Category: Social Psychology

As part of the study, which will follow 40,000 UK households over a number of years, young people aged between 10 to 15 years have been asked how satisfied they are with their lives. The findings indicate that a mother's happiness in her partnership is more important to the child than the father's. The findings are based on a sample of 6,441 women, 5,384 men and 1,268 young people.

Overall, 60 per cent of young people say they are 'completely satisfied' with their family situation but in families where the child's mother is unhappy in her partnership, only 55 per cent of young people say they are 'completely happy' with their family situation — compared with 73 per cent of young people whose mothers are 'perfectly happy' in their relationships.

The Understanding Society research examined the relationships between married or cohabiting partners, and relationships between parents and their children. Professor John Ermisch, Dr Maria Iacovou, and Dr Alexandra Skew from the Institute for Social and Economic Research found that the happiest children are those living with two parents — either biological or step — with no younger siblings, who do not argue with their parents regularly, who eat at least three evening meals per week with their family and whose mother is happy in her own relationship.

Commenting on the findings, Dr Maria Iacovou said: "At a time when there is widespread political concern about 'Broken Britain', these findings show that family relationships and the happiness of parents are key to the happiness of young people. Contrary to the popular belief that children only want to spend time playing videogames or watching TV we found that they were most happy when interacting with their parents or siblings."

The research also finds that having older siblings is not related to children's happiness with their family, but having younger siblings in the household is associated with lower levels of satisfaction, and this effect is greater the more younger siblings there are in the household. But relationships with parents are even more important than relationships with siblings. Only 28 per cent of children who argue more than once a week with their parents, and don't discuss important matters with their parents are completely happy with their families.

Dr Iacovou commented: "Together these findings reveal the complex influences of different family relationships on a child's happiness. Over the years, as Understanding Society follows the lives of families in the UK, we'll build up an even better picture of how children's lives are affected by all kinds of factors. Understanding Society is really set to become a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the well-being of children."

 A new study by Rochester Institute of Technology is one of the first to analyze how new-media technology, including the Internet and smartphones, are changing college students' eating habits and their relationship to food. Findings indicate that individuals are more likely to have meals while sitting at the computer than at the kitchen table, and that they use social media as the main avenue to obtain recipe and nutritional information.

"I sought to investigate how the explosion of new media is changing traditional notions of meals and how this is transforming human interaction," notes Madeline Varno, a senior communications major at RIT and principle author of the study. "As opposed to their parents or grandparents, college students do not see meals as a central activity in and of itself, either for enjoyment or communication. In fact none of the respondents I interviewed even had a kitchen table."

Varno conducted an extensive survey of college students at RIT, which assessed how meals were prepared and eaten, how students interacted with others during meals and how they obtained information about nutrition, potential food choices and recipes. It also assessed the importance of meals in students' social lives.

"Eating is now just one of several activities being multitasked at once, all of which generally involve computers and smartphones, including surfing the Web, communicating with friends via Facebook and doing homework," she continues. "This does not mean that students are any less social; in fact, they are often interacting with more people than if they were sitting in a dining room, but the method of that socialization is now directly connected to new media."

Varno also found that people were more likely to ask friends on Facebook or Twitter about recipes than consult a cookbook and often used social media to assess the relevance and validity of food and nutrition information.

"While some respondents expressed concern at the sheer volume of food information available online, they also indicated that the use of Facebook and Twitter to quickly validate data made them feel more informed about making the right choices," Varno adds.

Varno hopes her results will lead to additional studies with larger sample sizes that could further assess how new media is changing eating habits among the broader population.

 Women's appreciation of their bodies is only indirectly connected to their body mass index (BMI), a common health measure of weight relative to height, according to recent research.

The most powerful influence on women's appreciation of their bodies is how they believe important others view them, the study suggests. On the flip side, the more women are able to focus on the inner workings of their body — or how their bodies function and feel — rather than how they appear to others, the more they will appreciate their own bodies.

And the more a woman appreciates her body, the more likely she is to eat intuitively — responding to physical feelings of hunger and fullness rather than emotions or the mere presence of food.

"Women who focus more on how their bodies function and less on how they appear to others are going to have a healthier, more positive body image and a tendency to eat according to their bodies' needs rather than according to what society dictates," said Tracy Tylka, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University and senior author of the study.

Other studies have suggested that about 50 percent of women appreciate their bodies. This work is geared toward examining how they arrive at their satisfaction with their bodies, and how they avoid any pitfalls that might interfere with their positive thinking.

Ultimately, the researchers say, it boils down to respect. If women are going to treat their bodies well — through nourishment, health screenings and exercise, for example — they first have to like their bodies.

"And it turns out we look to whether others accept our bodies to determine whether we appreciate them ourselves," Tylka said. "It's not our weight, but instead whether others in our social network appreciate us. That implies that people should be convinced to be less judgmental and to focus less on weight."

Tylka performed the research with former Ohio State doctoral student Casey Augustus-Horvath, who is now at the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital in Tulsa, Okla. The study is published in the current issue of the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

Tylka has created what she calls an acceptance model, which serves as a guideline to other researchers and clinicians about the factors that influence whether women appreciate their bodies and engage in intuitive eating. She first constructed the model with input from college-age women, and expanded it in this study after surveying women between the ages of 18 and 65.

The women she surveyed were separated into three groups: emerging adult women age 18-25, early adult women age 26 to 39, and middle adult women age 40 to 65. A total of 801 women participated in the survey.

The researchers asked the women about their perceived social support from a variety of different relationships; whether they believed their bodies were accepted by people close to them as well as by society and the media; whether they focus more on how their bodies function and less on their appearance; how they felt about their own bodies; and whether they engaged in intuitive eating.

For the most part, the pathways to body appreciation and intuitive eating are the same among all adult age groups. Women who perceive that they have strong social support in turn believe that others accept their bodies. This perception empowers them to be less concerned about their physical appearance and more concerned about how their bodies function, which encourages appreciation of their own bodies and a healthful approach to eating.

But some differences also emerged in this study, especially with the addition of BMI as an influence. BMI alone was not directly associated with how women felt about their bodies.

"It was a cool finding, that BMI's association with body appreciation is mediated by how we view others' acceptance of our bodies," Tylka said. "So if women are heavy, they can have a good body image if they don't perceive that important others are trying to change their body shape or weight and instead accept them as who they are. And vice versa, if women have a low BMI, they might have a poor body image if they perceive that influential people don't accept their appearance, but not because of their weight.

"One clinical implication is to educate partners, family, friends and the media on the importance of accepting others' bodies and to stop criticizing people about their bodies and appearance."

BMI did affect eating patterns in the two older groups of women. For women age 26-65, those with a higher BMI were less likely to eat according to physical hunger and fullness cues. For the younger women, there was no relationship between BMI and intuitive eating.

"This could mean that people who are heavier feel pressure by others to lose weight so they go on a diet, taking them away from paying attention to those internal cues," Tylka said. "Perhaps, over time, women who are heavier start to mistrust their bodies, including when they are truly hungry and full."

The women in the two older age groups also were more likely to think that others didn't accept their bodies if they weighed more. Tylka said that finding suggests that the weight gain that often accompanies aging for women causes women to perceive that others do not accept their body, whether it is accurate or not.

Women age 26 to 39 were most likely to achieve body appreciation by focusing more on how their bodies function rather than how they physically appear.

"Our thinking here is that women in early adulthood are in their childbearing years, and if they take that perspective of 'look at what my body can do' with regard to having children, they're more likely to appreciate their body for more than just its appearance. But when they get past childbearing age and into middle adulthood, that appreciation is less strong," Tylka said.

Efforts by friends and family to encourage a person to lose weight often backfire, Tylka noted, because they tend to place the focus on eating according to arbitrary calorie counts and portion sizes — external cues — rather than on what the body really needs — actual internal hunger and satiety cues.

"If you're disconnected from hunger and fullness cues and someone makes you feel bad about yourself, you'll be more emotional. And if you tend to eat for emotional reasons, voilà, you're going to eat and likely gain weight," she said.

Tylka added, however, that, "We are in charge of our attitudes, ultimately. We don't want to send a message that the only thing that matters is that others accept our bodies. But others' opinions do have an impact. And we need as a society to stop judging people based on their appearance and weight."

Journal Reference:

1. Casey L. Augustus-Horvath, Tracy L. Tylka. The acceptance model of intuitive eating: A comparison of women in emerging adulthood, early adulthood, and middle adulthood.. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 2011; 58 (1): 110 DOI: 10.1037/a0022129

 More than 40 percent of Americans have at least one step relative, according to a recent Pew Center study. Relationships between stepchildren and stepparents can be complicated, especially for children. University of Missouri experts have found that stepchildren relate with stepparents based on the stepparents' treatment of them and their evaluations, or judgments, of the stepparents' behaviors.

"It takes both parties — children and adults — to build positive relationships in stepfamilies," said Larry Ganong, professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. "Children and stepparents should think of it as building a friendship. There's no perfect formula for doing this, and even if stepchildren initially reject their stepparents, it shouldn't be viewed as permanent. Relationships among stepchildren and stepparents can grow in acceptance, friendship and bonding, regardless of how they begin. Negative relationships don't have to last forever."

Ganong and Marilyn Coleman, Curators Professor in the College of Human Environmental Sciences, identified factors that are related to positive and negative stepchild-stepparent relationships. They found that stepchildren build positive or negative relationships based on their evaluations, or judgments, of stepparents' behaviors toward them and their family. Children also are affected by the opinions and actions of their biological parents and other family members as they develop relationships with stepparents.

The MU researchers evaluated stepchildren's participation and contributions in building relationships with stepparents. They identified six patterns of step-relationship development from stepchildren's perspectives: accepting as a parent, liking from the start, accepting with ambivalence, changing trajectory, rejecting and coexisting.

"Whether or not stepparents are accepted by stepchildren depends on the overall family situation and if they are recognized as being beneficial to their family, either financially or emotionally," Ganong said. "However, step-relationships aren't determined solely by individual actions, but by the collective interactions of both persons in the relationship."

Another complication is the presence of interested third parties, such as biological parents and siblings, and their reactions to stepparents. Through a process called triangulation, many nonresidential birth parents work to get their children to "side" with them and therefore, reject stepparents.

"Rather than engage children against stepparents, parents should seek counsel from persons outside the family, such as a minister, a therapist or best friend, and avoid getting kids involved," Ganong suggests. "Parents should remember that they won't be replaced by stepparents if they maintain strong bonds and that their kids will still love them, even if they also love their stepparents. Relationships are not a zero sum game; there isn't a limit on how much and who people can love."

Journal Reference:

1. Lawrence H. Ganong, Marilyn Coleman, Tyler Jamison. Patterns of Stepchild-Stepparent Relationship Development. Journal of Marriage and Family, 2011; 73 (2): 396 DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00814.x

— The more children are exposed to violence, the more they think it's normal, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE). Unfortunately, the more they think violence is normal, the more likely they are to engage in aggression against others.

Researchers asked nearly 800 children, from 8 to 12 years old, about whether they had witnessed violence at school, in their neighborhood, at home, or on TV. They also asked the participants if they had been a victim of violence with questions like "How often has somebody hit you at home?" The survey also measured responses to whether aggression was appropriate, such as in the statement: "Sometimes you have to hit others because they deserve it." The final section of the questionnaire measured how aggressive the child was, based both on their own report and what their classmates said about them.

Six months later, they surveyed the children again, asking the same questions. This allowed them to test whether witnessing violence — or being a victim of it — led to higher levels of aggression half a year later.

The schoolchildren who had witnessed violence were more aggressive. Witnessing violence also had a delayed effect — observing violence at the first phase of the study predicted more aggression six months later, over and above how aggressive the children were in the beginning.

The same effect occurred for being a victim of violence. Victimization at the first phase of the study was associated with more aggression six months later, even given the high levels of aggression at the study's start.

The increased aggression was caused in part by a change in how the children thought that violence was normal. Seeing violence — at home, school, on TV, or as its victim — made it seem common, normal, and acceptable. Thinking that aggression is "normal" led to more of it.

"Exposure to violence can also increase aggression regardless of whether at home, at school, in or in the virtual world of TV, regardless of whether the person is a witness or a victim," the authors wrote. "People exposed to a heavy diet of violence come to believe that aggression is a normal way to solve conflict and get what you want in life. These beliefs lower their inhibitions against aggression against others."

The research team was headed by Izaskun Orue of University of Deusto in Spain, and included Brad Bushman of Ohio State University, and researchers from The Netherlands and Germany.

Journal Reference:

1. I. Orue, B. J. Bushman, E. Calvete, S. Thomaes, B. Orobio de Castro, R. Hutteman. Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Hurt: Longitudinal Effects of Exposure to Violence on Children's Aggressive Behavior. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2011; DOI: 10.1177/1948550610396586

Mothers who were maltreated as children have increased risk for giving birth to low birth weight babies. The findings, by researchers at the University of Washington, are the first to show that maternal maltreatment can affect the health of offspring.

The study also finds that childhood poverty and substance use during adolescence and pregnancy contribute to low birth weight, which is linked to infant mortality and chronic health problems.

"Our findings suggest that a mother's economic position in childhood and her experience of maltreatment during childhood have implications for her children born years later," said Amelia Gavin, lead author and assistant professor in the UW School of Social Work. "To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that maternal childhood maltreatment may lead to lower birth weight among later-born offspring."

The results were published online March 14 in Journal of Adolescent Health.

Each year about 8 percent of babies in the United States are born weighing less than 2,500 grams, about five and a half pounds. Low birth weight — due to growth restriction in the womb or from being born prematurely — puts newborns at a greater risk for death before their first birthday. Babies with low birth weights who survive their first year are more likely to develop obesity, diabetes and other health risks later in life.

The rate of these births has increased since the mid-1980s even as prenatal care has improved.

"What matters most for healthy birth weights is the health status the mother brings into pregnancy," Gavin said. "We're trying to map pathways of early life exposures that lead to low birth weight."

Gavin and her co-authors examined data from an ethnically-diverse sample of 136 mothers participating in the Seattle Social Development Project since childhood. The long-term project, started by UW's Social Developmental Research Group in 1981, looks for ways to enhance positive development and reduce drug use, delinquency and risky sexual behaviors among adolescents and young adults.

Looking at mothers who had children after age 18, Gavin's analysis allowed her to see the extent to which mothers abused emotionally, sexually and physically before age 10 affected the birth weights of their children. She also considered the effects of childhood poverty and substance use — including binge drinking, smoking cigarettes and marijuana and other drug use — during high school and pregnancy.

Gavin found that maltreatment during childhood was a strong predictor of substance use during high school. And, most significantly, women who abused drugs during high school were more likely to smoke and drink alcohol during later pregnancies.

"We know that cigarette smoking and heavy alcohol use during pregnancy lead to low birth weights, and we know to warn expecting mothers about those risks," Gavin said. "Now, the results of this study show that women maltreated during childhood are more likely to use substances during pregnancy, which increases their risk of delivering low birth weight infants."

Gavin recommends that obstetric practitioners add universal screening of prospective mothers for childhood maltreatment to identify and provide services to women at risk for prenatal substance use.

"What is important about this study is that it was the mother's experience of poverty and maltreatment in childhood, not her poverty or depression or obesity in adulthood, that contributed to her infant's low birth weight," Gavin said.

The National Center for Research Resources and the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the study.

Co-authors are Karl G. Hill, director of UW's Seattle Social Development Project; J. David Hawkins, UW social work professor and co-founder of UW's Social Developmental Research Group, and Carl Maas, former research assistant at UW's Social Developmental Research and now an assistant professor of social work at the University of South Carolina.

Journal Reference:

1. Amelia R. Gavin, Karl G. Hill, J. David Hawkins, Carl Maas. The Role of Maternal Early-Life and Later-Life Risk Factors on Offspring Low Birth Weight: Findings From a Three-Generational Study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 2011; DOI: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2010.11.246

NewsPsychology (Mar. 28, 2011) — Physical pain and intense feelings of social rejection “hurt” in the same way, a new study shows.

The study demonstrates that the same regions of the brain that become active in response to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection.

“These results give new meaning to the idea that social rejection ‘hurts’,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “On the surface, spilling a hot cup of coffee on yourself and thinking about how rejected you feel when you look at the picture of a person that you recently experienced an unwanted break-up with may seem to elicit very different types of pain.

“But this research shows that they may be even more similar than initially thought.”

Kross, an assistant professor at the U-M Department of Psychology and faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), conducted the study with U-M colleague Marc Berman, Columbia University’s Walter Mischel and Edward Smith, also affiliated with the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and with Tor Wager of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

While earlier research has shown that the same brain regions support the emotionally distressing feelings that accompany the experience of both physical pain and social rejection, the current study is the first known to establish that there is neural overlap between both of these experiences in brain regions that become active when people experience painful sensations in their body.

These regions are the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula.

For the study, the researchers recruited 40 people who experienced an unwanted romantic break-up within the past six months, and who indicated that thinking about their break-up experience led them to feel intensely rejected. Each participant completed two tasks in the study — one related to their feelings of rejection and the other to sensations of physical pain.

During the rejection task, participants viewed either a photo of their ex-partner and thought about how they felt during their break-up experience or they viewed a photo of a friend and thought about a recent positive experience they had with that person. During the physical pain task, a thermal stimulation device was attached to participants left forearm. On some trials the probe delivered a painful but tolerable stimulation akin to holding a very hot cup of coffee. On other trials it delivered non-painful, warm stimulation.

Participants performed all tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The researchers conducted a series of analyses of the fMRI scans, focusing on the whole brain and on various regions of interest identified in earlier studies of physical pain. They also compared the study’s results to a database of more than 500 previous fMRI studies of brain responses to physical pain, emotion, working memory, attention switching, long-term memory and interference resolution.

“We found that powerfully inducing feelings of social rejection activate regions of the brain that are involved in physical pain sensation, which are rarely activated in neuroimaging studies of emotion,” Kross said. “These findings are consistent with the idea that the experience of social rejection, or social loss more generally, may represent a distinct emotional experience that is uniquely associated with physical pain.”

The team that performed the research hopes that the findings will offer new insight into how the experience of intense social loss may lead to various physical pain symptoms and disorders. And they point out that the findings affirm the wisdom of cultures around the world that use the same language — words like “hurt” and “pain” — to describe the experience of both physical pain and social rejection.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and performed at Columbia University.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by newsPsychology staff) from materials provided by University of Michigan.

Journal Reference:

1. Ethan Kross, Marc G. Berman, Walter Mischel, Edward E. Smith, Tor D. Wager. Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1102693108

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of NewsPsychology ( or its staff.

Psychological problems experienced during childhood can have a long-lasting impact on an individual's life course, reducing people's earnings and decreasing the chances of establishing long-lasting relationships, according to a new study.

Analyzing information about large group of British residents followed for five decades from the week of their birth, researchers found that family income was about one-fourth lower on average by age 50 among those who experienced serious psychological problems during childhood than among those who did not experience such problems.

In addition, childhood psychological problems were associated later in life with being less conscientious, having a lower likelihood of being married and having less-stable personal relationships, according to findings being published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

"These findings demonstrate that childhood psychological problems can have significant negative impacts over the course of an individual's life, much more so than childhood physical health problems," said James P. Smith, one of the study's authors and a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. "The findings suggest that increasing efforts to address these problems early in children may have large economic payoffs later in life."

The other two authors of the study are Alissa Goodman and Robert Joyce of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.

Researchers found that the impacts of psychological disorders during childhood are far more important individually and collectively over a lifetime than childhood physical health problems. To illustrate, while family income at age 50 is reduced by 25 percent or more due to childhood mental problems, the reduction in family income on average is 9 percent due to major childhood physical health problems and only 3 percent due to minor childhood physical health problems. A central reason for the larger impact of childhood mental health problems is their effects take place much earlier in childhood and persist, researchers say.

The study is the latest in a growing body of evidence that shows psychological troubles early in life can have a long-term negative impact on earnings and social relationships. An earlier study co-authored by Smith showed that childhood psychological problems had a major impact on adult socioeconomic standing, costing $2.1 trillion over the lifetimes of all affected Americans. The results found for the American sample closely parallel those found for the British sample. Another source of concern is that in both America and Britain childhood mental problems appear to be increasing over time.

The latest study was conducted by analyzing information collected as part of the National Child Development Study, which has followed the lives of a single group of 17,634 children who were born in Britain during the first week of March in 1958.

Information has been collected from the group periodically, including surveys about childhood physical and psychological health through physician-led examinations, extensive parental questionnaires and teacher reports. The study includes detailed information about participants' parents, including socio-economic details and family circumstances such as whether there was instability in the home.

Researchers found that the negative economic impact of childhood psychological problems were apparent early in adulthood, with household income 19 percent lower among 23-year-olds who had psychological problems as a child as compared to those who did not.

Some of the smaller family income is caused by a lower likelihood that those who had childhood psychological problems will live with a partner as an adult. By age 50, people who had childhood psychological problems had a 6 percent lower probability of being married or cohabitating and an 11 percent lower chance of working.

The National Child Development Study includes assessments of participants' cognitive functioning and personality traits at age 50, allowing researchers to estimate the impact of childhood psychological problems in those areas.

Children with mental health issues showed reduced cognitive abilities as adults, possibly because their psychological problems make it difficult for them to concentrate and remember, researchers say. Childhood mental health problems also had a negative impact at age 50 on agreeableness and conscientiousness, two key measures of personality.

Researchers found childhood mental health problems also had significant effects on inhibiting social mobility across and within generations and reduced the number of distinct continuous jobs a person held as an adult. This is important because one way people increase their income is by changing jobs by moving on to better opportunities.

The research was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labor and Population program. The program examines issues involving U.S. labor markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.

Journal Reference:

1. Alissa Goodman, Robert Joyce, James P. Smith. The long shadow cast by childhood physical and mental problems on adult life. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016970108

How does your best friend feel when people act needy? Or, about people being dishonest? What do they think when others seem uncomfortable in social situations? According to an upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, if you don't know – your relationship may pay a price.

There are lots of ways to know someone's personality. You can say "she's an extrovert" or "she's usually happy." You may also know how he or she reacts to different situations and other people's behavior. "It's a more detailed way of understanding personality," says Charity A. Friesen, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, who co-wrote the new paper with Lara K. Kammrath. "You might know the person is extroverted when they're out with their friends but more introverted when they're in a new situation." When a person is faced with one of a list of situations, then how does he or she behave? Friesen identifies this as an "if-then profile."

Friesen and Kammrath recruited university students to take part in the study. Each student was asked to get a friend to participate in the study with them. Then each of the participants individually filled out an online survey. This included a list of "triggers" — descriptions of behaviors that someone might find annoying. One example was the word "skepticism" which was described as when someone is overly disbelieving of information that he/she receives, when he/she questions things that are generally accepted, or when he/she is very hard to convince of something. The list also included gullibility, social timidity, social boldness, perfectionism, obliviousness and several dozen other possible triggers. For each behavior, each respondent answered a question about how much this triggers them and how much it triggers their friend.

Some people knew their friends' triggers well; others had almost no idea what set their friends off. And that made a difference to the friendship. People who had more knowledge of their friend's if-then profile of triggers had better relationships. They had less conflict with the friend and less frustration with the relationship. Other research has shown that it's not that hard to come up with a list of traits that describe someone; casual acquaintances can do it. "But, if I'm close to someone, I can really start to learn the if-then profiles, and that's what's going to pay off in my relationship," Friesen says.

Exposure to alcohol in the womb doesn't affect all fetuses equally. Why does one woman who drinks alcohol during pregnancy give birth to a child with physical, behavioral or learning problems — known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder — while another woman who also drinks has a child without these problems?

One answer is a gene variation passed on by the mother to her son, according to new Northwestern Medicine research. This gene variation contributes to a fetus' vulnerability to even moderate alcohol exposure by upsetting the balance of thyroid hormones in the brain.

The Northwestern Medicine study with rats is the first to identify a direct genetic mechanism of behavioral deficits caused by fetal alcohol exposure. The study is published in the FASEB Journal.

"The findings open up the possibility of using dietary supplements that have the potential to reverse or fix the dosage of the thyroid hormones in the brain to correct the problems caused by the alcohol exposure," said Eva E. Redei, senior author of the study and the David Lawrence Stein Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"In the not-too-distant future we could identify a woman's vulnerability to alcohol if she is pregnant and target this enzyme imbalance with drugs, a supplement or another method that will increase the production of this enzyme in the hippocampus, which is where it's needed," Redei said.

Efforts to educate pregnant women about the risks of alcohol have not changed the percentage of children born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, Redei noted.

The gene involved, Dio3, makes the enzyme that controls how much active thyroid hormone is in the brain. A delicate balance of the thyroid hormone is critically important in the development of the fetal brain and in the maintenance of adult brain function. Too much of it is as bad as too little.

When males inherit this variation of the Dio3 gene from their mother, they don't make enough of this enzyme in their hippocampus to prevent an excess of thyroid hormones. The resulting overdose of the hormones makes the hippocampus vulnerable to damage by even a moderate amount of alcohol. The rat mothers in the study drank the human equivalent of two to three glasses of wine a day. Their male offspring showed deficits in social behavior and memory similar to humans whose mothers drank alcohol.

The alcohol causes the problem by almost completely silencing the father's copy of the Dio3 gene in animals whose mother has the gene variation. As a result, the offspring don't make enough of this enzyme, disrupting the delicate balance of the thyroid hormone levels. This is an example of an interaction between genetic variation in the DNA sequence, and epigenetics, which is when the environment, such as alcohol in utero, modifies the DNA.

"The identification of this novel mechanism will stimulate more research on other genes that also influence alcohol-related disorders, especially in females," said Laura Sittig, the lead author of the study and a graduate student in Redei's lab.

In the study, the rats' social behavior was measured by putting a pup into a cage with an adult. Normal adult behavior is to lick and smell the pup. The adults exposed to alcohol in utero, however, interacted with the pup half as much as normal. They also forgot where to navigate in a maze that evaluated spatial memory.

"These results show they had social and memory deficits," Redei said. "This indicates the damage to the hippocampus from the alcohol exposure."

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Journal Reference:

1. L. J. Sittig, P. K. Shukla, L. B. K. Herzing, E. E. Redei. Strain-specific vulnerability to alcohol exposure in utero via hippocampal parent-of-origin expression of deiodinase-III. The FASEB Journal, 2011; DOI: 10.1096/fj.10-179234