FREE PLAY! SUMMERHILL

Let babies play! Study shows free play may help infants learn and develop

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT

The benefits of object play (blocks, puzzles, cars, dolls and so on) for infant learning and development are well documented. However, nearly nothing is known about how natural play unfolds in the ecologically valid home environment (real-life settings). Indeed, research on infant play is limited to structured tasks in child-friendly lab environments, where infants engage with predetermined objects for a fixed amount of time. Although structured observations illuminate how infants explore, interact, and learn with novel objects under controlled conditions, they reveal little about how infants spontaneously play in their everyday environments. A new study published in Child Development by researchers at New York University aimed to address this gap by examining infant free play outside the confines of a lab setting and pre-selected toys.

“Our findings show an essential first step in identifying the everyday inputs to infants’ natural learning,” said Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. “At a time in development when infants must acquire information about what objects are and what they can do with them, massive amounts of practice playing with a variety of objects at home is beneficial for learning. And varied exploration is adaptive. We thus seek to flip the narrative from a critique of what infants have not yet achieved to an acknowledgement of how infants interact with their natural learning environment at home.”

Study participants included 40 infants: 20 13-month-olds, 10 18-month-olds and 10 23-month-olds. Twice as many 13-month-olds were observed to enable comparisons between crawlers and walkers. Most infants were from White (75%), middle-class English-speaking families and were only children. Families were recruited in New York City through hospitals, referrals, and brochures. Mothers ranged from 27 to 46 years old and most (93%) had earned college or higher degrees and 65% worked part- or full-time. The study was conducted between December 2017 and September 2019. Families received a $75 gift card for each visit.

An experimenter recorded infants and their mothers with a handheld video camera during two home visits with minimal interference. Infants were free to interact with whatever objects were available. Object interaction was defined as infants manually displacing an object with their hands. Banging hands on a table or swiping hands on a surface did not count if the infant did not displace the object nor did touches with body parts other than the hands (e.g., kicking a ball, sucking on a pacifier) or touches to the infants’ own body (including clothing), the mother’s body, or a pet’s body.

During play at home, where objects abound and infants were free to play as they wished, babies transitioned among dozens of objects per hour in short bursts of activity, flitting between toys and non-toys alike. The short interactions added up to infants spending 60% of their time interacting with objects. Moreover, infants spent as much time playing with household objects—bins, boxes, pillows, remote controls, stools, cabinet doors, and so on—as they did with toys. Such findings provide a key to understanding how object play might facilitate everyday learning and development.

“Our research yields an unprecedented picture of infants’ spontaneous object interactions,” said Orit Herzberg, postdoctoral fellow at New York University. “Instead of viewing infant behavior as flighty and distractible, infants’ exuberant activity should be viewed as a developmental asset—an ideal curriculum for learning about the properties and functions that propels growth in motor, cognitive, social and language domains. Infants learn about the world by playing with as many things as possible, in short bursts of activity. And every object is a potential play object.”

The authors acknowledge several limitations of the research. First, infants were drawn from predominantly White, upper-middle class, educated families living in a large metropolitan area, thus the experiment was not tested in other samples, including communities where manufactured toys are rare or even nonexistent. Additionally, infants’ object interactions were only observed with their mothers present; thus whether infants’ spontaneous interactions vary by different types of social engagement remains an open question.  

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This research was supported by the LEGO Foundation and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Summarized from Child Development, Infant exuberant object play at home: Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice by Herzberg, O., Fletcher, K., Schatz, J., Adolph, K., and Tamis-LeMonda, C. (New York University). Copyright 2021 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved.

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JOURNAL

Child Development

DOI

10.1111/cdev.13669 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Infant exuberant object play at home: Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

29-Sep-2021

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Social inclusion of women by male colleagues in STEM fields can improve their workplace experience

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO

Organizations working to meaningfully improve diversity and inclusion in STEM may be missing a crucial consideration, new research suggests.

Rather than organizations solely focusing on hiring more women or increasing the visibility of women’s workplace achievements, new research highlights the importance of fostering positive workplace social relationships.  Specifically, facilitating male-female friendships might uniquely improve gender equity and inclusion in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

Hilary Bergsieker, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Psychology and co-author of the study, said they found even a small amount of social inclusion of women by male colleagues can go a long way toward reducing the gender barriers experienced by women in those fields.

“Merely working in a mixed-gender team—or even feeling respected as highly competent by men—is not sufficient to protect women from the psychological costs of experiencing social exclusion from male coworkers,” Bergsieker said. “When women and men have ample opportunity to interact informally and forge workplace friendships, these bonds can meaningfully improve women’s feelings of fit and engagement in STEM fields.”

In a two-part study, the researchers first examined whether acts of gendered social exclusion are systematically associated with men’s implicit gender stereotypes. They then turned to women’s experiences, investigating whether women’s workplace outcomes are associated with being socially excluded by male colleagues. 

Using a sample of 1,247 professional scientists and engineers from nine organizations, the researchers had participants complete a survey that measured their social networks, workplace outcomes, and implicit gender stereotypes (using a reaction time task). To gain insight into social network structures, participants listed up to five teammates and then indicated who, including themselves, sought out each person for informal socializing. Then, to measure workplace outcomes, participants completed a self-report of workplace engagement, efficacy, social fit, social identity threat, and workplace support.  

“Our research shows how positive day-to-day interactions between colleagues reflect and reinforce this chilly climate, and points to a counter-intuitive way that we can help fix it,” said Emily Cyr, a PhD candidate in social psychology at Waterloo. “When men made even small gestures of social inclusion, for example, chatting with female teammates during breaks, women reported feeling less worried about being stereotyped at work and more engaged in their careers. However, men were less likely to socially include their female colleagues than their male colleagues, especially men with stronger unconscious (implicit) gender stereotypes.”

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The study, Mapping Social Exclusion in STEM to Men’s Implicit Bias and Women’s Career Costs, authored by Bergsieker, Cyr, Tara Dennehy and Toni Schmader appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

 

Most cases of never-smokers’ lung cancer treatable with mutation-targeting drugs

Available, FDA-approved drugs may be effective in targeting about 80% of never-smokers’ lung tumors

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

 

IMAGE: PICTURED ABOVE IS A RADIOGRAPHIC IMAGE OF A LUNG TUMOR IN A PATIENT WHO NEVER SMOKED BUT STILL DEVELOPED LUNG CANCER. A NEW STUDY FROM WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE IN ST. LOUIS ESTIMATES THAT 78% TO 92% OF LUNG CANCERS IN PATIENTS WHO HAVE NEVER SMOKED CAN BE TREATED WITH PRECISION DRUGS ALREADY APPROVED BY THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION TO TARGET SPECIFIC MUTATIONS IN A PATIENT’S TUMOR. view more 

CREDIT: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Despite smoking’s well-known role in causing lung cancer, a significant number of patients who develop lung tumors have never smoked. While scientists are still working to understand what spurs cancer in so-called “never-smokers,” a study led by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis demonstrates new possibilities for treating these baffling tumors.

The new analysis suggests that 78% to 92% of lung cancers in patients who have never smoked can be treated with precision drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration to target specific mutations in a patient’s tumor. The researchers found that most never-smokers’ lung tumors had so-called driver mutations, specific mistakes in the DNA that fuel tumor growth and that can be blocked with a variety of drugs. In contrast, only about half of tumors in people who smoke have driver mutations.

The study appears Sept. 30 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

“Most genomic studies of lung cancer have focused on patients with a history of tobacco smoking,” said senior author Ramaswamy Govindan, MD, a professor of medicine. “And even studies investigating the disease in patients who have never smoked have not looked for specific, actionable mutations in these tumors in a systematic way. We found that the vast majority of these patients have genetic alterations that physicians can treat today with drugs already approved for use. The patient must have a high-quality biopsy to make sure there is enough genetic material to identify key mutations. But testing these patients is critical. There is a high chance such patients will have an actionable mutation that we can go after with specific therapies.”

In the U.S, about 10% to 15% of lung cancers are diagnosed in people who have never smoked, and that proportion can be has high as 40% in parts of Asia.

The researchers analyzed lung tumors from 160 patients with lung adenocarcinoma but no history of tobacco smoking. They also compared data from these patients to data in smokers and never-smokers from The Cancer Genome Atlas and the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium, projects led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to characterize different types of cancer. The scientists verified never-smoker status by examining the mutation patterns in these patients and comparing them to mutation patterns in lung cancers of patients who had smoked. Past work led by Govindan and his colleagues found that smokers’ lung tumors have about 10 times the number of mutations as the lung tumors of never-smokers.

“Tobacco smoking leads to characteristic changes in the tumor cells, so we can look for telltale signs of smoking or signs of heavy exposure to secondhand smoke, for example,” said Govindan, who treats patients at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. “But very few of these patients’ tumors showed those signs, so we could verify that this was truly a sample of lung cancer tumors in patients who had never smoked or had major exposure to tobacco smoke.”

The researchers also found that only about 7% of these patients showed evidence of having mutations present at birth that raised the risk of cancer — either inherited or arising randomly — furthering the mystery of what causes lung cancer in never-smokers.

“There appears to be something unique about lung cancer in people who have never smoked,” Govindan said. “We didn’t find a major role for inherited mutations, and we don’t see evidence of large numbers of mutations, which would suggest exposure to secondhand smoke. About 60% of these tumors are found in females and 40% in males. Cancer in general is more common among men, but lung cancer in never-smokers, for some unexplained reasons, is more common among women. It is possible additional genes are involved with predispositions to cancers of this kind, and we just don’t know what those are yet.”

The study also shed light on the immune profiles of these tumors, which could help explain why most of them do not respond well to a type of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors. Unlike the smokers’ lung tumors studied, very few of the never-smokers’ tumors included immune cells or immune checkpoint molecules that these drugs trigger to fight the cancer.

“The most important finding is that we identified actionable mutations in the vast majority of these patients — between 80% and 90%,” Govindan said. “Our study highlights the need to obtain high-quality tumor biopsies for clinical genomic testing in these patients, so we can identify the best targeted therapies for their individual tumors.”

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This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers 2U54HG00307910 and U01CA214195; and the Mesothelioma Biomarker Discovery Laboratory.

Devarakonda S, et al. Genomic profiling of lung adenocarcinoma in never-smokers. Journal of Clinical Oncology. Sept. 30, 2021.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,700 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, consistently ranking among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Clinical Oncology

ARTICLE TITLE

Genomic profiling of lung adenocarcinoma in never-smokers

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Sep-2021

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Center for Health, Work & Environment receives award to continue National Center of Excellence for Total Worker Health®

The Center for Health, Work & Environment at the Colorado School of Public Health has been awarded a five-year cooperative agreement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to operate a Center of Excellence for Total Worker Health®

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ANSCHUTZ MEDICAL CAMPUS

(AURORA, Colo.) September 30, 2021 - The Center for Health, Work & Environment at the Colorado School of Public Health has been awarded a five-year, approximately six million dollar, cooperative agreement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to operate a Center of Excellence for Total Worker Health. Support of this program from the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) will further advance Total Worker Health (TWH) as an emerging field of science and practice and address the needs of the 21st century of workforce through research, intervention, and outreach activities. 

The Center for Health, Work & Environment (CHWE) first received designation as a CDC/NIOSH Center of Excellence in 2016. With this renewal, it will be one of ten centers nationwide. The Centers of Excellence represent the extramural portfolio of TWH research to further its mission of protecting and advancing the safety, health, and well-being of the diverse population of workers in our nation. Under the direction center director, primary investigator, and University of Colorado (CU) distinguished professor Lee Newman, MD, MA, the new funding will support research on emerging issues impacting the well-being of American workers as well a robust community outreach program.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded the public of the high value we all place on having safe, healthy, and productive workplaces,” said Dr. Newman. “Now more than ever, there is a demand for research and interventions designed to keep workers safe,” he added.

The award will fund three new research projects led by investigators from the Colorado School of Public Health (ColoradoSPH), CU School of Medicine, and Colorado State University (CSU). Dr. Cathy Bradly, professor and associate dean for research at the ColoradoSPH and deputy director of the CU Cancer Center, will partner with Drs. Lee Newman and Lili Tenney to lead a five-year study that examines the employment experience of low-income, Latino men newly diagnosed with cancer. This flagship project will test a clinical-based TWH intervention delivered by oncology care teams to improve patients’ ability to continue working during cancer therapy. 

Dr. Kathy James, associate professor at ColoradoSPH, and Dr. Gwen Fisher, associate professor at CSU, will launch a new project that addresses behavioral health for farm workers and owners in the San Luis Valley of southern rural Colorado. A growing body of evidence shows that anxiety, depression, suicide, and other behavioral health challenges occur at significantly higher rates among U.S. agricultural workers, magnified by physical isolation from medical providers. The project will further investigate the contributions to this crisis and form a network of community partners and providers to better support the community.

The third project will be a two-year study to adapt and test a workforce mental health intervention with emergency preparedness programs in Pre-K-8 schools (led by ColoradoSPH assistant professors Dr. Courtney Welton-Mitchel and Dr. Natalie Schwatka). The project will review and co-create revisions to emergency preparedness plans and the mental health supports in participating schools.

The award will also support the center’s TWH initiatives including Health Links®, a program providing businesses with TWH assessment, certification, and advising. The outreach core, led by Dr. Tenney, will focus on dissemination and implementation projects to reach underserved organizations and working communities including small businesses, Latinx, and Black workforces. The award will support the development of new TWH training in the areas of behavioral health, leadership, and emerging issues.   

“The exposures of the traditional workplace have been expanded,” said Dr. Tenney. “Our center has been developing TWH initiates for the past five years and is excited to continue working with an expanded portfolio of research and outreach projects that are issue-driven. Our goal is to understand and adapt evidence and practice to the inevitable changing nature of work.”

“With this award, we can focus on partnerships with business leaders and employees to find and implement practical solutions that benefit all workers, especially those at greatest risk of job-related injuries and illness,” Newman said.  “We are committed to protecting and promoting the health and well-being of workers in the state of Colorado and the region, especially those who are in greatest need,” Newman added.

For more information about Total Worker Health, visit this webpage. For more information on the Centers of Excellence, please visit NIOSH’s website. 

 

About the Center for Health, Work and Environment

The Center for Health, Work and Environment (CHWE) at the Colorado School of Public Health is one of ten Centers of Excellence for Total Worker Health® and houses the Mountain and Plains Education and Research Center, one of 18 centers of its kind supported by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Main offices for the Center are located at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado. The Center team works with faculty, students, and community partners on numerous projects in occupational and environmental health, safety, and well-being.

About the Colorado School of Public Health

The Colorado School of Public Health is the first and only accredited school of public health in the Rocky Mountain Region, attracting top tier faculty and students from across the country, and providing a vital contribution towards ensuring our region’s health and well-being. Collaboratively formed in 2008 by the University of Colorado, Colorado State University, and the University of Northern Colorado, the Colorado School of Public Health provides training, innovative research, and community service to actively address public health issues including chronic disease, access to health care, environmental threats, emerging infectious diseases, and costly injuries. Learn more and follow Colorado SPH’s updates on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

 

The Lancet: More than half of police killings in USA are unreported and Black Americans are most likely to experience fatal police violence

Peer-Reviewed Publication

THE LANCET

Peer-reviewed / Observational/ People

• Researchers compared data from the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three non-governmental, open-source databases on fatal police violence and found that NVSS under-reported deaths from police violence by 55.5% between 1980-2018.
• Over the 40-year study period (1980-2019), Black Americans were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to die from police violence than white Americans.
• Open-source databases should be better utilized to improve reporting on fatal police violence and support policy changes to address systemic racism and reduce police violence.
   

More than 55% of deaths from police violence in the USA from 1980-2018 were misclassified or unreported in official vital statistics reports according to a new study in The Lancet. The highest rate of deaths from police violence occurred for Black Americans, who were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to experience fatal police violence than white Americans.

Researchers estimate that the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), the government system that collates all death certificates in the USA, failed to accurately classify and report more than 17,000 deaths as being caused by police violence during the 40-year study period.

“Recent high-profile police killings of Black people have drawn worldwide attention to this urgent public health crisis, but the magnitude of this problem can’t be fully understood without reliable data. Inaccurately reporting or misclassifying these deaths further obscures the larger issue of systemic racism that is embedded in many US institutions, including law enforcement. Currently, the same government responsible for this violence is also responsible for reporting on it. Open-sourced data is a more reliable and comprehensive resource to help inform policies that can prevent police violence and save lives,” says co-lead author Fablina Sharara of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington School of Medicine, USA. [1]

To examine the extent of under-reporting, researchers compared NVSS data to three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted [2]. These databases collate information from news reports and public record requests. When compared, the researchers’ new estimates highlight the extent to which deaths from police violence are under-reported in the NVSS and the disproportionate effect of police violence on Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people in the USA.

Across all races and states in the USA, researchers estimate that NVSS data failed to report 17,100 deaths from police violence out of 30,800 total deaths from 1980-2018 (the most recent years of available NVSS data), accounting for 55.5% of all deaths from police violence during this period. Using a predictive model, researchers also estimated the total number of deaths from police violence in the USA, for all races/ethnicities and all states for 2019, estimating an additional 1,190 deaths, bringing the total number of deaths from police violence from 1980-2019 to 32,000.  

Black Americans experienced fatal police violence at a rate 3.5 times higher than white Americans, according to this analysis, with nearly 60% of these deaths misclassified in the NVSS (5,670 unreported deaths from police violence out of 9,540 estimated deaths). From the 1980s to the 2010s, rates of police violence increased by 38% for all races (with 0.25 deaths from police violence per 100,000 person-years in the 1980s as compared to 0.34 deaths from police violence per 100,000 person-years in the 2010s).

Compared to the deaths recorded in the new analysis, NVSS also missed 56% (8,540 deaths out of 15,200) of deaths of non-Hispanic white people, 33% (281 deaths out of 861) of non-Hispanic people of other races, and 50% (2,580 deaths out of 5,170) of Hispanic people of any race.

Deaths due to police violence were significantly higher for men of any race or ethnicity than women, with 30,600 deaths in men and 1,420 deaths in women from 1980 to 2019.

Previous studies covering shorter time periods have found similar rates of racial disparities, as well as significant under-reporting of police killings in official statistics. This new study is one of the longest study periods to date to address this topic.

The authors call for increased use of open-source data-collection initiatives to allow researchers and policymakers to document and highlight disparities in police violence by race, ethnicity, and gender, allowing for targeted, meaningful changes to policing and public safety that will prevent loss of life.

Additionally, the researchers point out that because many medical examiners or coroners are embedded within police departments, there can be substantial conflicts of interest that could disincentivize certifiers from indicating police violence as a cause of death. Managing these conflicts of interest in addition to improved training and clearer instructions for physicians and medical examiners on how to document police violence in text fields on death certificates could improve reporting and reduce omissions and implicit biases that cause misclassifications.

“Our recommendation to utilize open-source data collection is only a first step. As a community we need to do more. Efforts to prevent police violence and address systemic racism in the USA, including body cameras that record interactions of police with civilians along with de-escalation training and implicit bias training for police officers, for example, have largely been ineffective. As our data show, fatal police violence rates and the large racial disparities in police killings have either remained the same or increased over the years. Policymakers should look to other countries, such Norway and the UK, where police forces have been de-militarized and use evidence-based strategies to find effective solutions that prioritize public safety and community-based interventions to reduce fatal police violence,” says co-lead author Eve Wool of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington School of Medicine, USA. [1]

The authors acknowledge some limitations in the study. This paper does not calculate or address non-fatal injuries attributed to police violence, which is critical to understanding the full burden of police violence in the USA and should be examined in future studies. The data also do not include police officers killed by civilians, police violence in USA territories, or residents who may have been harmed by military police in the USA or abroad. Because the researchers relied on death certificates, which only allow for a binary designation of sex, they were unable to identify non-cisgender people, potentially masking the disproportionately high rates of violence against trans people, particularly Black trans people.  The authors note that the intersectionality of gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other identities and the relationship to fatal police violence should be studied in the future.

A Lancet Editorial adds, “The study is a potential turning point for improving national estimates of fatalities from police violence by incorporating non-governmental open-source data to correct NVSS data…Better data is one aspect of a public health approach; introducing harm-reduction policies is another. Policing in the USA follows models of hostile, racialised interactions between civilians and armed agents of the state. Marginalised groups are more likely to be criminalized through the war on drugs or homelessness. Reducing hostile or violent interactions between police and civilians, particularly those who are most vulnerable overall, is a forceful case for investment in other areas of community-based health and support systems, including housing, food access, substance use treatment, and emergency medical services. Strategies to lower fatalities from police violence must include demilitarisation of police forces, but with the broader call to demilitarize society by, for example, restricting access to firearms…Police forces too must take greater responsibility for police-involved injuries and deaths. Such changes are long overdue.”

NOTES TO EDITORS

This study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. A full list of authors and institutions is available in the paper.

The labels have been added to this press release as part of a project run by the Academy of Medical Sciences seeking to improve the communication of evidence. For more information, please see: http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/AMS-press-release-labelling-system-GUIDANCE.pdf if you have any questions or feedback, please contact The Lancet press office pressoffice@lancet.com

[1] Quote direct from author and cannot be found in the text of the Article.

[2]Fatal encounters:  https://fatalencounters.org/; Mapping police Violence: mappingpoliceviolence.org;  The Counted:  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police-killings

IF YOU WISH TO PROVIDE A LINK FOR YOUR READERS, PLEASE USE THE FOLLOWING, WHICH WILL GO LIVE AT THE TIME THE EMBARGO LIFTS: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01609-3/fulltext

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JOURNAL

The Lancet

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01609-3 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Sep-2021

COI STATEMENT

M Mahmoudi is the co-founder and director of the Academic Parity Movement, a non-profit organisation dedicated to addressing academic discrimination, violence and incivility. K M Mehta reports leadership or fiduciary role in board, society, committee, or advocacy group, paid or unpaid, with the Youth Community Service as a board member, outside the submitted work. J A Singh reports consulting fees from Crealta/ Horizon, Medisys, Fidia, Two Labs, Adept Field Solutions, Clinical Care options, Clearview Healthcare Partners, Putnam Associates, Focus Forward, Navigant Consulting, Spherix, MedIQ, UBM LLC, Trio Health, Medscape, WebMD, and Practice Point Communications, and the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Rheumatology; payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing, or educational events from Simply Speaking; support for attending meetings or travel from OMERACT, an international organisation that develops measures for clinical trials and receives arm’s length funding from 12 pharmaceutical companies, when traveling bi-annually to OMERACT meetings; leadership or fiduciary role in other board, society, committee or advocacy group, paid or unpaid, with OMERACT as a member of the steering committee, with the US Food and Drug Administration Arthritis Advisory Committee, with the Veterans Affairs Rheumatology Field Advisory Committee as a member, and with the UAB Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group Satellite Center on Network Meta-analysis as a director and editor; stock or stock options in TPT Global Tech, Vaxart Pharmaceuticals, and Charlotte’s Web Holdings; and previously owned stock options in Amarin, Viking, and Moderna, all outside the submitted work.

Disclaimer: AAAS and Eure

Wildfire bees on the brink

Black Summer blazes raise extinction risk forecasts

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: FLINDERS UNIVERSITY RESEARCHER JAMES DOREY view more 

CREDIT: FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

The number of threatened Australian native bee species is expected to increase by nearly  five times after the devastating Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20, new research led by Flinders University has found.

With 24 million hectares of Australia’s land area burnt, researchers say the casualties are clear among bee fauna and other insects and invertebrates after studying 553 species (about one-third of Australia’s known bee species) to assess the long-term environmental damage from the natural disaster.

“Our research is a call for action, from governments and policymakers, to immediately help these and other native populations most in danger,” says lead author Flinders University PhD candidate James Dorey, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale University Center for Biodiversity and Global Change.  

Of the bees studied, nine species were assessed as Vulnerable and two more Endangered as a result of the multiple fire fronts in the 2019-20 bushfires that also destroyed approximately 3000 homes and killed or displaced an estimated 3 billion animals.

The new study published in Global Change Biology warns widespread wildfire and forest fire damage is being repeated all around the world, from North America and Europe to the Congo and Asia, causing catastrophic impacts on biodiversity and sudden and marked reduction in population sizes of many species.

“In these circumstances, there is a need for government and land managers to respond more rapidly to implement priority conservation management actions for the most-affected species in order to help prevent extinctions,” says Mr Dorey.

“Conserving insects and other less visible taxa should also be a factor in restoring and preserving some of the hundreds of bees that may not yet have been studied or recorded.”

He says the study forms a foundation for assessment of other taxa in Australia or on other continents where species are understudied and not registered on datasets or by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN Red List).

“Climate change is increasing the frequency of natural disasters like wildfire, which impacts our wildlife,” says fellow author Dr Stefan Caddy-Retalic, from The University of Adelaide and University of Sydney.

 

CAPTION

Graphical summary of the study

CREDIT

Flinders University

“Our study shows that we can assess the likely impact of natural disasters on poorly studied species, even when we can’t physically visit the field to do surveys.”

“Listing severely-impacted species on the IUCN red list and under Australian law represents our best approach to lobby governments to act,” he says, adding native bees are very important providers of ecosystem services including pollination, but most are poorly known.

“Most people aren’t aware of just how vulnerable our native bees are because they are not widely studied,” adds Flinders University researcher Olivia Davies, another of the 13 authors on the major paper. “The fact that no Australian bees are listed by the IUCN shows just how neglected these important species are.”

The study, which recommends 11 Australian bee species (just 2% of those analysed) as priority taxa for listing as IUCN Threatened species, also demonstrates a new model for “using the data we already have to understand how natural disasters are likely to impact key species and their ecosystems”.

CAPTION

A colourful display of some of Australia’s native bees. Photos James Dorey, Flinders University - Yale

CREDIT

Photos James Dorey, Flinders University - Yale

“Being able to collect targeted data will always be the gold standard but we shouldn’t let data gaps stop us from acting to protect species we know are vulnerable,” Dr Dorey concludes.

The collaborative study includes researchers from Flinders University’s Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics and Sociality, the South Australian Museum, University of Adelaide, Curtin University, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, Murdoch University and Charles Darwin University.

 The article, Continental risk assessment for understudied taxa post catastrophic wildfire indicates severe impacts on the Australian bee fauna (2021) by James B Dorey, Celina M Rebola, Olivia K Davies, Kit S Prendergast, Ben A Parslow, Katja Hogendoorn, Remko Leijs, Lucas R Hearn, Emrys J Leitch, Robert L O’Reilly, Jessica Marsh, John CZ Woinarski and Stefan Caddy-Retalic has been published in Global Change Biology (Wiley-Blackwell) DOI:

CAPTION

The golden-green carpenter bee (Xylocopa (Lestis) aerate Female) Xylocopa sp. F 52p MPE 3x-Edit.jpg Photo courtesy James Dorey, Flinders University - Yale University

CREDIT

Photo James Dorey, Flinders University - Yale University

CAPTION

L gracilipes, one of the species assessed as vulnerable in the new report Photo courtesy Ken Walker (iNaturalist Australia)

CREDIT

Ken Walker (iNaturalist Australia)

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JOURNAL

Global Change Biology

DOI

10.1111/gcb.15879 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Continental risk assessment for understudied taxa post catastrophic wildfire indicates severe impacts on the Australian bee fauna

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Sep-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors have no conflict of interest

 

Parental beliefs on child development and child outcomes go hand-in-hand—and those beliefs can be shifted

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICAL CENTER

In a paper published October 1 in Nature Communications, University of Chicago Medicine pediatrician Dana Suskind, MD, along with University of Chicago economists John List, PhD, and Julie Pernaudet, PhD investigate one potential source of discrepancy in child skill level: disparity in parents’ beliefs about their influence over their children’s development.

Through experimental studies involving hundreds of families across the Chicagoland area, the researchers show parental knowledge and beliefs differ across socioeconomic status. But these beliefs can, with the right intervention, be changed. Moreover, these changes can have measurable effects on child outcomes. The results may offer policymakers insights into addressing an important contributor to disparities in child skill development.

“Neuroscience clearly shows that building early brain connections in children relies on the nurturing ‘serve and return,’ meaning the interactions between adult and child,” said Suskind, Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics and Co-Director of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health.

For this reason, differences in parental engagement can lead to differences in children’s brain development and their capabilities later on.

“There are many deep, structural drivers of inequality that have enormous impacts on child development. At the same time, we know that parental input plays a major role in early foundational brain development,” said Suskind. “However, little research has been centered on understanding, number one, what parents know and believe in the first place, and, number two, whether or not changing what parents know and believe maps onto changes in child input and child outcomes.”

Suskind and her collaborators decided to investigate what underlies parental beliefs about their role in their child’s development. Then, the team asked whether these beliefs could even be changed, and, if so, what method of doing so might be most effective.

To do this, Suskind and her team conducted two field experiments, from 2016 to 2019, with families living in and around Chicago. The first experiment began in pediatric clinics serving underinsured or uninsured families with newborn children. As parents sat in the waiting room before their children’s first-, second-, fourth- and sixth-month check-ups, some were asked to watch 10-minute videos. A subset of the parents—the control group—watched videos about child safety or no video at all, while the “treatment” group watched videos on the parents’ role in very early child development, brain malleability and practical tips for parents to improve involvement.

The second experiment was more intensive. A group of parents of very young children from a variety of socioeconomic circumstances, this time recruited from a range of locations, such as grocery stores and daycares, as well as medical clinics, received monthly two hour-long home visits for six months. The visits involved watching a video on a development topic and doing an activity demonstrating how to apply the topic with their child, as well as a discussion of feedback and goals. This experiment’s control group received information and home visits on child nutrition.

Throughout both experiments, the researchers documented parents’ knowledge and beliefs about how much influence they had over their children’s development. Additionally, parents’ actual investments and child outcomes were measured.

To do this, they used a tool called SPEAK, developed and validated by Suskind and collaborators, which is the scale of parental expectation and knowledge of child development. With this tool, now used around the world by other researchers, Suskind and her team measured parents’ understanding of their children’s early cognitive and brain development and of their own ability to affect that development. The researchers also measured parents’ actual inputs, employing audio and video recordings of parents as they interacted with their children.

At the start of the experiments, Suskind and collaborators found that the more education or higher socioeconomic status parents had, the more knowledge they had of how their investments could affect their child’s skill levels.

“On average, the more education a parent had, the more their knowledge and beliefs were aligned with what the science shows. The more aligned their beliefs were with the science, the more facilitative behavior there was,” said Suskind.

However, within six months of starting the experiments, the beliefs of the treatment groups had shifted significantly from those of the control groups, although both were made up of parents of similar demographics. Moreover, the more intensive home visiting program saw more than twice the impact.

“With these different tiers of intervention,” said Suskind, “we could shift what parents know and believe and by doing so, shift their behavior in the positive direction.”

As parents began to believe their investments mattered, they began to invest more heavily in their children’s development. Suskind and her team saw statistically significant improvements in parent-child interactions over the span of both experiments.

These results were also correlated with improvements in child outcomes, such as vocabulary, math skills and social-emotional skills. Both experiments saw gains in outcomes, but the more intensive program again had a stronger effect.

“We were able to show robust impacts in what parents knew and believed as well as both a related shift in nurturing behavior— more talking interaction— and changes in child outcomes,” said Suskind.

The researchers then combined their data with a previous companion study of parents of older children from families of low socioeconomic status in the Chicagoland area. By compiling this data with their own, Suskind’s team discovered a consistently positive correlation between parental beliefs and child skill levels, across a relatively large range of child ages and across all skills.

This correlation allowed researchers to use parental knowledge level as a predictor of child skill level, and to provide a quantitative measure of how much a parent’s beliefs must change to produce a significant change in their child’s skills.

The results show not only that parental attitudes and beliefs are correlated with parental investment and child outcomes, but that these beliefs can be altered. The experiments provide examples of effective methods for changing parental beliefs that could be used in place of educational policies that don’t treat the underlying issue of lack of parental investment.

Although Suskind and her team recognize the causes of disparities in child outcomes as they age are multidimensional and complex, this work is a starting point that not only highlights the importance of parent-child interactions, but proposes methods of improving them.

In the future, Suskind envisions the results of this work and others like it influencing more personalized parent-child support. She points out that going beyond the underlying trends that the team uncovered in this study could inform more nuanced interventions.

“In the same way you have personalized medicine,” she said, “I see personalized support of families. If education is a form of equity, then all parents deserve to have this information.”

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-021-25964-y 

ARTICLE TITLE

Shifting parental beliefs about child development to foster parental investments and improve school readiness outcomes

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Oct-2021