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Families cling to hope of autism ‘recovery’
Los Angeles Times: In 1987, Ivar Lovaas, a charismatic UCLA psychology professor, published what remains the most famous study on the treatment of autism. Lovaas had broken down the basic skills of life into thousands of drills, such as pointing, identifying colors and reading facial expressions. For 40 hours a week on average, the therapists he trained used rewards and punishments, ranging from food treats to slaps on the thigh, to instill those abilities in 19 autistic youngsters under the age of 4. When the study began, most of the children didn't speak and were considered mentally retarded.
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The ability to love begins earlier than you think
Woman's Day: The ability to trust, love and resolve conflict with loved ones starts much earlier than you think. In fact, a new review of the literature in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, found that these abilities start in early childhood. Psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, one of the authors of the paper from the University of Minnesota, said the first 12 to 18 months of a child's life are crucial to this development. "Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behaviour in romantic relationships 20 years later," he said. Read the full story: Woman's Day
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Greg Hajcak
Stony Brook University, The State University of New York www.psychology.stonybrook.edu/ghajcak-/ What does your research focus on? My laboratory focuses on cognitive and affective science and their intersection with psychopathology (anxiety, depression, and psychosis). We are particularly interested in emotion–cognition interactions: how attention, emotion, and cognitive control relate to one another — including the topic of emotion regulation, which has become hot over the past few years.
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Gaia Scerif
University of Oxford, UK http://psyweb.psy.ox.ac.uk/abcd/index.html What does your research focus on? We live in complex multimodal environments, and yet even as infants we direct attention very efficiently to select what is relevant into memory, learning, and action selection. I am fascinated by processes of attentive learning, and therefore by the following questions: How do we come to learn what to attend to and how to control our attention to learn new information over developmental time? Why do some individuals really struggle to do so? What are the cascading consequences of attention differences over developmental time? What drew you to this line of research?
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Does Team Training Save Lives? A New Science Gives It a Rigorous Evaluation
Whether the task is flying a plane, fighting a battle, or caring for a patient, good teamwork is crucial to getting it done right. That’s why team-building and training courses are big business in the U.S., and have been for decades. But lately something has changed: “There’s a demand for evaluations—an emphasis on showing that team training makes a difference in safety, decision-making, communication, clinical outcomes—you name the ultimate criteria the industry has,” says Eduardo Salas, an organizational psychologist at the University of Central Florida.
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Ehsan Arabzadeh
University of New South Wales, Australia http://www2.psy.unsw.edu.au/Users/earabzadeh/ What does your research focus on? A principal challenge of systems neuroscience is to quantify brain activity underlying behavior. Key questions include: How are different stimuli represented in neuronal activity? How does neuronal activity give rise to animals’ choices? I have a broad interest in systems neuroscience spanning areas such as sensory coding, adaptation, and learning.
