Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, August 07, 2014
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After following nearly 800 Baltimore school children for almost three decades, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found most of the children grew up to have about the same socio-economic status as their parents. Those born poor stayed poor. Those born to more economically successful families fared better.
Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander PhD, and fellow researchers, the late Doris Entwisle, PhD, and Linda Olson MA, tracked 790 Baltimore children from the time they entered first grade through their late 20s. They repeatedly interviewed the students, their parents and their teachers through their school careers, and continued conversations with the maturing students as they entered the work force and started families. Their research is presented in their book, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and Transition to Adulthood.
The findings are described on the Johns Hopkins website. Only 33 children born to impoverished families earned high incomes as young adults, whereas 70 would have been expected to have high incomes if the family of origin did not impact the children's prospect for upward mobility, the researchers reported. Only 19 of those born to well off families dropped into the low income bracket as adults.
Only four percent of those from low income backgrounds had a college degree by age 28, a figure Alexander found shocking. By contrast, 45 percent of children born to higher income families had college degrees. And race played a significant role in adult outcomes. While 45 percent of white men from low income families had landed one of the shrinking number of industrial jobs in the area, only 15 percent of black man from low income families had such jobs. White men self-reported having the highest rates of drinking, smoking and drug use, though black men had slightly higher arrest rates and white men were more likely to be employed despite their records and substance use. Alexander said white men were more likely to have social networks that helped them find jobs.
In an interview with NPR, Alexander said we expect that if we "Play by the rules, work hard, apply yourself and do well in school ...that will open doors for you." But the Baltimore study suggests that what makes the difference between success and failure is money and family. Still, a few defy the odds against them. NPR interviewed one young woman in the study whose harrowing childhood included drug addicted parents and neighborhood chaos. "I remember being so immune to death, so immune to shootings and killings. I just remember wanting them to rush, like get the body out of the way so we can get back to playing hopscotch or dodgeball," she said. But she managed to get a well-paying job and give her two children more stability and motherly support. She says she has a strong relationship and plans to be married.
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Updated: Friday, August 01, 2014
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can learn very early in life to fear something that frightened their
mothers even before they were born. Scientists have known for some time
that trauma can ripple through generations. New research on fear
transmission may help explain how that happens.
team of researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School
taught a group of female rats to fear the smell of peppermint by
repeatedly accompanying the smell with mild but unpleasant electric
shocks. That was before they were pregnant. After the rats became
pregnant and gave birth, the team exposed them to the peppermint smell
again, without the shocks, to induce the fear response again.
A story on the university website by Kara Gavin
explains that the babies of fearful mother rats, and a comparable group
of rat pups whose mothers had no fear of peppermint, were exposed to
the smell under many conditions with and without their mothers. When
babies were separated from their mothers and exposed to the minty smell
along with air piped to them from a nearby container occupied by their
frightened mothers, they quickly learned to fear the smell. The trigger
for learning apparently was the scent the mothers give off when they are fearful.
"Our research demonstrates that infants can learn from maternal expression of fear very early in life," said Jacek Debiec,
MD, PhD, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist who led the research.
"Before they can even make their own experiences, they basically acquire
their mothers' experiences. Most important, these maternally
transmitted memories are long-lived, where other types of infant
learning, if not repeated, rapidly perish."
In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Debiec and colleague Regina Marie Sullivan
PhD, describe how brain imaging, studies of the genetic activity of
individual brain cells, and monitoring blood levels of cortisol, the
stress hormone, were used to examine the working of fear in the brain.
They found a brain structure called the lateral amygdale was the key
location for learning fears, and when they gave baby rats something that
blocked activity in that region, they did not learn their mothers'
fear. That could help explain why some offspring of traumatized mothers
don't inherit fears. The authors hope the work will aid understanding of
post-traumatic stress and other mental ills in humans.
recalls working with adult children of Holocaust survivors who had
nightmares and flashbacks related to experiences they had not endured
themselves. Rachel Yehuda,
a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, has studied
descendants of Holocaust survivors and the children of women who were
pregnant and in or near the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. She found
evidence of intergenerational trauma transmission that could not have
occurred through storytelling. She was not involved in Debiec's work,
but she told Arielle Duhaime-Ross of Verge
magazine that the study is valuable because it provides molecular
analysis that would not be possible in living human brains. She said
understanding the brain changes that occur with intergenerational
transmission could help people understand the long-term impact of
parental experiences. "Your fears are not only a response to your
personal experiences," Yehuda told Verge, "but those that your parents
had as well."
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, July 24, 2014
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tend to choose friends who share our interests and outlooks, but our
selections may have less conscious and more ancient roots. Recent
research suggests friends share genetic similarities and that resulting
social networks play an important role in human evolution.
In their paper "Friendship and Natural Selection," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Yale, and James Fowler,
a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University
of California at San Diego, write that the number of genetic markers
shared by two friends is about what they would have if they were fourth cousins.
That amounts to about one percent of a human's genetic markers. That doesn't sound like much, but Fowler explains in a Washington Post story
that has huge implications for human evolution. Researchers found the
genes that friends have in common seem to be evolving faster than other
genes, so our social environments and social networks could be a key
no gene for friendship, and no way to predict friendship among people
because of a particular genetic trait. But the genetic data of two
people provides clues to whether they will become friends. The
researchers developed a genetic "friendship score" that suggests the
likelihood of friendship. Individuals don't consciously recognize these
similarities, but they are statistically measurable in huge data sets.
are likely to share genes associated with the sense of smell. Being
drawn to the same scent could attract us to certain environments, the
authors suggest: people who like the smell of coffee might be drawn to
coffee shops where they meet others who like the smell. The authors
think our sense of smell may be one of the mechanisms humans use to
identify genetically similar friends, though they emphasize more
research is needed to discover how that happens.
and Fowler examined genetic information and details of social
relationships documented among nearly 2,000 people who participated in
the Framingham Heart Study
that began in 1948. They and colleagues analyzed nearly 1.5 million
markers of gene variations, and compared the data for pairs of unrelated
friends and pairs of unrelated strangers. Because nearly all the people
in the study had similar European origins, the findings weren't
explainable by the tendency to gravitate to others of similar
friends are less likely to share genes associated with immunity to
specific diseases, the authors note, and that that could be an
evolutionary advantage. We're somewhat less susceptible to the things
that sicken our friends.
In their book Connected,
Christakis and Fowler write that social networks are in our genes.
After studying friendship networks among 1,110 twins drawn from national
health data of 90,115 adolescents, they discovered that social network
structure was influenced by genes: kids located at the center of their
networks had a different genetic makeup than those located at the
periphery, and those whose friends were closely connected had different
genetic make than those with friends in divergent groups.
the new paper they discuss the role of genes in a broader social
environment where we interact and collaborate with friends and
strangers. "Our results support the idea that humans might be seen as metagenomic
not just with respect to the microbes within them, but with respect to
the humans around them. It may be useful to view a person's genetic
landscape as a summation of the genes within the individual and within
the people surrounding the individual, just as in certain other
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, July 17, 2014
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technologies allow us to be "in a persistent state of absent presence"
that can erode empathy and connection, according to Virginia Tech
fact, researchers found just having a mobile device within easy
reach-even if you're not holding it or using it-can lessen the quality
of a face to face conversation, reduce empathy among friends, and
deflect our attention from what is happening right before our eyes.
"Mobile phones hold symbolic meaning in advanced technological societies," a research team led by Shalini Misra of Virginia Tech wrote in an article in the journal Environment and Behavior.
"In their presence people have the constant urge to seek out
information, check for communication and direct their thoughts to other
people and words."
the study, 200 participants were divided into pairs and asked to chat
for 10 minutes on either a meaningful topic or a trivial one. Nearby
researchers recorded their nonverbal behavior and the presence or use of
any mobile device at any time during the conversation. Afterwards,
participants were asked about their feelings of personal connectedness
and empathy with their conversational partners. When a mobile device was
visible, participants rated the encounter less fulfilling and less
empathetic. That finding held for trivial and substantial topics, and
the negative relationship between the presence of devices and empathy
was even more pronounced when the conversation was between people who
knew each other. Apparently the mere presence of a mobile device can
derail the natural empathy between friends.
Earlier research by Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein
of the University in Essex in the UK produced similar findings. Pairs
of strangers conversed while seated facing each other. A nearby table,
out of their direct line of vision, held a book and one other item. When the other item was a cell phone, participants reported lower connectedness and a lower quality encounter than when the other item was a notebook.
Research by Sara Konrath and colleagues, reported in Scientific American and at the University of Michigan website,
indicates college students of today are less empathetic than they were
30 years, ago, and that empathy has declined the most in the last
decade. Konrath conducted meta-analysis combining the results of 72
different studies of American college students between 1979 and 2009.
While reasons are uncertain, researchers note the trend has accompanied
the rise of social media and mobile communications.
scientists say those results aren't necessarily discouraging. They show
our brains are plastic and subject to experiential influence. And as
Konrath writes in a Psychology Today blog
mobile communications can make people feel closer to distant loved
ones, and that they have tremendous still fully untapped potential to
help people manage physical and mental illnesses. She notes that
paradoxically the same technology associated with our being stressed and
distracted can be used for people to provide electronic encouragement,
kindness and support to each other.
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, July 10, 2014
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Descartes' mind-body duality. A more recent perspective known as
embodied cognition is based on growing recognition that thinking isn't
confined to our brain cells. Our understanding of the world is
profoundly influenced by our bodies and our experiences in physical
reality. Research shows even the way we use our hands offers clues to
how we think, what we know, and when we're ready to learn.
a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, studied hand
gestures used by adults and children and discovered that when gestures
accompany language, they can provide visual and intuitive evidence of
important meanings not explicitly put into words. She reports an
experiment in which young children were asked whether two identical rows
of checkers had the same number of pieces. The experimenter then spread
out the second row and asked again whether the number was the same. One
child said the number was different because the checkers were moved,
and made a spreading gesture with her hands. The answer is wrong but the
gesture matched the speech. Another child gave the same answer, but
pointed at the first checker in each row, and continued moving his
finger between the rows. In that case, the child's gesture conveyed
different information from what he said, so speech and gesture were
kids who mismatched benefited more from instruction, and learned faster
than kids who matched. Further, when experimenters taught a strategy
for solving a math problem correctly, with matching and mismatching
gestures, kids taught with the mismatching gestures were more
successful. Why? Goldin-Meadow wrote in Current Directions in Psychological Science
that a conversation in gesture seemed to be taking place along side a
conversation in speech, perhaps adding information, perhaps lightening
the cognitive load, and perhaps aiding memory. Gestures let speakers
convey thoughts they may not have words for, and mismatches may signal
readiness to change a thought or learn new information.
Researchers from Michigan State
showed 184 elementary school children a video about mathematical
equivalence (an equation: 7+2+9=7+__________.) Half of the kids saw the
teacher sweep her left hand beneath the left side of the equation as she
spoke about that side, and her right hand under the right side when she
spoke of the "other" side. The rest of the kids just heard her talk.
When the children were given a different problem based on the same
principle, those who saw the hand gestures were more successful.
Annie Murphy Paul, in the Business Insider Brilliant Blog,
notes that the act of gesturing "seems to accelerate learning, bring
nascent knowledge into consciousness" and aid understanding of new
concepts. She cites Goldin-Meadow's work and a 2007 study by Susan Wagner Cook of the University of Iowa, in which third graders who gestured as they learned
algebra were three times more likely to remember what they learned than
classmates who did not gesture. In another study, Cook found that
college students who gestured as they retold short stories remembered
the story details better.
Posted By Jeff Cohn,
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Updated: Friday, September 19, 2014
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Jasper Palmer died last week. He was a patient transporter at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia for more than 20 years. Jasper and I became connected closely in 2005 when Einstein became a participant in the Positive Deviance/MRSA project, facilitated by Plexus Institute. The role of the patient transporter is to do just that: transport patients throughout the medical complex to wherever they need to go. When that patient is identified as harboring the "superbug" MRSA, preventing the bacteria from spreading during that transport is quite a challenge, one that even experts from the CDC hadn’t figured out. We recognized that working with the transporters and asking them how to transport MRSA-positive patients could uncover solutions and barriers of which we weren’t aware.
Jasper emerged as a leader when he pointed out a significant barrier to safe contact with these patients. MRSA-positive patients are placed in "contact isolation,” meaning that staff entering their rooms are required to put on gowns and gloves prior to entry. Jasper noted that trash cans were often overflowing with gowns that had been worn and disposed. This left the next person entering with a dilemma - does one do the right thing by wearing a gown, only to have no reasonable place to dispose it? Or does one avoid the disposal problem, take a risk, and perform the patient task without a gown? Not only did Jasper identify the challenge, he developed a solution that worked for him that could work for others. See him demonstrate his simple solution in the video.
Given a forum to share his concerns and solution, Jasper took it upon himself to help others learn this approach. He would stop physicians facing the disposal dilemma and tell them, "I think I have a method that could help.” He worked with his transport colleagues to develop safer methods of transporting patients, even those connected to ventilators and monitors. Not everyone adopted the Palmer Method. However, it garnered attention to the challenge and ultimately investments were made in different disposal apparatus that could accommodate the large volume of gowns being disposed much more effectively than the small, rigid trash cans in place before.
We wound up referring to Jasper as an "unusual suspect.” By this we meant he wasn't a typical infection prevention expert (i.e., physician, nurse, pharmacist). We learned that we needed to look beyond the usual suspect to those unusual ones, from which diverse perspectives and new innovations would emerge. Instead of asking, "whom do we need to involve?” we asked, "who doesn’t need to be involved?” and then tried to engage everyone else.
Upon learning of Jasper's death, I began to think about the concept of unusual suspects. On reflection, it strikes me as, while well intentioned, a bit demeaning and indicative of our fixation with hierarchy and position. Jasper had served his country in the military, was a family man, had worked at Einstein for many years, had lots of friends, and cared about patients. Why wouldn’t we think someone like him could be beneficial to our improvement efforts? Using this lens, who would qualify as someone unlikely to be a source of new behaviors and ideas, an unusual suspect? Someone wedded to the status quo? No, there are likely many benefits of the current state that deserve preservation. A skeptic? No, their contrary position can help expose blind spots. Maybe a good example is a content expert who is unwilling/unable to see any other perspectives. In the case of our MRSA work, those would typically be clinicians and the same people we initially thought would be our key contacts.
Jasper, I think you've taught us all a critical lesson. Anyone- no, everyone who cares about a challenge, who wants to be involved in any way, and who is willing to share collaboratively can be a useful contributor. In fact, we depend on the diverse perspectives of many to discover and create the solutions for our big challenges. Thank you, Jasper, for helping us to appreciate the wisdom that lies within our networks. Your legacy will live on through the work we and others you've touched carry forward.
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, July 03, 2014
Updated: Friday, July 04, 2014
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Clayton Christensen, the business scholar who developed the
concept of disruptive innovation, and historian Jill Lepore are Harvard faculty
colleagues. The two professors don't agree on much, and Lepore's sharply written
assault on Christensen's theory has ignited an uproar in academic and business
In his 1997 book the Innovator's
Dilemma, Christensen lays
out his theory of disruptive
innovation, which holds that products or services that begin simply and
inexpensively at the bottom of market, often using new technology, can
eventually displace those of established companies that seem to be doing all
the right things to maintain their success.
The Thinkers50, a biennial ranking of the
world's most influential management theorists, last year for the second time
named Christensen the
top "thought leader" in the world, and disruptive innovation has been one
of the most widely celebrated ideas in modern business.
to Lepore, the theory's
celebration is one of its problems: she thinks it has escaped critical
examination and been carelessly applied to explain too much. In her New
Yorker article "The Disruption Machine," Lepore analyzes how we understand innovation and disruption. Every age has its
theory of history, she writes. The eighteenth century had the idea of progress,
the nineteenth had evolution, and the twentieth had growth and innovation. "Our
era has disruption," she writes, "which despite its futurism is atavistic. It's
a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an
apocalyptic fear of global devastation and shaky evidence."
used to have negative connotations, she says, but the idea was redeemed by its
use to describe bringing new products to market. Still, she writes, "The idea
of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspiration of
enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the 20th century,
and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out
the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt and you will
In his book, Christensen supports his theory with industrial
case histories. Mainframe computer manufacturers were disrupted when they
missed the market for personal computers. Mini steel mills disrupted the operations of big steel companies,
and a healthy department store industry—the number of stores in U.S. plunged
from 316 to fewer than 10—was disrupted by growth of discount stores. Lepore asserts that Christensen
handpicked his examples, and she introduces evidence to challenge or complicate
his much of his analysis. She notes, for instance, that companies and divisions
that dominated the disc drive industry in the 1980s dominate today, despite
facing disruption Christensen describes from makers of smaller hard drives .She
also points out a high failure rate among would-be disruptive start ups.
In an interview with Drake
Bennett at Bloomberg Business Week, Christensen agrees with Lepore that the
word disruption has become a cliché. But agreement ends there. He calls her
story "a criminal act of dishonesty." Slate's
technology writer Will Oremus says that’s overstating his case, which is
what he accuses Lepore of doing. Oremus concludes that Lepore's cherry picked
examples don't overthrow Christensen's theory any more than Christensen's cherry-picked
examples definitely prove it. In a
in Forbes, Clark Gilbert, chief executive of the Deseret News and Deseret
Digital Media, vigorously defends Christensen’s theory and the scholarship
behind it, as does business consultant John
Hegel in his blog.
Leonard, New York Times columnist
Krugman, and New York
Roose, sympathize with Lepore's views with some caveats. Richard
Feloni at Business Insider reviewed reactions, including tweets from Steven
Sinofsky, the former president of Microsoft's Windows division, who suggests
that both professors are right. He says disruptive innovation has plenty of
exceptions but it's still a useful theory.
What do disruptive innovation theory and its critique look
like through a complexity lens? If
you have thoughts on that, we’d love to hear from you.
Thank you Peter Jones, David Hurst and John Kenagy for your thoughts on disruption and innovation!
Peter Jones, PhD, of OCAD University in Toronto, addresses the issues raised by Jill Lepore and Clayton Christensen in his blog post Reproduction of Disruption, How Innovation Regimes Reproduce Culture.
Reproduction of Disruption
Business consultant and author David K. Hurst, BA, MBA has written two parts of a three part post interpreting disruption from an ecological perspective. He comments, "With the continual emergence of antibiotic-resistant bugs threatening to disrupt healthcare, it seems to me that the ecological/complex systems view is essential."
Disrupting Disruption Theory [Part I]: Storm in a Modernist Teacup
Disrupting Disruption Theory [Part II]: Ecological Transformation
See commentary of John Kenagy, MD, MBA, ScD, FACS "Fireworks: The Disruption of Disruptive Innovation" at his m2s2 e club site.
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Updated: Wednesday, July 02, 2014
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pictures may record more than milestone events and the little incidents
we love to remember. New technology may help doctors identify rare
genetic conditions by analyzing ordinary digital photos of faces. Facial
recognition software may even be useful in identifying presently
unknown rare disorders with symptoms that baffle families and doctors.
A New Scientist story by Andy Coghlan
explains that while genetic tests exist for common conditions, such as
Down's syndrome, genetic tests for many more unusual conditions aren't
available because the gene variants that cause them haven't been
discovered. A story in The Independent by Charlie Cooper explains that 30 to 40 percent of genetic disorders involve some kind of change to the face or skull. Software developed at Oxford University
by medical researchers collaborating with the university's Department
of Engineering Science was initially "trained" by analyzing thousands of
photos of people diagnosed with eight genetic disorders. Coughlin's
story explains that the computer "learned" to identify each condition
from a pattern of 36 features in each face.
who designed the software with Oxford colleague Andrew Zisserman,
believes it can help family doctors and general pediatricians make
preliminary diagnoses of health conditions that may have puzzled them.
In the future, Nellaker told The Independent, a doctor anywhere
in the world should be able to take an ordinary smartphone picture of a
patient, run a computer analysis, and find out which genetic disorder a
patient is likely to have. The technology isn't meant to replace
traditional diagnoses, but to aid it by giving doctors information not
otherwise available to them.
Alastair Kent, director of the Genetic Alliance UK, a charitable organization dedicated to helping people with genetic disorders, told New Scientist
that because few physicians are skilled in the diagnostic use of facial
analysis, families often wait years to learn the cause of their
children's problems. Many of the combinations of facial characteristics
that have diagnostic significance would be undetectable to a layman.
Oxford database now has nearly 3,000 photos, and the software can
recognize 90 disorders. As the database grows, the software will enable
researchers to study groups of patients with undiagnosed problems who
share similar facial features and skull structures. That could allow
researchers to identify presently unknown disorders and the explore the
gene variants that cause them, which could potentially improvement
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, June 19, 2014
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music carries you melodically into dreams and reveries, and some
conveys sadness, joy or a sense of peace. Then there's music that
bounces along with skips and hops and you just have to dance, snap your
fingers or tap your feet. Certain kinds of rhythm induce an almost
irresistible urge to move.
A few years ago, Maria Witek,
a neuroscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who studies emotion
and loves music, created an online survey to try and figure out what
music impels people to start swaying and dancing. She pursued the
subject and described her findings to Michaeleen Doucleff in an NPR interview.
Pharrell Williams' song "Happy," which was just chosen as the new advertising theme song for the New Jersey Lottery, and The Meters "Hand Clapping Song" are examples of what her research shows. So is Chuck Berry's"Rock and Roll Music," especially the version he performs with Tina Turner. Try and sit still when you hear these!
says when the rhythmic structure has gaps, or spaces in the underlying
beat of the music, we are provided with "an opportunity to physically
inhabit those gaps and fill those gaps with our own bodies." In a recent paper,
she suggests that has to do with the way we hear music and the way the
brain processes it by anticipating its structural patterns. In her
survey, Witek asked respondents to listen to drumming pieces that ranged
from simple rhythms with regular beats to very complex patterns with
many gaps where beats might have been expected. She found people all
over the world agreed on which patterns made them want to dance. They
were the ones in between the very simple and the highly complex. People
wanted to physically engage with the rhythm when there was enough
regularity to perceive the beat and enough complexity to make it
interesting without being totally unpredictable. They danced to the
music that was layered with predictable beats and syncopated ones, she
said. The layering can be provided by numerous musical combinations of
claps, drums, other instruments, voice, and lyrics.
In a New York Times essay on rhythm, Nicholas Wade
says Darwin thought that before our human ancestors developed speech,
they discovered that musical notes and rhythm could charm potential
mates. He says Darwin thought that music's origins in courtship explain
why it can arouse strong passions. Wade notes that in his 1997 book How the Mind Works, Harvard scholar Steven Pinker
called music "auditory cheesecake"-a happy accident we enjoy though it
has no survival value. But Darwin theorized, according to Wade, that
anything that enhanced courtship promoted survival by helping to
perpetuate parental genes in a new generation. Read Wade's essay here. Thanks to Bruce Waltuck for the NPR story.
Posted By Prucia Buscell,
Thursday, June 12, 2014
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who think they will die young are more likely to do dangerous things
such as using drugs, fighting, and having unsafe sex and
self-destructive things such as dropping out of school.
counselors and other youth workers have often heard teens-especially
boys from impoverished neighborhoods-say they don't expect to live
beyond 25 or 30, but the impact of that perception has only recently
been studied. And the research is cause for both alarm, because the
feeling is so prevalent, and hope, because envisioning a future life can
inspire more beneficial choices.
University of Minnesota researcher Iris Borowsky, MD, PhD, and colleagues found that one in seven adolescents interviewed believed they would die before age 35,
and that this belief strongly predicted future risky behavior. Kids who
envisioned a long life were more likely to graduate from high school
and stay out of trouble. Boroswky and colleagues analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health,
a sample of more than 20,000 kids in grades seven through 12. A
fatalistic belief in early death was most common among minority kids
from poor families: 29 percent of adolescent American Indians, 26
percent of teen African Americans, and 21 percent of teen Hispanics
reported they expected to die young, compared with 10 percent of their
Alex R. Piquero,
a criminology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, studied
1,354 youth offenders charged with serious crimes from Maricopa County,
Arizona, and Philadelphia over a seven year period. In the beginning,
Piquero asked all the subjects how many years they thought they would
live. His team found those who expected to die young were more likely to commit more crimes, and more serious crimes, and go to prison. Those who anticipated long lives were less likely to re-offend. Piquero's study "Take my License and All that Jive, I can't see ...35" appeared in the journal Justice Quarterly.
The Minnesota study of general population youngsters found no
relationship between actual early death and expectation of dying young.
But by the end of Piquero's study, 45 youngsters had died of non-natural
causes-violence, suicide or other tragedies.
Eduardo Porter, writing in the New York Times, describes a school program designed to give kids a vision of living many future years. Tim Jackson works at Harper High School,
in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago's South Side. As a
counselor for the Becoming a Man program, he tries to train boys to have
a "visionary goal" worth saving themselves for. It's a daunting task,
given the neighborhood's gangs, joblessness and violence. In 2013 alone 29 current and recent students were shot. In one recent weekend in Chicago three young men were fatally shot, and at least 25 people-many of them teens-suffered gunshot wounds.
danger is just one reason youth are fatalistic. Porter writes that
today's rich-poor income gap is bigger than it was at its peak in the Roaring
Twenties, raising suspicion that economic opportunity is available only
to the lucky or unusually talented. A National Bureau of Economic
Research paper shows young men of low socioeconomic status are most
likely to drop out of school when the incomes of families at the bottom tenth of
the income distribution are furthest from the incomes of families in the middle.
Studies have also shown that teenaged girls are most likely to become
pregnant when the gap between the bottom and the middle is biggest. Porter says that creates a condition researchers call economic despair, which means opportunity isn't just out of reach, it's unimaginable. Porter tells how Jackson opened a recent a session
with his students with a story. He was stopped at a traffic light when a
car occupied by three angry drunk men rear ended his car. Should he
confront them? He didn't. He walked across the street and called police.
His students figured out how he made that decision: he thought about
his stake in the future.