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Contact: Lisa M.P. Munoz
spsp.publicaffairs@gmail.com
703-951-3195
SAGE Publications

Changing people's behavior: From reducing bullying to training scientists

San Diego, January 26, 2012 - If you want to change how teenagers view bullying, go to the straight to the source of most school trends: the most connected crowd. According to new intervention research, targeting the most influential students in a school could be a key factor in reducing harassment and bullying.

These results are part of a group of studies that are being presented today at a social psychology conference in San Diego, CA, on new, sometimes small, ways to make meaningful impacts on people's lives. "This is an exciting time in the field of social psychology," says Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia who wrote Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change. "Increasingly, researchers are devising theory-based interventions that have dramatic effects in the areas of education, prejudice reduction, adolescent behavior problems, health, and many others."

The idea behind such intervention work is to change the behavior for a particular group of individuals. Reducing student bullying, increasing interest among teens in math and science, and improving perceptions of women in engineering are the focus of today's talks in San Diego.

Reducing student bullying

In the bullying intervention study, Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd of Princeton University set out at a U.S. public high school to change students' perceptions that harassment of fellow students is a normal way to gain and maintain status.

"We were interested in the idea that harassment and bullying in schools is a social norm that is not necessarily related to students' personal feelings," says Levy Paluck. Her team used social network analysis to identify the students who might have the most influence in setting social norms. A random subset of these students participated in public denouncements of harassment and bullying. The researchers then tracked the social network over one year, also collecting data on disciplinary records and teacher assessments.

Levy Paluck and Shepard found that students who were socially tied to the intervention significantly decreased their perception that harassment and bullying is a desirable norm. At the same time, those students' decreased their harassment and bullying behavior as measured through disciplinary records, teacher assessments, and independent behavioral observations.

Increasing teens' interest in math and science

In a different intervention study aimed at changing teen behavior in math and science, researchers did not target the students themselves but rather their parents. The goal was to increase students' interest in taking courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). "We focus on the potential role of parents in motivating their teens to take more STEM courses, because we feel that they have been an untapped resource," says Judith Harackiewicz of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The participants consisted of 188 U.S. high school students and their parents from the longitudinal Wisconsin Study of Families and Work. Harackiewicz and her colleague Janet Hyde found that a relatively simple intervention aimed at parents – two brochures mailed to parents and a website that all highlight the usefulness of STEM courses – led their children to take on average nearly one semester more of science and mathematics in the last two years of high school, compared with the control group. "Our indirect intervention," funded by the National Science Foundation, "changed the way that parents interacted with their teens, leading to a significant and important change in their teens' course-taking behavior," Harackiewicz says.

Improving perceptions of women engineers

"Many of these interventions work by changing the stories people tell themselves about who they are and why they do what they do, in ways that lead to self-sustaining changes in behavior," says Wilson of the University of Virginia. For example, new work being presented by Greg Walton of Stanford University tested the effects of two interventions on female engineering students, one aimed at making them feel like they belong in engineering and another at teaching them to reflect on core values to help them cope with stress.

Both interventions improved the first-year grades of women enrolled in male-dominated engineering majors compared to a control group, eliminating a gender gap. The two interventions worked in different ways, however: Women in the belonging group were able to build better relationships with male engineers, while women in the value-training group made more friends outside of engineering, according to the study funded by the Spencer Foundation. "The two interventions suggest the power of social-psychological approaches to help people cope with settings in which their group is underrepresented and negatively stereotyped," Walton says.

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The symposium "Revealing the Power of Social Psychology through Theoretically-Based Intervention Research" takes place on Jan. 26, 2012, at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). More than 3,000 scientists are in attendance at the meeting in San Diego from Jan. 26-28 (www.spspmeeting.org).

SPSP promotes scientific research that explores how people think, behave, feel, and interact. With more than 7,000 members, the Society is the largest organization of social and personality psychologists in the world (www.spsp.org).

Contacts:
Lisa M.P. Munoz, SPSP Public Information Officer
spsp.publicaffairs@gmail.com
703-951-3195

Timothy Wilson, University of Virginia
tdw@virginia.edu
434-924-0674

Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Princeton University
epaluck@princeton.edu
609-258-9730

Greg Walton, Stanford University
gwalton@stanford.edu
650-498-4284

Judith Harackiewicz, University of Wisconsin, Madison
jmharack@wisc.edu
608-262-5924

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Contact: Barbara Abney
barb.abney@ucf.edu
407-823-5139
University of Central Florida

A first: Brain support cells from umbilical cord stem cells

ORLANDO, Jan. 17, 2012 -- For the first time ever, stem cells from umbilical cords have been converted into other types of cells, which may eventually lead to new treatment options for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, among other nervous system diseases.

"This is the first time this has been done with non-embryonic stem cells," says James Hickman, a University of Central Florida bioengineer and leader of the research group, whose accomplishment is described in the Jan. 18 issue of the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cn200082q?prevSearch=Hickman&searchHistoryKey=

"We're very excited about where this could lead because it overcomes many of the obstacles present with embryonic stem cells."

Stem cells from umbilical cords do not pose an ethical dilemma because the cells come from a source that would otherwise be discarded. Another major benefit is that umbilical cells generally have not been found to cause immune reactions, which would simplify their potential use in medical treatments.

The pharmaceutical company Geron, based in Menlo Park, Calif., developed a treatment for spinal cord repair based on embryonic stem cells, but it took the company 18 months to get approval from the FDA for human trials due in large part to the ethical and public concerns tied to human embryonic stem cell research. This and other problems recently led to the company shutting down its embryonic stem cell division, highlighting the need for other alternatives.

Sensitive Cells

The main challenge in working with stem cells is figuring out the chemical or other triggers that will convince them to convert into a desired cell type. When the new paper's lead author, Hedvika Davis, a postdoctoral researcher in Hickman's lab, set out to transform umbilical stem cells into oligodendrocytes--critical structural cells that insulate nerves in the brain and spinal cord--she looked for clues from past research.

Davis learned that other research groups had found components on oligodendrocytes that bind with the hormone norephinephrine, suggesting the cells normally interact with this chemical and that it might be one of the factors that stimulates their production. So, she decided this would be a good starting point.

In early tests, she found that norepinephrine, along with other stem cell growth promoters, caused the umbilical stem cells to convert, or differentiate, into oligodendrocytes. However, that conversion only went so far. The cells grew but then stopped short of reaching a level similar to what's found in the human nervous system.

Davis decided that, in addition to chemistry, the physical environment might be critical.

To more closely approximate the physical restrictions cells face in the body, Davis set up a more confined, three-dimensional environment, growing cells on top of a microscope slide, but with a glass slide above them. Only after making this change, and while still providing the norephinphrine and other chemicals, would the cells fully mature into oligodendrocytes.

"We realized that the stem cells are very sensitive to environmental conditions," Davis said.

Medical Potential

This growth of oligodendrocytes, while crucial, is only a first step to potential medical treatments. There are two main options the group hopes to pursue through further research. The first is that the cells could be injected into the body at the point of a spinal cord injury to promote repair.

Another intriguing possibility for the Hickman team's work relates to multiple sclerosis and similar conditions. "Multiple sclerosis is one of the holy grails for this kind of research," said Hickman, whose group is collaborating with Stephen Lambert at UCF's medical school, another of the paper's authors, to explore biomedical possibilities.

Oligodendrocytes produce myelin, which insulates nerve cells, making it possible for them to conduct the electrical signals that guide movement and other functions. Loss of myelin leads to multiple sclerosis and other related conditions such as diabetic neuropathy.

The injection of new, healthy oligodendrocytes might improve the condition of patients suffering from such diseases. The teams are also hoping to develop the techniques needed to grow oligodendrocytes in the lab to use as a model system both for better understanding the loss and restoration of myelin and for testing potential new treatments.

"We want to do both," Hickman said. "We want to use a model system to understand what's going on and also to look for possible therapies to repair some of the damage, and we think there is great potential in both directions."

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Besides Hickman and Davis, the other authors on the paper were Xiufang Guo, Stephen Lambert, and Maria Stancescu, all from the University of Central Florida.

UCF Stands For Opportunity --The University of Central Florida is a metropolitan research university that ranks as the second largest in the nation with more than 58,000 students. UCF's first classes were offered in 1968. The university offers impressive academic and research environments that power the region's economic development. UCF's culture of opportunity is driven by our diversity, Orlando environment, history of entrepreneurship and our youth, relevance and energy. For more information visit http://news.ucf.edu

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Contact: Roger Ratcliff
Ratcliff.22@osu.edu
614-292-7916
Ohio State University

Elderly can be as fast as young in some brain tasks, study shows

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Both children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings.

But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed.

In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy – meaning their cognitive skills in this area aren't so different from younger adults.

"Many people think that it is just natural for older people's brains to slow down as they age, but we're finding that isn't always true," said Roger Ratcliff, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the studies.

"At least in some situations, 70-year-olds may have response times similar to those of 25-year olds."

Ratcliff and his colleagues have been studying cognitive processes and aging in their lab for about a decade. In a new study published online this month in the journal Child Development, they extended their work to children.

Ratcliff said their results in children are what most scientists would have expected: very young children have slower response times and poorer accuracy compared to adults, and these improve as the children mature.

But the more interesting finding is that older adults don't necessarily have slower brain processing than younger people, said Gail McKoon, professor of psychology at Ohio State and co-author of the studies.

"Older people don't want to make any errors at all, and that causes them to slow down. We found that it is difficult to get them out of the habit, but they can with practice," McKoon said.

Researchers uncovered this surprising finding by using a model developed by Ratcliff that considers both the reaction time and the accuracy shown by participants in speeded tasks. Most models only consider one of these variables.

"If you look at aging research, you find some studies that show older people are not impaired in accuracy, but other studies that show that older people do suffer when it comes to speed. What this model does is look at both together to reconcile the results," Ratcliff said.

Ratcliff, McKoon and their colleagues have used several of the same experiments in children, young adults and the elderly.

In one experiment, participants are seated in front of a computer screen. Asterisks appear on the screen and the participants have to decide as quickly as possible whether there is a "small" number (31-50) or a "large" number (51-70) of asterisks. They press one of two keys on the keyboard, depending on their answer.

In another experiment, participants are again seated in front of a computer screen and are shown a string of letters. They have to decide whether those letters are a word in English or not. Some strings are easy (the nonwords are a random string of letters) and some are hard (the nonwords are pronounceable, such as "nerse").

In the Child Development study, the researchers used the asterisk test on second and third graders, fourth and fifth graders, ninth and tenth graders, and college-aged adults. Third graders and college-aged adults participated in the word/nonword test.

The results showed that there was a rise in accuracy and decrease in response time on both tasks from the second and third-graders to the college-age adults.

The younger children took longer than older children and adults to respond in the experiment, Ratcliff said. They, like the elderly, were taking longer to make up their mind. But the younger children were also less accurate than younger adults in this study.

"Younger children are not able to make as good of use of the information they are presented, so they are less accurate," Ratcliff said. "That improves as they mature."

Older adults show a different pattern. In a study published in the journal Cognitive Psychology, Ratcliff and colleagues compared college-age subjects, older adults aged 60-74, and older adults aged 75-90. They used the same asterisk and word/nonword tests that were in the Child Development study. They found that there was little difference in accuracy among the groups, even the oldest of participants.

However, the college students had faster response times than did the 60-74 year olds, who were faster than the 75-90 year olds.

But the slower response times are not all the result of a decline in skills among older adults. In a previous study, the researchers encouraged older adults to go faster on these same tests. When they did, the difference in their response times compared to college-age students decreased significantly.

"For these simple tasks, decision-making speed and accuracy is intact even up to 85 and 90 years old," McKoon said.

That doesn't mean there are no effects of aging on decision-making speed and accuracy, Ratcliff said. In a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Ratcliff, McKoon and another colleague found (like in studies from other laboratories) that accuracy for "associative memory" does decline as people age. For example, older people were much less likely to remember if they had studied a pair of words together than did younger adults.

But Ratcliff said that, overall, their research suggests there should be greater optimism about the cognitive skills of seniors.

"The older view was that all cognitive processes decline at the same rate as people age," Ratcliff said.

"We're finding that there isn't such a uniform decline. There are some things that older people do nearly as well as young people."

Ratcliff co-authored the Child Development paper with Jessica Love and John Opfer of Ohio State and Clarissa Thompson of the University of Oklahoma. Ratcliff and McKoon co-authored the Cognitive Psychology and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General papers with Anjali Thapar of Bryn Mawr College.

Some of the research was supported with grants from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Contact: Roger Ratcliff, (614) 292-7916; Ratcliff.22@osu.edu
Gail McKoon, (614) 292-7888; Mckoon.1@osu.edu

Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu

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