Human Development

Strong Moms (a newsletter by Similac)
July 2009

"Strong Moms" is a newsletter that I receive every month from Similac since I had my baby girl Zahra (5 months ago.) It comes on several cards that have tips and advice for new moms. This month the newsletter included a lot of tips about spending one on one time with your baby to help his or her development. Here are some that I thought were the most important:

1)Hug and cuddle your baby often

2)Smile and talk to your baby often and sing to her at bedtime

3)Play “Peekaboo” and let your baby look in a mirror

4)Read books to your baby

5)Get touchy feely, and rub different textured fabrics onto your baby’s hands and feet

6)Make trips with your baby (like to the park or the supermarket) so he or she can experience new sights and sounds.

The newsletter echoes the topics studied in chapter 9 of our text, “Human Development”, in the section titled: “The Newborn” as well as the section “Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development. These sections explain how important it is for babies to be exposed to new sights, sounds and experiences. In particular, schemas are defined as “the mental images or generalizations that form as people experience the world.” Schemas in other words organize past experiences and provide a framework for understanding future experiences.” So the tips contained in the newsletter, like letting your baby look in a mirror, encourage moms to help their babies form new schemas. In this example, once the baby has an experience with the mirror, they ’catalog’ what mirrors can do for future encounters with them.

Decision Making and Science

NPR News Friday, July 24, 2009

Guests:
Michael J. Frank, assistant professor, Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition, Brown University
Jennifer S. Lerner, professor, Harvard Kennedy School, director, Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, Harvard University
Colin Camerer, professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics, California Institute of Technology

This news story contained was about a half hour long and contained a large amount of information, so briefly I’ll discuss what part of decision making each guest represented:

Colon Camerer elaborated on Behavioral/ Neuro-Economics and looking directly at brain function to try and measure the thought processes involved with decision making. In some of the research coming out of his institute it is found that certain areas of the brain are involved with self control and raising questions about what stimulates these areas for further studies.

Michael Frank pointed out that people have a habit of adaptively choosing things that have had a good outcome in the past but that sometimes we don’t know what the best outcome is of our actions until we explore. Researchers in his laboratory found that people who had a certain type of gene variation in their DNA were more likely to explore decisions that had uncertain outcomes than those that didn’t have the gene variation. The professor also explained that our brain can integrate our experiences to help make decisions between things that we have had experience with and that may be familiar.

Jennifer S Lerner clarified emotions in decision making and compared Integral Emotions: emotions you have about the decision your making, (ex how you would feel if if the decision turned out badly) and Incidental Emotions: emotions that the person happens to be having at the time of the decision. She also mentioned the role of using fMRI Scanners (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) to study the processes that influence decision making. The fMRI records blood flow and blood oxygen in certain areas of the brain and illuminates these areas on the brain image

The information from the above report, closely relates to the section in our book: “Decision Making” in chapter seven, “Thought, Language, and Intelligence.” The section on decision making discusses how we weigh options when making up our minds and how this process can be affected by biases or flaws. The news story clarifies what new research is being done in these areas to further our understanding of how decisions are influenced and what methods we can use to measure these influences. The roles of fMRI and TMS mentioned in the report not only apply to our understanding of the thought processes involved with decision making but were also mentioned in chapter 4 of our text, “Consciousness.”

Teens Drug of Choice: Pills

The Herlad (York County South Carolina) pg8A Sunday, July 19,2009

In York County the abuse of prescription Drugs and deaths due to overdosing are on the rise. In particular, teenagers of wealthy parents, and those that are depressed are raiding their parents medicine cabinets and using the drugs to feel happier or more academically confident. Marvin Brown (senior commander of the York County Multijurisdictional Drug Enforcement Unit) thought that the appeal of prescription drugs was that taking them wouldn‘t seem as bad as abusing other common illicit drugs and because some prescription drugs indicate exactly how much opiate they contain, like “OxyContin so teens feel safer taking them (even though its still very dangerous)

In Chapter four of our text (“Consciousness“) under the heading: “The Varying Effects of Drugs” several reasons that people desire drugs and become dependent on them are discussed. The chapter mentions that many researchers agree that most people continue to use drugs because of their positive effects rather than the negative effects of not taking them and this seems to be true for the teens of York County as well. It’s possible that teens of wealthy families use prescription drugs because they seem ‘cleaner’ than other drugs; they may think: “I’m not using drugs, just taking a few pills to feel better” or just because the pills are so readily available to them.

The reason teens and others are abusing prescription drugs may be partly the fault of society, since these days everything is a disease with a new medication, even discomforts like heartburn, which (with the exception of severe cases ) could be controlled by diet. So taking medicine has become a less serious and potentially dangerous thing. There are hundreds of possible explanations as to why teenagers are beginning to abuse prescription drugs at a higher rate than before, but the point is that our text emphasizes the use of drugs as a solution to unhappiness and or low confidence and the article above confirms that this is exactly what’s happening on an even larger scale than before.

Worlds Oldest Mom Dies

The Charlotte Observer- pg18A Thursday, July 16, 2009

This is the story of Maria del Carmen Bousada who was declared as the oldest woman to give birth by the Guinness Book of World Records after having twins at the age of 69. After caring for her elderly mother who died at the age of 101, Maria decided to have children. But the problem was that she was 69 years old. Showing intense motivation she underwent strong hormonal treatments to reverse 20 years of menopause, and had her uterus ‘rejuvenated’ by even more hormonal treatments after lying to the fertility clinic about her age, which she said was 55. She was slender with dark hair and looked uncommonly young for her age, and so the clinic believed her. The health risks were not all that Maria paid for her twins though, she even sold her house for $59,000 to pay for In-vitro fertilization. Sadly, Maria was diagnosed with a tumor shortly after giving birth and died by the time the twins were three years old.

In chapter 8 of our text, “Motivation and Emotion”, the concepts between the reasons we do things and what thought processes and other factors influence us to do them is discussed. Maria’s behavior is a good example of how emotional and cognitive factors can be strong motivators. Perhaps since Maria spent so much time caring for her mother that after she died, she felt as though her life didn’t have much meaning, or it could be that she always wanted children but had to put her dreams on hold to care for her mother.

Whatever it was, there was definitely strong emotion that motivated Maria to her shocking behavior. Cognitive motivators came into play as well, because Maria must have felt very confident in her ability to have children and raise them despite her age, health, and finances. The way she perceived herself made it obvious that she expected to live for many more years, and the precise planning of her actions did lead to her partial success, so her thought processes definitely played a big role in the manifestation of her desires.

My Sister's Keeper (2009)

My Sisters Keeper is a movie about an eleven year old girl, Anna, who sues her parents for the rights to her own body. Anna was genetically conceived by her parents to be a perfect donor match for her sister, Kate, who was dying of Leukemia. Anna’s parents had been taking transplants from her since she was a newborn including cord blood, bone marrow, white blood cells and many other painful and dangerous procedures. However the catalyst was when her mother wanted Anna to give Kate one of her Kidneys.

Although at first it seemed as though it was all Anna’s idea it turns out that Kate had actually told her to do so because her mother was refusing to let her go, and she wanted to die because she was tired and very sick. This was actually a book written by Jodi Picoult and the ending in her book is that Anna wins the case but soon after dies in a tragic car accident and so Kate ends up getting her kidney and ironically living anyway. In the movie, Anna wins the case and Kate dies.

Although this movie has many psychological elements I want to focus on the mothers Defense Mechanisms in this whole story. Throughout the case, and Anna’s entire life her mother had been in denial that Kate was dying and that eventually it was going to happen. Because of this acute denial, Anna repressed all signs that she was injuring her marriage, neglecting her other children, giving up on her own life/hopes/dreams, and not listening to Kate’s plea to rest peacefully. Things ended up resolved in the end, but there was a lot of damage to the entire family. This was an excellent example of how we often use denial and/or other defense mechanisms to push away undesired realities or deal with grief.

It may not be possible to stop such an emotional reaction (I even got teary-eyed during the movie!) but knowing this may allow us to try and prevent damage from defense mechanisms. Defense Mechanisms were discussed in chapter 11 of our psychology text on page 422 (4th edition)