risk of getting colon, mouth, throat, esophageal and endometrial cancers. People who drink coffee are also less likely to have cavities, gallstones, cirrhosis of the liver, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, or to commit suicide, studies have found. Last year, researchers at Harvard University and the University of Madrid assessed data on more than 100,000 people over 20 years and concluded that the more coffee they drank, the less likely they were to die during that period from any cause.

Seriously - that's music to my ears.

But...I also talked today about how one of the reasons that every psychology course has a section on research methods, and one of the reasons that I go on and on and on until you fall asleep spend so much time and energy trying to hammer home research methods is that understanding some of the details and rules about how science is conducted helps us become better consumers of science.  Just because we find a relationship between two variables (i.e. a correlation) doesn't necessarily imply a causal relationship, even it it's something we really really want to believe.

The WSJ article actually does a relatively good job pointing out some of the complications with the rosy view of coffee presented above.  For example, they point out that while certainly those beneficial effects have been noted, negative effects for coffee consumption have also been found in other research.

But those studies come on the heels of older ones showing that coffee—particularly the caffeine it contains—raises blood pressure, heart rate and levels of homocysteine, an amino acid in blood that is associated with stroke and heart disease. Pregnant women who drink two or more cups of coffee a day have a higher rate of miscarriages and lower birth-weight babies; caffeine has also been linked to benign breast lumps and bone loss in elderly women. And, as many people can attest, coffee can also aggravate anxiety, irritability, heartburn and sleeplessness, which brings its own set of problems, including a higher risk of obesity. 

Moreover, as they point out, research on coffee consumption is plagued by many of the same methodological concerns common to most research focusing on lifestyle issues.  For reasons of both pragmatics and ethics, most studies such as the ones cited above involve observational designs.  In other words, people report on their consumption.  As such, there may be something different about regular coffee drinkers than those who abstain, or people's memories may be faulty or incorrect. And lab studies which do control for these factors can be critiqued on the grounds that they are not ecologically valid.  What happens in the lab may not necessarily mirror what happens in real  life.

The authors of the article conclude that while there are some indications that coffee can be a healthy drink, there is not enough evidence to suggest that non-coffee drinkers take up the habit, and that certain groups (e.g. pregnant women, people with high blood pressure) should consider reducing their intake.

As for me?  I'll stick with my caffeine habit.  After all it makes the morning headache go away just tastes so darned good in the morning!