Tip-of-the-Tongue Syndrome (TotTS) and Transactive Memory - An aside

Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is an experience so common that cultures worldwide have a phrase for it.

Cheyenne Indians call it navonotootse’a, which means “I have lost it on my tongue”; in Korean it’s hyeu kkedu-te mam-dol-da, which has an even more gorgeous translation: “sparkling at the end of my tongue.”

The phenomenon generally lasts only a minute or so; your brain eventually makes the connection.

But … when faced with a tip-of-the-tongue moment, many of us have begun to rely instead on the Internet to locate information on the fly.

If life-logging … stores “episodic,” or personal, memories, Internet search engines do the same for a different sort of memory: “semantic” memory, or factual knowledge about the world.

When you visit Paris and have a wonderful time drinking champagne at a café, your personal experience is an episodic memory.

Your ability to remember that Paris is a city and that champagne is an alcoholic beverage – that’s semantic memory. …

What’s the line between our own, in-brain knowledge and the sea of information around us? Does it make us smarter when we can dip in so instantly? Or dumber with every search?

Thompson, the author of the book 'Smarter than you Think,' reminds us of the anecdote, by now itself familiar “to the point of banality,” about Socrates and his admonition that the “technology” of writing would devastate the Greek tradition of debate and dialectic, and would render people incapable of committing anything to memory because “knowledge stored was not really knowledge at all.”

He cites Socrates’s parable of the Egyptian god Theuth and how he invented writing, offering it as a gift to the king of Egypt, Thamus, who met the present with defiant indignation:

"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. 

 

The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality".

Read more of this article by Mary Popova

Childhood Obesity: In-home intervention improves risk reduction routines

This is one of the pieces sent to parents as part of the "Healthy Habits, Happy Homes" program.

Credit: Healthy Habits, Happy Homes Study Group, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute

In the battle to reduce childhood overweight and obesity, several in-home factors have been identified as reducing those risks – participation of children in regular family dinners, getting enough sleep and less time watching television or other "screen time."

A new study appearing in JAMA Pediatrics describes how a home-based program that helped at-risk families improve household routines was able to slow weight gain in a group of young children.

"While childhood obesity rates may have stabilized in some population subgroups, overall rates remain stubbornly high, and racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities persist.

Elsie Taveras

For these reasons, seeking solutions that will particularly influence high-risk families is important." says Elsie Taveras, MD, MPH, chief of General Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children who led the study.

"Our findings demonstrate that relatively simple, no-cost changes in routines within the home can help children maintain or achieve a healthful weight."

The study was conducted at four community health centers in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, Mass., all of which serve predominantly low-income, minority populations.

The research team enrolled 121 families – each with a child aged 2 to 5 who slept in a room with a television – that were randomly divided into two groups.

At the beginning and end of the 6-month study period, each family received an in-home visit during which research assistants administered surveys about household routines, measured the child's height and weight, and observed other aspects of the home environment.

Throughout the study period, the control group received monthly packages with educational information on early childhood development.

Families in the intervention group participated in a program called "Healthy Habits, Happy Homes," designed to encourage families to have regular meals together, ensure adequate sleep for children, limit the time children spend watching television and remove television from rooms where children sleep.

The intervention also encouraged parenting practices such as role modeling and limit setting. Parents were not told that these changes were designed to limit weight gain in their child.

Interventions were delivered in four home visits that addressed project goals and checked in on progress, monthly coaching phone calls, and frequent text messages to encourage healthy practices.

Mailings included newsletters for the parents and, for the children, toys focused on the program goals – such as stickers, coloring books, a copy of Good Night Moon for bedtime reading, and toys for active play.

At the end of the study period, children in the intervention group were sleeping about 45 minutes longer than children in the control group.

Time spent watching television on weekends dropped about an hour per day in the intervention group, leading to a significant difference from the control group, which increased weekend TV viewing.

Both groups had a small reduction in weekday TV viewing, with a greater decrease in the intervention group.

Neither group had any significant change in the frequency of family meals together – which may reflect the fact that participating families already shared an average of six meals per week together – and there was little change in the presence of television sets in the rooms where children slept, possibly because 80 percent of parents reported that their child slept in the parents' bedrooms.

At the end of the study period, the body mass index of children in the intervention group dropped an average of 0.18, while it rose 0.21 in the control group.

Taveras explains that increasing height, weight, and body mass index would be expected among children in this age group, as they are developing and growing.

"The Healthy Habits, Happy Homes intervention was able to slow weight gain relative to height increase in these children, which is important because – as our earlier research has shown – rapid weight gain in these early years can lead to higher rates of obesity later in life."

Jess Haines

Jess Haines, PhD, MHSc, RD, University of Guelph, Ontario, lead author of the study, adds, "Our findings suggest that, by encouraging parents to establish household routines that increase children's sleep and decrease TV viewing, health professionals can help prevent children from becoming overweight or obese.

Almost 90 percent of participating parents reported they were satisfied with the program, and 98 percent said they would recommend it to family and friends.

A longer-term study, currently being planned by our research group,will tell us how long the changes we observed here can be maintained.

We also need to investigate how large an interventional 'dose' is required to change these behaviours – for example, could they be accomplished with a single visit or just with phone calls?"

Taveras, an associate professor of Pediatrics and Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School, adds, "For now, interventions such as ours can be one way of keeping young children off an obesity trajectory that would be hard to alter by the time they enter middle school."

Robotic therapy helps children's hand-eye coordination

Researchers from the University of Leeds are developing an innovative new robotic device that helps children to practise and improve their hand coordination.

Read the article on the Leeds University site.

The robotic arm uses haptic technology – meaning it applies forces, vibrations or motions to the user – to guide a child's hand as they play computer games designed to help writing.

The games the children play require them to practise hand and wrist movements commonly made during handwriting and other manual tasks.

As the child plays the games, the robot's arm helps them learn the correct movements by pushing and pulling the pen in the direction required to make the right moves.

The research has been led by Professor Mark Mon-Williams and Dr Liam Hill at the University of Leeds, in partnership with the Bradford Institute for Health Research and colleagues at the University of Indiana in the United States.

Mark Mon-Williams

Dr Hill said: "In trying to support a child with handwriting and coordination difficulties one of the major challenges teachers and occupational therapists come up against time and again is the limited time they have to work one-to-one with each child. In this respect haptic robotic technologies have huge potential efficiency benefits.

"They provide a means by which children can receive supported practise, at a level which adjusts to their growing abilities, without the need for one-to-one interaction with a therapist."

"Banks of these systems could be used simultaneously by multiple children in a clinic or in the classroom setting, under the supervision of a single overseeing professional."

The first United Kingdom pilot of the device has just been completed, demonstrating its feasibility for use in the classroom.

This was carried out with a small number of five- to seven-year-old children in Bradford with a wide range of manual abilities.

The researchers investigated their level of motivation and enjoyment whilst practicing for 20 minutes on a variety of robotic arm tasks presented previously in US-based studies using the system.

All the children found the tasks highly enjoyable and were able to perform them to an acceptable level.

Differences in performance between children previously identified by their classroom teachers as having handwriting difficulties were also noticeable.

Plans are now under way to run a larger intervention study within schools in Bradford that will formally investigate whether earlier research findings from the US can be replicated in younger schoolchildren in the UK.

Professor Mon-Williams and Dr Hill presented their findings at the British Psychological Society's Cognitive and Developmental Sections Joint Conference, in Reading.

Teenagers with Autism: Watching their success helps master important life skills

Watching a video of themselves on an iPad successfully solving a problem can help students with autism master critical life skills.

Like all special education instructors, Cami Burton aims to help her students with autism and developmental disabilities master real-life skills that will allow them to become more independent.

But traditional teaching methods often fail to give these students the practice and reinforcement they need to embed the important skills that can enhance their long-term life outcomes.

Now, a promising study Burton conducted at Brigham Young University using iPads combined with a proven video instruction technique has helped children with autism develop and retain important math skills.

The research was conducted by Burton, a graduate student in the David O. McKay School of Education, and faculty members Darlene Anderson, Mary Anne Prater and Tina Dyches.

Darlene Anderson

While many studies have shown the benefits of video self-modeling (VSM) —filming students as they successfully solve a problem or complete an assignment—in regular educational settings, few studies have investigated the use of VSM in teaching core skills such as math and science to students with autism and intellectual disabilities.

Mary Anne Prater

In the BYU study, several junior high school-age students with autism used an iPad that showed a video of themselves accurately and independently solving a practical math problem: Estimating the amount of money they needed to pay for an item as well as how much they should get back in change.

 Tina Dyches

They were then asked to solve similar problems using the VSM as a guide. Gradually, over time, the students were asked to figure out the math problem without the VSM.

The results: The students were able to independently solve the math problems with an accuracy of between 80 and 100 percent.

And, best of all, they enjoyed it. All student participants indicated that they liked having a video made of them in class and stated that they enjoyed using the iPad and watching a video of themselves.

As one student stated, "It was cool and fun."

Cami Burton

Children with autism have difficulty generalising, Burton explained.

"We want them to be able to generalise what they've learned and apply it to new skills. Anything visual will help heighten their awareness of the task," she said.

"We're not always able to capture their potential," said Anderson. "These new technologies can make that possible."

The BYU researchers also observed that, without exception, all of the students seemed enthusiastic and excited to participate in the study each day.

"We noticed an immediate and abrupt change in student performance each time the video model was introduced," Burton said.

"Students with serious unwanted behaviour issues—such as aggression and fidgeting—seemed to remain on task to a greater extent than when the iPads weren't used."

Said Anderson, "The students were clearly focused and engaged."

The research paper, published in the journal Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, documented the positive functional relationship between viewing the VSM and student performance.

Burton, who completed her master's thesis while working as a full-time teacher, was motivated by her desire to use her research to help the students she works with every day.

"Our research indicated that video self-modeling via an iPad may be an effective way to deliver academic content to adolescent students with autism and intellectual disability," said Burton, who continues to successfully use the iPad/VSM method in her classes.

Future research should be easy to implement, since, thanks to ever-improving iPad applications, the video models are simple to create and are easily demonstrated and measured, Anderson said.

"I believe this model could transfer to anything you're willing to apply it to," said Burton. "And it's very socially appropriate and easy for these students to carry an iPad around with them."

More information:
'Video Self-Modeling on an iPad to Teach Functional Math Skills to Adolescents With Autism and Intellectual Disability'

Maternal Smoking + asthma + pregnancy is a dangerous combination

New research from the University of Adelaide has shown for the first time that pregnant women who smoke as well as having asthma are greatly increasing the risk of complications for themselves and their unborn children.

In the first study of its kind in the world, researchers from the University's Robinson Institute compared data from more than 170,000 South Australian women over 10 years.

The results have been published online ahead of print in the European Respiratory Journal.

Nicolette Hodyl

Speaking during National Asthma Week, lead author Dr Nicolette Hodyl says: "We know that being pregnant and having asthma poses risks to both the mother and the baby."

"We know that smoking poses risks to both the mother and the baby but now we also know that the combination of these conditions represents a very dangerous situation."

"Asthma and smoking are separately linked during pregnancy to increased risk of bleeding from the birth canal before labour, urinary tract infections, premature rupture of membranes, low birth weight and preterm birth (less than 37 weeks of pregnancy)."

"The combination of asthma and smoking greatly increases the risk of these complications during pregnancy."

Dr Hodyl says 5.8% of pregnant women who were not asthmatic and non-smokers experienced a preterm birth. "For asthmatic women, the preterm birth rate increased to 6.5%. 

Among smoking women, 9.4% experienced preterm birth. And for asthmatic women who also smoked, the rate of preterm birth jumped to 12.7%, which is more than double the normal rate.

"This is an alarming statistic. We hope that pregnant women begin to understand the seriousness of this situation to their health and the health of their child," she says.

Dr Hodyl says the research also uncovered another worrying statistic: about a quarter of pregnant women with asthma are smokers.

"While the rates of smoking have been decreasing in recent years, it is very concerning to us that many pregnant women with asthma are also smoking," she says.

"Quitting smoking during pregnancy is very difficult, and therefore pregnant women need as much support as possible from family, friends and health professionals. Our results show that even a reduction in the number of cigarettes women smoke per day can lead to some improvement to the risks to their child. However, the potential for poor health outcomes for both the mother and child should not be underestimated."

More information: erj.ersjournals.com/

Children with behavioural problems more at risk of chronic conditions

Karestan Koenen

Children with behavioural problems may be at risk of many chronic diseases in adulthood including heart disease, obesity, diabetes, as well as inflammatory illnesses (conditions which are caused by cell damage).

Analyzing data on more than 4,000 participants in the Children of the 90s study at the University of Bristol, researchers from Harvard and Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health found that children with behavioral problems at the age of 8, had higher levels of two proteins (C-reactive protein—CRP; and Interleukin 6—IL-6) in their blood when tested at the age of 10.

This was the case even after a large number of other factors, including sex, race, background, and medication use, were taken into account.

Having raised levels of CRP and IL-6 can be an early warning sign that a person may be at risk of chronic or inflammatory conditions later in life.

Previous research has shown that children with behavioural problems can go on to develop health problems during adulthood, but this is the first time that a link has been found between mental health and inflammation in childhood.

The researchers believe the link may be due to the fact that many behavioral problems are associated with how the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis works.

The HPA axis plays a major role in controlling reactions to stress and the immune system and, if it malfunctions, it can stimulate the release of the two proteins that cause chronically elevated levels of inflammation, which is tissue's response to injury.

Speaking about the findings, Karestan Koenen, PhD, the report's senior author and associate professor of Epidemiology at Harvard, said:
"This new research shows for the first time that having behavioural problems in childhood can put children on the path to ill health much earlier than we previously realized." 

"The important message for healthcare professionals is that they need to monitor the physical health as well as the mental health of children with behavioural problems to identify those at risk as early as possible."

Findings are published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

More Information: article/pii/S030645301300262X

FASD: Association found between poor academic achievement and maternal drinking

Education records from the WA Literacy and Numeracy Assessment statewide testing program were compared with maternal alcohol consumption data. Credit: iStock

Researchers from WA and the UK have linked heavy drinking and binge drinking, even occasionally during pregnancy, to children's academic achievement in reading, writing and spelling; and this impact is related to the trimester in which the exposure occurred.

These results lend further support to other international studies which have found prenatal alcohol exposure increases the risk of a range of neurodevelopmental disorders, including Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).

Lead author Colleen O'Leary, from Curtin's Centre for Population Health Research, says this study is a first.

"This is the first population-based study that utilises linked cohort and state-wide education test data to examine the effect of prenatal alcohol exposure on educational achievement," Dr O'Leary says.

The cohort of 4056 children aged 8-9 years-old were from the Randomly Ascertained Sample of Children born in Australia's Largest State study; a 10 per cent random sample of infants born in WA between 1995 and 1997.

FASD Indications

Information about maternal alcohol consumption was catergorised into dosage and pattern; low (1-2 standard drinks on occasion, less than 7 per week), moderate (3-4 standard drinks on occasion, 7 per week), binge drinking (more than 50g per occasion), and heavy drinking (more than 7 standard drinks per week).

They then matched this data with education records from the WA Literacy and Numeracy Assessment statewide testing program, and also examined absenteeism at these tests.

Resulting learning problems varied depending on the dose, timing, and drinking pattern of the prenatal alcohol exposure.

"Children exposed to heavy prenatal alcohol exposure during the first trimester were over twice as likely as comparison children to not achieve the reading benchmark," Dr O'Leary says.

"Prenatal exposure to occasional binge drinking in late pregnancy [second and/or third trimester] increased the risk of not achieving the benchmark for writing.

"Children of mothers binge drinking occasionally or drinking heavily at any stage during pregnancy were more likely to have been absent for the spelling test."

Dr O'Leary says results are particularly pertinent given the high rate of pregnancies reported to be unplanned – around 50 per cent – and thus associated risk of unintentional prenatal alcohol exposure.

While low or moderate levels of prenatal alcohol exposure was not associated with academic underachievement, Dr O'Leary stresses that other studies have demonstrated adverse offspring effects, even at very low doses.

As such, "we cannot conclusively state that any amount of alcohol is 'safe'."

She recommends exploring the impact of whether supportive family and school systems can improve academic achievement of children exposed prenatally to alcohol.

More information: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23837182

Dyslexia: Audio-Letter game helps - Thesis

Dyslexia is a highly heritable neurobiological disorder defined as a persistent difficulty in learning to read. Phonological processing skills, associating letters to sounds, and word retrieval are deficient in many children with dyslexia. - Credit Lovio, Riikka

Poor reading accuracy and slow reading speed are, in turn, characteristic for adults with dyslexia.

Intact processing of even minor differences in speech sounds is essential for language development and reading skills. Speech perception requires sound discrimination and phoneme identification, despite the variation in their acoustical features.

Accurate phonological representations are also important for learning the connection between sounds and letters. Difficulties in auditory processing are common in individuals with dyslexia.

Cortical auditory processing can be investigated by recording the electroencephalography (EEG). The detection of changes in the regularities of the auditory input gives rise to neural activity in the brain that is seen as a mismatch negativity (MMN) response of the event-related potential (ERP) recorded by EEG.

As the recording of MMN requires neither a subject s behavioural response nor attention towards the sounds, it is suitable for studies of even young children.

Despite its advantages over behavioural measures, a major obstacle to the use of the MMN method has been the relatively long duration of its recording.

However, the multi-feature MMN paradigm with several types of sound changes was recently developed in order to obtain a comprehensive profile of auditory sensory memory and discrimination accuracy in a short recording time.

The present thesis investigated cortical multi-attribute auditory processing in dyslexia and the efficacy of intervention on reading-related skills and cortical speech sound discrimination.

Moreover, the feasibility of the multi-feature paradigm for dyslexia research, and studies in children was tested for the first time.

In this thesis, the multi-feature paradigm was found to be well suited for studies investigating central auditory processing in dyslexia and in children.

The results showed that cortical auditory processing is aberrant in dyslexia.

In children at risk for dyslexia, auditory processing seems to be deficient even at the initial phase of sound encoding.

Furthermore, these children also showed a widespread pattern of abnormal cortical auditory discrimination processes.

Adults with dyslexia, in turn, have difficulties in discriminating sound frequency and duration features in a complex auditory environment.

Early intervention can influence the developmental path of dyslexia, however.

The results of this thesis show that even a short intervention with audio-visual letter-sound exercises improves children s reading-related skills and cortical discrimination of vowel contrasts.

More Information:
Cortical multi-attribute auditory discrimination deficits and their amelioration in dyslexia - Lovio, Riikka

Good Parenting: There is no definitive Rule Book

Any parent will tell you that there is no simple recipe for raising a child. Being a parent means getting hefty doses of advice – often unsolicited – from others.

But such advice often fails to consider a critical factor: the child. A new review of dozens of studies involving more than 14,600 pairs of twins shows that children's genetics significantly affect how they are parented.

Reut Avinun

"There is a lot of pressure on parents these days to produce children that excel in everything, socially and academically," says Reut Avinun of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"Since children are not born tabula rasa, I felt it was important to explore their side of the story, to show how they can affect their environment, and specifically parental behaviour."

Most studies of parenting look at only the reverse, how parents affect their children's experiences.

To explore the flip side, Avinun and Ariel Knafo looked to twins. They reasoned that if parents treat identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, more similarly than non-identical twins, who share on average 50 percent of their genes, then it suggests that the child's genes shape parenting.

Indeed, across 32 studies of twins, they found that children's genetically-influenced characteristics do affect parental behavior.

As published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, they estimated that 23 percent of differences in parenting is due to a child's genetics.

The genotype-related differences are ways that the children evoke different responses from their environment.

For example, a child that is antisocial is more likely to elicit harsh discipline from parents than a more social child.

In one recent study, Knafo's research group found that boys with less self-control are more likely to experience lower levels of positive maternal behaviour.

For boys, but not for girls, a particular genotype – a polymorphic region in the gene that codes for the serotonin transporter – predicted mothers' levels of positive parenting and the boys' level of self-control.

"In other words, boys' genetically influenced level of self-control affected the behaviour of their mothers toward them," Avinun says.

Avinun and Knafo also found that children's shared environment – socioeconomics, cultural exposure, etc. – accounts for 43 percent of parenting differences.

And the non-shared environment – different schools, friends, etc. – accounts for 34 percent of the differences.

Importantly, the study's findings support the idea that parenting does not necessarily affect children in the same family, in a similar way.

Several factors affect the extent to which genetics influence parenting. Avinun and Knafo found, for example, that age was important, supporting the argument that the child's genetic influence on parenting increases with age.

"As children become increasingly autonomous, their genetic tendencies are more likely to be able to affect their behaviour, which in turn influences parental behaviour," Avinun says.

The research in total, Avinun says, "means that parenting should not be viewed solely as a characteristic of the parent, but as something that results from both parental and child attributes."

Therefore, any interventions or treatments to help parenting should consider both the parents and children, and could vary even within a family.

"The discussion of 'nature vs. nurture' has transformed into 'nature and nurture.' We now understand that most characteristics are determined by the interplay between genetic and environmental influences," Avinun says.

Because children are born differently, there never can be a general rule book for raising children, she explains.

"There isn't one style of ideal parenting. Each child requires a different environment to excel. So parents should not invest a lot of effort in trying to treat their children similarly, but instead, be aware of the variation in their children's attributes and nurture them accordingly."

More information:
The study, "Parenting as a Reaction Evoked by Children's Genotype: A Meta-Analysis of Children-as-Twins Studies" by Reut Avinun and Ariel Knafo, was published online on August 12, 2013, and is forthcoming in print in November 2013 in Personality and Social Psychology Review: psr.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/08/12/1088868313498308

Parenting Teenagers: Using harsh verbal discipline with teens is detrimental

Many American parents yell or shout at their teenagers. A new longitudinal study has found that using such harsh verbal discipline in early adolescence can be harmful to teens later.

Instead of minimizing teens' problematic or unwanted behaviour, harsh verbal discipline may actually aggravate it.

Ming-Te Wang

The study, from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan, appears in the journal Child Development.

Harsh verbal discipline happens when parents use psychological force to cause a child to experience emotional pain or discomfort in an effort to correct or control behaviour.

It can vary in severity from yelling and shouting at a child to insulting and using words to humiliate.

Many parents shift from physical to verbal discipline as their children enter adolescence, and harsh verbal discipline is not uncommon.

A nationally representative survey found that about 90 percent of American parents reported one or more instances of using harsh verbal discipline with children of all ages; the rate of the more severe forms of harsh verbal discipline (swearing and cursing, calling names) directed at teens was 50 percent.

Few studies have looked at harsh verbal discipline in adolescence. This study found that when parents use it in early adolescence, teens suffer detrimental outcomes later.

The children of mothers and fathers who used harsh verbal discipline when they were 13 suffered more depressive symptoms between ages 13 and 14 than their peers who weren't disciplined in this way; they were also more likely to have conduct problems such as misbehaving at school, lying to parents, stealing, or fighting.

Moreover, the study found that not only does harsh verbal discipline appear to be ineffective at addressing behaviour problems in youths, it actually appears to increase unwanted behaviours.

Parents' hostility increases the risk of delinquency by lowering inhibition and fostering anger, irritability, and belligerence in adolescents, the researchers found.

The effect went the other way, too. Children who had conduct problems at 13 elicited more harsh verbal discipline from their parents between ages 13 and 14.

The study looked at 967 two-parent families and their children. About half were European American; 40 percent were African American and the rest were of other ethnic backgrounds.

Most of the families were middle class. Students and parents completed surveys over a two-year period on topics related to their mental health, child-rearing practices, the quality of the parent-child relationship, and general demographics.

Adolescents' conduct problems were assessed at ages 13 and 14 by survey questions like;

"In the past year, how often have you:

1. been disobedient in school, 
2. lied to your parents,
3. stolen from a store, 
4. been involved in a gang fight, and 
5. damaged public or private property for fun?" 

The response format ranged from 1 (never) to 5 (10 or more times).

Parents' behaviours indicating harsh verbal discipline were measured by questions like;

"In the past year, after your child has disobeyed you or done something wrong, how often have you:

• shouted, yelled, or screamed at the child, 
• swore or cursed at the child, and 
• called the child dumb or lazy or some other name like that?" 

Items were rated on a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always).

"This is one of the first studies to indicate that parents' harsh verbal discipline is damaging to the developing adolescent," says Ming-Te Wang, assistant professor of psychology in education at the University of Pittsburgh, who led the study.

"The notion that harsh discipline is without consequence, once there is a strong parent-child bond—that the adolescent will understand that 'they're doing this because they love me'—is misguided because parents' warmth didn't lessen the effects of harsh verbal discipline.

"Indeed, harsh verbal discipline appears to be detrimental in all circumstances," Wang concludes.

Wang suggests that parents who want to modify their teenage children's unwanted behaviour would do better by discussing with them their concerns about the consequences of the behaviour.

The study's findings can inform parenting programs so that parents can learn alternatives to shouting and insulting their teens.