Bullying affects most Adolescents, Popularity Increases the Risk of Getting Bullied

Bullying affects more than just those children who are seen to be isolated and marginalised, according to sociologists.

In fact, researchers have found that the 'popular' students are affected and may actually suffer more from a single act of social aggression.

"We did find that students who are isolated do get bullied," said Diane Felmlee, professor of sociology, Penn State.

Diane Felmlee

"However, for most students, the likelihood of being targeted by aggressive acts increases as a student becomes more popular, with the exception of those at the very top."

In a study of students and their friendship networks in 19 North Carolina schools, the researchers found that the risk of being bullied drops dramatically only for the adolescents in the top five percent of the school's social strata.

Bullying may be a tactical form of aggression, according to the researchers, who report their findings in the current issue of American Sociological Review (pdf).

Young people who are attempting to climb in status may increase their risk of victimization.

Robert Faris

"When youth are vying for status, they probably gain little from attacking students who are already marginalised, in fact, it might backfire," said Felmlee, who worked with Robert Faris, associate professor, University of California Davis.

"But, if adolescents put down someone who is trying to be a leader in their group, or who constitutes a threat to their status, then there is a lot more to be gained."

Faris and Felmlee also found that girls are more likely to be victims of both male and female bullies. Girls who date are at increased risk of physical violence.

"Girls may pose particular threats to other female students' social standing and represent potential rivals when it comes to securing a boyfriend," said Felmlee.

"For boys, girls who date represent rewarding, often popular and relatively easy targets who are unlikely to retaliate physically."

Students who have an aggressive friend tend to avoid being victimized. This may be further evidence that bullying is rarely an individual act, but associated with how friends establish and maintain hierarchies by protecting their own, according to the researchers.

There are serious costs associated with bullying over time, Felmlee said. Victims suffer elevated levels of anxiety, depression and anger. They tend to develop negative feelings about their schools, as well.

Bullying's detrimental effects can be even more pronounced among relatively popular students, according to the researchers.

Higher status students experienced significantly larger increases in depression, anxiety and anger than low-status students.

The friendships of these students also deteriorated.

"The effects of social aggression were magnified by the student's friendship status," said Felmlee.

"It may be that the kids who are extremely popular and rarely victimized had farther to fall than those more accustomed to being a target, so, although socially vulnerable youth suffer significantly from frequent harassment, more central victims of bullying, those who may be 'hidden in plain sight' face serious consequences."

The researchers examined data from the Context of Adolescent Substance Use study, which surveyed about 4,200 middle and high school students twice during the school year.

The surveys included questions on serious verbal and physical harassment, but did not include minor incidents, such as playful teasing.

The students were asked to provide information about their friendships, as well as information about students whom they believe they harassed and about those who they believe harassed them.

Divorce early in childhood affects parental relationships in adulthood

Divorce has a bigger impact on child-parent relationships if it occurs in the first few years of the child's life, according to new research.

Those who experience parental divorce early in their childhood tend to have more insecure relationships with their parents as adults than those who experience divorce later, researchers say.

R. Chris Fraley

"By studying variation in parental divorce, we are hoping to learn more about how early experiences predict the quality of people's close relationships later in life," says R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Psychologists are especially interested in childhood experiences, as their impact can extend into adulthood, but studying such early experiences is challenging, as people's memories of particular events vary widely.

Parental divorce is a good event to study, he says, as people can accurately report if and when their parents divorced, even if they do not have perfect recollection of the details.

In two studies published today in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Fraley and graduate student Marie Heffernan examined the timing and effects of divorce on both parental and romantic relationships, as well as differences in how divorce affects relationships with mothers versus fathers.

In the first study, they analyzed data from 7,735 people who participated in a survey about personality and close relationships through yourpersonality.net.

More than one-third of the survey participants' parents divorced and the average age of divorce was about 9 years old.

The researchers found that individuals from divorced families were less likely to view their current relationships with their parents as secure.

And people who experienced parental divorce between birth and 3 to 5 years of age were more insecure in their current relationships with their parents compared to those whose parents divorced later in childhood.

"A person who has a secure relationship with a parent is more likely than someone who is insecure to feel that they can trust the parent," Fraley says.

"Such a person is more comfortable depending on the parent and is confident that the parent will be psychologically available when needed."

Although there was a tendency for people to experience more anxiety about romantic relationships if they were from divorced families, the link between parental divorce and insecurity in romantic relationships was relatively weak.

This finding was important, the researchers say, as it shows that divorce does not have a blanket effect on all close relationships in adulthood but rather is selective – affecting some relationships more than others.

They also found that parental divorce tends to predict greater insecurity in people's relationships with their fathers than with their mothers.

Conclusion
While it is premature to speculate on the implications of this work for decision-making regarding child custody, the work is valuable as it suggests that "something as basic as the amount of time that one spends with a parent or one's living arrangements" can shape the quality of child-parent relationships, write Fraley and Heffernan.

"People's relationships with their parents and romantic partners play important roles in their lives," Fraley says.

"This research brings us one step closer to understanding why it is that some people have relatively secure relationships with close others whereas others have more difficulty opening up to and depending on important people in their lives."

Read the full article here

More information: doi: 10.1177/0146167213491503

Autism: Affects social abilities AND a broad range of sensory and motor skills

Lead researcher, Aarti Nair, a student in the San Diego State University/University of California, San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology reviews MRI scans of children with autism. Credit: SDSU

A group of investigators from San Diego State University's Brain Development Imaging Laboratory are shedding a new light on the effects of autism on the brain.

The team has identified that connectivity between the thalamus, a deep brain structure crucial for sensory and motor functions, and the cerebral cortex, the brain's outer layer, is impaired in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Led by Aarti Nair, a student in the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, the study is the first of its kind, combining functional and anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to examine connections between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus.

Ralph-Axel Müller

Nair and Dr. Ralph-Axel Müller, an SDSU professor of psychology who was senior investigator of the study, examined more than 50 children, both with autism and without.

Brain communication
The thalamus is a crucial brain structure for many functions, such as vision, hearing, movement control and attention. In the children with autism, the pathways connecting the cerebral cortex and thalamus were found to be affected, indicating that these two parts of the brain do not communicate well with each other.

"This impaired connectivity suggests that autism is not simply a disorder of social and communicative abilities, but also affects a broad range of sensory and motor systems," Müller said.

Disturbances in the development of both the structure and function of the thalamus may play a role in the emergence of social and communicative impairments, which are among the most prominent and distressing symptoms of autism.

While the findings reported in this study are novel, they are consistent with growing evidence on sensory and motor abnormalities in autism.

They suggest that the diagnostic criteria for autism, which emphasize social and communicative impairment, may fail to consider the broad spectrum of problems children with autism experience.

Parental cultural attitudes and beliefs affects Children's TV Media Habits

Wanjiku F. M. Njoroge

Differences in parental beliefs and attitudes regarding the effects of media on early childhood development may help explain increasing racial/ethnic disparities in child media viewing/habits, according to a study by Wanjiku F. M. Njoroge, M.D., of Seattle Children's Hospital and the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues.

A total of 596 parents of children ages 3 to 5 years completed demographic questionnaires, reported on attitudes regarding media's risks and benefits to their children, and completed one-week media diaries in which they recorded all of the programs their children watched.

According to study results, children watched an average of 462.0 minutes of TV per week, with African American children watching more TV/DVDs per week than did children of other racial/ethnic backgrounds.

The relationship between child race/ethnicity and average weekly media time was no longer statistically significant after controlling for socioeconomic status (parental educational attainment and reported annual family income), indicating that the observed relationship between race/ethnicity and media time was significantly confounded by socioeconomic status (SES).

Significant differences were found between parents of ethnically/racially diverse children and parents of non-Hispanic white children regarding the perceived positive effects of TV viewing, even when parental education and family income were taken into account.

"These findings point to an important relationship between parental attitudes/beliefs about child media use and time that could be useful for intervention work."

The study concludes,

"Because of the strong relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and media exposure in our sample, future research with larger samples of children from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds is warranted to better understand the complexities of race/ethnicity, family SES, and parental beliefs and attitudes on child media exposure." 

More information: JAMA Pediatr. Published online June 17, 2013. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.75

Noonan syndrome: Father's age affects offspring

In a new paper, USC Dornsife molecular and computational biologists Norman Arnheim and Peter Calabrese and their team found that the longer a man waits to have children, the greater the chance of having a child with Noonan syndrome.

Norman Arnheim

Scientists in USC Dornsife have unlocked the mystery of why new cases of the genetic disease Noonan syndrome are so common—a mutation that causes the disease disproportionately increases a normal father's production of sperm carrying the disease trait.

When the mutation arises in a normal sperm stem cell, it makes that cell more likely to reproduce itself than stem cells lacking the mutation.

The father then is more likely to have an affected child because more mutant stem cells result in more mutant sperm.

The longer the man waits to have children, the greater the chance of having a child with Noonan syndrome, which is among the most common genetic diseases with a simple inheritance pattern.

About one of every 4,000 live births is a child with a new disease mutation. The disease can cause craniofacial abnormalities, short stature, heart defects, intellectual disability and sometimes blood cancers.

Peter Calabrese

By examining the testes of 15 unaffected men, a team led by USC Dornsife molecular and computational biologists Norman Arnheim and Peter Calabrese found that the new mutations were highly clustered in the testis and that the overall proportion of mutated stem cells increased with age.

Their computational analysis indicated that the mutation gave a selective edge over nonmutated cells.

"There is competition between stem cells with and without the mutation in each individual testis," said Arnheim, who holds a joint at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

"But what is also unusual in this case is that the mutation which confers the advantage to testis stem cells is disadvantageous to any offspring that inherits it."

The new findings also suggested an important new molecular mechanism to explain how certain genetic disease mutations can alter sperm stem cell function leading to exceptionally high frequencies of new cases every generation.

The Arnheim and Calabrese team paper detailing their research was published on June 6 in The American Journal of Human Genetics.

ADHD: Research shows how Ritalin affects Children's brains

Ritalin activates specific areas of the brain in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mimicking the brain activity of children without the condition, a new review says.

"This suggests that Ritalin does bring the brain [of a child with ADHD] back to the brain the typically developing kid has," said study author Constance Moore, associate director of the translational center for comparative neuro-imaging at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Analyzing data from earlier studies that looked at how children's brains were affected by doing certain tasks that are sometimes challenging for kids with ADHD, the researchers found that Ritalin (methylphenidate) was having a visible impact on three areas of the brain known to be associated with ADHD: the cortex, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.

Constance Moore

The study could be helpful in diagnosing and treating children with ADHD, Moore said. "It may be helpful to know that in certain children, Ritalin is having a physiological effect in the areas of the brain involved with attention and impulse control," she said.

The research was published recently in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

Nine studies analyzed by the researchers used functional MRI to evaluate brain changes after children had taken a single dose of Ritalin.

The children were involved in different types of tasks that tested their ability to focus and inhibit an impulse to act.

For example, to observe the brain's reaction during a test of what is called "inhibitory control," a child was told that every time he saw a zero show up on a screen, he should push the button on the right; every time he saw an X appear, he should push the left button.

The children would then be asked to flip their responses, pushing the left button when they saw a zero.

"That's hard to do," Moore said, "because you've developed the habit [of pushing the other button], so you have to suppress your impulse.

If you do 20 zeros and keep pressing and then you see an X, most kids with ADHD will hit the wrong button."

In three out of five of the inhibitory control studies, Ritalin at least partially normalized brain activation in ADHD children.

To note how the brain reacted to a selective attention test, Moore said, children would first be asked, for example, what word they were seeing.

The word would be "red," and the colour of the type also would be red. Then they would be shown the word "red," but the colour of the type would be green.

In several studies, Ritalin affected activation in the frontal lobes during such inhibitory control tasks. Most of the studies included in the review were performed in the United States or the United Kingdom.

The majority of participants were adolescent boys, and all studies compared their results to healthy children of the same approximate age.

Because none of the studies looked at the correlation between ADHD symptoms and whether the child was taking Ritalin, there is no way to link the changes in brain activation with clinical improvement, Moore said.

"It's possible that kids who are not responsive to Ritalin may have brain changes too," she said. ADHD affects between 3 percent and 7 percent of school-aged children in the United States, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

Boys are more likely to have ADHD than girls. One expert was not surprised by the results.

Andrew Adesman

"The review article shows there is a consensus of well-designed imaging studies showing that [Ritalin] has an impact on the frontal cortex of the brain, where we have long believed these patients have issues," said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioural pediatrics at the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York, in New Hyde Park.

Adesman wondered if Ritalin may play a role in helping the brain mature. "Their data provides partial support for that," he said.

"But if anything, the medicine seems to help the brain look more normal and doesn't seem to do anything bad to it."

More information: Learn more about ADHD from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fathers and Teenagers: Fathers' Previous Desire for Children Affects Relationship

The relationships of fathers to their teenage children are apparently influenced by the nature of their previous desire for children.

The more acute that this feeling is, the more closely fathers engage with their children at an everyday level.

This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Basel.

This is the first time that a study has examined the perspectives of both fathers and teenagers regarding their relationship.

Diana Baumgarten

For her investigation, the sociologist and gender researcher Dr. Diana Baumgarten conducted a detailed evaluation of long interviews with eight fathers between the ages of 46 and 58, as well as with eight children between 16 and 21 years of age.

The respondents live in a common household in German-speaking Switzerland.

The questions to the men concentrated on approaches to fatherhood, everyday arrangements, and relationships with teenagers.

The teenagers had to report on the details of their daily lives and their relationships with their fathers.

"Equivalent," "Supplementary," and "Satellite" Fathers
One result of the study is that the fathers' earlier desire for children played a significant role in their relationships with their children.

The more aware the father was of his desire for children, the clearer perception the father has today of his relationship to the child.

Such "equivalent" fathers assume more restrictions and burdens upon themselves, such as a career trajectory that develops more slowly.

They are also more likely to see the teenager as an individual counterpart than those that the author describes as "supplementary" and "satellite" fathers.

Activities and Exchange of Views
In the relationship between fathers and their teenage children, the author encountered the "activity norm."

Especially fathers who are less present for their children on an everyday level have the entitlement to do as much as possible with their children.

While mothers tend to live their relationships with their children on an everyday level, fathers operate under the norm that they must always develop their relationship through special and extraordinary activities.

Another notable result is the great value accorded to communication and exchanges of views. Prior studies have made this point for mother-child relationships, and have disregarded the communicative value of fathers.

The author also found through interviews with fathers and teenagers that motherhood is depicted as the model of parental care and is often measured against fatherhood.

However, distinct concepts of fatherhood are also expressed in the study and thus, also concepts of masculinity.

Journal Reference:

1. Diana Baumgarten, Väter von Teenagern. Sichtweisen von Vätern und ihren jugendlichen Kindern auf ihre Beziehung. Budrich Unipress, 2013