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APS Fellow Helps Make Life With Autism a Little Easier
When she was a graduate student in the late 1970s, APS Fellow Geraldine Dawson worked with a family that changed her life. They had an autistic child and “I was just captured by the experience and decided to devote my entire career to it,” Dawson told Autism Talk TV. Today, Dawson is a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as Chief Science Officer of Autism Speaks. She is recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism who has used brain imaging to analyze neural irregularities associated with the disease. She has also studied the genetics of autism and helped to pinpoint some of the earliest symptoms of the disorder.
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Mind Changer and Game Changer
APS Past-President Elizabeth Loftus, University of California, Irving, is the highest-ranking female in the list of top 100 psychologists. She's gained world-wide renown for her experiments showing that memory, far from being an accurate record, is influenced by subsequent exposure to information and events and is re-constituted according to the biases these create. In the BBC series Mind Changers, Claudia Hammond discusses the impact of Loftus’ research and how it has revolutionized eyewitness testimony procedures and legal systems. Hammond speaks with other APS Fellows Barbara Tversky, Gordon Bower, Lee Ross, and Brian Wandell, as they reflect on the influence of her work.
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Preschool Has Big Advantages for the Disadvantaged
It may seem obvious that preschool helps kids perform better in later grades. But most studies to date have produced limited conclusions about how the preschool environment impacts a child’s academic success. A recent Psychological Science study has filled in some of those gaps. In the study, Elliot Tucker-Drob analyzed a data set that included 1,200 fraternal and identical twins from 600 families. The focus on twins allowed Tucker-Drob to fully account for family-to-family variation as well as genetic influences. He also evaluated each child at two, four, and five years of age to make sure that achievement gaps attributed to preschool didn’t already exist before the preschool years.
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The Photos That Make Us Feel
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Kathleen E. Hazlett from Marquette University present her poster session research on “Self Selected Pictures Are More Effective than IAPS for Inducing Positive Emotion.” According to Hazlett, your own photo album (or Facebook timeline, or Flickr account) might be the best pick-me-up when you’re feeling down. Personal photos could also be the best way for researchers to elicit positive emotions in the lab.
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Adapting Counseling Strategies for Native Communities
Evidence-based psychotherapy should work the same for everyone, right? Wrong. In his research, Joseph P. Gone of the University of Michigan points out that the latest treatments developed by psychological scientists can’t be applied to all communities in exactly the same way. Gone is interested in how evidence-based mental health treatments and the cultural traditions of American Indians can intersect. This intersection, he says, is elusive. Integrating Native traditions and evidence-based therapy, he points out, may require merging spiritual and mental health practices, and clinicians would have to address difficult ethical and political complications.
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Optogenetics: Stranger Than Fiction
It sounds like a science fiction movie: Scientists integrate the photoreceptive properties of light-sensitive algae into rat neurons. The result? A rat whose brain can be controlled by light. As crazy as it seems, this isn’t science fiction: The field of optogenetics is scientific reality. In a May 2011 talk at the TED Conference, Edward Boyden explained that optogenetics allows scientists to target specific neurons quickly; conventional methods like drugs take longer to kick in. Boyden is also featured in a March Observer article on optogenetics, and he will be speaking in a webinar called Optogenetics in Neurons and Beyond on March 15, 2012.
