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Helping Students Cope with the Pressure to Succeed
Experts say that students from high achieving schools, who are privileged in terms of educational opportunities, are at greater risk of substance abuse, depression and anxiety than the national norm, because of an unrelenting, insidious pressure to succeed. Correspondent Lee Cowan talks with students and a psychologist about how adolescent wellness is as vulnerable to academic pressure as it is to poverty, trauma and discrimination. ...
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Refugees Often Suffer Lasting Trauma. Meditation May Help.
Research suggests a trauma-sensitive and socioculturally adapted group intervention can significantly reduce posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and multimorbidity among refugees and asylum seekers.
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ISSBD 2022 Conference
The 26th biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development will take place in person on the Island of Rhodes in Greece, June 19 - 23, 2022. More information is available on the conference website.
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The Littlest Linguists: New Research on Language Development
New research on language acquisition, bilingualism, and speech perception.
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America needs a Chief Friendship Officer
America is suffering from a lack of friendship. The average American hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s American Perspectives Survey from May 2021, Americans report having fewer friendships than in the past three decades. Nearly one in five Americans has no close social connections, a double digit increase from 2013. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990. Loneliness and isolation are far more common experiences for people with few close friendships.
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Lila Gleitman, Who Showed How Children Learn Language, Dies at 91
Lila Gleitman, whose pioneering work in linguistics and cognitive science expanded our understanding of how language works and how children go about learning it, died on Aug. 8 at a hospital in Philadelphia. She was 91. Her daughter Claire Gleitman said the cause was a heart attack. Until the 1970s, most linguists believed that the structure of language existed out in the world, and that the human brain then learned it from infancy. Building on the work of her friend Noam Chomsky, Dr. Gleitman argued the opposite: that the structures, or syntax, of language were hard-wired into the brain from birth, and that children already had a sophisticated grasp of how they work.
