Social Work Today E-Zine

Children who can stay focused and don’t sweat the small stuff have a better shot at good health in adulthood—and this is especially true for girls, according to a new study reported in Health Psychology.

“Certain characteristics already evident early in life are likely to spark positive or negative emotions, and also influence biological and behavioral responses to stress,” says lead author Laura D. Kubzansky, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health. “Some traits may contribute to developing healthier behaviors and better social relationships, and ultimately more resilience in midlife.

Kubzansky and coauthors tracked 569 individuals (60% men, 40% women; 80% white, 20% black) from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project from age 7 to their mid-30s to see if certain personality traits influenced later health. Trained observers rated the 7 year olds on 15 different behaviors. These behaviors were then assigned to three different personality attributes: attention, distress-proneness, and behavior inhibition.

To determine adult health, the participants rated their health and reported whether they had any of the following illnesses: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, asthma, arthritis, stroke, bleeding ulcer, tuberculosis, or hepatitis.

For all the participants, superior attention spans and having a more positive outlook in youth affected health the most. These effects were greater for women, the researchers found. The authors suggested that women may be more sensitive to interactions among emotion, behavior and biology and, therefore, be more predisposed to certain health risks, such as heart disease, although additional research is needed to understand this more completely.

“This longitudinal study provides more evidence that behavior and emotions generally linked to certain temperaments play a crucial role in long-term health,” Kubzansky said.

— Source: American Psychological Association

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to stare at people's mouths rather than their eyes. Now, a study, reported online in Nature, in 2 year olds with the social deficit disorder suggests why they may find mouths so attractive: lip-sync—the exact match of lip motion and speech sound. Such audiovisual synchrony preoccupied toddlers who have autism, while their unaffected peers focused on socially meaningful movements of the human body, such as gestures and facial expressions.

"Typically developing children pay special attention to human movement from very early in life, within days of being born. But in children with autism, even as old as two years, we saw no evidence of this," explains Ami Klin, PhD, of the Yale Child Study Center, who led the research.

While it was known that people with autism do not spontaneously orient to social signals, it was unclear what early-emerging mechanism may contribute to that. Nor was it clear exactly what they were attending to instead. To find out, the researchers tracked the eye movements of two year olds with and without the disorder while they looked at cartoon animations on split-screen displays.

Eye-tracking data initially showed that 21 toddlers with ASD had no preference for either screen’s animation, looking back and forth between the two. By contrast, 39 typically developing toddlers and 16 developmentally delayed but nonautistic toddlers clearly preferred the one screen’s animation.

However, responses to one animation didn't fit the pattern. In this animation, unlike the others, the movements of the points of light actually cause the clapping sound. This physical synchrony—dots colliding to produce a clapping sound—only existed on the one side of the screen. The children with ASD chose this figure 66% of the time, a strong preference.

The researchers then reanalyzed the data, factoring in more subtle synchronous changes in motion and sound. "Audio-visual synchronies accounted for about 90% of the preferred viewing patterns of toddlers with ASD and none of unaffected toddlers," says Warren Jones, a researcher.

A follow-up experiment using new animations optimized for audiovisual synchrony confirmed these results.

The researchers also reported that children with autism look more at peoples' mouths than eyes as early as the age of 2. Since the mouth is the facial feature with most audiovisual synchrony—lip motion with speech sound—the researchers propose that their new findings offer a likely explanation for this phenomenon.

— Source: National Institute of Mental Health

The day that robot playmates help children with autism learn the social skills that they naturally lack has come a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child's emotional state.

Over the last five years, Nilanjan Sarkar, PhD, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University has developed a method that uses physiological measurements to monitor an individual’s emotional state. He worked with Wendy Stone, PhD, a professor of pediatrics and investigator at Vanderbilt's Kennedy Center, to develop this new approach.

In the first set of experiments, Sarkar and Stone conducted with six children ranging in age from 13 to 16 years who had been diagnosed with ASD. A battery of physiological sensors were attached to the participants and they were asked to play two games.

One of the most encouraging results of their preliminary research was discovering that the affective model works accurately in different settings. The model was based on the readings they took as the children played the first game. The game was then changed in several ways, which allowed the researchers to induce emotions of interest, boredom, anxiety, and engagement in each participant. The model was then used to predict how each child would react to changes in the computer game. When they switched to the second game, they found that the model's predictions were equally accurate.

The researchers report that the physiological data they gathered can be used to develop an affective model for each individual that can predict his or her emotional states of liking, anxiety, and engagement with an accuracy of better than 80%. Furthermore, they showed that this information can be used in real time to alter the game configuration in ways that significantly increase the children's degree of engagement.

A robot's ability to provide consistent and predictable responses should be particularly useful for treating ASD. Each child has individual triggers. Once a particular trigger is identified, a robot could be programmed to increase the stimulus at such a gradual rate that the child doesn't notice it. The robot could also be programmed to back off when it senses that its responses are beginning to bother the child. In this fashion, it could build up the child's tolerance to the problem stimulus.

— Source: Vanderbilt University

For parents with concerns about their child’s mental health, they may look to their child's primary care physician (PCP) for guidance and assistance with getting treatment if needed. But according to the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, PCPs aren't asking most parents if they have concerns about their child's mental health. “We found that more than one half of parents (56%) report that their primary care physician never asks about whether they have mental health concerns for their child,” says Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, director of the National Poll on Children's Health.

The poll asked parents of children aged 5 to 17 the degree to which they interacted with their children's PCPs about mental health issues and how often their child received specialty mental health services. Though many parents said their child's PCP never asks about mental health concerns for their kids, 22% of parents reported that their child's PCP regularly asks and 22% report being asked sometimes.

For parents who have discussed mental health concerns with their child's PCP, 62% report having used specialty mental health services for their children. Of parents whose children have mental health diagnoses, 25% say they've had difficulty finding the specialty mental health services they want for their child.

For parents who say they've had difficulty getting specialty mental health services for their child, 46% of parents cite difficulty finding a provider as the reason, 43% of parents say services cost too much, 35% say they could not get a timely appointment, and 33% say they did not know where to go.

— Source: University of Michigan Health System

Single mothers come surprisingly close in the number of hours they spend caring for their children compared with married mothers, and the difference is explained almost entirely by socioeconomic factors and the kind of jobs they hold, say University of Maryland sociologists in a new study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. The researchers conclude public policy focuses too heavily on the mother’s marital status.

The study finds that single mothers who may lack a large support network still manage to provide 83% to 90% of child-rearing time as their married counterparts. While the difference is statistically significant, the researchers expected a greater gap.

The researchers analyzed American Time Use Survey data collected between 2003 and 2004. The study is based on responses from 1,821 single mothers and 4,309 married mothers with children less than 13 years of age.

• Single mothers, on average, spend between three and five hours less time per week on child care than married mothers. These differences were statistically significant.


• Unmarried mothers who live with the father spend about the same time on child care as married mothers.


• The reduced amount of time single mothers spend on child care are accounted for by differences in available resources—type and hours of employment, education, maternal age, age of children. When these factors are statistically controlled, the differences disappear.


• Some mothers are more “single” than others—they differ in the support network available to them, such as help from the father or relatives.


— Source: University of Maryland, College Park

As this holiday season approaches, would-be Santa’s should look to be more creative about the toys they buy their young children.

“Old-fashioned inexpensive retro toys, such as red rubber balls, simple building blocks, clay and crayons, that don’t cost so much and are usually hidden in the back shelves are generally healthier for children than the electronic educational toys that have fancier boxes and cost $89.99,” says Temple University developmental psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD.

The overarching principle is that children are creative problem-solvers, they’re discoverers, they’re active, says Hirsh-Pasek, codirector of the Temple University Infant Lab. “Your child gets to build his or her imagination around these simpler, more inexpensive toys; the toys don’t command what your child does, but your child commands what the toys do.”

As Roberta Golinkoff, PhD, head of the Infant Language Project at the University of Delaware says, “Electronic educational toys boast brain development and that they are going to give your child a head start. But developmental psychologists know that it doesn’t really work this way. The toy manufacturers are playing on parents’ fears that our children will be left behind in this global marketplace.”

Ironically, says Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, the real educational toys are those that nurture the skills sets important in the 21st Century world: collaboration, communication, creative thinking, and a sense of confidence.

Golinkoff adds that “kids are not like empty vessels to be filled. If they play with toys that allow them to be explorers, they are more likely to learn important lessons about how to master their world.”

— Source: Temple University

Researchers have found that infants who had an opportunity to use a plastic cane to get an out-of-reach toy were better able to understand the goal of another person’s use of a similar tool than were infants who had previously only watched an adult use a cane to retrieve a toy.

“Acting on the world is one way infants learn about the world, and only recently have there been studies showing that active, hands-on experience is a more effective way of learning than watching. This study indicates that there is a benefit to actual hands-on experience early in human development,” says Jessica Sommerville, PhD, a University of Washington assistant professor of psychology and lead author of a study published in Developmental Psychology.

The researchers divided 51 infants—26 boys and 25 girls—into three groups for the new study. Those in the training group were trained in how to use the crook of a cane to retrieve a toy. Finally, they were given two trials to see if they could pull the toy to them by themselves. A second group of infants, the observational group, watched an adult mimic the babies in the first group learning how to use the cane to get a toy. Finally the infants in those two groups, as well as those in the third, or baseline, group individually watched training trials in which a researcher seated behind a table used one cane to retrieve a toy and then picked up the toy.

Sommerville says the experiment was designed to see if the infants would play attention to a change in the experimenter’s goal of getting a new toy rather than using a different tool. Infants in the observational and baseline groups spent equal amounts of time looking at the new cane and toys trials. But the trained group spent more time looking at the new toy trials, suggesting they understood that the adult was using the cane as a tool.

“We speculate that for infants to really understand the tool use event, and, in particular, for them to anticipate upcoming actions and action outcomes while watching the event, they need to be able to perform the tool use sequence themselves,” says Sommerville. “Merely watching another person perform the sequence does not appear to be enough for them to understand it.

— Source: University of Washington