 |
||
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
|
A short class assignment narrows a race gap The difference in classroom achievement between African Americans and European Americans remains one of America’s most troubling problems. But two Yale social psychologists have now shown that a brief in-class assignment can reduce the race gap in seventh graders' performance by roughly 40 percent. University of Virginia psychologist Timothy D. Wilson expressed surprise that the approach would work. “But common sense is sometimes wrong,” he said. The assignment was designed to affirm the students' sense of personal worth, explains Julio Garcia, an associate research scientist in the psychology department, and Geoffrey Cohen, a psychology professor now at the University of Colorado, in the September 1 issue of Science. While the recurrent experience of being judged makes school stressful for all students, Garcia and Cohen argue, longstanding negative stereotypes about African Americans' intelligence add a unique psychological threat to black students' classroom experience. Garcia and Cohen hypothesized that, for students whose sense of academic competence was undermined by this stress, any classroom setback could set off a downward spiral in performance. So they created an intervention “to reduce [the students'] perception of that threat,” says Garcia. “The idea was to take another part of themselves they really valued to assert their sense of self-worth, which we thought might have a subtle but powerful protective effect.” The study involved 119 African American and 124 European American students from middle- to lower-middle-class families attending a suburban middle school in the Northeast. (The school and suburb are not identified in the study.) In the fall, teachers gave these students a list of values, such as relationships with friends or family, religion, or being good at music, sports, or art. In the first year, the students were randomly divided into two groups: treatment subjects were asked to choose their most important value on the list, control subjects their least important value. The following year, a new group of treatment subjects chose their two or three most important values and new control subjects chose their least important values. Both years, treatment subjects were asked to write a brief paragraph explaining why the values they selected were important to them. Control subjects were asked to write about why the chosen values might be important to someone else. The teachers then resumed their normal lesson plans. At the end of the term, black students who had written about their values earned higher grades in the course than did black students in the control group; the treatment was associated with a roughly 40 percent reduction in the race gap. The percentage of black students receiving grades of D or F fell by more than 50 percent, from 20 percent in the control group to 9 percent in the treatment group. Says Garcia: “Social groups may look like they are in the same psychological situation. This shows they are not.” Cohen concludes, “You can increase academic performance, sometimes dramatically, by removing psychological stressors that inhibit it.”
Antibiotics? Not so fast Children with ear infections typically receive antibiotics, but pediatricians have learned that acute otitis media often resolves on its own in a couple of days. So, with antibiotic resistance a “substantial and growing” problem among children as well as adults, Eugene Shapiro, a professor of pediatrics at the medical school, and his colleagues investigated the effects of cutting back on the drugs. Shapiro and his team conducted a year-long randomized study at Yale–New Haven Hospital’s pediatric emergency department. A total of 238 children, aged from 6 months to 12 years, took part. The parents of each participant got an antibiotic prescription. Roughly half were told to fill the prescriptions right away. The others were asked not to fill them unless their children failed to get better in 48 hours. Sixty-two percent of the “wait-and-see prescription" (WASP) group did not fill their prescriptions, compared with just 13 percent of the other group. However, medical outcomes—as measured by rates of fever, earache, and unscheduled doctors' visits—were about the same. The results appeared in the September 13 Journal of the American Medical Association. The key to the WASP strategy’s success was that all children received ibuprofen and pain-relieving ear drops. “It’s extremely important to treat the pain,” says David Spiro, the study’s lead investigator and an assistant professor of pediatric emergency medicine. (Spiro has recently joined the faculty at the Oregon Health and Science University.) “There’s a general belief that antibiotics will cure all. Hopefully the study will make people rethink.”
Chemical warfare and mental health Growing up in Iran, Farnoosh Hashemian '05MPH experienced the devastation of combat firsthand before she graduated from elementary school. “It was difficult,” she says of the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. “We missed school a lot, and every night we had to run to the basement because Iraqi aircraft were passing overhead and dropping bombs.” Now a research associate in epidemiology and public health, Hashemian studies the psychological aftereffects of warfare. In the August 2 Journal of the American Medical Association, she and her Iranian colleagues reported that nearly two decades after the war’s conclusion, many Iranians continue to suffer from mental illnesses related to the conflict, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. Civilians exposed to both high-intensity warfare and chemical attacks were hardest hit psychologically. Hashemian conducted face-to-face interviews with 153 civilians of three Iranian border towns. One of the towns had been bombarded fewer than ten times during the war; a second suffered higher-intensity warfare, including 70 bombardments; and the third endured both high-intensity warfare and chemical attacks. Residents of this last town, Sardasht, had a significantly higher rate of mental illness than residents of the other two: 59 percent had suffered from PTSD at some point in their lives, 65 percent reported severe anxiety symptoms, and 41 percent had major depressive symptoms. “They don’t have any hope for the future,” she says. “They’re also disappointed that the international community didn’t pay any attention to them while all of this was going on.” Hashemian theorizes that chemical warfare wreaks the most psychological havoc on its victims because the chronic health consequences of chemical exposure serve as a repetitive reminder of the trauma. “When the attack first happened, no one knew it was a chemical bomb, so people rushed outside to help their fellow citizens and inhaled the mustard gas,” she says. Hashemian hopes her work helps the efforts to ban chemical warfare altogether. “The mental effects of this kind of warfare are everlasting.”
Bulk up, dumb down If athletes needed another reason to avoid the muscle-building drugs called anabolic steroids, Barbara Ehrlich, professor of pharmacology at the medical school, has one that’s especially persuasive. Steroid abuse, Ehrlich and her colleagues report in the September issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, can cause brain cells to commit suicide en masse. Ehrlich subjected nerve cells to various concentrations of the male hormone testosterone, the primary anabolic steroid in humans. Testosterone in the normal range contributes to neuron health, she explains, but high steroid levels have been associated with hyperexcitability, a superaggression known as 'roid rage, and even suicide. Ehrlich and her colleagues showed that a greatly elevated testosterone concentration—similar to that of steroid-abusing body builders—triggers apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in neurons. (Interestingly, the team found that elevated levels of the female hormone estrogen had a neuroprotective effect.) Other researchers have demonstrated that low testosterone levels can also cause nerve cell death. The study suggests that neuron health depends on a Goldilocks equation: not too hot, not too cold. It also suggests that steroid abusers may have caused enough cell death to damage their brains. “Next time a muscle-bound guy in a sports car cuts you off on the highway, don’t get mad,” says Ehrlich. “Just take a deep breath and realize that it might not be his fault.”
Why quitting is so hard Cigarette smokers who try to kick the habit are up against a challenging opponent: their own brains. A study in the August issue of the Journal of Neuroscience by Julie K. Staley, an associate professor of psychiatry and of diagnostic radiology, and her colleagues showed that nicotine can cause changes in brain circuitry that persist for days after a person quits smoking. Using a molecular imaging technique called SPECT, Staley’s team mapped the number of nicotine receptors in the brains of 16 smokers, about seven days after their last cigarette. The scans were then compared with those obtained from 16 age- and sex-matched nonsmokers. Urine nicotine levels tested equally low in both groups, but the recent smokers still had significantly more brain nicotine receptors than their non-smoking counterparts. The difference varied by brain region, from 8.7 percent in the thalamus to 36 percent in the occipital cortex. The extra receptors disappear in time, but it isn’t yet known how long this takes in humans—a knowledge gap that may explain why nicotine replacement therapies like gums and skin patches fail as often as they succeed. “When you’ve been smoking for a while and then you quit, it’s like having ten thousand people in a room and all of a sudden they leave,” says Staley. “Your brain really feels that loss.” Staley plans to determine the speed with which the brain scales back nicotine receptors. “This finding has the potential to help us modify how nicotine replacement therapies are used and maybe to design a better dosing strategy,” she says. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
||
©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
||