Category: Social Psychology

The commonly held belief that men should dominate sexually can disempower both women and men, according to a new study.

Gender roles and norms play a key role in sexual behavior between men and women. It is often assumed that men should dominate women sexually. This assumption may lead to loss of both power and the ability to control sexual behavior among women and men, as well as lead to increased sexual risk-taking, such as not using a female condom. The new study, by Dr. Lisa Rosenthal from Yale University in the US, and her colleagues, is published online in Springer's journal Sex Roles.

Social dominance orientation is a measure of people's level of support for social power inequalities and hierarchy. The belief is linked to greater hostile sexism, more negative attitudes towards women's rights, a greater tolerance of sexual harassment and a greater preference for traditional gender roles. Rosenthal and team examined whether the extent to which both women and men endorse social dominance orientation explains gender dominance and dynamics in heterosexual relationships.

A total of 357 undergraduate women and 126 undergraduate men from a Northeastern US university took part in the study. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire on a computer, next to which there was a bowl of female condoms. The researchers assessed the students' social dominance orientation, the extent to which they believed that men should dominate sexually, how confident they felt in sexual situations, as well as the number of female condoms they took away with them.

Overall, women were less likely than men to endorse the view that men should dominate sexually. The more men and women believed that social power inequalities and hierarchy were valid, the more likely they were to endorse the belief that men should dominate sexually, and the less likely they were to feel confident in sexual situations and consider using female condoms.

The authors conclude: "These findings suggest that beliefs about power may play a key role in both women's and men's attitudes to sexual behavior, and potentially their decisions to protect themselves during sexual activity. Results highlight that social dominance orientation and dynamics in heterosexual relationships do not only hurt women, but also men because they potentially decrease their sexual self-efficacy and interest in female condoms as well."

Whether human or baboon, it helps to have friends. For both species, studies have shown that robust social networks lead to better health and longer lives. Now, a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers has helped show that baboon personality plays a role in these outcomes, and, like people, some baboons' personalities are better suited to making and keeping friends than others.

The research was conducted by psychology professor Robert Seyfarth and biology professor Dorothy Cheney, both of Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. They collaborated with the Arizona State University's Joan Silk.

Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Seyfarth and Cheney, along with their colleagues and students, have spent the last 17 years observing a group of baboons living in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana, studying the biological roots of their social dynamics. As with many other primates, baboon societies are strongly hierarchical. Females "inherit" their dominance ranks from their mothers and enjoy priority of access to food and mates. But high-ranking females do not always have greater reproductive success than low-ranking females. This suggests that, when it comes to evolutionary success, the inherited advantage of high rank can't explain everything.

"If you look at a baboon society," Seyfarth said, "and see the ranked, matrilineal families, you would think that whatever traits put an individual at the top of the hierarchy, that's what natural selection is going to favor. But that turns out not to be the case.

"In fact, dominance rank is not as good a predictor of reproductive outcomes as a close network of social relationships and stable relationships over time. So our question became 'What predicts having a strong network?'"

Baboon females actively work to maintain close social bonds, but, like humans, some baboons seemed to be better at it than others. With such traits closely tied to fitness and reproductive success, the Penn researchers wanted to get at the root of this variation.

During seven years of observations in the animals' natural habitat, the researchers measured individual female baboons on their sociability. They measured the number of grooming partners a baboon had, as well her tendency to be friendly or aggressive toward others. They also measured reproductive and fitness benefits they accrued: how long individuals and their offspring lived, as well as their stress levels, as determined by the presence of certain hormones in their droppings.

The researchers found that strength of an individual's social bonds was not fully predicted by seemingly obvious factors, such as the female's rank or the size of the family she was born into.

"Even when a female has a lot of relatives," Cheney said, "sometimes she's a loner, but some females who have no relatives do just fine. It suggests that you have to be both lucky and skilled to have these networks."

And, again like humans, these skills came down to individual personality traits. To determine a female's personality, the researchers paid close attention to grunting behavior. For baboons, grunting greases the social wheels. If a lower-ranking female grunts when approaching a higher-ranking female, the grunt acts as a kind of appeasement, reducing the chance of receiving aggression. Conversely, if a higher-ranking female grunts to a lower-ranking female, the grunt puts her at ease, increasing the chance of a friendly social interaction. And females of all ranks grunt when approaching a mother with an infant, because grunts increase the likelihood that the mother will allow the grunter to interact with her child.

Working bottom up from the trends they found in the baboon's behavior, the researchers grouped the baboons into three distinct personality profiles: "nice," "aloof" and "loner."

Nice females were friendly to all others and often grunted to lower-ranking females to signal reassurance. They formed strong and enduring social bonds with fairly consistent partner preferences over time.

Aloof females were more aggressive and less friendly, and they grunted primarily to higher-ranking females who had infants. They formed weaker bonds but had very consistent partner preferences.

Loner females were often alone and relatively unfriendly; they grunted primarily to appease higher-ranking females without infants. They formed weak bonds with changing partners.

Of the three, the loners had the highest stress levels, the weakest social bonds and the least stable social partners over time. Both of these measures were correlated with lower offspring survival and shorter lifespans. Both nice and aloof females showed the health and reproductive benefits associated with strong social bonds.

"This belies the idea that everything is competition and conflict," Cheney said.

While the mechanisms that make both "nice" and "aloof" effective strategies remains unclear, the study shows that cooperative personalities are adaptive.

"These results have allowed us to, for the first time in a wild primate, link personality characteristics, social skill and reproductive success," Seyfarth said. "By being a nice baboon, you increase the likelihood of having strong social bonds, which in turn translates to a better chance of passing on your genes."

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Leakey Foundation and National Geographic Society.

Humanitarian workers are at significant risk for mental health problems, both in the field and after returning home. The good news is that there are steps that they and their employers can take to mitigate this risk.

These findings, from a new study by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and collaborators, including Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, are published online in the journal PLOS ONE.

Researchers surveyed 212 international humanitarian workers at 19 NGOs. Prior to deployment, 3.8% reported symptoms of anxiety and 10.4%, symptoms of depression, broadly in line with prevalence of these disorders in the general population. Post-deployment, these rates jumped to 11.8% and 19.5%, respectively. Three to six months later, while there was some improvement in rates of anxiety — they fell to 7.8% — rates of depression were even higher at 20.1%.

Adjusting to home life is often difficult. "It is quite common for people returning from deployment to be overwhelmed by the comforts and choices available, but unable to discuss their feelings with friends and family," says Alastair Ager, PhD, study co-author and Professor of Clinical Population & Family Health at the Mailman School.

Even tuning into one's own family can be a challenge. "I remember one highly capable humanitarian worker struggling because the time she spent with her children simply didn't give the same 'buzz' as leading emergency operations in the field," adds Dr. Ager. "She felt guilty in this, but her nervous system had become 'wired' for emergency settings."

It was continual exposure to a challenging work environment that increased risk for depression, not the experience of particular dangerous or threatening situations. Weak social support and a history of mental illness also raised risks. On the plus side, aid workers who felt highly motivated and autonomous reported less burnout and higher levels of life satisfaction, respectively.

The paper outlines several recommendations for NGOs: (1) screen candidates for a history of mental illness, alert them to the risks associated with humanitarian work, and provide psychological support during and after deployment; (2) provide a supportive work environment, manageable workload, and recognition; and (3) encourage and facilitate social support and peer networks.

The well-being of humanitarian workers can be overshadowed by the needs of the populations they serve. "It has been challenging to get mental health care for workers onto the agendas of agencies employing them — and even onto the radar of workers themselves," says Dr. Ager. "Depression, anxiety and burnout are too often taken as an appropriate response to the experience of widespread global injustice. We want them to know that the work they are doing is valuable and necessary and the situations difficult, but this doesn't mean they need to suffer." The study, he notes, provides "the first robust research evidence to establish the case that good staff care can make a real difference."

Dr. Ager and colleagues are also looking at the experience of those working as humanitarian workers in their own country. Results are due later this year.

 Hate the Lakers? Do the Celtics make you want to hurl? Whether you like someone can affect how your brain processes their actions, according to new research from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Most of the time, watching someone else move causes a "mirroring" effect — that is, the parts of our brains responsible for motor skills are activated by watching someone else in action.

But a study by USC researchers appearing October 5 in PLOS ONE shows that whether you like the person you're watching can actually have an effect on brain activity related to motor actions and lead to "differential processing" — for example, thinking the person you dislike is moving more slowly than they actually are.

"We address the basic question of whether social factors influence our perception of simple actions," said Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, assistant professor with the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Division of Occupational Science. "These results indicate that an abstract sense of group membership, and not only differences in physical appearance, can affect basic sensory-motor processing."

Past research has shown that race or physical similarity can influence brain processes, and we tend to have more empathy for people who look more like us.

In this study, the researchers controlled for race, age and gender, but they introduced a backstory that primed participants to dislike some of the people they were observing: Half were presented as neo-Nazis, and half were presented as likable and open-minded. All study participants recruited for the study were Jewish males.

The researchers found that when people viewed someone they disliked, a part of their brain that was otherwise activated in "mirroring" — the right ventral premotor cortex — had a different pattern of activity for the disliked individuals as compared to the liked individuals.

Importantly, the effect was specific to watching the other person move. There was no difference in brain activity in the motor region when participants simply watched still videos of the people they liked or disliked.

"Even something as basic as how we process visual stimuli of a movement is modulated by social factors, such as our interpersonal relationships and social group membership," said Mona Sobhani, lead author of the paper and a graduate student in neuroscience at USC. "These findings lend important support for the notion that social factors influence our perceptual processing."

Glenn Fox and Jonas Kaplan of the Brain and Creativity Insitute were co-authors of the paper.

 To understand the effects of continuous computerized surveillance on individuals, a Finnish research group instrumented ten Finnish households with video cameras, microphones, and logging software for personal computers, wireless networks, smartphones, TVs, and DVDs. The twelve participants filled monthly questionnaires to report on stress levels and were interviewed at six and twelve months. The study was carried out by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, a joint research institute of Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, Finland.

The results expose a range of negative changes in experience and behavior. To all except one participant, the surveillance system proved to be a cause of annoyance, concern, anxiety, and even anger. However, surveillance did not cause mental health issues comparable in severity to depression or alcoholism, when measured with a standardized scale. Nevertheless, one household dropped out of the study at six months, citing that the breach of privacy and anonymity had grown unbearable.

The surveillees' privacy concerns plateaued after about three months, as the surveillees got more used to surveillance. The researchers attribute this to behavioral regulation of privacy. Almost all subjects exhibited changes in behavior to control what the system perceives. Some hid their activities in the home from the sensors, while some transferred them to places outside the home. Dr. Antti Oulasvirta explains: — Although almost all were capable of adapting their daily practices to maintain privacy intrusion at a level they could tolerate, the required changes made the home fragile. Any unpredicted social event would bring the new practices to the fore and question them, and at times prevent them from taking place.

The researchers were surprised that computer logging was as disturbing as camera-based surveillance. On the one hand, logging the computer was experienced negatively because it breaches the anonymity of conversations. — The importance of anonymity in computer use is symptomatic of the fact that a large proportion of our social activities today are mediated by computers, Oulasvirta says.

On the other hand, the ever-observing "eye," the video camera, deprived the participants of the solitude and isolation they expect at home. The surveillees felt particularly strong the violation of reserve and intimacy by the capture of nudity, physical appearance, and sex. — Psychological theories of privacy have postulated six privacy functions of the home, and we find that computerized surveillance can disturb all of them, Oulasvirta concludes.

More experimental research is needed to reveal the effects of computerized surveillance. Prof. Petri Myllymäki explains: — Because the topic is challenging to study empirically, there is hardly any published research on the effects of intrusive surveillance on everyday life. In the Helsinki Privacy Experiment project, we did rigorous ethical and legal preparations, and invested into a robust technical platform, in order to allow a longitudinal field experiment of privacy. The present sample of subjects is potentially biased, as it was selected from people who volunteered based on an Internet advertisement. While we realize the limits of our sample, our work can facilitate further inquiries into this important subject.

The first results were presented at the 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012) in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

How skillful are you at remembering faces and names?

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are inviting the world to take part in an online experiment that will allow participants to see how their individual scores on a face-name memory test compare with those of other test takers.

The test, which can be taken from a computer, smartphone, iPad and other mobile devices, is part of a growing "crowd-sourcing" trend in science, which harnesses the Internet to gather massive amounts of research data while allowing individual study participants to learn a little something about themselves.

To take part, just visit the test website at experiments.wustl.edu.

"It's a simple test that only takes about 10 minutes to complete," says research team member David Balota, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences. "We're finding that people really seem to enjoy being tested this way."

By participating, individuals both contribute to the science of memory and also receive feedback about their own face-name memory performance in comparison with others who have participated. By placing the test online, researchers are hoping to obtain a wealth of data on how a very diverse sampling of the human population performs on a simple memory performance task.

After completion of the test, users will be provided with a rough estimate of their "Face-Name Memory IQ" score, which simply reflects how their score stacks up against others who have taken the test.

Designed to be both fun and informative, the test also is easy to share among friends — users are given the option of clicking an embedded "like" button that will auto-post a reference to the test in the news feed of their Facebook pages.

Development of the online experiment has been a team effort involving faculty, staff and students from the university's Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Mary Pyc, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in psychology, collaborated with Todd Sproull, PhD, a lecturer in computer science, to develop the online presentation of the face-name memory test. Students from the university's Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA) internship program also assisted in system development.

Other members of the Washington University research team include Henry L. "Roddy" Roediger III, PhD, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, and Kathleen B. McDermott, PhD, professor of psychology, both in Arts & Sciences.

The research team is exploring the use of social media and other options to spread word about the experiment in hopes of getting as many people as possible to take the online test.

Balota recently took part in a similar international online experiment that utilized an iPhone app to test how quickly participants could identify whether a string of presented letters represented a real word or some made-up non-word, such as "flirp."

"The word-recognition study was conducted in seven languages, and, in four months, we collected as much data as a more laboratory-based version took three years to collect in a single language," Balota says. "At one point, it was the fifth-most downloaded word game app in the Netherlands."

Communication between K-12 teachers and parents has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Parent-teacher communication represents a primary form of parental support or involvement, elements which have recently received much attention given the connections between parental support and academic achievement. In fact, parental involvement at the K-12 level represents a major component in recent education policies at the national level.

Mazer and Blair Thompson (Western Kentucky University) published an article in the April 2012 issue of Communication Education in which they developed a scale to measure parent-teacher communication at the K-12 level. The Parental Academic Support Scale (PASS) was developed to assess the supportive interactions between parents and teachers, including the frequency of specific behaviors associated with parental academic support, parents' perceptions of the importance of those supportive behaviors, and the modes (e-mail, face-to-face interactions, phone, etc.) of communication that parents commonly use to communicate with teachers. School districts nationwide may find this scale useful in enhancing communication between parents and teachers.

Mazer and Thompson found that parent-teacher communication centers around five different topic areas: academic performance, classroom behavior, child's academic and social preparation for school, hostile communication between peers, and health related issues. The findings suggest that parents most frequently communicate with teachers about their child's academic performance. Additionally, Mazer and Thompson learned that parents most frequently chose e-mail to communicate with teachers across all five topic areas. This was somewhat surprising because topic areas such as classroom behavior and hostile communication between peers are fairly complex, often requiring more delicate communication that may be accomplished more effectively via face-to-face communication. While parents used richer modes of communication such as face-to-face and phone communication to talk about behavioral, social, and health related issues to more accurately interpret the content of the messages as well as each other's reactions, convenience was often an overriding factor in which mode parents selected to communicate with teachers.

Mazer and Thompson's findings are useful to administrators, teachers, and parents. School superintendents can use the information from this research to advise and train teachers to communicate more effectively with parents. New communication technologies such as iPhones and iPads increase the likelihood that parent-teacher communication will continue to expand. Therefore, it is important for teachers and parents alike to consider the importance of communication in fostering relationships and, most importantly, in enhancing student success and learning.

Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are commonly associated with sexual assault, but a new study from The University of Texas at Austin shows that female victims suffer from a wide spectrum of debilitating effects that may often go unnoticed or undiagnosed.

Researchers Carin Perilloux, now a visiting assistant professor at Union College in New York, and David Buss, a professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, found significant negative consequences of rape and attempted sexual assault in 13 domains of psychological and social functioning, including self-esteem, social reputation, sexual desire and self-perceived mate value.

The study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, will lend important insight into psychological and social ramifications, and possibly interventions, for rape and sexual assault victims.

"These findings document that victims of sexual assault, and even victims of attempted sexual assault, suffer psychological and social costs more far ranging than previously suspected," says Perilloux, who earned her Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011.

As part of the study, the researchers conducted a survey with 140 women who had experienced rape or attempted sexual assault. On a scale of negative three to positive three, with zero representing no change, they evaluated the severity of damage they experienced after their rapes or assaults. The respondents also provided subjective descriptions of the impact of their experiences in relation to each of the psychological and social domains that were studied.

Though all victims of rape and attempted sexual assault reported negative effects in every domain, rape victims reported significantly more negative outcomes than victims of attempted rape in 11 domains.

Across the board, the most negatively affected domains were self-esteem, sexual reputation, (i.e. being labeled as promiscuous), frequency of sex, desire to have sex, and self-perceived mate value or desirability.

Though the sobering data cannot be taken lightly, hope could be found in some respondents' self-described feelings of optimism.

"Women often show exceptional resilience," Perilloux says. "With support and assistance, many rape victims may be able to regain normalcy in some of the domains of their lives affected by the victimization."

 By the time our children reach kindergarten their learning and developmental patterns are already taking shape, as is a trajectory for their future health. Now, for the first time, scientists have amassed a large collection of research that looks "under the skin," to examine how and why experiences interact with biology starting before birth to affect a life course.

Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners, a special volume published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and authored largely by researchers of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), sets out an emerging new field of the developmental science of childhood adversity.

The implications of the research are far reaching, from new approaches to learning and language acquisition, to new considerations for the health effects of social environments affecting large populations, and policies for early childhood care and education.

"CIFAR's multidisciplinary and international program in early childhood development is transforming our understanding of how early life experiences affect the development of the brain and in so doing set a lifelong trajectory," says Dr. Alan Bernstein, CIFAR President & CEO. "This research is providing the scientific basis for public policy concerning the critical window to provide the optimal conditions that will enable our children to grow up to be well-adjusted, well-educated and productive individuals."

The volume is a multidisciplinary collection of 25 thought-provoking papers that have implications for a broad range of scientific inquiry: from molecular genetics, evolutionary biology and neuroscience to social and behavioural science, epidemiology and social policy.

"This is the first volume of collected research to provide such a substantial and comprehensive picture of the interaction between experience and biology in the early years," says Dr. Marla Sokolowski, Co-director of CIFAR's program in Experience-based Brain & Biological Development, and Co-editor of the PNAS volume. "Brain and genetic development are extraordinarily intricate and complex, and so by approaching this question from multiple angles, we're able to reveal a convergence on a number of themes, giving us new insights and an understanding of a greater whole, which now sets more clearly a direction for research to come."

Select highlights:

From the lab of CIFAR Fellow Michael Meaney (McGill University): Scientists have provided evidence that socioeconomic status affects family function and the development and function of brain regions that are critical for attention, learning and memory. Meaney's lab looks into how parenting produces lasting effects on cognitive and emotional development. His lab examined development in rats and found parental influences on the chemical, or 'epigenetic', signals that control the activity in the brain of genes that influence the connections between brain cells as well as learning and memory. In adult animals that were licked more frequently by their mothers the epigenetic signals enhanced the activity of genes associated with learning and memory. These findings reveal that social influences during early life affect the activity of genes that affect the structure and function of brain regions critical for cognitive capacity.

From the lab of CIFAR Fellow Takao Hensch (Harvard University): Given that music is a powerful tool for probing and promoting brain development, Hensch and his collaborators exposed young mice to music and discovered a critical period between 15 and 24 days of life when they could change the mice's innate preference for a silent shelter to a preference for shelter with music. Typically, this preference cannot be altered in adulthood. However, the team then treated adult mice and were able to show that a key brain region could be re-wired to have a preference for music in later adult years. His results point to molecular factors that emerge after early critical periods of plasticity and can be manipulated in adulthood — the first evidence that a juvenile form of higher cognitive behavior can be restored. This clearer picture of molecular mechanisms in early development is critical to eventually treating complex, life-long disorders of the brain, such as autism or acute anxiety.

From the lab of CIFAR Fellow W. Thomas Boyce (University of British Columbia): Guided by animal models of hierarchy and an understanding of the health effects of socioeconomic status (SES), Tom Boyce and his team examined the behavioral development of children in a kindergarten classroom hierarchy. The study found that children in subordinate roles had more depressive behaviors and inattention, fewer good friends and diminished academic ability. The study found that subordination was compounded by low SES — the children with low SES had the lowest levels of prosocial behaviors. Importantly, the study found that teachers who utilized child-centred teaching practices to create better classroom climates were able to diminish some of the adverse effects of stratification. The study suggests that socioeconomic gradients in health and development are the products of more than simply differences in access to money, material goods, medical care, or nutrition. When taken with our growing understanding of the importance of the first five years of life, this research renders even more crucial the need to provide egalitarian and supportive early childhood settings.

From the lab of CIFAR Fellow Janet Werker (University of British Columbia): Janet Werker and her researcher collaborators at University of British Columbia, the Child & Family Research Institute (CFRI) at BC Children's Hospital and Harvard University studied babies belonging to three groups of mothers — one being treated for depression with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs), one with depression not taking antidepressants and one with no symptoms of depression. By measuring changes in heart rate and eye movement to sounds and video images of native and non-native languages, the researchers calculated the language development of babies at three intervals, including six and 10 months of age. The heart rate response of unborn babies at age 36 weeks to languages was also measured. Their study is the first to show that maternal depression and its treatment can accelerate babies' ability to attune to the sounds and sights of their native language, thereby affecting the timing of language development in babies.

About CIFAR's program in Experience Based Brain & Biological Development

Launched in 2003, CIFAR's research program in Experience-based Brain and Biological Development explores the core question of how social experiences and settings affect developmental biology and help set early trajectories of lifelong development and health.

The CIFAR research program brings together an international team of scientists with expertise in neurobiology, molecular genetics, epidemiology, developmental sciences, pediatrics and psychology. Their work capitalizes on new techniques for measuring physiological changes, as well as a new abundance of knowledge in genetics, epigenetics, and neuroscience. This breadth and interdisciplinarity has led to transformative new thinking in understanding gene-environment interactions: CIFAR researchers say the nature-versus-nurture debate is dead. Real solutions come from studying interactions between the two.

In December, 2011, members of CIFAR's Experience-Based Brain & Biological Development program partnered with the NAS to present the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, "Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners," which became the genesis for this PNAS volume. Thomas Boyce and Marla Sokolowski are co-directors of CIFAR's Experience-based Brain & Biological Development program, as well as the co-editors of the PNAS special edition.

CIFAR researchers reporting in the PNAS special edition (http://www.pnas.org/)

Ronald G Barr (University of British Columbia): Abusive head trauma: Preventing a failure of normal caregiver-infant interaction.

W. Thomas Boyce (University of British Columbia): Social stratification, classroom 'climate' and the behavioral adaptation of kindergarten children.

David F Clayton (Queen Mary, University of London): The impact of experience-dependent and -independent factors on gene expression in songbird brain.

Lia C. H. Fernald (University of California at Berkeley): Socio-economic gradients in child development in very young children: Evidence from India, Indonesia, Peru and Senegal.

Russell D Fernald (Stanford University): How does social information change the brain?

Takao K Hensch (Harvard): A critical period for acoustic preference in mice.

Clyde Hertzman (University of British Columbia): Biological embedding: Putting the concept in perspective.

Michael S Kobor (University of British Columbia): Biological and environmental predictors of variable DNA methylation in a human community cohort.

Bryan Kolb (University of Lethbridge): Experience and the developing prefrontal cortex.

Joel D. Levine (University of Toronto, Mississauga): Social structures depend on innate determinants and chemosensory processing in Drosophila.

Michael J. Meaney (McGill University and Douglas Hospital Research Centre): Variations in postnatal maternal care and the epigenetic regulation of Grm1 expression and hippocampal function in the rat.

Michael Rutter (King's College London): Achievements and challenges in the biology of environmental effects.

Marla B Sokolowski (University of Toronto): Gene-environment interplay in Drosophila melanogaster: Chronic food deprivation in early-life affects adult exploratory and fitness traits.

Moshe Szyf (McGill University): Conserved epigenetic sensitivity to early life experience in the rat and human hippocampus.

Janet F. Werker (University of British Columbia): Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception.

 The experience of being bullied is particularly detrimental to the psychological health of school girls who don't have social support from either adults or peers, according to a new study by Dr. Martin Guhn and colleagues from the University of British Columbia in Canada. In contrast, social support from adults or peers (or both) appears to lessen the negative consequences of bullying in this group, namely anxiety and depression.

The work is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies.

Guhn and his team looked at whether the combination of high levels of bullying and low levels of adult as well as peer support have a multiplicative negative effect on children's well-being.

A total of 3,026 ten-year-old school children from 72 schools in Vancouver, Canada, took part in the study and completed questionnaires, which assessed their satisfaction with life, their self-esteem, and their levels of anxiety and depression. The authors looked at whether the ratings for these factors differed, according to the quality of the children's relationships with both adults and their peers and how often they felt victimized.

Overall, girls were more likely to report positive relationships with both adults and peers, higher satisfaction with life, higher self-esteem as well as higher anxiety levels. There were no differences between boys' and girls' reported levels of bullying and depression. However, as many as 1 in 7 girls and 1 in 6 boys felt victimized several times a week, with verbal and social victimization more commonly reported than physical bullying; cyber bullying appeared to be relatively low.

The authors also found that positive relationships with adults and peers were strongly linked to life satisfaction and self-esteem, whereas bullying was strongly linked to depressive symptoms and anxiety. In addition, victimization was particularly strongly linked to low life satisfaction, low self-esteem and more depressive symptoms in girls who reported low levels of social support from adults as well as from peers.

The authors conclude: "Our findings have implications for promoting children's well-being in school and community contexts, supporting interventions that foster relationship-building skills and simultaneously reduce victimization. In other words, children need more than the absence of risk factors to experience good mental health and well-being."