Happy children become happy adults

Being a ‘happy’ teenager is linked to increased well-being in adulthood, new research finds.

Much is known about the associations between a troubled childhood and mental health problems, but little research has examined the affect of a positive childhood. For the first time, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing have analysed the link between a positive adolescence and well-being in midlife.

Using information from 2776 individuals who participated in the 1946 British birth cohort study, the scientists tested associations between having a positive childhood and well-being in adulthood.

A ‘positive’ childhood was based on teacher evaluations of students’ levels of happiness, friendship and energy at the ages of 13 and 15. A student was given a positive point for each of the following four items – whether the child was ‘very popular with other children’, ‘unusually happy and contented’, ‘makes friends extremely easily’ and ‘extremely energetic, never tired’. Teachers also rated conduct problems (restlessness, daydreaming, disobedience, lying, etc) and emotional problems (anxiety, fearfulness, diffidence, avoidance of attention, etc).

The researchers then linked these ratings to the individuals’ mental health, work experience, relationships and social activities several decades later. They found that teenagers rated positively by their teachers were significantly more likely than those who received no positive ratings to have higher levels of well-being later in life, including a higher work satisfaction, more frequent contact with family and friends, and more regular engagement in social and leisure activities.

Happy children were also much less likely than others to develop mental disorders throughout their lives — 60% less likely than young teens that had no positive ratings.

The study not only failed to find a link between being a happy child and an increased likelihood of becoming married, they found that the people who had been happy children were actually more likely to get divorced. One possible factor suggested by the researchers is that happier people have higher self-esteem or self-efficacy and are therefore more willing and able to leave an unhappy marriage.

“The benefits to individuals, families and to society of good mental health, positive relationships and satisfying work are likely to be substantial,” said Professor Felicia Huppert, one of the authors of the paper and Director of the Well-being Institute at the University of Cambridge. “The findings support the view that even at this time of great financial hardship, policymakers should prioritise the well-being of our children so they have the best possible start in life.”

Adult Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a common cause of reading difficulty in adults. Many adults were never diagnosed as children, so they have no idea that they are suffering from adult dyslexia. Every job application, mortgage application, or complicated instruction sheet makes them cringe.


A common misconception is that dyslexia only affects children. Not only does it affect adults, it impacts millions of adults. In fact, many famous people have dyslexia. Having dyslexia does not have to hold you back – if you learn how to work with it.

These days there are many adults who have come forward to talk about their dyslexia and share their experiences. In this age of disclosure, it is a welcome sight to see adults who have struggled alone with this challenging brain disorder see that they are not alone and that there are others who face the same challenges.

From Einstein to Tom Cruise, and millions of other adults, dyslexia affects so many. Common symptoms of dyslexia include difficulty with reading or writing, trouble understanding directions, poor spelling, and many other signs.

Often people with dyslexia will simply say that they don’t care for reading – not understanding that it is their brain function that is at fault. Some feel as if they must be stupid, when in fact dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence. Many very intelligent people suffer from dyslexia and many successful people have learned to overcome it.

Dyslexia can often lead to more creative thinking, since dylexics can often see the world in a slightly different way than those who rely more on their linear, left-brained thinking. If you think that you, or someone you love, might need adult dyslexia testing, there are simple, private tests to help determine if dyslexia is the root of the problem.

If it is, there are may learning techniques that can make reading and writing much easier – coping with dyslexia is easier when you know you have it. Just knowing that there is a name for the problem, and most importantly, that you are not alone in dealing with it, can make all the difference.

Dyslexia treatment has come a long way in recent years, there are now even colleges for learning disabilities, ensuring that anyone who wants an education can get one. These colleges are set up to allow for extra time to take tests, individualized learning styles and more.

However, any college is required to make allowances for a disability – even a learning disability. This is one reason testing is so important. If your college determines that you do indeed have dyslexia, they are then able to offer certain study aides such as textbooks on audio or increased testing time.

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Brains of blind people reading in Braille show activity in same area that lights up when sighted readers read

The portion of the brain responsible for visual reading doesn't require vision at all, according to a new study published online on Feb. 17 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in precisely the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read. The findings challenge the textbook notion that the brain is divided up into regions that are specialized for processing information coming in via one sense or another, the researchers say.

"The brain is not a sensory machine, although it often looks like one; it is a task machine," said Amir Amedi of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "A brain area can fulfill a unique function, in this case reading, regardless of what form the sensory input takes."

Unlike other tasks that the brain performs, reading is a recent invention, about 5400 years old. Braille has been in use for less than 200 years. "That's not enough time for evolution to have shaped a brain module dedicated to reading," Amedi explained.

Nevertheless, study coauthor Laurent Cohen showed previously in sighted readers that a very specific part of the brain, known as the visual word form area or VWFA for short, has been co-opted for this purpose. But no one knew what might happen in the brains of blind people who learn to read even though they've had no visual experience at all.

In the new study, Amedi's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in eight people who had been blind since birth while they read Braille words or nonsense Braille. If the brain were organized around processing sensory information, one might expect that Braille reading would depend on regions dedicated to processing tactile information, Amedi explained. If instead the brain is task oriented, you'd expect to find the peak of activity across the entire brain in the VWFA, right where it occurs in sighted readers, and that is exactly what the researchers found.

Further comparison of brain activity in blind and sighted readers showed that the patterns in the VWFA were indistinguishable between the two groups.

"The main functional properties of the VWFA as identified in the sighted are present as well in the blind, are thus independent of the sensory modality of reading, and even more surprisingly do not require any visual experience," the researchers wrote. "To the best of our judgment, this provides the strongest support so far for the metamodal theory [of brain function]," which suggests that brain regions are defined by the tasks they perform. "Hence, the VWFA should also be referred to as the tactile word form area, or more generally as the (metamodal) word form area."

The researchers suggest that the VWFA is a multisensory integration area that binds simple features into more elaborate shape descriptions, making it ideal for the relatively new task of reading.

"Its specific anatomical location and its strong connectivity to language areas enable it to bridge high-level perceptual word representation and language-related components of reading," they wrote. "It is therefore the most suitable region to be taken over during reading acquisition, even when reading is acquired via touch without prior visual experience."

Amedi said the researchers plan to examine brain activity as people learn to read Braille for the first time, to find out how rapidly this takeover happens. "How does the brain change to process information in words?" he asked. "Is it instantaneous?"

Serotonin levels affects Behaviour

Mice that lack the gene for integrin β3, or ITGB3 — which regulates the levels of serotonin in the blood — groom themselves frequently and show less interest in stranger mice compared with controls, according to a study published in February in Autism Research as part of a special issue on mouse models in autism.

Lower-than-normal levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin have been linked to several psychological disorders, most notably depression. About 30 percent of people with autism show higher levels of serotonin in the blood compared with controls, suggesting that serotonin levels could serve as a biomarker for the disorder.

Mutations in ITGB3 are associated with autism and with changes in blood levels of serotonin, suggesting that this gene could be a link between the two. In the new study, mice missing one or both copies of ITGB3 show changes in two of the three core categories of autism symptoms — repetitive behavior and social interactions.

Unlike control mice, the mutant mice do not show a preference for a new mouse over one they are used to. They are still able to distinguish between different smells, however, suggesting that they can tell the two mice apart.

Mutations in the receptor for oxytocin — a hormone linked to autism and believed to be important for social interaction — can have the same effect.

Mice lacking ITGB3 also groom themselves more when placed in a new cage, but not in their home cage. This is probably not the result of increased anxiety in general, as these mice are just as likely as controls are to enter elevated platforms and roam in an open space.

The results are complicated by the fact that the mice have other symptoms, including problems with blood clotting. Lower levels of ITGB3 are also likely to lead to less serotonin in the blood, not more, contrary to what is seen in autism. However, the results suggest that ITGB3 affects social behavior, which reinforces its potential role in autism.

Crying baby draws blunted response in depressed mom’s brain

Mothers who are depressed respond differently to their crying babies than do non-depressed mothers. In fact, their reaction, according to brain scans at the University of Oregon, is much more muted than the robust brain activity in non-depressed mothers.

An infant crying is normal, but how mothers respond can affect a child’s development, says Jennifer C. Ablow, professor of psychology. For years, Ablow has studied the relationship of behaviour and physiological responses such as heart rate and respiration of mothers, both depressed and not, when they respond to their infants’ crying.

A new study — online in advance of publication in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience — provides the first look at brain activity of depressed women responding to recordings of crying infants, either their own or someone else’s. The brains of 22 women were scrutinised using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Non-invasive fMRI, when focused on the brain, measures blood flow changes using a magnetic field and radio frequency pulses, producing detailed images that provide scientists with information about brain activity or help medical staff diagnose disease.

Researchers considered both group differences between women with chronic histories of depression and those with no clinical diagnoses, and more subtle variations in the women’s brain activity related to current levels of depressive symptoms. All were first time mothers whose babies were 18 months old.

“It looks as though depressed mothers are not responding in a more negative way than non-depressed mothers, which has been one hypothesis,” said Heidemarie K. Laurent, assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, who led the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Ablow’s lab. “What we saw was really more of a lack of responding in a positive way.”

As a group, brain responses in non-depressed mothers responding to the sound of their own babies’ cries were seen on both sides of the brain’s lateral paralimbic areas and core limbic sub-cortical regions including the striatum, thalamus and midbrain; depressed mothers showed no unique response to their babies. Non-depressed mothers activated much more strongly than depressed mothers in a subcortical cluster involving the striatum — specifically the caudate and nucleus accumbens — and the medial thalamus. These areas are closely associated with the processing of rewards and motivation.

“In this context it was interesting to see that the non-depressed mothers were able to respond to this cry sound as a positive cue,” Laurent said. “Their response was consistent with wanting to approach their infants. Depressed mothers were really lacking in that response. “

In a separate comparison, mothers who self-reported that they were more depressed at the time of their fMRI sessions displayed diminished prefrontal brain activity, particularly in the anterior cingulate cortex, when hearing their own baby’s cries. This brain region, Laurent said, is associated with the abilities to evaluate information and to plan and regulate a response to emotional cues.

The important message of the study, Ablow and Laurent said, is that depression can exert long-lasting effects on mother-infant relationships by blunting the mother’s response to her infant’s emotional cues.

“A mother who is able to process and act upon relevant information will have more sensitive interactions with her infant, which, in turn, will allow the infant to develop its own regulation capacities,” Ablow said. “Some mothers are unable to respond optimally to their infant’s emotional cues. A mother’s emotional response requires a coordination of multiple cortical and sub-cortical systems of the brain. How that plays out has not been well known.”

The findings may suggest new implications for treating depression symptoms in mothers, Laurent said. “Some of these prefrontal problems may be changed more easily by addressing current symptoms, but there may be deeper, longer-lasting deficits at the motivational levels of the brain that will take more time to overcome,” she said.

We regard the findings as a “jumping-off point” to better understand the neurobiology of the mothering brain, said Ablow, co-director of the UO’s Developmental Sociobiology Lab. “In our next study, we plan to follow women from the prenatal period through their first-year of motherhood to get a fuller picture of how these brain responses shape mother-infant relationships during a critical period of their babies’ development.”

Using EEGs to diagnose autism in infants

A computational physicist and a cognitive neuroscientist at Children’s Hospital Boston have come up with the beginnings of a noninvasive test to evaluate an infant’s autism risk. It combines the standard electroencephalogram (EEG), which records electrical activity in the brain, with machine-learning algorithms. In a pilot study, their system had 80 percent accuracy in distinguishing between 9-month-old infants known to be at high risk for autism from controls of the same age.

Although this work, published February 22 in the online open-access journal BMC Medicine, requires validation and refinement, it suggests a safe, practical way of identifying infants at high risk for developing autism by capturing very early differences in brain organization and function. This would allow parents to begin behavioral interventions one to two years before autism can be diagnosed through traditional behavioral testing.

“Electrical activity produced by the brain has a lot more information than we realized,” says William Bosl, PhD, a neuroinformatics researcher in the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program. “Computer algorithms can pick out patterns in those squiggly lines that the eye can’t see.”

Bosl, Charles A. Nelson, PhD, Research Director of the Developmental Medicine Center at Children’s, and colleagues recorded resting EEG signals from 79 babies 6 to 24 months of age participating in a larger study aimed at finding very early risk markers of autism. Forty-six infants had an older sibling with a confirmed diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD); the other 33 had no family history of ASDs.

As the babies watched a research assistant blowing bubbles, recordings were made via a hairnet-like cap on their scalps, studded with 64 electrodes. When possible, tests were repeated at 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months of age.

Bosl then took the EEG brain-wave readings for each electrode and computed their modified multiscale entropy (mMSE) — a measure borrowed from chaos theory that quantifies the degree of randomness in a signal, from which characteristics of whatever is producing the signal can be inferred. In this case, patterns in the brain’s electrical activity give indirect information about how the brain is wired: the density of neurons in each part of the brain, how connections between them are organized, and the balance of short- and long-distance connections.

The investigators looked at the entropy of each EEG channel, which is believed to contain information about the density of neural connections in the brain region near that electrode.

“Many neuroscientists believe that autism reflects a ‘disconnection syndrome,’ by which distributed populations of neurons fail to communicate efficiently with one another,” explains Nelson. “The current paper supports this hypothesis by suggesting that the brains of infants at high risk for developing autism exhibit different patterns of neural connectivity, though the relationship between entropy and the density of neural arbors remains to be explored.” (Neural arbors are projections of neurons that form synapses or connections with other neurons.)

On average, the greatest difference was seen at 9 months of age. The researchers note that at 9 months, babies undergo important changes in their brain function that are critical for the emergence of higher-level social and communication skills — skills often impaired in ASDs.

For reasons that still need to be explored, there was a gender difference: classification accuracy was greatest for girls at 6 months and remained high for boys at 12 and 18 months.

Overall, however, the distinction between the high-risk group and controls was smaller when infants were tested at 12 to 24 months. The authors speculate that the high-risk group may have a genetic vulnerability to autism that can be influenced and sometimes mitigated by environmental factors.

Bosl hopes to follow the high-risk group over time and compare EEG patterns in those who receive an actual ASD diagnosis and who appear to be developing normally — and then compare both groups to the controls.

“With enough data, I’d like to follow each child’s whole trajectory from 6 to 24 months,” Bosl adds. “The trend over time may be more important than a value at any particular age.”

Although EEG testing for autism risk may seem impractical to implement on a wide scale, it is inexpensive, safe, does not require sedation (unlike MRI), takes only minutes to perform and can be done in a doctor’s office. There are already data showing differences in EEG patterns for schizophrenia, major depression and PTSD, Bosl says.

Bosl also has started to collect data from older children 6 to 17 years old, and eventually hopes to have enough subjects to be able to compare EEG patterns for different types of ASDs.

Bone-anchored hearing aids appear beneficial for hearing-impaired children

Bone-anchored hearing aids appear helpful in improving hearing and quality of life in children with hearing loss in one or both ears, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

“Since its introduction more than 30 years ago, the bone-anchored hearing aid (BAHA) has become an established treatment option for auditory rehabilitation in patients with chronic conductive or mixed hearing loss,” the authors write as background information in the article. Although the BAHA was most commonly fitted in adults when it was first introduced, it has gradually become a popular option for children with bilateral conductive hearing loss who are too young to undergo alternative surgical options.

Maarten J. F. de Wolf, M.D., and colleagues at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, obtained information about 31 children who were current BAHA users. Data were collected through questionnaires answered by the children and their parents. Eligible children were a minimum of 4 years old at the time of BAHA fitting, and had been using the device for one to four years. Patients with both bilateral hearing loss (16 children) and unilateral hearing loss (15 children) were evaluated.

Questionnaires were composed of four parts measuring the child’s daily use of the BAHA, health-related quality of life immediately following the BAHA fitting, auditory functioning and overall quality of life after using the device over a period of time. In the bilateral hearing loss group, 13 children (81 percent) were using the BAHA for more than eight hours a day, and 12 (75 percent) reported that it was worth the effort. In the unilateral hearing loss group, seven (47 percent) were using their BAHA for more than eight hours a day and six (40 percent) were using it between four and eight hours a day. Ten children (67 percent) in this group felt the device was worth the effort.

In both subgroups, a younger age at the time of the BAHA fitting was associated with greater benefit and a higher quality of life after continued use. Additionally, the BAHA was found to have a large benefit on learning, particularly in the bilateral hearing loss group, underscoring the potential benefit of the device for the education of hearing-impaired children. Although this same benefit was seen in the unilateral hearing loss group, the authors recommend that use of the BAHA in this group, “should be made on an individual basis with the aid of a trial period of at least two weeks, which allows the child to use the BAHA in a variety of settings, particularly the school environment.”

“Overall, BAHA fitting can be considered effective and beneficial in children with bilateral or unilateral hearing loss,” the authors conclude. “…the BAHA was particularly beneficial for a child’s learning, which may be largely due to its beneficial effects in noisy surroundings.”

(Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2011;137[2]:130-138. Available pre-embargo to the media at www.jamamedia.org.)

Callous-unemotional traits, conduct problems in children can lead to antisocial behavior in pre-teens

Research presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlights the importance of callous-unemotional traits (CU) in identifying children at risk of antisocial behaviour and other adjustment problems.

The research, presented by Indiana University Bloomington faculty member Nathalie M.G. Fontaine, finds that the emergence of CU traits in childhood is in most cases influenced by genetic factors, especially in boys.

However, environmental factors appear to be more significant for the small number of girls who exhibit high levels of CU traits.

In this first longitudinal study employing a group-based analysis to examine the connection between childhood trajectories of CU traits and conduct problems, researchers found that high levels of both CU traits and conduct problems were associated with negative child and family factors at age 4 and with behavioral problems at age 12.

CU traits, such as a lack of emotion and a lack of empathy or guilt, are exhibited by a small number of children and are associated with persistent conduct problems, which are experienced by 5 percent to 10 percent of children.

"The children with high levels of both CU traits and conduct problems between ages 7 to 12 were likely to present negative predictors and outcomes, including hyperactivity problems and living in a chaotic home environment," said Fontaine, assistant professor of criminal justice in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. "If we could identify those children early enough, we could help them as well as their families."


The researchers examined data for more than 9,000 twins from the Twins Early Development Study, a data set of twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996. Assessments of CU traits and conduct problems were based on teacher questionnaires when the children were 7, 9 and 12. Family-level predictors at age 4 were based on information from parents, and behavioral outcomes at age 12 were based on information from teachers.

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