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How do our brains decide to remember something positively or negatively?
(SOUNDBITE OF ALARM RINGING)
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
What happens when you hear that sound in the middle of the day? Do you feel dread or anger? Or maybe if you're a morning person, it makes you feel excited because you associate it with the start of your day. Be it positive or negative, a new study shows how the brain associates the sound of an alarm or any memory with a feeling. Hao Li is a researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and one of the authors of this study. He joins us now. Welcome.
HAO LI: Hi.
RASCOE: So your study refers to something called emotional valence. Can you first tell me what that is?
LI: Yeah. So essentially, all the behaviors in our lab have been motivated by either there's a good memory or bad memory. So emotional valence just refers to the value that we put on our memories.
RASCOE: OK. So this makes me think of that song "The Way We Were" by Barbra Streisand. Stay with me, now. I've been listening to the version by Gladys Knight, and she says memories may be beautiful, and yet what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. So it's talking about the different types of memories and why we might remember good things over bad things. Is that kind of why you wanted to do this research?
LI: Yes, exactly. It's really close to our daily life. So that's one of the big motivations for me to study neuroscience, particularly study how our brain thinks and how the memory is stored.
RASCOE: And so let's say I smell or taste something that makes me feel comforted. What's happening in my brain that associates that feeling with that memory?
LI: So this goes back to our 2015 study where we identified these two populations of neurons in the amygdala that selectively responds to good or bad memories. So it's almost like two separate railway tracks that one leads to reward and one leads to punishment.
RASCOE: What was your approach to finding out how this emotional valence is determined?
LI: Essentially, we use rodents models, specifically mice. We train the mice to perform this task where they hear a sound, and a few seconds later, the sound is followed by either a sugar water reward or a mild shock punishment. So over multiple trials, we'll learn that sound A is predictive of reward, which is the sugar. The sound B is predictive with a full shock, which is punishment. So we can then observe the animals' behavior during the presentation of this tone to see whether or not animal have learned that this is a good sound or otherwise the bad sound.
RASCOE: And what you found was that they were able to associate that sound with either a good thing or a bad thing.
LI: Yeah. Essentially, we use this task to model whether the animal have learned a good and bad memory. And what we found is this signaling molecule that's called neurotensin that can work as almost a switch operator that can turn on and off good and bad memory.
RASCOE: And, I mean, do we know if the same rules apply to human brains?
LI: Yes. Yes. A lot of studies have shown that human brains are using a very similar circuit to rodent brains in terms of emotional or memory processing or learning those basic survival skills.
RASCOE: So would there be, like, an evolutionary reason for these findings? I mean, it seems like it would make sense that if you hear something that should be associated with danger, it would be good to remember that.
LI: Yeah, I think it's most likely it's a revolutionary reason, right? Because, you know, if there's a danger, you want to avoid, run away, but if you're hungry, you can wait. But you don't want to wait if the tiger is coming at you. So evolutionarily, the brain circuits have been prompt to punishment over reward.
RASCOE: So then I got to ask because it almost seems like in modern day with humans, we can be anxious and remember those bad experiences that we don't want to remember as much. Are there practical ways that scientists or medical professionals could use your findings to help with people who may have a lot of negative feelings?
LI: Yeah. So I think there's a big potential because if you think all those mental health disorders, there's either too much reward or too much negative feeling, right? But if there's a molecule that can reverse this and make them feel happy again or make them learn things to be happy, they can potentially help them to overcome or recover from these diseases.
RASCOE: Hao Li is a researcher with the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Thank you so much for talking to me about this. It was very interesting.
LI: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | <urn:uuid:98ed85b5-625c-49fd-a795-494c1d585e91> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.wamc.org/2022-11-06/how-do-our-brains-decide-to-remember-something-positively-or-negatively | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474595.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225103506-20240225133506-00504.warc.gz | en | 0.965002 | 1,064 | 3.53125 | 4 | 500 |
A virtual reality (VR) hand, controlled by the mind, could help stroke patients restore hand movement as part of VR assisted physiotherapy.
Funded as part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s Audience of the Future challenge, Cogitat is a startup founded last year to turn research by Imperial into products that help people.
So, it’s exploring medical and gaming applications of its core technology. This is a brain-computer interface that allows users to move in VR environments by mentally willing themselves to move rather than physically moving.
Impaired upper limb movement
Many stroke patients suffer from impaired upper limb movement due to disrupted connections between their brains and muscles.
However, thanks to the brain’s plasticity this can often be restored using regular physiotherapy exercises that help reconfigure the connections.
Cogitat and VR production studio Unit 9, with support from UKRI, are exploring the potential for games powered by a brain-computer interface. This involves a virtual hand performing the movements that the patient is attempting to make.
This programme will help patients practise and improve their performances in a range of hand exercises.
More rewarding experience
Allan Ponniah, Cogitat’s CEO, explains:
If you can’t move your hand at all, repeated practice can be very frustrating, but the games we are developing will offer a more rewarding experience.
Initially, users just imagine their movements and they see their hands moving in VR. As time goes on, it helps calibrate their hands.
Once they move their hands a little bit, this is represented in the VR experience as a more successful performance.
This pushes them towards a situation where they can, for example, fully open and close a fist.
Motivated by research
The concept for the games is motivated by research in neuroscience.
The research suggest that the experience of seeing a motor task performed helps you develop the motor skills needed to perform that task yourself.
This is done by stimulating so-called mirror neurons, brain cells that are activated both by witnessing and performing motor tasks.
The proposed VR rehabilitation games could be used as part of physiotherapy sessions at clinics, but also have the potential advantage of helping patients to carry out exercises at home.
Game elements such as the opportunity to compete online with other ‘players’ or to try to beat one’s own past performances could make the exercises more enjoyable.
Making a real difference
Andrew Chitty, Audience of the Future challenge director at UKRI, says:
Combining Cogitat’s ground-breaking technology of brain-computer interfaces with the capabilities of VR and games technology offers the potential of making a real difference to the rehabilitation of stroke sufferers, one of the commonest causes of chronic disability in the UK.
This is a fantastic example of the potential for deep tech innovation from the life sciences to cross fertilise with creative technologies, engage patients in their own care and build businesses that will revolutionise healthcare.
A deep tech company
Dr Dimitrios Adamos, Imperial research fellow and Cogitat’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, says:
We are a deep tech company that develops cutting-edge artificial intelligence or machine learning-powered brainwave decoders trained on real-life electroencephalography (EEG) data.
Our device-agnostic technology can interface with any EEG headset and sensor configuration, including devices that haven’t even hit the market.
EEG devices, which use electrical activity on the scalp as a proxy for brain activity, are far cheaper than other forms of brain imaging such as magnetic resonance imaging.
They’re also portable enough to use outside research settings.
Top image: Credit: microgen, iStock, Getty Images Plus via Getty Images | <urn:uuid:3ec1aa03-139e-4e45-83e2-cc6c647ecbc2> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.ukri.org/news/mind-controlled-vr-games-could-aid-stroke-rehabilitation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474697.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228044414-20240228074414-00504.warc.gz | en | 0.935993 | 791 | 2.515625 | 3 | 501 |
What is Sexual Harassment?
Participates will receive training designed to identify and discuss sexual harassment from the perspective of real life examples in an organization and how to prevent from being charged with sexual harassment complaint. This training will include role plays, videos, review key definitions of sexual harassment, facts and myths, and events that have transpired in organizations. The objectives of this training is to ensure your program provides information, awareness, and prevention of sexual harassment in a learning environment that is creative and informative.
This is not your typical sexual harassment training, we’re giving you the tools you need in your daily life!
Learn from us!
Five Stages of Recovery.Defining, identifying, and understanding the five stages of recovery is essential when providing advanced victim services. This training will cover the five stages: initial shock, denial, reactivation, anger, and integration. Survivors will enhance their current knowledge base and be able to identify these stages during their recovery.
This training explores the growing epidemic of bullying and how bullying has changed A fun and interactive class that explores how social media impact our views on bullying and how it can lead to depression and/or death. Participants will be introduced to a different perspective of bullying that can occur in person, online, or via the cellphone.
This class targets all ages and media platforms and encourages learning via the internet.
Impact of Music, Movies and Social Media on Sexual Assault & Harassment:
A fun and interactive class that explores how social media impact our views on sexual assault, sexual harassment, bullying, drugs, and alcohol. Participants will be introduced to a different perspective of social media. This class targets all ages and media platforms and encourages learning via the internet.
Music, Assault, & Harassment:
A fun and interactive class that explores how music affects our views on sexual assault, sexual harassment, drugs, and alcohol. Participants will be introduced to a different perspective of the music industry. This class targets all ages and music genres and encourages learning through music.
Effective Communication with Your Friends:
An interactive class that applies the adult learning principles to effective and sensitive communication. This approach will ensure that participants learn various techniques to communicate with their battle buddy, friends, and family who are victims/complainants and help them establish the kind of rapport that’ s crucial for reassuring and comforting victims. Participants will team up to perform various roles plays based on realistic scenarios. The scenarios are added value to allow individuals to practice their introduction, communication styles, and the difference between empathy and sympathy.
Diversity and Inclusion of YOU:
A workshop designed to encourage participants to look at diversity and inclusion from a self- reflective point of view. Participants will use an assessment to determine their strength and weakness in the realm of diversity. The strategies presented to the participants will be engaging and lead to a better understanding of diversity and inclusion within their organization and why they are critical business priorities. The end result of the training will lead to participants recognizing the impact of their attitudes and behaviors towards team members and customers.
LGBT Awareness/Gender Inclusion:
Participates will receive training designed to identify and discuss diversity and inclusion from the perspective of sexual orientation and cultural competence. Sexual orientation is often considered a difficult topic to include in diversity issues because it brings up differences in religion, perceptions of morality, and politics. This training will include these discussions, review key definitions of LGBT, facts, and myths of the LGBT population, and review scenarios. The objectives of this training are to ensure your program provides information, awareness, and explores various demographics and cultures. | <urn:uuid:783bbc66-5146-4c17-a1f8-315ba6f996b4> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://hushnomore.org/training/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474843.87/warc/CC-MAIN-20240229134901-20240229164901-00504.warc.gz | en | 0.918113 | 725 | 2.78125 | 3 | 502 |
You’ve probably seen or heard of fidget spinners, those little hand-held toys that spun the world into a frenzy a few years ago. While they have somewhat faded from the limelight, the science and psychology behind these little devices have sparked a surge of innovative successors. Among the most intriguing are metal fidget sliders, designed to help users maintain focus and combat stress. These unassuming gadgets, elegantly simple in design and surprisingly beneficial in function, use a combination of tactile response, rhythmic movement, and silent operation to harness the power of fidgeting.
Distinguished by their tactile metallic surfaces and satisfyingly smooth sliders, these devices are often small enough to be unobtrusive, yet substantial enough to provide sensory feedback. Unlike the spinners of yesteryear, which could be flashy and sometimes noisy, adult fidget toys that you can find if visit this site are more discreet. They’re designed to satisfy our innate urge to fidget without becoming a distraction to ourselves or those around us.
Understanding Concentration and its Importance
Concentration is the mind’s ability to direct its focus onto a specific task or stimulus, tuning out irrelevant distractions. It’s an integral part of our cognitive architecture, underpinning our capacity to learn, work, and interact with the world around us. Without concentration, completing tasks efficiently and effectively becomes a formidable challenge. But why is it that sometimes, focusing seems to be an insurmountable task? The answer lies within our brains’ desire to balance stimulation and attention.
Our brains thrive on a certain level of stimulation to function optimally. Too little, and we find ourselves bored and distracted. Too much, and we can become overwhelmed and anxious. Striking this balance can be challenging, especially in a world increasingly saturated with stimuli. From incessant notifications on our devices to multitasking demands at work or school, our attention is continually being pulled in various directions.
The Psychology of Fidgeting and its Impact on Focus
Fidgeting has been studied extensively in psychology and neuroscience. Often dismissed as a sign of boredom or inattentiveness, fidgeting is increasingly being recognized for its potential benefits to focus and cognition. To comprehend this, we must first understand what fidgeting is. It’s essentially a form of spontaneous, non-goal-oriented movement. Twirling your hair, tapping your foot, or sliding a piece of metal back and forth – these are all forms of fidgeting.
The relationship between fidgeting and focus may seem paradoxical. After all, shouldn’t engaging in an unrelated physical activity detract from our cognitive engagement? Interestingly, research suggests the contrary. Fidgeting, it appears, can serve as a self-regulation mechanism, allowing our brains to maintain the optimal level of arousal necessary for sustaining focus.
When our brains are understimulated (for example, during a monotonous task), fidgeting can provide the additional sensory-motor input needed to stay engaged. Conversely, in situations of hyperstimulation (like stress or anxiety), it can offer a physical outlet for restless energy, helping us remain calm and centered. This dual function forms the basis for how metal fidget sliders might enhance concentration.
Mechanisms of Action: How Metal Fidget Sliders Enhance Concentration
So how exactly do metal fidget sliders work to enhance focus? First, their action hinges on the principle of sensory gating. Sensory gating is the brain’s ability to filter out unnecessary sensory information, allowing us to focus on what’s relevant. However, some of us have ‘leaky’ sensory gates, making it challenging to tune out background stimuli. The steady, rhythmic movement of a fidget slider provides just enough sensory input to engage these leaky gates without overwhelming them, helping the brain concentrate on the primary task.
Secondly, fidget sliders engage the power of rhythmic movement. Studies suggest that engaging in rhythmical, non-distracting activities like drumming fingers or bouncing a leg can enhance focus and cognitive performance. By providing a steady, silent rhythm, metal fidget sliders can stimulate this response.
Lastly, the tactile nature of these sliders provides sensory stimulation, often found soothing or satisfying. This stimulation can increase our level of arousal to an optimal point, promoting alertness and focus, particularly when we’re dealing with tasks that might otherwise seem dull or monotonous.
Cognitive Benefits of Using Metal Fidget Sliders
Beyond improving concentration, metal fidget sliders offer several other cognitive benefits. They can serve as a self-soothing device, reducing stress and anxiety by providing a physical outlet for restless energy. This can be particularly helpful during high-pressure tasks, allowing the user to channel their nervous energy into the slider, thereby freeing up cognitive resources to focus on the task at hand.
Furthermore, these devices can promote mindfulness. The physical act of manipulating the slider brings attention to the present moment, helping to reduce mind-wandering and promote a state of focused awareness. This increased mindfulness can have ripple effects, enhancing memory, creativity, and overall cognitive performance.
Finally, for individuals with ADHD or similar conditions, fidget sliders can be particularly beneficial. By providing a steady stream of sensory input, these devices can help manage symptoms of restlessness and attention deficit, facilitating increased focus and cognitive engagement.
The Role of Sensory Stimulation in Concentration Enhancement
Sensory stimulation plays a crucial role in enhancing concentration. Whether it’s auditory, visual, or tactile, stimulation can activate our brain’s attention systems, allowing us to focus better. In the case of metal fidget sliders, it’s the tactile and proprioceptive stimulation that takes center stage. The tactile sensation of the cold, smooth metal under the fingers provides grounding sensory input, helping to anchor attention.
Moreover, the proprioceptive input – the sensation of where our bodies (or in this case, fingers) are in space – can further anchor our focus. Proprioceptive activities are often used in therapies for ADHD and sensory processing disorders, as they can be calming and help improve attention.
By manipulating the slider, users engage in a form of ‘active touch.’ Research suggests that active touch, where we manipulate an object, aids in cognitive processing and learning, offering another layer of potential benefits from using a metal fidget slider.
In a world that continually demands our attention, tools that can help us focus are invaluable. The science behind metal fidget sliders suggests that these small devices can play a big role in supporting our cognitive performance and well-being. Happy sliding! | <urn:uuid:7917dcbc-84f5-4e41-bd92-64e21b4bdd81> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.bearshare.com/metal-fidget-sliders-improve-concentration/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474843.87/warc/CC-MAIN-20240229134901-20240229164901-00504.warc.gz | en | 0.918886 | 1,375 | 2.859375 | 3 | 503 |
Developmental Evaluation is an exciting approach to evaluation that enables social innovators, policy and program managers, and community leaders to design, monitor, and adapt social change initiatives in complex and uncertain environments.
In this course, you will be introduced to Developmental Evaluation (DE) through an interactive learning approach that models adult learning principles. Using asynchronous and synchronous learning modalities you will explore when, where, and why to use a DE approach, the guiding principles and component elements of DE, and examine real world examples of DE in action individually and in small groups.
You will develop a DE framework to use in your own context. This component of the course will be an exercise in action learning as you work on the design and application of DE concepts, tools, and processes, and share your experiences and reflections across the cohort. You will also have opportunity for one-on-one support and coaching from the course facilitators.
- Reliable internet access (high speed is recommended)
- Speakers and microphone
This course is taught from a Canadian perspective for participants from the G20. The G20 comprises 19 countries and the European Union. The 19 countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. | <urn:uuid:cfe58af2-36ff-4aae-8880-bd4ea1446374> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://cep.anglican.ca/courses/developmental-evaluation-for-social-impact/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475711.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301225031-20240302015031-00504.warc.gz | en | 0.898473 | 281 | 2.65625 | 3 | 504 |
This lecture covers a lot of post-war developments in the science of the mind, focusing first on the cognitive revolution, and concluding with living machines.
This lecture provides an overview of depression (epidemiology and course of the disorder), clinical presentation, somatic co-morbidity, and treatment options.
This lesson is part 1 of 2 of a tutorial on statistical models for neural data.
What is the difference between attention and consciousness? This lecture describes the scientific meaning of consciousness, journeys on the search for neural correlates of visual consciousness, and explores the possibility of consciousness in other beings and even non-biological structures.
This talk enumerates the challenges regarding data accessibility and reusability inherent in the current scientific publication system, and discusses novel approaches to these challenges, such as the EBRAINS Live Papers platform.
This lesson aims to define computational neuroscience in general terms, while providing specific examples of highly successful computational neuroscience projects.
This lesson covers membrane potential of neurons, and how parameters around this potential have direct consequences on cellular communication at both the individual and population level.
An introduction to data management, manipulation, visualization, and analysis for neuroscience. Students will learn scientific programming in Python, and use this to work with example data from areas such as cognitive-behavioral research, single-cell recording, EEG, and structural and functional MRI. Basic signal processing techniques including filtering are covered. The course includes a Jupyter Notebook and video tutorials. | <urn:uuid:dfcfceaf-d7f7-4bcb-8396-aec4c44670f0> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://training.incf.org/search?subjects%5B53%5D=53&%3Bf%5B0%5D=topics%3A43&f%5B0%5D=difficulty_level%3Aadvanced&f%5B1%5D=difficulty_level%3Abeginner&f%5B2%5D=lesson_type%3A24&f%5B3%5D=lesson_type%3A26&f%5B4%5D=lesson_type%3A32&f%5B5%5D=lesson_type%3A33&f%5B6%5D=topics%3A21&f%5B7%5D=topics%3A37&f%5B8%5D=topics%3A47&f%5B9%5D=topics%3A52&f%5B10%5D=topics%3A57&f%5B11%5D=topics%3A70&f%5B12%5D=topics%3A253&f%5B13%5D=topics%3A276&f%5B14%5D=topics%3A281&filter=&page=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476532.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304200958-20240304230958-00504.warc.gz | en | 0.874002 | 298 | 2.578125 | 3 | 505 |
A fundamental mystery of the human cortex is how its 16 billion neurons integrate or bind the many different kinds of information they encode into a single coherent unified experience or memory.
Scientists have hypothesized that such binding involves high-frequency oscillations or “ripples” that promote neural interactions, much like rhythm does in music or dance. In a paper published July 7, 2022 in PNAS, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine provide some of the first empirical evidence that such ripples do, in fact, occur in people.
“Think about the experience of petting your cat: its form, location, surroundings, color, feel, movement and sound, plus your own responding emotions and actions. They are all bound together in a coherent whole,” said senior author Eric Halgren, PhD, professor of radiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
“These different aspects of the experience are encoded in locations distributed across the cortical surface of the brain, and the experience is sub-served by their spatiotemporal firing pattern. The mystery has been how activities in those different locations get connected.”
Previous studies, mainly in rodents, had found that ripples in a different structure, the hippocampus, organize the replay of these spatiotemporal patterns during sleep, and this is essential for making memories permanent.
The UC San Diego team, led by Halgren, found that ripples also occur in all areas of the human cortex, in waking as well as sleep. The ripples were brief, lasting roughly one-tenth of a second, and had a consistent narrow frequency close to 90 cycles per second. The authors calculated that a typical brief ripple event may involve approximately 5,000 small modules becoming active simultaneously, distributed across the cortical surface.
This work is part of the doctoral thesis in neurosciences by first author Charles W. Dickey.
“Remarkably, the ripples co-occurred and synchronized across all lobes and between both hemispheres, even at long distances,” said Dickey. “Cortical neurons increased firing during ripples, at the ripple rhythm, potentially supporting interaction between distant locations.
“There were more co-occurrences preceding successful memory recall. All of which suggests that distributed, cortical co-ripples promote the integration of different elements that may comprise a particular experiential memory.”
The researchers found that cortical ripples are often coupled with hippocampal ripples and embedded in slower oscillations (1 and 12 cycles per second). These slower rhythms are orchestrated by a central structure controlling cortical activity levels, the thalamus, and modulate neuronal firing, which is needed for memory consolidation.
“As our experience is organized hierarchically in time, so too are the rhythms that organize our cortical activities that create that experience,” Halgren said.
The research involved analyses of week-long recordings made directly from inside the brains of 18 patients being monitored to locate the origin of their epileptic seizures. Ongoing work in Halgren’s lab is demonstrating that neuronal firing patterns in different parts of the cortex are more mutually predictive during co-rippling, and co-rippling is associated with the binding of letters into words and meanings with actions.
“Like any other basic research that increases our understanding of how the world works, it is impossible to know what its practical implications will be,” said Halgren. “But I would note that schizophrenia, a common and incurable disease, is characterized by mental fragmentation. Our findings and those of others indicate that a particular type of inhibitory interneuron is crucial for the generation of ripples, and these cells are known to be selectively affected by schizophrenia, as are high frequency oscillations. Perhaps we are a little closer to finding a mechanism for one aspect of this tragic disease.”
Co-authors include: Ilya A. Verzhbinsky, Xi Jiang, Burke Q. Rosen, Sophie Kajfez, Jerry J. Shih and Sharona Ben-Haim, all at UC San Diego; Brittany Stedelin and Ahmed M. Raslan, Oregon Health & Science University; Emad N. Eskandar, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Jorge Gonzalez-Martinez, Cleveland Clinic; and Sydney S. Cash, Harvard Medical School.
# # #
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Article Publication Date | <urn:uuid:4dd08626-eb6a-44c5-a25f-a5f4b3208ef2> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/958324 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473824.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222193722-20240222223722-00604.warc.gz | en | 0.947142 | 910 | 3.625 | 4 | 506 |
Have you ever wondered what exactly psychology is and why it is so important in our lives? Psychology is a multifaceted field that delves into the complexities of the human mind and behavior.
In this article, we will explore the different approaches in psychology, from the biological and cognitive to the humanistic and evolutionary. We will also debunk common misconceptions about psychology and discuss its practical applications in everyday life, such as improving relationships and managing stress.
Join us as we unlock the key to understanding this diverse and fascinating field.
- 1 Key Takeaways:
- 2 What Is Psychology?
- 3 Why Is Understanding Psychology Important?
- 4 What Are the Different Approaches in Psychology?
- 5 How Do These Approaches Interact with Each Other?
- 6 What Are the Common Misconceptions about Psychology?
- 7 What Are the Applications of Psychology in Everyday Life?
- 8 Frequently Asked Questions
- 8.1 What is the Essential Approach in psychology?
- 8.2 How does the Essential Approach differ from other approaches in psychology?
- 8.3 What are some key concepts of the Essential Approach?
- 8.4 Why is the Essential Approach important for understanding psychology?
- 8.5 How can the Essential Approach be applied in real-life situations?
- 8.6 Is the Essential Approach the only way to understand psychology?
What Is Psychology?
Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mind, encompassing conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as thought processes and emotions.
Cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology are some of the branches that delve into specific aspects of human behavior and mental processes.
Psychologists employ various research methods, including experiments, surveys, and observations, to investigate behavior patterns and mental functions.
Understanding mental health aspects such as emotions, motivations, and perceptions is crucial in the field of psychology.
The study of neurological processes and how they relate to behavior and cognition plays a significant role in advancing our knowledge of the human mind.
Why Is Understanding Psychology Important?
Understanding psychology is crucial as it provides insights into human behavior, mental health, cognitive development, and social interactions, enabling effective interventions and personal growth.
Psychology offers a vast array of tools and theories that help individuals comprehend their own actions and emotions while also facilitating better understanding of the behavior of those around them.
By looking into psychological principles, one can explore the intricate connections between thoughts, feelings, and actions, unravelling the complexities of the human mind. It sheds light on the underlying factors influencing decision-making, relationships, and overall well-being, making it an critical aspect of personal and professional development.
What Are the Different Approaches in Psychology?
Psychology encompasses various approaches and perspectives, including biological, cognitive, behavioral, psychoanalytic, and humanistic paradigms, influenced by pioneers like William James, Sigmund Freud, and B.F. Skinner.
These key perspectives offer unique insights into the study of human behavior and mental processes.
The biological perspective focuses on the influence of genetics and the nervous system on behavior, while the cognitive perspective emphasizes mental processes such as thinking, memory, and problem-solving.
In contrast, the behavioral perspective examines how environmental factors shape behavior through reinforcement and conditioning.
The theories put forth by influential figures like Jean Piaget have significantly contributed to the development and refinement of these paradigms.
The biological approach in psychology focuses on the physiological basis of behavior and mental processes, exploring the role of genetics, neurotransmitters, and brain functions in shaping human cognition and emotions.
Neuroscience plays a crucial role in understanding how the brain interacts with behavior and mental health. By utilizing advanced imaging techniques such as fMRI and EEG, researchers can pinpoint specific brain regions that influence various cognitive functions and emotional responses.
Genetics not only determine physical traits but also contribute to individual differences in personality and susceptibility to mental illnesses. The intricate interplay of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine regulates mood, motivation, and overall psychological well-being.
The cognitive approach in psychology examines mental processes such as attention, memory, and problem-solving, emphasizing how individuals perceive, think, and process information to understand human behavior.
Attention is a fundamental cognitive process that filters and selects information from the environment, influencing what we focus on and ultimately shaping our experiences. Memory, another key cognitive function, not only stores past experiences but also shapes future decisions by guiding behavior based on past learnings.
Problem-solving, a cognitive skill crucial for adapting to new situations, involves mentally representing a problem, strategizing possible solutions, and evaluating their effectiveness. These cognitive processes are interconnected and play a significant role in decision-making, with attention directing what information is processed, memory retrieving relevant past experiences, and problem-solving aiding in finding solutions to complex challenges.
The behavioral approach in psychology emphasizes observable behaviors, learning processes, and environmental influences on human actions, shaping educational practices and behavior modification techniques.
Behaviorism, a key component of the behavioral approach, focuses on the belief that behavior is acquired through conditioning and reinforcement.
Learning theories such as classical and operant conditioning have significant roles in understanding how individuals acquire new behaviors.
The environment plays a crucial role, as it provides stimuli that influence behavior.
By creating a conducive environment, educators can effectively shape desired behaviors in students and facilitate the learning process.
Understanding these principles can lead to more effective teaching strategies and behavior interventions.
The humanistic approach in psychology focuses on individual potential, personal growth, and the importance of emotions and self-awareness in shaping personality and subjective experiences.
One of the key principles of this approach is the concept of self-actualization, which emphasizes the inherent drive in individuals to fulfill their potential and achieve personal fulfillment.
Through fostering empathy and understanding towards oneself and others, individuals can cultivate a deeper sense of connection and authenticity. This approach also highlights the significance of recognizing and embracing human potential, encouraging individuals to explore their values, beliefs, and capacity for growth.
The psychoanalytic approach, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, delves into the unconscious mind, repressed emotions, and childhood experiences to understand the complexities of human behavior and mental health.
This approach emphasizes that many of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by unconscious processes we are not aware of.
Freud’s contributions revolutionized psychology, introducing concepts such as the id, ego, and superego, exploring how conflicts between these structures shape personality. He also underscored the significance of early experiences, suggesting that events in childhood influence adult behaviors and relationships.
The evolutionary approach in psychology explores how human behaviors and cognitive processes have evolved over time, emphasizing adaptation, survival advantages, and the impact of evolutionary history on contemporary behavior.
One of the key principles in evolutionary psychology is the idea that behaviors and cognitive functions have developed as mechanisms to help individuals adapt to their environment and increase their chances of survival.
This process has led to the evolution of specific behavioral traits that serve important functions related to reproduction, social interactions, and cooperation within groups.
For example, the theory of parental investment suggests that certain behaviors, such as caregiving and protection of offspring, have evolved because they provide advantages in terms of reproductive success.
The sociocultural approach in psychology studies how cultural norms, societal influences, and social contexts shape human behavior, cognition, and emotional experiences, highlighting the impact of cultural variations on mental processes.
This perspective emphasizes the relationship between individuals and the society they live in, underlining how social interactions and cultural practices influence psychological development.
By examining diverse cultural perspectives and historical contexts, sociocultural psychologists aim to understand how cultural factors impact perception, thought processes, and communication styles. They explore how cultures differ in terms of beliefs, values, and traditions, affecting everything from personality formation to problem-solving strategies.
Sociocultural psychology sheds light on the role of socialization in shaping individual identities and behavior patterns.
The eclectic approach in psychology integrates concepts and methods from various psychological perspectives, emphasizing the value of combining diverse theories and approaches to understand complex human behavior and mental processes.
This approach recognizes that no single theory or perspective can fully capture the complexity of human experience, leading practitioners to draw from cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, and humanistic traditions to develop a holistic understanding of individuals.
By embracing a versatile toolkit of interventions, therapists can tailor their treatment strategies to suit the unique needs of each client, promoting flexibility and individualized care in mental health settings.
How Do These Approaches Interact with Each Other?
The different approaches in psychology often complement each other, offering diverse insights into human behavior, cognitive processes, and emotional experiences, fostering a comprehensive understanding of psychological phenomena.
The psychodynamic perspective delves into unconscious processes, childhood experiences, and the role of inner conflicts in shaping our personalities.
On the other hand, the behaviorist approach focuses on observable behaviors, stimulus-response associations, and how external factors influence behavior.
Cognitive psychology, with its emphasis on mental processes like memory, thinking, and problem-solving, adds another layer to our understanding of human cognition.
Humanistic psychology emphasizes individual growth, self-actualization, and subjective experiences, providing a more human-centered view of psychology.
What Are the Common Misconceptions about Psychology?
Several misconceptions surround psychology, including beliefs that it is merely common sense, not rooted in science, or reserved for individuals with severe mental health issues, highlighting the need for accurate information and awareness.
Contrary to popular belief, psychology is a well-established scientific discipline that combines rigorous research methods with empirical evidence to understand and explain human behavior.
It delves into the complexities of the mind, emotions, and behavior patterns, offering valuable insights for individuals of all backgrounds, not just those facing serious mental health challenges. In fact, psychological principles are widely applicable in everyday situations, from improving communication skills to enhancing personal relationships and boosting overall mental well-being.
Psychology is Just Common Sense
One common misconception about psychology is the notion that it merely reflects common sense, overlooking the rigorous research, systematic study, and theoretical frameworks that underpin psychological principles and interventions.
Contrary to popular belief, psychology is a multidimensional field that employs a wide array of methodologies such as experiments, surveys, and observations to investigate human behavior, cognition, and emotion.
Through meticulous data collection and analysis, psychologists formulate hypotheses, conduct controlled experiments, and draw evidence-based conclusions that contribute to the ever-evolving body of psychological knowledge.
Psychology embraces diverse perspectives, including biological, cognitive, behavioral, and psychodynamic approaches, to provide comprehensive insights into the complexities of human experience.
Only ‘Crazy’ People Need Therapy
Another prevalent misconception is the belief that therapy or psychological support is exclusively for individuals with severe mental health issues, perpetuating stigma and hindering access to beneficial interventions for various psychological concerns.
Therapy is a versatile tool that can benefit individuals facing a wide array of emotional, behavioral, and relational challenges. It provides a safe and supportive space for individuals to explore their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, helping them develop coping strategies and build resilience.
From managing stress and anxiety to improving communication skills and enhancing self-awareness, therapy offers effective techniques and insights that can give the power to individuals to lead more fulfilling lives.
Psychology is Not a Science
A common misunderstanding is the assertion that psychology is not a science, disregarding the empirical research, experimental methodologies, and systematic approaches employed by psychologists to investigate human behavior, cognition, and emotions.
Psychology, as a scientific discipline, encompasses a wide range of research methods such as laboratory experiments, observational studies, surveys, and case studies to gather data and draw conclusions. These methodologies allow psychologists to test hypotheses, measure variables, and establish patterns in human behavior through empirical evidence.
Empirical research forms the backbone of psychology, providing a basis for evidence-based practices and interventions that have proven effective in addressing mental health issues and improving overall well-being.
All Therapies are the Same
Another misconception pertains to the assumption that all psychological therapies or treatment approaches are identical, overlooking the diverse range of therapeutic modalities, theoretical orientations, and intervention strategies tailored to individual needs and preferences.
Within the realm of psychology, each therapeutic approach carries its own unique set of principles, techniques, and focuses, catering to a wide array of mental health conditions and personal situations.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), for instance, emphasizes the connection between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to create positive change. In contrast, psychodynamic therapy delves into unconscious processes and past experiences for insight and healing. Meanwhile, humanistic therapy encourages self-exploration and personal growth in a supportive environment.
What Are the Applications of Psychology in Everyday Life?
Psychology offers practical applications in everyday life, ranging from enhancing relationships, managing stress and anxiety, improving learning and memory, to promoting mental and emotional well-being through evidence-based strategies and interventions.
By understanding the principles of effective communication and conflict resolution, individuals can navigate interpersonal relationships more smoothly. Learning to recognize and regulate emotions helps in better coping with stressors and maintaining mental resilience.
Educational practices benefit from psychological insights by tailoring teaching methods to individual learning styles, ensuring optimal retention and engagement. In mental health support, therapy techniques like cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness-based interventions offer tools for managing psychological disorders and emotional challenges effectively.
Understanding and Improving Relationships
Psychology provides insights into understanding and enhancing relationships through effective communication, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence, fostering healthier and more fulfilling interpersonal connections.
By looking into the complexities of human behavior and emotions, psychology equips individuals with valuable tools to navigate the intricate dynamics of relationships.
Understanding one’s own emotions and those of others is a cornerstone of emotional intelligence, enabling individuals to communicate more empathetically and build deeper connections.
Applying psychological principles can help individuals identify and address sources of conflict within relationships, leading to more constructive and harmonious interactions.
Managing Stress and Anxiety
Psychology offers coping strategies and relaxation techniques for managing stress and anxiety, give the power toing individuals to build resilience, enhance self-care practices, and maintain emotional well-being amidst life’s challenges.
By looking into the realm of mental health, individuals can gain insights into their thought patterns, emotions, and behaviors, paving the way for effective stress reduction.
Through therapeutic approaches such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or mindfulness practices, people can learn to reframe negative thinking, regulate their emotions, and cultivate a sense of calm in the face of stressful situations.
Creating a support network and engaging in activities that promote relaxation, such as yoga or meditation, can significantly alleviate anxiety levels and improve overall well-being.
Enhancing Learning and Memory
Psychological principles support effective learning strategies, memory enhancement techniques, and cognitive development practices, facilitating improved academic performance, information retention, and intellectual growth.
Understanding how the mind processes and retains information is integral to optimizing learning outcomes.
Memory consolidation, a crucial process in educational psychology, involves converting short-term memories into long-term ones.
By incorporating active recall, spaced repetition, and elaborative interrogation into study routines, individuals can improve memory encoding and retrieval.
Engaging in critical thinking tasks that challenge mental schemas fosters cognitive development and enhances problem-solving abilities.
These practices not only benefit academic success but also contribute to overall mental acuity and neuroplasticity.
Promoting Mental and Emotional Well-being
Psychology plays a vital role in promoting mental and emotional well-being, offering therapeutic interventions, counseling support, and self-care strategies to enhance psychological resilience, reduce distress, and foster holistic wellness.
Emotional balance is crucial in navigating life’s challenges, and through psychological approaches, individuals can gain insight into their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Counseling services provide a safe space for individuals to explore their emotions, address underlying issues, and develop coping mechanisms. By incorporating evidence-based practices, therapists help clients work through trauma, anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns.
Additionally, self-help techniques give the power to individuals to take an active role in their mental well-being, promoting self-awareness, mindfulness, and emotional regulation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Essential Approach in psychology?
The Essential Approach is a framework for understanding the diverse and complex field of psychology, providing key concepts and theories to help make sense of the subject.
How does the Essential Approach differ from other approaches in psychology?
Unlike other approaches that focus on a specific aspect of psychology, the Essential Approach takes a holistic view, considering all factors that contribute to understanding human behavior and mental processes.
What are some key concepts of the Essential Approach?
Some key concepts of the Essential Approach include the mind-body connection, biopsychosocial model, and the importance of cultural and historical context in shaping individual experiences.
Why is the Essential Approach important for understanding psychology?
The Essential Approach provides a comprehensive and integrated perspective on psychology, allowing for a deeper understanding of human behavior and mental processes.
How can the Essential Approach be applied in real-life situations?
The concepts and theories of the Essential Approach can be applied in various fields, such as therapy, education, and organizational psychology, to help individuals and groups better understand themselves and others.
Is the Essential Approach the only way to understand psychology?
No, the Essential Approach is not the only way to understand psychology, but it serves as a valuable framework for exploring and making sense of the diverse field of psychology. Other approaches may offer additional insights and perspectives. | <urn:uuid:593fecc2-15d4-496c-897d-1d0c97118382> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://listen-hard.com/applied-psychology-and-everyday-life/essential-psychology-approach/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474523.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20240224044749-20240224074749-00604.warc.gz | en | 0.893243 | 3,635 | 3.453125 | 3 | 507 |
The astonishing maps that reveal how our brain organises everything we see
- UC Berkeley team use fMRI to find out where semantically linked concepts are processed in the brain
- Findings are a quantum leap from previous research mapping concepts to brain regions
- Team create video and interactive website to present their incredible discoveries
Scientists have put together the first ever map of how the brain organises the thousands of images that come flooding in through our eyes every day.
A team at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see.
To illustrate their findings, they have created the first map of how the brain organises these categories across the cortex.
The team used fMRI scans of patients to work out which how which regions of their brains process different categories of information (right). They were then able to show the regions on a virtual 3D brain (left)
The result — achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while test subjects watched hours of video clips — is what researchers call 'a continuous semantic space'.
The UC Berkeley team have mapped this data across the human cortex to show which areas of the brain deal with which categories of objects we see in the world around us.
Some relationships between categories make sense - for example, that humans and animals share the same 'semantic neighbourhood' - while others - like the apparent link between hallways and buckets - seem less obvious.
Nevertheless, the researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout.
The Berkeley team used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of five researchers as they each watched two hours of film clips.
Researchers then analysed the readings to find correlations in data and build a model showing how each of 30,000 subdivisions in the cortex responded to the 1,700 categories of objects and actions shown.
Next, they used principal components analysis, a statistical method that can summarize large data sets, to find the 'semantic space' that was common to all the study subjects. The results are presented in multicoloured, multi-dimensional maps showing the more than 1,700 visual categories and their relationships to one another.
Categories that activate the same brain areas have similar colours. For example, humans are green, animals are yellow, vehicles are pink and violet and buildings are blue.
'Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organised,' said Alexander Huth, lead author of the study published yesterday in the journal Neuron. 'Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organisation of a single human brain.'
His and his colleagues findings show that the brain efficiently represents the diversity of categories in a compact space. Instead of having a distinct brain area devoted to each category, as previous work had identified, for some but not all types of stimuli, the researchers found brain activity is organised by the relationship between categories.
'Humans can recognise thousands of categories. Given the limited size of the human brain, it seems unreasonable to expect that every category is represented in a distinct brain area,' said Mr Huth.
A clearer understanding of how the brain organises visual input can help with the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. The findings may also be used to create brain-machine interfaces, particularly for facial and other image recognition systems.
'Our discovery suggests that brain scans could soon be used to label an image that someone is seeing, and may also help teach computers how to better recognise images,' said Mr Huth.
Semantic map of the brain: This images of subjects' brains scanned as part of the study shows how which regions of their brains process different categories of information. See key below
These three images are the key for the above brain scans: Different categories are represented in four semantic dimensions by different colours. Categories that activate the same brain areas have similar colours. For example, humans are green, animals are yellow, vehicles are pink and violet and buildings are blue
He has produced a video and interactive website to explain the science of what the researchers found.
It was long believed that each category of object or action humans see — people, animals, vehicles, household appliances and movements — is represented in a separate region of the visual cortex.
But this new study shows that these categories are actually represented in highly organised, overlapping maps that cover as much as 20 per cent of the brain, including the somato-sensory and frontal cortices.
'Using the semantic space as a visualisation tool, we immediately saw that categories are represented in these incredibly intricate maps that cover much more of the brain than we expected,' Mr Huth said.
Dr Jack Gallant, at whose laboratory the work was carried out, said: 'Discovering the feature space that the brain uses to represent information helps us to recover functional maps across the cortical surface.
'The brain probably uses similar mechanisms to map other kinds of information across the cortical surface, so our approach should be widely applicable to other areas of cognitive neuroscience.'
Now watch a video of one of the researchers explaining the map and findings
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If you’re a leader in any sense of the word, you know that it’s a difficult job.
Leadership is about much more than giving orders, managing employees’ time and making schedules, or providing annual performance reviews; it’s a task that requires dedication and a wide range of skills.
Leading others can get messy and complicated, but it’s a vital role—and a vital role to get right.
Read on to learn about how you can approach leadership in a positive, effective, and impactful way.
Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Leadership Exercises for free. These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or others adopt positive leadership practices and help organizations thrive.
This Article Contains:
- What is Positive Leadership?
- Positive Leadership Styles
- The Key Traits and Skills of a Positive Leader
- Implementing Positive Psychology into Leadership
- A Look at Positive Leadership in Project Management
- Essential Leadership Skills Needed in Childcare
- Training Options
- Recommended Articles
- Recommended Books
- 5 YouTube Videos
- 9 Quotes on the Topic
- A Take-Home Message
What is Positive Leadership?
Positive leadership is an area of study within positive psychology concerning leadership styles, techniques, and behavior that can be classified as deviant—positively deviant.
Being positively deviant means that the style, technique, or behavior the leader engages falls outside of the normal range observed in leadership. Think of a bell curve of leadership behaviors, with negative behaviors on the left and positive behaviors on the right. Most leadership behaviors will fall somewhere within the middle, the thickest part of the bell curve.
Bad behaviors will fall in the far left tail, while positive leadership behaviors fall in the far right tail.
We spend a lot of time talking about bad leadership, pointing out what not to do, and trying to get people to shift their behavior from the left side to the middle-right of the bell curve. Positive leadership’s aim is to get leaders to shift their behavior from anywhere it may fall on this curve to the far right of the curve.
A Look at the Theory and Model
Positive leadership is a catch-all term, an umbrella under which several different leadership theories live.
The most well-known of these theories include:
- Authentic Leadership Development (ALD)
- Transformational Leadership
- Charismatic Leadership
- Servant Leadership
- Spiritual Leadership (Avolio & Gardner, 2005)
The models employed by these theories differ based on the unique assumptions and relationships in which the theory is grounded, but generally, they all include a few agreed-upon components:
- Positive leadership involves experiencing, modeling, and purposefully enhancing positive emotions.
- A positive leader is interested in his or her employees’ development as well as the bottom line.
- High self-awareness, optimism, and personal integrity (Avolio & Gardner, 2005).
A Look at Positive Organizational Leadership
Positive organizational leadership is an area of focus within positive organizational psychology that generally takes a broader perspective on the subject, looking at how leaders influence the organization itself.
This subfield of positive leadership explores topics like positive deviance on an organizational level, organizational citizenship behaviors (behaviors that indicate loyalty, commitment, and a willingness to go above and beyond), change management (particularly positive-focused change management), and other high-level ways that positive leaders can impact an organization.
Positive Leadership Styles
There are tons of positive leadership styles out there, and the exact number and description will depend on who you ask.
Ask leadership researchers Bruce Avolio or William Gardner and you’ll learn about the popular theory of authentic leadership development. An authentic leadership style is characterized by four factors: self-awareness, relational transparency, internalized moral perspective (a sense of ethics and integrity), and balanced processing (being fair and open-minded; Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2007).
If you ask emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman or his colleagues, researchers Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, you’ll hear about four of them:
- Visionary (or Authoritative) Leaders – they have an ambitious vision and they inspire others to pursue it.
- Coaching Leaders – they know how to further development, and get the best out of those around them, and they usually do just that.
- Affiliative Leaders – these leaders are well-versed in applying and enhancing positive affect in the workplace, and they can bring harmony and conflict resolution to a team.
- Consensus (or Democratic) Leaders – they thrive on collaboration, bringing together a diverse range of viewpoints to gather information and make decisions (Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee, 2002).
Talk to a number of organizational leaders and business executives and they’ll tell you about Bass’ transformational leadership style, which is characterized by:
- Idealized influence: the leader is liked and respected by their followers, and serve as a role model.
- Inspirational motivation: the leader motivates and inspires their followers.
- Intellectual stimulation: the leader promotes creativity and innovation through open-mindedness and non-threatening questioning of ideas.
- Individualized consideration: the leader treats each follower as a unique individual with unique strengths, weaknesses, and needs (Bass & Riggio, 2006).
You might also hear about charismatic leadership, a subtype of transformational leadership. In charismatic leadership, the leader checks all four of the boxes outlined above but he or she is also very skilled in communicating with others, especially on a deeper level (Riggio, 2012).
Finally, one of the other popular styles of positive leadership you may hear about is servant leadership. Servant leadership is defined as leadership that embodies three important factors:
- It empowers and develops people.
- It expresses humility, authenticity, interpersonal acceptance, and stewardship.
- It provides direction (van Dierendonck, 2010).
What Does the Research Say?
Although the research is not settled, positive leadership is generally linked to better outcomes than negative leadership styles or “plain old leadership” styles.
For example, transformational leadership has been found to contribute significantly to follower performance, job satisfaction, and extra effort expended (Molero, Cuadrado, Navas, & Morales, 2014). Further, servant leadership has been shown to enhance follower development, job satisfaction, and both follower and team performance (van Dierendonck, 2010).
We’ll look at some of the findings from research on positive leadership later in this piece, including ways to implement positive leadership tools and techniques.
6 Examples of Positive Leadership in Action
So what does positive leadership look like in action? It looks like leaders who care, who empower their employees, and who support their employees.
For example, a leader who cares will respond to a rare mistake from their most productive employee with concern and compassion rather than condemnation. A leader who cares will understand that we are all human and each and every one of us will make a mistake at some point.
An effective positive leader will also understand that there is probably a reason behind the mistake, and she will talk to the employee to see if he or she is struggling with something that’s not immediately obvious.
A leader who empowers his employees is one who gives them as much power and self-determination as possible. A good positive leader does not give orders or answers but provides the guidance and resources necessary for his employees to do their best work.
An empowering leader might delegate projects and large-scale tasks to staff, but allow them to choose how they will go about tackling them. He may also encourage them to choose their own training and development opportunities to ensure they are invested in their own growth.
Finally, a positive leader supports her employees. This entails more than just seeming supportive; being a truly supportive leader requires acting as a backup for your employees and being there for them when they need it the most. This might look like acting as a buffer between his employees and a micromanaging middle manager, or it may manifest as speaking up for an employee in a meeting when he or she is struggling.
The Key Traits and Skills of a Positive Leader
To be a positive leader, there are some important skills and traits that you can develop or improve. Although this is nowhere near a comprehensive list, a few of the most vital of these traits and skills include:
- Positive affect
- Locus of control
- Emotional stability (Carleton, Barling, & Trivisonno, 2018; Hannah, Woolfolk, & Lord, 2009).
The Role of Resilience in Leadership
In addition to the traits and skills listed above, resilience plays a particularly vital role in leadership.
Think about how often something goes wrong at work or some unexpected problem crops up. The leaders that have to deal with these issues (and sometimes widespread fallout over such issues) are well-served by a solid foundation of resilience; without it, they would crumble at the first sign of trouble.
Resilient leaders are simply better leaders; not only can they handle a crisis better, but they are also generally more socially competent, have better problem-solving skills, and have a better sense of purpose and future (Luthans, 2002).
The Work of Kim Cameron
Kim Cameron is one of the biggest names in the positive leadership realm—you might even call him a “founding father” of positive leadership—and his work has proven to be a significant source of knowledge about positive leadership.
For example, Cameron’s description of positive leadership has been widely used to define the boundaries of the subfield; the three connotations of positive leadership according to Cameron are:
- It facilitates positively deviant (extraordinarily positive) performance.
- It features an affirmative bias, meaning that it is oriented towards the positive (strengths instead of weaknesses).
- It fosters the good in people (e.g., virtuousness, moral integrity; Cameron, 2008).
This simple but comprehensive description of positive leadership perfectly captures what sets it apart from all other types of leadership. Cameron’s work has made positive leadership more accessible to everyone as well as adding valuable findings to the literature.
Learn more about Cameron’s work in positive leadership.
Implementing Positive Psychology into Leadership
It’s easy to say (and believe) that implementing the principles of positive psychology into leadership is a good idea, but it can be difficult to know how to actually implement it.
Below are some practical ways to put the theories into practice.
Positive vs. Negative Leadership
The difference between positive and negative leadership is fairly simple once you strip away the technical terms and academic language: positive leadership encourages, empowers, and energizes people, whereas negative leadership drains them, discourages them, and demoralizes them.
At the most basic level, you can determine whether a leadership behavior is positive or negative (or neutral) by asking yourself these questions:
- Does it encourage or discourage followers?
- Does it empower or demoralize followers?
- Does it energize or drain followers?
If the answer is the former (encourage, empower, energize), it is likely a behavior at home in positive leadership. If the answer is the latter (discourage, demoralize, drain), it’s probably a negative leadership behavior.
7 Behaviors a Leader Needs to be Effective
To be an effective positive leader, there are seven behaviors that you may want to incorporate into your toolbox:
- Self-awareness (asking for feedback)
- Relational transparency (having a clear leadership philosophy)
- Balanced processing (using active listening)
- Ethical behavior (following through on what you say you will do)
- Trustworthiness (treating others with respect and keeping your word)
- Supportiveness (giving appreciation and support to followers)
- Empowerment (giving your followers freedom and choice; Wong & Cummings, 2009).
Implement these seven positive behaviors in your day-to-day leadership and you will see a marked improvement in follower performance, organizational climate, and morale!
9 Tips on How to Best Model Positive Leadership Behavior
To model positive behavior for your followers, don’t just think about the behaviors themselves, think about the values behind them. For example, if you go around telling your employees about the importance of collaboration and assigning them to teams, but never work as part of a team yourself, your employees will probably not feel encouraged and inspired.
To ensure you are modeling good leadership behavior, keep these tips in mind:
- Model your personal values behind the behaviors, not just the behaviors themselves.
- Promote self-determination in your followers by showing them how it’s done.
- Encourage positive emotions and positive social exchanges in the workplace.
- Set high expectations, and live up to them.
- Make sure you deliver on the commitments you make.
- Value your followers (and others) and be sure to nurture relationships as well as skills and professional development.
- Work well with others, and promote (and engage in) teamwork and collaboration.
- Try to resolve the inevitable conflicts that will arise in the workplace as quickly and effectively as possible.
- Be open about your desire and willingness to help, support, and develop others (Avolio & Gardner, 2005; Mariama-Arthur, 2014; Woolley, Caza, & Levy, 2011).
6 Ways to Deliver Positive Feedback
Leaders generally find that delivering positive feedback is much easier than delivering negative feedback, but that doesn’t mean you can kick back and relax; there are right and wrong ways to do it.
Here are some basic tips on how to deliver positive feedback in the most effective way:
- Try to identify with the recipient of your feedback and imagine how he or she would feel if they were to receive this feedback.
- Explain your purpose in giving feedback; is it to simply congratulate them, to help them see where they should focus their efforts, or perhaps to encourage them to build on their existing skills?
- Focus on the future and help your follower figure out their next steps.
- Make sure to keep a positive facial expression; avoid expressing judgment and remember to smile and nod!
- Keep your tone friendly and uplifting.
- Keep your focus on the positive and avoid slipping into the negative (Porath, 2016).
A Look at Positive Leadership in Project Management
Positive leadership is applicable in all scenarios where leaders exist, and we can always find ways to improve our leadership abilities and become more effective in our leadership abilities. Project management is one area where such exploration is actively happening; as many of the world’s organizations have shifted to a project management perspective, there is greater demand for integrating positive leadership into project management.
What does positive leadership look like in project management? Take it from Frank P. Saladis, an expert in project management and leadership:
“Positive leadership is about establishing relationships, understanding other points of view, not always having the answer (or pretending to have the right answer), and creating an environment of creativity and innovation. The truly effective and positive leader is an observer, a mentor, a change agent, and someone who enables others to succeed” (2015).
Positive leaders are not only more effective as project managers, but they also have the opportunity to create a culture of positive leadership in their project staff.
Essential Leadership Skills Needed in Childcare
Although we tend to think of leadership in organizations and offices, there is a need for leadership in all walks of life. One important area for leadership development and implementation is in childcare and early childhood education. Not only is leadership needed for effective care and education, but it is also an excellent role to model for young children.
There is a lot of overlap in the skills needed for more traditional leadership and leadership in childcare, but there are a few skills, abilities, and practices that are unique to or especially important in this area:
- Identifying and articulating a vision.
- Ensuring shared understandings, meanings, and goals.
- Effective communication.
- Encouraging reflection.
- Monitoring and assessing practice.
- Commitment to ongoing professional development.
- Distributive leadership.
- Building a learning community and team culture.
- Encouraging and facilitating genuine family and community partnerships.
- Striking the balance between leading and managing (Siraj-Blatchford & Manni, 2007, as referenced in Lewis & Hill, 2012).
These skills allow leaders to engage in vital activities like:
- Making children’s learning, development and wellbeing the core focus
- Addressing children’s rights and honoring diversity of all kinds in positive, constructive, and courageous ways
- Building respectful, trusting, nurturing, and equitable relationships
- Building respectful and genuine connections with families and communities
- Collaboratively developing a culture of ethical inquiry
- Collaboratively creating a community of learners (Lewis & Hill, 2012)
There are many opportunities to get some training in positive leadership. Aside from these 50+ opportunities, you can also look into training options from these organizations, among others:
- Jon Gordon’s Power of Positive Leadership Training (more on this later) (Website)
- Center for the Advancement of Well-Being at George Mason University (Website)
- Performance Management Consultants Workshop/Course (Website)
For further reading of the academic variety, give these fundamental positive leadership articles a try:
- Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership by Bruce J. Avolio and William L. Gardner (Access here)
- Positive leadership: Meaning and application across cultures by Carolyn M. Youssef-Morgan and Fred Luthans (Access here)
- Positive global leadership by Carolyn M. Youssef and Fred Luthans (Access here)
- Psychological capital: A positive resource for combating employee stress and turnover by James B. Avey, Fred Luthans, and Susan M. Jensen (not publicly available, but check your local library!) (Access here)
- Positive leadership and employee wellbeing by Kevin Kelloway, Heidi Weigand, Margaret McKee, and Hari Das (you can request this article from the authors here) (Access here)
If you’re looking for a bit lighter reading but you have enough time to dedicate to a whole book, you might find the books below helpful.
1. The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change the World – Jon Gordon
This book from popular author and leadership guru Jon Gordon explores all the ways that being a positive leader makes a positive impact.
He defines what positive leadership is (and what it is not), outlines some of the research behind the effectiveness of positive leadership, and describes how you can implement positive leadership in your workplace.
Find the book on Amazon.
2. Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance – Kim S. Cameron
Renowned researcher Kim Cameron provides an excellent introduction to positive leadership in this book.
He describes what makes positive leadership so positive—what he terms “positively deviant performance”—and notes some of the results that you can expect from such leadership, including impressive gains in productivity and effectiveness.
In this book, you’ll learn that positive leaders emphasize strengths over weaknesses, foster virtuous values and actions, encourage positive goals, and enable their followers to find meaning in their work.
Find the book on Amazon.
3. Practicing Positive Leadership: Tools and Techniques That Create Extraordinary Results – Kim S. Cameron
Another entry from Kim Cameron, this book goes into more detail on how to actually implement the strategies and styles from the previous book.
The four strategies include: creating a positive organizational climate, building and maintaining positive relationships, fostering positive communication, and encouraging positive meaning in the workplace.
The tactics and techniques in this book are well-described and backed up by meaningful research in the positive leadership literature.
Find the book on Amazon.
4. Positive Academic Leadership: How to Stop Putting Others Fires and Start Making a Difference – Jeffrey L. Buller
This book was written by author and coach Jeffrey L. Buller, and has earned the praise of multiple experts in positive leadership (including Kim Cameron) for its practical tools, easy-to-understand tips, and lighthearted style.
Although Buller cites his sources, providing evidence from research in neuroscience, psychology, management, and organizational behavior—among other disciplines—he does it with a sense of humor and he incorporates real-world examples to make his tactics and tools easy to implement.
Find the book on Amazon.
5. Positive Leadership: The Game Changer at Work – Steve Gladis
This book from author and executive coach Steve Gladis is another impressively robust entry on the list, with plenty of sources to back up its point.
It’s split into two sections: “The Concept” covers the research behind positive leadership and why you should care about it, while “The Story” shares a tale of a successful business executive who was brought low in life, even becoming homeless, and his experience climbing back up out of that pit.
Find the book on Amazon.
5 YouTube Videos
If you don’t have time to read a book on positive leadership, don’t worry! There are some excellent videos that can give you at least a basic understanding of positive leadership and related topics. Here are a few to help you get started:
Kim Cameron’s Talk at Google – Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance
Lars Sudmann’s Great Leadership Starts with Self-Leadership TEDx Talk at UCLouvain
Tom Thibodeau’s Positive Power of Servant Leadership TEDx Talk at Gustabus Adolphus College
Steve Gladis’ Positive Leadership Introduction
Simon Sinek’s Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe TED Talk
9 Quotes on the Topic
Need a good quote on leadership? Check out these 9 quotes.
“Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.”
“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”
“Leadership is the ability to guide others without force into a direction or decision that leaves them still feeling empowered and accomplished.”
Lisa Cash Hanson
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.”
“Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.”
“Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.”
“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”
“As a leader, it’s a major responsibility on your shoulders to practice the behavior you want others to follow.”
A Take-Home Message
I hope this piece gave you a good primer in positive leadership. If you feel you know a little bit more about how to be a positive leader than you did at the beginning of the piece, I’ve done my job!
What are your thoughts on positive leadership? Do you have any examples you’d like to share? How do you incorporate positive leadership techniques into your personal style? Let us know in the comments section below.
Thanks for reading, and happy leading!
We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Leadership Exercises for free.
- Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315-338.
- Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational Leadership (2nd Edition). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
- Cameron, K. S. (2008). Positive leadership. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
- Carleton, E. L., Barling, J., & Trivisonno, M. (2018). Leaders’ trait mindfulness and transformational leadership: The mediating roles of leaders’ positive affect and leadership self-efficacy. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 50, 185-194.
- Hannah, S. T., Woolfolk, R. L., & Lord, R. G. (2009). Leader self-structure: A framework for positive leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30, 269-290.
- Lewis, J., & Hill, J. (2012). What does leadership look like in early childhood settings? Every Child, 18(4). Retrieved from http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/our-publications/every-child-magazine/every-child-index/every-child-vol-18-4-2012/leadership-look-like-early-childhood-settings/
- Luthans, F. (2002). The need for and meaning of positive organizational behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23, 695-706.
- Mariama-Arthur, K. (2014). 6 key tips for leading by example. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237440
- Molero, F., Cuadrado, I., Navas, M., & Morales, J. F. (2014). Relations and effects of transformational leadership: A comparative analysis with traditional leadership styles. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 10, 358-368.
- Porath, C. (2016). Give your team more-effective positive feedback. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/10/give-your-team-more-effective-positive-feedback
- Riggio, R. E. (2012). What is charisma and charismatic leadership? Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201210/what-is-charisma-and-charismatic-leadership
- Saladis, F. P. (2015). Positive leadership in project management. Paper presented at PMI Global Congress 2015—EMEA, London, England. Newtown Square, PA, US: Project Management Institute.
- Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Manni, L. (2007). Effective leadership in the early years sector: The ELEYS study. London, UK: Institute of Education, University of London.
- Van Dierendonck, D. (2010). Servant leadership: A review and synthesis. Journal of Management, 37, 1228-1261.
- Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2007). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34, 89-126.
- Wong, C. A., & Cummings, G. G. (2009). The influence of authentic leadership behaviors on trust and work outcomes of health care staff. Journal of Leadership Studies, 3, 6-23.
- Woolley, L., Caza, A., & Levy, L. (2011). Authentic leadership and follower development: Psychological capital, positive work climate, and gender. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 18, 438-448. | <urn:uuid:6d72f9c9-08b0-4020-977a-0c67c3d5860f> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://positivepsychology.com/positive-leadership/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474700.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228080245-20240228110245-00604.warc.gz | en | 0.921424 | 5,915 | 3.109375 | 3 | 509 |
Embargoed for Release
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
2 p.m. EDT
NIH researchers implicate unique cell type in multiple sclerosis
Study reveals new effects of the investigational MS drug daclizumab
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found evidence that a unique type of immune cell contributes to multiple sclerosis (MS). Their discovery helps define the effects of one of the newest drugs under investigation for treating MS — daclizumab — and could lead to a new class of drugs for treating MS and other autoimmune disorders.
In these disorders, the immune system turns against the body's own tissues. Ongoing clinical trials have shown that daclizumab appears to help quiet the autoimmune response in MS patients, but its precise effects on the legions of cells that make up the immune system are not fully understood.
The new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, shows that one effect of daclizumab is to thin the ranks of lymphoid tissue inducer (LTi) cells. These cells are known to promote the development of lymph nodes and related tissues during fetal life, but their role during adulthood has been unclear. The new study marks the first time that LTi cells have been implicated in any human autoimmune disorder.
"While further study is required to confirm the role of LTi cells in autoimmunity, our results point to the cells as a promising target for the development of new drugs to treat autoimmune disorders," said Bibiana Bielekova, M.D., an investigator at NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).
Dr. Bielekova and her team found that among MS patients participating in clinical trials of daclizumab, the number of LTi cells was elevated in patients not receiving daclizumab compared to those on the drug. Patients receiving daclizumab also had reduced signs of inflammation in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that surrounds the brain. And the researchers found that daclizumab appears to steer the body away from producing LTi cells, in favor of another cell type that counteracts autoimmunity.
In MS, the immune system attacks myelin, a material that insulates nerve fibers running throughout the brain and spinal cord. This typically leads to vision loss, and other sensory changes such as numbness and tingling, weakness, and fatigue. The disorder affects approximately 400,000 people in the United States. In about 85 percent of patients, MS starts as a relapsing-remitting form, in which symptoms come and go. Many patients eventually develop secondary progressive MS, in which symptom flare-ups are followed by worsening disability. Many medications are available to decrease the number of flare-ups, but no medication is effective at slowing the course of progressive MS.
The newer, sophisticated drugs for relapsing-remitting MS target key cells and molecules responsible for triggering and maintaining autoimmunity. Cytotoxic T cells, the immune system's specialized mobile infantry, are known to lead the attack. Antibodies, the immune system's guided missiles, appear to help reinforce it.
Daclizumab is a lab-engineered antibody, or monoclonal antibody, that alters signaling by interleukin-2 (IL-2), a key factor that mobilizes T cells. In a large clinical trial (NCT00109161), it has shown promise as an add-on therapy for patients taking the approved MS drug interferon-beta. Another ongoing trial (NCT00390221) is investigating whether or not daclizumab is effective as a stand-alone therapy for reducing relapses in MS.
The drug was designed to suppress T cell responses to IL-2, and it does so — but Dr. Bielekova had found previously that this suppression is indirect and depends on other immune cells. For example, one effect of daclizumab is to stimulate the non-specialized counterparts of T cells, called natural killer cells. These cells in turn suppress T cell activity.
In their new study, Dr. Bielekova and her team discovered that daclizumab's stimulatory effect on natural killer cells is paired with an inhibitory effect on LTi cells. They found evidence that the drug, via its effects on IL-2 signaling, acts on a type of stem cell. The drug appears to decrease the likelihood that this stem cell will develop into LTi cells, and sway it toward becoming natural killer cells.
"This helps explain why natural killer cells are activated and their numbers are expanded by daclizumab therapy," Dr. Bielekova said. Meanwhile, she said, the drop in LTi cells was "intriguing" in itself, given the cells' role in lymph node development.
Lymph nodes — found conspicuously in the armpits, neck and groin — are patches of tissue where T cells and antibody-producing B cells set up camp. Inside the nodes, T cells and B cells are found in clusters called lymphoid follicles, where they wait for a signal that the body is under siege from infection. In autoimmune disorders, abnormal lymphoid follicles can develop and contribute to the autoimmune response. Secondary progressive MS, in particular, is associated with abnormal lymphoid follicles in the connective tissues (or meninges) surrounding the brain. These are believed to contribute to chronic brain inflammation in MS, eventually leading to shrinkage of the brain.
Dr. Bielekova and her team reasoned that daclizumab, by suppressing LTi cells, should reduce the growth of lymphoid follicles. Since it is not possible to visualize these follicles in the live brain, the researchers measured the effects of daclizumab on markers of inflammation in the CSF. They found that CXCL13, a protein linked to lymphoid growth, and the IgG index, a measure of antibody production, decreased by an average of 50.4 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively, in trial participants who took the drug for six and half months.
"To our knowledge, no other MS therapy reduces IgG index," Dr. Bielekova said.
She cautioned that these data provide only an indirect link between LTi cells and brain inflammation in MS. If further research confirms that the cells play an important role in MS or other autoimmune disorders, "pursuing the development of new drugs to selectively inhibit LTi cells could be a useful therapeutic strategy," she said.
This study was funded by the NIH-NINDS intramural research program. The lead authors were Justin Perry and Sungpil Han. Mr. Perry was a fellow in NIH's Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award program, and is currently a Ph.D. student in the neuroscience program at Washington University in St. Louis. Mr. Han is an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Pusan National University in South Korea, and is supported in part by a fellowship from the Korea Research Foundation to study at NIH. Patient data were derived from a small completed trial (NCT00071838) which showed that daclizumab may reduce lesions in relapsing-remitting MS, and from an ongoing trial to investigate the drug's mode of action (NCT01143441).
NINDS (http://www.ninds.nih.gov) is the nation’s leading funder of research on the brain and nervous system. The NINDS mission is to reduce the burden of neurological disease – a burden borne by every age group, by every segment of society, by people all over the world.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health ®
Reference: Perry, JSA and Han, S et al. "Inhibition of LTi cell development by CD25 blockade is associated with decreased intrathecal inflammation in multiple sclerosis." Science Translational Medicine, published online August 1, 2012. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3004140. For more information about MS, please visit http://www.ninds.nih.gov/MS. | <urn:uuid:13eccc33-da38-4f2f-8e2e-46aa30292fda> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://elbiruniblogspotcom.blogspot.com/2012/08/nih-researchers-implicate-unique-cell.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475727.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302020802-20240302050802-00604.warc.gz | en | 0.940266 | 1,788 | 2.640625 | 3 | 510 |
The knowledge & abilities we possess are evolving because of the information deluge that exists today. Gone are the days when universities and colleges could offer the same courses and curriculum year after year and knowledge advanced at a very slow rate.
But nowadays, education must play the role of enabler, teaching pupils the value of lifelong learning. Learning cannot be contained within the four walls of a classroom. In other words, lifelong learners learn outside of the scope of a course and sometimes even outside of a formal educational setting.
The institutions have a critical role to play in helping their students develop a habit of lifelong learning by inspiring them and giving them all the tools they need to chart their learning paths. Integrated School Platforms can be of massive help in such scenarios!
Self-directed education that is centered on personal growth is called lifelong learning. Although there isn't a single, agreed-upon definition of lifelong learning, it is typically understood to mean learning that takes outside of a conventional educational setting like a school, college, or university.
Although, complete learning need not be restricted to unstructured learning. It can be best described as voluntary and intended to bring about personal fulfillment. It could be accomplished through informal or formal instruction.
Lifelong learning is typically thought of as being self-motivated, informal, voluntary, and based on personal interests. Learning to play an instrument, participating in an online skills course, or even signing up for a retraining program are all lifelong learning.
We can easily plan and carry out a lifelong learning process across the school with Gosfem. Additionally, we can monitor the development of students' learning through sophisticated statistics like lesson engagement and performance management systems.
To engage in lifelong learning, a person must voluntarily try to advance their knowledge and abilities. As a result, lifelong learning is a voluntary activity that helps individuals genuinely enjoy learning.
Schools now play different roles in line with contemporary reality. Here, we explore ways that academic institutions might employ an integrated school platform to encourage students to continue studying outside the classroom.
Educational institutions would be wise to use digital media to digitize their content with integrated school platforms like Gosfem, in light of recent technological advancements. For instance, gamified learning with the help of leaderboards, badges & prizes encourages students to learn better.
While giving students the chance to learn at their pace in a pleasant and engaging atmosphere, this type of immersive learning offers improved learning outcomes. Gosfem offers interesting digital content that might pique students' sincere interest in their studies. The enlightening and understandable information can promote a culture of lifelong learning.
Another way to encourage lifelong learning is to divide lengthy lessons into modules & then each module into tiny, micro-sized content capsules, each of which would include concise facts about a topic.
Typically, 3 to 5-minute films, presentations, text files, images, or infographics serve as microlearning bites. The ability to pay attention is rare at a time of information overload. Within a short period, these microlearning morsels can grab students' attention and give them succinctly pertinent knowledge.
The information that students need is neatly packaged and provided for consumption & they don't have to sift through an abundance of information to get it. Microlearning is a fantastic way to hold students' attention and instill the value of lifelong learning in them. Gosfem keeps students interested from beginning to end with enormous teaching and learning resources.
With an extensive and curriculum-based content collection for every school, Gosfem makes lesson planning enjoyable. Through carefully chosen and interesting multimedia content that is compatible with many devices, including smart TVs, it fosters lifelong learning.
Teachers can employ successful teaching techniques that are most successful for their students. Effective teaching strategies that work best for kids can be used by teachers. Students should have an active role in learning.
When students interact with their teachers and peers, they are more likely to enjoy learning. They often start to acquire a passion for studying in this way. With the help of live polls, private chat for classrooms, hand-raise, and discussion forums, teachers can improve classroom collaboration. Every strategy must be given a shot to discover whether it works for kids.
Use a trial and error approach to assess the strategies' effectiveness for students and whether they cause beneficial changes in pupils.
When students and teachers are communicating in real-time, usually through integrated school platforms like Gosfem, synchronous learning happens. This communication happens with the help of delivery platforms and distance learning tools like video conferencing, discussion boards, and community chat.
Although learning happens simultaneously, participants don't need to be there in person or in the same place. Asynchronous learning is a type of instructional design and delivery that lets students access content or engage in learning at their own pace outside the classroom.
The asynchronous technique is more learner-centered and enables students to finish courses without being restricted to a specific location & time.
To promote a culture of lifelong learning among people, schools are fundamental. Schools can promote a culture that encourages students to pursue their education. Due to their enthusiasm for learning, they would be motivated to keep studying.
Everyone should pursue lifelong learning, but educators should do so even more because they must serve as role models for their pupils and work in a field that constantly evolves in reaction to discoveries.
Modern technologies, like integrated school platforms, especially cloud-based ones, enable educators to engage in lifelong learning in unprecedented ways by facilitating remote professional contacts and enhancing access to resources.
If you want your school to cultivate lifelong learning, Gosfem will help you in implementing cutting-edge edTech solutions so that you are always one step ahead. With our advanced LMS and school ERP solution, institutes can change their teaching-learning experience.share share share share share share share
Study any topic, anytime. explore thousands of courses for the lowest price ever! on Gosfem Learning Mangement Software and increase your knowledge with our courses from the best instructors around the world.Explore Courses
Join thousands of instructors on Gosfem LMS teaching platform. Teachers around the world are already joining us. Do not be left out from this great platform. Come and teach what you know best and let others benefit from the wealth of knowledge you have.Become Instructor | <urn:uuid:38246c87-3cde-4b75-8ab3-9c7cc5f3c7f6> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://gosfem.com/blog/how-to-ensure-lifelong-learning-using-integrated-school-platforms | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475727.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302020802-20240302050802-00604.warc.gz | en | 0.951686 | 1,285 | 3.4375 | 3 | 511 |
Research in the Kelly lab combines conceptual and empirical tools from comparative neuroanatomy, developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and molecular neuroscience to understand the proximate and ultimate causes of social behavior.
In a nutshell, we are interested in all things social! Below are brief descriptions of some of the different research trajectories in the lab.
Neuroscience of complex societies
Numerous species, including herds of wildebeest, flocks of birds, and pods of dolphins, live in large groups. Humans, however, are the epitome of this among mammals, with complex societies spanning the globe. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how the brain promotes large group-living. The majority of neuroscience studies examining social behavior focus on bonding in reproductive contexts, such as parent-offspring or mating bonds. While there are certainly reproductive social interactions in large group-living species, there are also numerous social interactions that occur in a nonreproductive context. For humans, we refer to such bonds as friendships, acquaintances, or professional interactions. The primary goals of this line of research are to understand how the brain regulates interactions between individuals in such non-reproductive contexts and to examine how the brain facilitates large group-living and social stability.
Aubrey M. Kelly
Environmental Influences on the Brain and Behavior
What types of environmental (social and/or physical) stimuli impact social behavior and neural function? And how plastic (i.e., flexible) is social behavior and the social brain once animals are adults? Do certain experiences have more lasting effects than others?
We conduct experiments where we manipulate either the social environment (i.e., group size, exposure to unrelated neighbors) or the physical environment (i.e., temperature, water availability, etc.) in early development or in adulthood to determine how specific environmental factors influence social behavior and underlying neural and physiological mechanisms.
Understanding how one's social environment influences how we behave and can produce long-lasting effects on the brain can provide translational insights important for mental health. Additionally, as the climate continues to change, having an understanding of how physiology, the brain, and behavior may be influenced by changing environmental pressures has the potential to aid in conservation efforts.
The ability to rapidly adapt behavior to best fit a particular social context is crucial to the survival of many animals. In humans, behavioral flexibility facilitates social competence and bolsters interpersonal relations such as aiding in the maintenance of healthy relationships and coping with uncertainty in socially dynamic situations. Therefore, seeking to understand the neural mechanisms that allow individuals to exhibit rapid context-specific responses can not only inform us about complex ways in which the brain has evolved to handle dynamic environments, but it also has translational relevance and can provide insight into mechanisms that promote psychological flexibility in humans.
We conduct experiments in Mongolian gerbils, which readily exhibit rapid changes in prosocial and antisocial behavior when interacting with a pairbond partner vs. an intruder, respectively. Using techniques such as classic endocrine manipulations and state-of-the-art technology (i.e., fiber photometry), we are
examining how peripheral steroids influence neurosteroid mechanisms and other systems (i.e., the nonapeptide system) to produce rapid changes in behavior.
Calcium signaling via fiber photometry
Mapping Social Neural Circuits
Complex social behavior isn't the result of activity in one region of the brain. Rather, behavior is the result of multiple brain regions and multiple cell types working in concert. We seek to understand how the brain produces behaviors such as gregariousness (a preference to affiliate in large groups), general affiliation, and aggression. Using behavioral and immediate early gene (IEG) studies, pharmacological manipulation, and viral technology (i.e., tracing, CRISPR, and DREADDs), we aim to map neural circuits underlying various types of social behavior.
Additionally, we examine how different neural systems interact to modulate behavior. For example, we are interested in how nonapeptides act as neuromodulators and influence the dopaminergic system to play a role in social reward.
Applying a comparative approach
to understand social behavior
If we are to truly understand the evolution of social behavior, we must consider the fact that various aspects of social behavior evolved independently many times. Thus, we cannot assume that relevant mechanisms have evolved similarly in all species. In order to build a solid foundation on which we study behavior and the underlying mechanisms, we must consider several important factors. Principally, we must use comparative approaches to examine a diversity of species within and across taxa. Doing so will ultimately determine the fundamental principle components for particular social behaviors. On the other hand, and equally important, we must consider the behavioral ecology of an organism and how this shapes components of social behavior. This approach helps explain the significant species-specific subtleties that govern the same behaviors. A combination of these approaches will ultimately provide a picture of the primary evolutionary drivers for those behaviors, both in terms of identifying unifying principles that generalize across taxa, and the singularities that make animals different. Without a fundamental baseline that captures the similarity across taxa, comparisons lack reference. To this end, our research incorporates the use of multiple social species across taxa.
Teaming up with colleagues who work with a variety of species across numerous taxa and have expertise in different areas of ecology, behavior, endocrinology, and neuroscience can lead to the development of a comprehensive body of work that examines the evolution of behavior that considers the whole organism (i.e., feedback between the brain and the periphery) and its environment in a manner that is often not feasible within a single laboratory. Thus, the Kelly Lab is always open to collaboration – please feel free to reach out to us if you are interested in developing a collaboration.
Thank you to our funders!
ANIMALS IN THE LAB
Spiny mice are precocial rodents found throughout Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia. They are primarily studied for their late-gestational development and their remarkable regenerative abilities (i.e., they can regenerate skin and musculoskeletal tissue). We are interested in spiny mice because of their highly social nature. Spiny mice are communal breeders and socially cooperative that offer opportunities for studying mammalian grouping behavior, cooperative behavior, neurodevelopment, and neuroplasticity.
PAST ANIMALS IN THE LAB
Mongolian gerbils are a socially monogamous rodent that hail from grasslands and shrublands of China, Mongolia, and Russia. Although gerbils have been used in science since the late 1800s, they are a surprisingly uncommon study organism today. Gerbils are primarily used for examining the auditory system and studying epilepsy. Spiny mice are more closely related to gerbils than mice, and thus Mongolian gerbils serve as a less social relative for comparative studies. An added bonus is that the gerbils are quite friendly and a delight to work with!
*Although we are currently finishing gerbil projects, the lab no longer maintains a gerbil breeding colony.
Prairie voles are a well-studied, socially monogamous rodent native to the central and mid-western United States and south-central provinces of Canada. Numerous field studies have resulted in a rich literature on their natural history and behavioral ecology. Importantly, they share some relatively rare, but defining, behaviors with humans – social monogamy and biparental care. Prairie voles have become quite popular for translational social neuroscience and are an emerging model organism for understanding the neurobiology of attachment and bonding (primarily monogamous pair-bonds and parent-offspring bonds). Various molecular tools have been developed for prairie voles over the last decade, so despite prairie voles not representing a traditional laboratory rodent, state-of-the-art technology is available for asking cutting edge questions in this species.
Estrildid finches are found throughout the Old World tropics and Australasia. They exhibit an array of social phenotypes, ranging from highly territorial to highly social. Some species are solitary and affiliate only with their pairbond partner whereas other species flock in groups of hundreds. Thus, this family of birds lends itself well to the study of the evolution of sociality. Dr. Kelly’s past research in violet eared waxbills, Angolan blue waxbills, and zebra finches elucidated both convergent and divergent neural mechanisms that modulate grouping behavior. Highly social estrildids, such as zebra finches, are also an excellent model for translational social neuroscience given that they exhibit behaviors similar to humans: communal living, social monogamy, and biparental care. Although the Kelly Lab does not currently have ongoing finch studies at Emory, Dr. Kelly worked with estrildid finches for nearly a decade, and eagerly awaits the day to have the opportunity to return to working with birds – either in the lab or through outside collaborations. | <urn:uuid:78ec26a5-1287-46dc-b370-9ac362b230b3> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.thekellylab.org/research | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476374.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20240303111005-20240303141005-00604.warc.gz | en | 0.92199 | 1,845 | 2.796875 | 3 | 512 |
Researchers have developed the first scalable method to identify different subtypes of neurons in the human brain.
The work lays the groundwork for “mapping” the gene activity in the human brain. It could also help provide a better understanding of brain functions and disorders, including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and depression.
By isolating and analyzing the nuclei of individual human brain cells, researchers identified 16 neuronal subtypes in the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer of neural tissue responsible for cognitive functions including memory, attention and decision making. The team, led by researchers at the University of California San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and Illumina, published their findings in the journal Science.
“We’re providing a unified framework to look at and compare individual neurons, which can help us find out how many unique types of neurons exist,”
said Kun Zhang, bioengineering professor at the University of California, San Diego and a corresponding author of the study.
Brain Reference Map
Researchers can use these different neuronal subtypes to build what Zhang calls a “reference map” of the human brain, a foundation to understand the differences between a healthy brain and a diseased brain.
“In the future, patients with brain disorders or abnormalities could be diagnosed and treated based on how they differ from the reference map. This is analogous to what’s being done with the reference human genome map,” Zhang said.
The new study reflects a growing understanding that individual brain cells are unique. They express different types of genes and perform different functions.
To better understand this diversity, researchers analyzed more than 3,200 single human neurons in six Brodmann areas, which are regions of the cerebral cortex classified by their functions and arrangements of neurons.
Transcriptomic Neuron Profiles
Through an interdisciplinary collaborative effort, the team developed a new method to isolate and sequence individual cell nuclei. TSRI researchers led by neuroscience professor Jerold Chun obtained the samples from a post mortem brain and focused on isolating the neuronal nuclei.
Zhang’s lab worked with Fluidigm, a manufacturer of microfluidic chips for single-cell studies, to develop a protocol to identify and quantify RNA molecules in individual neuronal nuclei. Scientists at San Diego-based Illumina sequenced the resulting RNA libraries. Researchers led by biochemistry professor Wei Wang at UC San Diego developed algorithms to cluster and identify 16 neuronal subtypes from the sequenced datasets.
Researchers deciphered what types of genes were “turned on” within each nucleus and revealed that various combinations of the 16 subtypes tended to cluster in cortical layers and Brodmann areas, helping explain why these regions look and function differently.
Neurons exhibited many differences in their transcriptomic profiles, the patterns of genes that are being actively expressed by these cells, revealing single neurons with shared, as well as unique, characteristics that likely lead to difference in cellular function.
Co-first author Blue Lake, a postdoctoral researcher in Zhang’s lab, said:
“We’re finding new ways to understand the basic building blocks of the brain. Our study opens the door to look at global gene expression patterns and how that defines cell types within a normal tissue, which can also be used to see what’s abnormal in terms of disease or disorders.”
In future studies, researchers aim to analyze neurons in other Brodmann areas of the brain and investigate what subtypes exist in other brain regions. They also plan to study neurons from multiple post mortem human brains (this study only involved one) to investigate neuronal diversity among individuals.
Kun Zhang et al.
Neuronal subtypes and diversity revealed by single-nucleus RNA sequencing of the human brain
Science, June 2016 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf1204
- Methylomes: Methylation Signatures Reveal 21 Neuron Subtypes
- Proprioceptive Sensory Neuron Subtype Genes Identified
- Extended Mouse Brain Connection Map Traces 300 Neurons
Last Updated on November 29, 2023 | <urn:uuid:821dd89a-9add-455f-8307-54f5a8f49b98> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://sciencebeta.com/neuronal-subtype-diversity/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473871.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222225655-20240223015655-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.909095 | 862 | 2.890625 | 3 | 513 |
- Focus on the critical learning targets - scale way back
- Make the learning intention clear.
- Make the learning relevant. Students should be able to answer the question "Why do I need to know this?"
- Articulate the success criteria that will be used to determine when students meet a learning goal.
- Provide examples or good models for students to reference.
- Offer choice in how it can be learned
- Focus on feedback
- Be clear about how you will know if students "get it" and not worry about quantifying their performance on a scale of 0 -100
By making student learning our primary focus and helping students share that same focus, the learning experience moves from knowledge transmission to active learning. Teachers are the authors of their instructional design and should take into account the different ingredients when designing instructional experiences. Think about something that you are good at. More than likely, you were not always good at it. How did you get good at it? Look at the graphic below, were all or most of the elements below a part of your learning pathway to achieve the level of proficiency you now have now?
Generating opportunities for students to give you "summative output" can be done by student created products or student performance within an online testing environment. Check out 100 Things Students Can Create to Demonstrate What They Know or the website Exam.net. Exam.net is free to use right now if your school is outside Sweden. An additional resource for math teachers to look at is a post by Alice Keeler, From @mathdiana: Have Students Talk About Math. (I prefer to call it a task not a test” – @mathdiana)
During these difficult times, we will learn new and better ways to guide students along a learning pathway than placing a number on a paper. I believe that growing and getting stronger in instructional design and assessment practices will transfer to improved learning experiences for students once we are back in our brick and mortar classrooms. And this goes without saying, but if you have a solid relationship formed with students this is all going to be a lot easier!
If you have additional resources and ideas on instructional design, assessment and feedback practices, please share them! I know that I have only scratched the surface in my own learning. | <urn:uuid:efd592fc-96be-43da-ad81-008f759d7ede> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.curiouseducator.com/blog/archives/04-2020 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473871.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222225655-20240223015655-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.94604 | 466 | 3.484375 | 3 | 514 |
Build the Relationship
Effective mentor teachers work to build relationships with their students, and with the new teachers they are mentoring as well. Meaningful relationships are built intentionally, and through shared experience. Here are six tips for building relationships with the new teacher you are mentoring.
1.) Share Your Story
Take the time to talk with the teacher you are mentoring about how and why you became a teacher. Discussing your philosophy of education and the ways that you know students learn best can be meaningful ways of getting to know one another. Invite your mentee to share their story with you. Knowing each other’s stories is a meaningful and powerful first step in building a relationship.
2.) Build Trust
During your early conversations, establish a relationship built on trust. Emphasize that your role as a mentor is to coach and support the new teacher. Remind them that effective teachers cultivate a growth mindset, and that all teachers engage in reflection and goal setting. Your role as a mentor is to support the growth of the new teacher. Emphasize that you are there to support the new teacher learn by celebrating their successes and reflecting on mistakes.
3.) Set Expectations
It’s important to be on the same page as you begin this close working relationship.
What can your mentee expect from you as a mentor? What do you expect from them? How often will you meet and for how long? What roles and responsibilities will the new teacher have in your classroom and how will they evolve throughout the year? Communicating expectations at the beginning of the school year lays the groundwork for successful co-teaching relationships.
Relationships can be built through shared work. Teachers engage in a variety of projects at the beginning of the year, from setting up the classroom to making home visits to planning for the year. Engaging in this work together helps you to build a relationship through shared experience.
5.) Be Transparent
As an experienced teacher you might have processes or systems that are built into your practice. As part of sharing that practice with a new teacher, explain why you do what you do, and how you’ve built your knowledge and understanding over time. By explaining what’s happening behind the scenes, mentor teachers.
6.) Share your goals
Effective teachers are lifelong learners. Share your professional goals, and discuss the ways in which you reflect upon and refine your own practice. Model growing your own practice as way to inspire new teachers to do the same. A mentor is not a perfect teacher; a mentor is a real teacher who reflects on practice and seeks growth opportunities. Modeling this growth mindset will encourage your mentee to do the same.
Relationship building takes time, energy, honesty and intention. Effective mentors invest in developing and nurturing relationships early on in order to make their mentoring meaningful and successful throughout the school year. Based on this solid foundation, highly skilled mentors can support and inspire new teachers to truly be the best they can be.
PEBC believes that supporting leaders and mentors is imperative to cultivating a system of continuous learners. Watch for more blogs and upcoming offerings that support the practice of leading.
Learn More at an Upcoming Institute
Effective Mentoring & Coaching Institute
In this institute, you will develop skills and strategies to effectively mentor, coach and lead adult learning that impact student growth.
September 27-28, 2017 | <urn:uuid:2185cde4-abc5-4cb5-87cc-ecaaff6c5802> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.pebc.org/mentors-6-tips-for-connecting-with-new-teachers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474526.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20240224080616-20240224110616-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.958489 | 689 | 2.671875 | 3 | 515 |
Starting with psychology begins with simple study on the subfields of psychology that passion you. You can easily locate numerous resources online and at collections, consisting of used books. It is actually additionally significant to take respectable details when researching in order that you may evaluate later. psychology
Psycho therapists make use of clinical methods to examine the mind, mind, and behavior. Their work aids folks overcome complications and also strengthen their lives.
Psycho therapists use their knowledge in individual behavior to assist people, groups as well as organizations beat behavior and also psychological complications, enhance functionality as well as attain private development. They are trained to deliver treatment as well as offer emotional examinations, as properly as execute investigation. They typically team up with physicians to manage physical troubles that have underlying psychological sources. They may specialize in medical, social, company or even forensic psychology.
Folks that possess an undergraduate’s level in psychological science may locate occupations in managerial support, legislation administration, learning, organization and also service industries. They are additionally well-suited to work such as job counselor students, recruiters as well as workers analysts. Those that would like to elevate in their occupations can pursue a master’s or postgraduate degree in psychological science.
Along with syllabus, trainees in graduate plans have to finish a practicum and a dissertation. Practicums give pupils hands-on expertise teaming up with customers under guidance. Treatises are actually normally research-based and also demand original quantitative or even qualitative pragmatic analysis, theoretical scholarship, program assessment or critical literature review. Many systems additionally call for students to take on a specified amount of hrs of personal psychotherapy with non-faculty specialists.
Psychoanalysts are medical doctors who concentrate on psychological health and wellness. They collaborate with even more difficult cases, and also they can easily suggest medication for some conditions. They likewise have actually raised instruction in neuroscience as well as pharmacology. To become a psychoanalyst, a person should initially earn an undergraduate’s level, after that complete a medical institution educational program as well as get a certificate to perform medication.
Psychological science is an administered scientific research that is used to comprehend and also strengthen human actions. Psychologists carry out both standard as well as integrated research study, seek advice from along with businesses and also companies, detect and also manage mental health problem, as well as show future psychologists and also trainees in various other willpowers. They likewise analyze just how humans interact with one another as well as machines, and also work to enhance those relationships.
Whether you wish to assist individuals conquer developmental obstacles or collaborate with the judicial body to assist public safety and security, a psychological science level may open up doors to lots of professions. The BS in Psychology will certainly offer you a comprehensive understanding of the strategies utilized to analyze the thoughts, human brain, and actions. You’ll know exactly how to recognize and analyze individual actions, along with just how to create practices that duplicate previous study. The plan’s unique subject workshops and also intensive hands-on research chances will certainly prep you for a variety of careers and also graduate university courses in psychological science.
You’ll enroll in topics consisting of developing, wellness as well as preclinical (unusual) psychology; personality conditions as well as therapy; character and also attitude buildup; and the impacts of society, social, and personal variables on actions. You’ll additionally have the opportunity to obtain valuable experience and also insight through a teaching fellowship. This adventure can easily assist you attract attention to employers and also may even trigger a project provide. You can easily additionally administer as much as 18 credit rating hours of thesis, practica, private learning experiences, reviewing training courses and also analysis of prior discovering toward the degree demands.
Psychology as a profession
Along with dealing with patients, psychologists may likewise function in research laboratories as well as other academic environments. Their analysis pays attention to topics including finding out, individual development, mind and inspiration. The investigation method is strenuous and demands mindful monitoring, experimentation as well as evaluation. Psychologists also release their cause medical diaries as well as join area projects to address social complications. Sometimes, they might act as specialists to organizations as well as authorities firms.
Relying on the region of psychology, psycho therapists may focus on temporary problems like family or even teen problems and also longer-term issues like depression or even fears. They can easily additionally concentrate in different populaces, such as kids; married couples as well as households; gay, homosexual or even bisexual individuals; and the aged. They also partner with physicians to help people take care of signs that show up physical but in fact possess psychological origins.
As the world becomes a lot more diverse, the requirement for psychological science grads boosts. The field is testing but awarding. The most ideal way to make a decision if it is actually the appropriate career for you is to talk with graduate division agents and also go to relevant information sessions. You need to likewise understand that admittance decisions are actually created on a variety of standards, including exam credit ratings. Several systems call for candidates to take the Graduate Report Assessment (GRE). Connect with personal divisions for particular admission criteria. Most graduate universities have a weight of the GRE rating even more heavily than undergraduate qualities, however some location sizable weight on personal statements and character references.
Psychological science as a field
Psychology is actually an interdisciplinary science that studies individual actions and also human brain features. It employs the clinical strategy, which entails inquiring a question, popping the question a concept, and conducting extensive research laboratory or even field experiments to evaluate it. Psychologists make use of the understanding obtained from their study to address troubles as well as improve lives. They use their competence in human viewpoint, discovering, moment, emotional states, as well as inspiration to improve the high quality of live for people, groups, and also societies.
Lots of folks who possess projects that demand them to work with other people are actually learnt the style of psychology. This consists of commercial as well as company psychologists, human factors designers, and also scientific and also therapy psycho therapists. Considerably, companies and also wellness solutions compensation providers require psychologists to have doctoral levels from systems recognized due to the American Psychological Affiliation (APA).
Among the key aspects of psychology is its own concentrate on purposeful human expertise. Interest is actually a basic part of the human expertise, and psycho therapists use this curiosity to cultivate methods that aid individuals obtain their individual targets and reside a better life. Psycho therapists have the capacity to respond to questions that challenge our presumptions and also offer brand new standpoints on the planet around us.
In recent years, psychology has actually welcomed an amount of different methods, consisting of biopsychology, which finds to know exactly how the individual mind and nerves influence emotions, notions, emotions, as well as actions. This method has actually caused a far better understanding of just how drugs, injury, as well as sickness impact mind functionality. Biopsychology likewise concentrates on the importance of neurotransmitters, which hold chemical notifications coming from nerve cells to various other tissues in the physical body and human brain. | <urn:uuid:7447f062-c8a9-4f96-ba2a-9de8d5d06123> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://7dollarmillionaire.com/the-amount-of-time-is-going-out-believe-about-these-5-ways-to-improvement-your-psychological-science/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474670.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227021813-20240227051813-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.965252 | 1,453 | 2.796875 | 3 | 516 |
What is practicing gratitude?
Gratitude is something that anyone can practise, anywhere and at any time. It doesn’t cost anything and can be truly life-changing.
Practicing gratitude is reflective and involves recognising and appreciating anything and everything fostering contentment and a deeper connection to life's inherent value. It is a practice of focusing on what you have not what you lack.
When was the last time you stopped to smell the roses? To sit and say thanks? If you can’t remember, you’re missing out. Without gratitude and appreciation, regardless of your success, you may be in danger of creating an unhappy prison for yourself.
Take, for example, the words of Confucius “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” What’s the point of moving mountains if you can’t enjoy the journey?
Stopping to reflect and appreciate the good things in life will impact your health and everyday enjoyment. Life is a journey to be enjoyed and appreciated, not endured. Life won’t be devoid of bad times and imperfections, but there’s beauty in that if you know how to look for it.
The latest research on gratitude.
The latest research shows that a gratitude practice can be one of the biggest game changers end of story, but when it comes to our brain it’s particularly interesting.
Research shows gratitude helps to reduce stress and anxiety while increasing happiness and optimism. A pretty good silver bullet right?
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle, and the other is as if everything is a miracle.” ― Albert Einstein
In recent years, scientists have been studying the neuroscience of gratitude and how it affects the brain.
Key benefits to practicing gratitude
Gratitude increases activity in the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, emotional regulation, and empathy. Studies have shown that when we experience gratitude, there is increased activity in this area of the brain, which can lead to improved mental and emotional health.
This part of the brain is super important, as it’s the part of the brain responsible for purposeful actions towards higher-level goals, complex social information processing, introspection, and language.
Gratitude stimulates the production of dopamine and serotonin.
Who doesn’t like some happy chemicals? No… not that kind. Dopamine and serotonin are neurotransmitters that are associated with feelings of pleasure and happiness. When we experience gratitude, the brain releases more of these chemicals, which can improve our mood and overall well-being.
Gratitude reduces the effects of stress on the body.
Stress can have negative effects on the body, including increased inflammation and a weakened immune system. You only need to look at how every Prime Minster of the UK seems to age faster than those around them. Studies have shown that practising gratitude can help reduce the effects of stress on the body, leading to improved physical health.
Gratitude can improve sleep quality.
Research has shown that people who practice gratitude before bed have better sleep quality and duration. This may be because gratitude can reduce stress and anxiety, both of which can interfere with sleep.
Gratitude can improve self-esteem.
When we feel grateful for the positive aspects of our lives, we are more likely to feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments. This can lead to improved self-esteem and self-confidence. With more of those we generally accomplish more and then the cycle continues!
Gratitude can improve resilience.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficult situations. Studies have shown that people who practice gratitude are more resilient and better able to cope with challenges and adversity. With more resilience, you will be able to return to your baseline level of happiness quicker than your average catastrophiser.
Building gratitude into your daily life.
By incorporating gratitude into our daily lives, we can reap the many benefits of this powerful emotion physically and mentally.
We have found that it is like building muscle. The more you train it, the stronger it gets. Gratitude being a core part of the Evolve Journal we have seen people’s entire outlook shift during their Evolve Journey from pessimistic and negative to a perspective that looks first the upside. This shift in perspective lifts a massive weight off people’s shoulders and will start to create all sorts of positive feedback loops with their other actions. For example, they show up and appreciate their relationships which in turn strengthens them.
To try gratitude today and build a daily habit, just like Confucius says, start with just one small stone. Get a pen and paper and write down some things that make you smile. Try to think about what you feel gratitude for. It could be your good health, a great evening with friends, your chance to travel this month, your new comfy slippers you name it, big or small, it's yours to appreciate. Do this daily, and don’t worry if some things repeat. Practicing gratitude plays a key part in achieving happiness. This is why we have included a specific section to remind you to practice this skill in our journal.
If you want to make it a daily habit then habit stacking is your friend. Find something you do every day without question. Put your piece of paper and pen next to it to serve as your reminder. An example would be leaving your house keys on top of your journal.
Next time you get shit on by a bird, remember they’re just bestowing good fortune on you. There’s always a silver lining. Some might even leave a stain. | <urn:uuid:0a494a27-3c97-4642-b779-701743b9e7c5> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.evolvejourney.co.uk/blogs/news/the-science-of-gratitude-the-keys-to-unlocking-the-good-life | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474715.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228112121-20240228142121-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.937491 | 1,184 | 3.078125 | 3 | 517 |
Analysis paralysis or paralysis by analysis is the state of over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome. A decision can be treated as over-complicated, with too many detailed options, so that a choice is never made, rather than try something and change if a major problem arises. A person might be seeking the optimal or “perfect” solution upfront, and fear making any decision which could lead to erroneous results, while on the way to a better solution.
According to Wikipedia, “analysis paralysis” describes a situation in which the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds the benefits that could be gained by enacting some decision, or an informal or non-deterministic situation where the sheer quantity of analysis overwhelms the decision-making process itself, thus preventing a decision. The phrase applies to any situation where analysis may be applied to help make a decision and may be a dysfunctional element of organizational behaviour. This is often phrased as paralysis by analysis.
Learn how to take calculated risks in uncertain times from Author & Risk Analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
According to Deloitte, decision paralysis brought on by the inability to choose between options is typically the result of cognitive overload and fatigue. “The human brain simply isn’t designed to process and compare the sheer amount of information it is often given. While consumers say they want choices, the need to select between endless options can become a cognitive burden rather than a delight. Without ways to mentally manage or weigh the value of information, people struggle to decide and freeze”.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz coined the phrase “Paradox of Choice” to describe his consistent findings that, while increased choice allows us to achieve objectively better results, it also leads to greater anxiety, indecision, paralysis, and dissatisfaction. Rather than empowering us to make better choices, our virtually unlimited access to information often leads to greater fear of making the wrong decision, which in turn leads to us spinning our wheels in a seemingly inescapable purgatory of analysis paralysis, all the while getting nowhere on our important projects.
In addition to the mental exhaustion caused by juggling multiple complex options, saving for retirement faces a second challenge that encourages paralysis: “Outcomes set in the distant future typically lack a sense of urgency in contrast with everyday needs, making it easy to defer decision making to a tomorrow that never arrives. The human tendency to overinflate the here and now, known as the present bias, makes us regularly tip the balance in favour of choices that benefit us in the short term,” shows Deloitte Insight.
Moreover, as they point out, this form of paralysis arises from conflicting values between peoples’ present and future selves, in which “the now” is concrete, but the future is uncertain and difficult to plan for. In the context of long-term planning, today’s consumer has well-defined preferences but little sense of—or even empathy for—what her 80-year-old self will need or want. Not surprisingly, then, situations in which people face major decisions that have uncertain downstream implications, like saving for retirement, are ripe for paralysis.
A 2010 LexisNexis survey showed that, on average, employees spend more than half their workdays receiving and managing information rather than using it to do their jobs, a fact that has made us ask ourselves some important questions and that definitely impacts efficiency and productivity. Moreover, other studies in psychology and neuroscience reveal that analysis paralysis takes a far greater toll on your productivity and well-being than just lost time. | <urn:uuid:4522cb4d-50be-4324-9933-e02716715d30> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://brandminds.com/decision-paralysis-when-it-happens-and-why/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474853.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20240229202522-20240229232522-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.941654 | 747 | 2.796875 | 3 | 518 |
Inspirational leadership is a leadership style that focuses on motivating and inspiring others to achieve their full potential. Inspirational leaders use their vision, passion, and charisma to inspire their followers to pursue a common goal and to achieve great things. They often have a clear sense of purpose and are able to communicate it effectively to others, inspiring them to take action and achieve their own goals.
Inspirational leaders also often lead by example, setting high standards for themselves and their followers and demonstrating a commitment to excellence. This leadership style can be particularly effective in situations where a group or organization needs to overcome significant challenges or achieve ambitious goals. By inspiring and motivating others, inspirational leaders can help to create a sense of shared purpose and a shared commitment to success.
Inspirational leadership is a concept that has gained considerable attention in the realm of leadership studies. It refers to a style of leadership that emphasizes the importance of motivating and inspiring followers to achieve their full potential. This approach to leadership involves creating a vision for the organization or team, communicating this vision effectively, and inspiring followers to work towards achieving it.
One key aspect of inspirational leadership is the ability to connect with followers on an emotional level. This involves understanding their needs, goals, and aspirations, and leveraging this knowledge to inspire them to pursue excellence. Leaders who adopt an inspirational approach are often able to cultivate a sense of shared purpose among their followers, which can lead to greater levels of engagement and commitment.
Overall, inspirational leadership represents an important paradigm shift from traditional models of command-and-control leadership. By emphasizing the importance of motivation and inspiration, leaders who adopt this approach are better equipped to create high-performing teams and organizations that are capable of achieving exceptional results.
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence has become an increasingly critical topic of discussion in both academic and professional settings, as it is an essential aspect of effective human interaction. The concept of emotional intelligence has been defined in various ways; however, its central premise is that it involves the ability to recognize, understand and manage emotions in oneself and others effectively. This definition highlights that emotional intelligence is not just about being able to recognize emotions but also entails using them appropriately to facilitate communication, problem-solving and decision-making.
Research shows that individuals with high levels of emotional intelligence tend to possess a range of benefits, including better social relationships, higher job satisfaction, improved physical health and well-being. In contrast, those with low emotional intelligence levels may struggle with stress management, interpersonal conflict resolution or decision making. Additionally, the development of emotional intelligence can be beneficial for organizations looking to create a positive work culture conducive to productivity and growth. As such, there is a growing interest in exploring how interventions can be used to enhance individual and collective levels of emotional intelligence within organizational settings.
The importance of emotional intelligence cannot be overstated given its potential impact on various aspects of human interaction at both individual and organizational levels. It offers valuable insights into how we can best navigate complex social situations while fostering positive relationships with others. As such, further research aimed at understanding the underlying mechanisms that contribute to the development of emotional intelligence will undoubtedly have significant implications for a range of fields from psychology to business management.
Building Trust and Transparency
The concept of building trust and transparency in inspirational leadership has gained significant attention in contemporary organizational studies. Trust and transparency are two key elements that are central to the success of any enterprise, particularly in cases where an individual or entity is tasked with leading others towards a common goal. In the context of inspirational leadership, trust refers to the belief that individuals have in their leader’s ability to make sound decisions and act in the best interest of the group. Transparency, on the other hand, involves providing information that enables individuals to understand how decisions are being made and what is happening within an organization.
Building trust and transparency in inspirational leadership requires an understanding of leadership as a process rather than a position. The process-oriented approach emphasizes that effective leaders need to be able to adapt their style based on their followers’ needs, values, and preferences. This approach recognizes that different followers may respond differently to different leadership styles, which means that successful leaders must be able to modify their behavior accordingly. Moreover, building trust and transparency also involves creating a shared vision among followers and communicating it effectively so that everyone feels invested in its realization.
Building trust and transparency in inspirational leadership requires leaders who are willing to engage with their followers authentically, aligning themselves with their values while remaining transparent about decision-making processes. By doing so, they can create an environment where followers feel empowered to contribute meaningfully towards achieving collective goals.
Encouraging Creativity and Innovation
This process involves the development of a supportive work environment that fosters creativity, experimentation, and learning, while simultaneously promoting collaboration and teamwork. Leaders who are capable of inspiring their teams to innovate and create can leverage this talent to achieve competitive advantages in the market.
Effective inspiration-based leadership involves harnessing the cognitive abilities and talents of the team members towards achieving organizational goals. Such leaders employ various strategies to motivate their subordinates, such as instilling vision, fostering trust-based relationships, providing positive feedback for achievements, and encouraging risk-taking. Creative employees are more productive because they feel more engaged with their work, more satisfied with their jobs, and more committed to the organization’s success.
Overall, encouraging creativity and innovation through inspirational leadership is fundamental in today’s business landscape where firms must be responsive to dynamic changes in consumer preferences and market trends. The ability of leaders to inspire their subordinates towards innovative solutions can lead to enhanced productivity, job satisfaction, employee retention rates as well as greater competitive advantages for businesses.
Empowering and Supporting Your Team
This approach to leadership seeks to foster an environment of trust, collaboration, and mutual respect within the team, which results in increased productivity, motivation, and overall job satisfaction. To achieve this goal, leaders must employ various strategies that capitalize on their team members’ strengths while also addressing any areas of weakness.
One effective strategy for empowering and supporting a team in inspirational leadership involves promoting autonomy among individual members. This involves giving employees the freedom to make decisions about their work while still providing them with guidance and support. By doing so, leaders can help cultivate a sense of ownership and pride among their team members, as well as encourage creativity and innovation. Additionally, providing opportunities for professional development can be another important element of empowering and supporting a team in inspirational leadership. By investing in their employees’ growth and development, leaders can not only enhance their skills but also demonstrate their commitment to helping them achieve their full potential.
Empowering and supporting a team in inspirational leadership is an essential component of effective management that requires careful attention to detail and strategic planning. Leaders who are able to harness the strengths of each individual member while providing guidance and support can create an environment that fosters innovation, collaboration, and success. Ultimately, by investing time and resources into building strong relationships with their teams, leaders can promote long-term success both for themselves as well as for their organizations.
Communicating with Clarity and Purpose
Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of inspirational leadership, as it enables leaders to articulate their vision and goals clearly to others within the organization. To communicate with clarity and purpose in this context, leaders must develop a nuanced understanding of the audience to whom they are communicating, as well as the message they want to convey. This requires them to adopt an empathetic approach that takes into account the individual needs and perspectives of their team members, while also maintaining a clear focus on the overarching goals of the organization.
In addition to cultivating empathy and awareness, successful inspirational leaders must also hone their communication skills by employing a range of techniques designed to engage and motivate their audience. For instance, they may use storytelling or analogies to help illustrate complex ideas or concepts in a relatable way, or they may employ rhetorical devices such as repetition or parallelism to emphasize key points. Additionally, effective communicators in this context often place a premium on authenticity and transparency, recognizing that these qualities can help build trust and credibility with those around them.
Communicating with clarity and purpose in inspirational leadership requires not only an acute understanding of one’s audience but also a willingness to adapt one’s style and approach based on contextual factors. By mastering these skills, leaders can create an environment where team members feel empowered and motivated to contribute fully toward achieving shared objectives.
Leading by Example
The concept of “Leading by Example” is a fundamental tenet in the field of leadership studies. At its core, it involves the influential action of leaders through their modeling and embodiment of positive behaviors, attitudes, and values that inspire followers to achieve common goals. The theoretical framework underlying this phenomenon is rooted in social learning theory and social cognitive theory, which posit that individuals learn by observing others and imitating their actions. Leaders who lead by example effectively capitalize on this notion by demonstrating desired behaviors themselves, thereby setting a standard for those around them to follow.
Leading by example is often seen as a highly effective form of leadership, as it can inspire followers to emulate the leader’s behavior and attitudes. In doing so, followers may experience a sense of empowerment and motivation that can lead to higher levels of performance and productivity. Additionally, leading by example can help build trust between leaders and their followers, as it demonstrates a commitment to shared values and goals.
While there are many potential benefits to leading by example in inspirational leadership, there are also some challenges to consider. For example, leaders must be mindful of their own behavior at all times, as they are constantly being watched and evaluated by their followers. Additionally, not all leaders may be able or willing to set a positive example for others in every situation. Despite these challenges, however, leading by example remains an important aspect of effective leadership that warrants further study and exploration.
Here are some ways that inspirational leaders can lead by example:
- Show passion and commitment: Inspirational leaders should demonstrate their passion and commitment for the work they do. They should communicate their enthusiasm and inspire others to share their vision.
- Be a role model: Inspirational leaders should model the behaviors they want to see in their team. They should show honesty, integrity, and respect towards their team members.
- Celebrate success: Inspirational leaders should celebrate the successes of their team members. They should recognize and reward good performance and show appreciation for their hard work.
- Build relationships: Inspirational leaders should build strong relationships with their team members. They should take the time to get to know their team and understand their needs, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Take ownership: Inspirational leaders should take ownership of their decisions and actions. They should take responsibility for their mistakes and show a willingness to learn and improve.
By leading by example, inspirational leaders can create a positive and motivating work environment where team members feel valued, supported, and inspired to achieve their goals. When leaders show commitment, enthusiasm, and respect towards their team, they can build trust and inspire their team members to do the same. | <urn:uuid:221be3e9-e60c-4a05-9389-575a540709fa> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://zaviad.com/unlocking-the-secrets-to-inspirational-leadership/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474853.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20240229202522-20240229232522-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.960271 | 2,258 | 2.5625 | 3 | 519 |
Are you right-brained or left-brained?
It's a popular question, hovering at the edges of sound neuroscience. The left brain is supposed to be more creative and artistic, the right brain more organized and logical. Indeed, Google "right-brain dominance" or "left-brain dominance," and you'll find endless blog posts on the subject. You'll also find quizzes that purport to tell readers which sort of person they are.
But the real science says there's no such thing as right- or left-brain dominance.
In a sweeping two-year study, published in 2013 in the journal PLOS One, researchers looked at the brains of more than 1,000 people and found no evidence for significant differences in brain-side dominance among individuals.
There are differences between the hemispheres though, right?
You might not have a more dominant half, but your brain really is split into two hemispheres, left and right.
And the left and right hemispheres are not the same. They are highly similar and redundant, though. Most processes that you'd find on the left side also take place on the right, and vice-versa.
The book "Disorders of the Nervous System: A Primer" (Imperial Company Printers, 1995) by Dartmouth neurologists Dr. Alexander Reeves and Dr. Rand Swenson, quotes Dr. Harold Wolff — one of the great brain scientists of the 20th century — as saying that both sides of the brain have "the capacity to express appropriate feelings, appetites and drives; the capacity [for] … learning, memory, logic, etc.; the capacity to maintain appropriate thresholds and tolerance for frustration and failure, and to recover promptly from their effects; the capacity to maintain effective and well-modulated defense reactions (i.e., repression, denying, pretending, rationalization, blaming, withdrawal, fantasy, depersonalization, obsessive-compulsive behavior and bodily reaction patterns involving alimentation, respiration, metabolism, etc.)."
That's some dense text, but the point is simple: Just about everything about your brain that makes you human exists on both sides of the organ.
Need proof? If you remove a hemisphere from the brain of a 3-month-old baby — a surgery that doctors sometimes perform in cases of severe epilepsy and other disorders, according to the Cleveland Clinic — that baby can still grow up with normal memories and a normal personality. Surgeons pulled off the surgery, known as a hemispherectomy, "hundreds of times" in the last century, according to Scientific American.
So, what's the difference between the two hemispheres?
Generally speaking, the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body, and the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body, according to the website The Brain from Top to Bottom, which was written and developed by Bruno Dubuc, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. Things get more complicated for vision: Nerves from the left sides of both eyes connect to the left side of the brain, and nerves from the right sides of both eyes connect to the right side of the brain.
In the19th century, a pair of neuroscientists — Dr. Pierre Paul Broca and Dr. Karl Wernicke — found that people who struggled with language processing tended to have damage to specific areas on the left sides of their brains. The researchers concluded that those two areas were important to language processing, announcing to the world that language lives in the left brain. That idea is probably at the root of this notion that the left brain is more creative and the right brain is more analytical.
Later, Robert Louis Stevenson's novella "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" helped spread the idea of left and right brains in popular culture, according to Anne Stiles, a professor of English at Saint Louis University.
But Broca and Wernicke's asymmetries aren't consistent from one brain to the next.
In about 5 percent of right-handed people, the key language-processing centers are on the right sides of the brain, and in 30 percent of left-handed people, these centers are on the right side of the brains, Dubuc wrote. Plus, in most people, both hemispheres take part in some aspect of speaking. People who have damage to their left hemispheres can relearn speech using their right hemispheres.
Researchers are still working to understand the full extent of the differences between the two hemispheres, and between people with different kinds of a asymetries in their brains. But the idea of right-brained and left-brained people? That's a myth.
Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2011.
Originally published on Live Science.
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Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. | <urn:uuid:fdceb048-4d28-4a4c-9001-3907b74000d6> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.livescience.com/32935-whats-the-difference-between-the-right-brain-and-left-brain.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476396.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20240303142747-20240303172747-00704.warc.gz | en | 0.938662 | 1,028 | 2.8125 | 3 | 520 |
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Back to 2018_05_15_opinion_ICS_terminos_mentalidades_memoria
José Víctor Orón Semper, researcher of the 'group Mente-cerebro ' del Institute for Culture and Society
Terms and mentalities. report
Today no one doubts the strength of the emotional reality in human beings. It is commonly accepted that we are not only rational, but also emotional. And although there are many who have not yet discovered the intrinsic and natural relationship between reason and emotion, it is accepted by all that something "has to do" with each other. All this has led today to the existence of a sensitivity to discover an emotional presence where before it was believed that reason reigned. This is the case of report. The traditional view of report consists of remembering what happened in the form of neutral data . In such a case, report is basically a cognitive exercise; which together with a model in which learning things is basically exercising report, has led for a long time to understand teaching as something fundamentally cognitive. This association between report and remembering data is what is called neutral report . But today it is known that neutral report does not exist. It does not exist means that, even if one wants to remember things as a mere remembering data, it is not possible to stay there.
Today it is known that the report also captures the emotions intrinsically linked to those data. Emotions are more intensely learned and less forgotten. Pleasant emotions favor remembering things more globally, and unpleasant emotions favor remembering things in their details. Therefore, it has been proposed that students must be excited to learn things. We are looking at student for the emotion button. This button must be pressed by the teacher or the parent so that student or the child turns on who knows what and starts to memorize everything. This proposal, besides being simplistic, ends up falling where it wanted to go out because it ends up thinking that the important thing about the report is to remember data. Or that it is possible to distinguish between the data and the emotions they arouse, which means ignoring the meaning of a reality (see the term meaning).
That is, they have discovered that the emotional is important, but they end up thinking that the emotional modulates the way they remember data. What it would be worthwhile for them to discover is that there is no such thing as data, but rather data . That to speak of data is an abstract conceptualization of lived experience.
The research in neuroscience can help us in our presentation because we sample that what we call remembering, reliving, recontextualizing and reinterpreting are not different actions, but different aspects of the same action. The four verbs occur at the same time. Thus, in exercising the report, the human, what we do is indeed these four things, which are not four but one. The four terms are not four actions that we can relate, but there is only one action and, to the extent that we look at it, we discover that we can conceptualize four distinct elements.
When speaking of the report, we point out that I speak of the human report ; since the report exists in the entire universe. Also a stone has report: if you give it a blow and break it, it will be remembered for life. If report is that the past affects the present, the stones also have report. Those who want to retain data and data, look for a petrine report . Also an animal has report. More sophisticated than that of a stone, because past experiences serve to make different decisions in the present. But that is not the human report . Those who are simply looking for a report to learn from the past, from bad and good experiences, are moving to the level of the animal report , an emotional report . The human report does much more as it remembers-rerecalls-recontextualizes-reinterprets in a single act. I repeat, there are not four actions that we relate, but a single action from which we differentiate elements.
When remembering, our body relives the experiences that were lived in the past, but they are revived contextualized in the new status, so the same emotional experience changes and, along with it, a new meaning is being given to what was lived. With each act of remembering we change our past. This is what allows the healing of report. When people have lived such painful experiences that they cannot accept them, psychoanalysis teaches us that this is how the subconscious arises. Winnicott said that when we do not have the resources to accept a past event because of the pain it awakens in us, then we have the psychological resource to hide it from our own conscious. The contemplation of such pain is not endured. This is one of the ways by which the subconscious is formed. But subconscious does not mean that it is not active in our life. It is necessary to heal the report: if in a new environment, the person updates what has been lived, then the human report allows him to relive and re-understand what has been lived from his current status .
A point where the human report and the animal report clearly differ is that the animal report remembers the emotional experiences that the animal lived, but the human report remembers the interpersonal relationships that were at stake in the same way that when we give meaning to the world what we do is to project the quality of our interpersonal relationships on what things are, as research on social referencing has shown. If what things are what they are comes from the way they are embedded in interpersonal relationships, the memory of them is the memory of those relationships.
For an animal there is data as the "bag" of characteristics linked to the presence of an object. That is to say, for an animal there is not the object, but the emotional experiences linked to the object, which is what an animal would call data. But for the human being there is no data but interpersonal relationships. To explain this in detail would be extensive, but basically an animal remembers the emotional experiences it lived and the data associated to it; on the other hand, a person remembers the intention of the relationship staff beyond the mere emotional experience or the data. This means that while for the animal, strictly speaking, there are neither relations nor objects but only data; on the other hand, for the person there are interpersonal relations, he can discover the presence of the object and even differentiate it from the data.
The human report always remembers personally, that is, it remembers the significance staff of the event. If someone goes and hits an animal, the animal remembers the emotional experience and the data surrounding it; more if a person is hit, what is remembered is the experience staff of having felt rejected in what one is and means.
To heal the report in the case of an animal is to give it new pleasant experiences and some pleasant data will alleviate the effect of some unpleasant data . For the human being the report is not healed by living a status of well-being after a painful status , but it is necessary to repair the interpersonal relations at stake.
Thus, when we want our children or students to learn data and to do so we want to excite them so that they memorize them more firmly, we are treating them like animals.
The human report is the report of interpersonal relationships and in this framework you can register all the data that you want. What matters to the human being are the other human beings and the data that we remember are those that help us to know how to situate ourselves in this complicated sea of interpersonal relationships. When remembering, what becomes present are the interpersonal experiences at stake. Thus, not only should it be said that there is no neutral report (thinking that remembering is a technical and cold act of remembering data), but also that there is no emotional report (data + emotions), but what really exists in human beings is report staff .
A paradigmatic case of this is Alzheimer's disease, where the painful thing is not the forgetting of data, not even the topic is in not remembering the emotional experiences lived, but the painful thing is that we do not remember what was the interpersonal relationship we had with our loved ones.
Thus, the human report , which we have called report staff , ends up leading to reinterpret the interpersonal relationships from the present interpersonal relationships and opening to the subject of interpersonal relationship that we could have. Any exercise of report does not only entail the reinterpretation of the past, but also a reinterpretation at the level of staff. (Explanation in the term re-signifying).
If in the term meaning we saw that the data are significant because of what they meant for the interpersonal relationship, it is logical that now we say that when we remember data what we really remember are the interpersonal relationships in play. The novelty would be that the human report is creative and allows us to re-signify (and heal) the interpersonal relationships in play. That is why the re-signification takes place through gratitude and reconciliation (see these terms).
At the level of educational this implies that it would be convenient to educate personally and not animalistically. To want to learn data and to want to remember data and its attached emotional experiences is to learn and remember as an animal. Wanting to learn what data means and helps interpersonal relationships and remembering them in the same way is learning and remembering as a human being. | <urn:uuid:53928e96-fe21-4d49-8faf-a45f168a09d4> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://en.unav.edu/opinion/-/contents/15/05/2018/terminos-y-mentalidades-memoria/content/CnBM7sduyZOb/18114146 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473524.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221170215-20240221200215-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.964598 | 1,916 | 3.109375 | 3 | 521 |
Objective: to impart knowledge and skills on good health research practice (GHRP) related to conduct of human health research. The course will provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills for human research management and helps scientists to:
- understand the importance of ethical and quality principles in the conduct of human research
- strengthen their skills in the implementation of these principles
- assume responsibility for and apply these skills to their daily work
This training, covered learning outcomes:
Showing Pancasilais attitude and awareness about nation and state concern
Showing honesty, responsible attitude, confidence and emotional maturity, ethics, independence, adaptive, and awareness to become a long-life learner.
Able to evaluate the concept of academic integrity generally and plagiarism concept specifically, in the context of the type of plagiarism, consequence of violation, and how to prevent it.
Able to criticize scientific philosophy in the Medicine and Health Science field.
Able to combine science philosophy in the Biomedical, Clinical Medicine, Public Health, Nutrition, Nursing, or Medical Education field.
General Skills Learning Outcome
Able to develop logical, critical, systematic, and innovative thinking using information technology to generate solutions based on an area of expertise with integrity realized by a scientific document.
Able to develop a research roadmap to discover or expand theory/conception/new scientific ideas with inter-discipline, multidiscipline, or trans-discipline approach.
Able to develop a network, adapt, invent, contribute, conduct supervision, evaluate and make decisions to perform independent and group work to implement science in social life.
Specific Skills Learning Outcome
Able to develop science using up-to-date health technology in Biomedical Science, Clinical Medicine, Public Health, Nutrition, Nursing, or Medical Education using a transactional research approach based on research ethics so can generate creative, original, and tested inventions.
Able to manage and lead research using inter-discipline, multi-discipline, and trans-discipline also attuned to local wisdom to discover respond and/or solve health problems in the national, regional, or global level.
Output: At the end of the training, the trainees will have gained the necessary tools to design, conduct, record and report of research project according to ethical and quality principles.
Course format and methodology: This is a four day course; the overall training approach used in these modules is based on adult learning theory. Methods would comprise a combination of interactive lectures, discussions, practical exercises – small group work and problem analysis.
The training focuses on a series of modules leading the participants through a progressive learning process. | <urn:uuid:c54d8e8d-3dfa-4e8e-b8c2-2e91c8ab03c5> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://s3.fkkmk.ugm.ac.id/good-health-research-practice-ghrp/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473524.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221170215-20240221200215-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.902038 | 541 | 2.71875 | 3 | 522 |
Next month we’re off to the Vendée for our holiday and I’m really excited, as well as nostalgic – it was a popular choice of my parents when my brother and I were small.
It’s got me thinking about the crucial role of the senses in locking in memories – helping us remember things in rich detail. This is central to how we design training at Green Door and we like to think it’s one of the things that makes us a bit different.
The memories I have of France are predominantly food-based: the smell of a crêpe cooking and the spoils of my dad’s early morning croissant-run. I remember learning to swim in the chill of an outdoor pool and sunny days on the beach exploring salty rock pools. Dire Straights played repeatedly on the car’s tape-deck. No iTunes or DVD players back then. We had Mark Knopfler and endless games of I Spy.
I’m really looking forward to our trip, seeing new memories being formed for my own children and to indulge my own reminiscence.
Our amazing brains store information as a pattern of neurons firing in response to stimuli, and the richer the experience/memory, the more permanent the learning. We also store information topographically, so the memory of a wonderful meal will involve storage in specialised areas: tastes (parietal lobe), sound (temporal lobe), people (occipital lobe), etc. Here are a range of resources exploring this neuroscience in more depth.
So to generate learning that really stays the course, at Green Door we focus on creating training events that are vivid and multi-faceted – based on sound, feeling, colour, movement, taste and even smell (good ones!). We believe the very best training environments are vibrant, dynamic and…well, memorable.
How are you nourishing your brain? How could you use colour, association, repetition, smell or music to help you remember key things.
If we could help your organisation to deliver training or facilitate events where the learning sticks and real change results, do drop us a line.
And if you’re off on your holidays too…bon voyage! | <urn:uuid:0e7b7816-ef41-4341-b920-ee9e04f9e33e> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.greendoorpeople.co.uk/2017/07/aide-memoire-rich-memories-key-learning/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473524.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221170215-20240221200215-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.938547 | 457 | 2.515625 | 3 | 523 |
The NHS is currently facing its annual winter of discontent; founded in the 1940s, to provide universal healthcare, the service is under severe financial strain.
All users of the NHS have one thing in common; they will not receive or have to pay a bill for the care they receive.
Their healthcare is free and universal and has been since the formation of the country’s National Health Service in 1948.
The population’s healthcare is funded through tax and compulsory national insurance contributions deducted from income, which also go toward many other state benefits.
But, as the demand for health care has increased across all levels of care – primary, secondary and tertiary – so has the strain on this once-coveted health system – particularly on its finances.
Healthcare budgets in the UK have been plateauing, with only minor increases in spending, as percentages of gross domestic product spent on it have been declining.
According to the Kings Fund, an independent health care charity, the National Health Service is halfway through its most austere decade ever. Figures from the World Bank reflect this: In 2009, the UK spent 9.8% of its GDP on health care; by 2014, it fell to 9.1%, according to the World Bank.
Along with this have come more people, who are living longer and with multiple conditions like diabetes and heart disease that require treatments also rising in cost. Meanwhile, hospital bed numbers have fallen, numbers visiting emergency rooms have risen, and the demand for social care – such as home care or equipment – in the community has increased with limited services in place to provide it, again leaving more people with fewer hospital beds.
“The current situation is unsustainable,” says Dr. Ian Eardley, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons in the UK and practising surgeon at a hospital in Leeds. “There are patients who are medically fit but can’t get help in the community, or support, to leave hospital.”
Austerity has brought extended waiting times for people seeking elective or routine treatments, such as knee or hip surgery, while emergency treatments for serious issues such as cancer or heart attacks continue to be treated promptly.
Guidance requires anyone in the UK with signs of cancer be seen within two weeks, “But you can’t bring patients in for elective surgeries,” said Eardley, who further stressed the complexities surrounding people living longer.
“People often live longer with other medical problems being controlled and managed,” he says, adding that greater expectations by patients today and the tendency to discuss cases in greater detail all add time and strain to an already overwhelmed system.
Real National Health Service spending in 2015-16 increased by just 1.6%, according to the Kings Fund and the budget has been frozen for too long; more funding is needed to decrease the debt owed by hospitals whose budgets were not sufficient and to ensure a greater transition from care settings into the community.
The UK recently-announced Spring budget pledged £2 billion ($2.5 billion) toward adult social care over the next three years to “ease pressure on the NHS”.
£425 million ($525 million) was also announced to be invested in the NHS in the next three years, with £100 million ($125 million) going to Accident and Emergency departments in 2017-18, to help them manage increasing demand.
Experts welcome the investment, but believe it will not be enough. The UK is not exceptional, other countries have similar levels of health care coverage using a tax-based system, including Finland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain. The broad model of tax-based funding is common in quite a few countries.
A recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development highlighted that, although access to care in the UK is good, the quality of care is uneven and continues to lag behind that of many other countries.
It is worth noting that Germany and France, which spent 11.3% and 11.5% of their GDPs on health care, respectively, in 2014 and have more beds per capita, more doctors per 1,000 people and longer life expectancies.
Germany and France use a social insurance model to pay for their health care: Deductions are taken from income, but unlike in the US, everyone is covered, and companies don’t make a profit. Those contributing also “own” the organizations involved through boards and unions.
People pay a fee at the point of care, though it’s just $5 to $11 in Germany and $25 in France, which is often reimbursed.
The Western country spending the most on its health care is the US, which spent 17.1% of its GDP on healthcare in 2014.
Yet a series of factors – such as a lower life expectancy and uneven coverage – highlight that increased expenditure alone is not always a good thing. A system to manage it best is key.
The US is an outlier internationally and very few people would say the US model is good for the population.
Treatments and new technologies for conditions such as cancer often lead from the US, but the key issues are access and the varying amounts that could be charged as a fee to provide them.
The private insurance-based model in the US, covering only those who are insured, leads to companies in the industry working toward profit, which leads to more division and less universal coverage.
“If you have lots of money, you get good care,” Eardley says about US healthcare. “If you don’t have money, you don’t fit into the system,” he adds, calling such a system “wasteful.”
Experts in the UK are eager to stress the cost-efficiency of the National Health Service; according to the Royal College of General Practitioners, the UK pays the least per patient than most countries in the West.
In comparison with the US, Europe’s universal coverage, with tax- and social-fund-based financing through contributions, spends less and has more care with better outcomes.
Many countries on the continent still have a small sector of patients using private insurance. In the UK, an estimated 11% of the population has private insurance, often through their employers. In Germany, top earners can opt out of the public system and pay privately instead, representing an estimated 10% of Germans.
At the core of the debate around health care, money alone is not the issue; it’s the model of care.
“Healthcare should be free at the point of delivery,” says Dr. Richard Kerr, a council member of the Royal College of Surgeons in the UK and consultant neurosurgeon at a large regional hospital in Oxford. “There is a fee structure behind it, but when a patient comes to see me … the issue of money never comes into it.”
Kerr believes countries worldwide can learn from those on mainland Europe, such as Germany and France, where the population receives great care, in his opinion, with good quality but pays more for it through taxes. “They are taxed higher but have much more investigative healthcare.”
“We should look at the different models of health care and take the good aspects of it … without getting rid of the basics of what we’ve got,” he says. “But what you get for your buck is more here.”
With the UK being more cost-efficient, he ponders whether that is something to be proud of. “If you receive the same level of care with less money,” that is indeed a point of pride. But with patient waiting times up to 20 weeks in some cases, he adds, that is not the case.
The neuroscience department at his hospital in Oxford is the regional hospital, a point of tertiary care where patients requiring specialist procedures are referred from their district hospitals. It serves more than 2.8 million people across a 100-mile radius, with just 60 beds in his main ward and another 13 in the intensive care unit.
The building is just a decade old, light and airy in design, but he stresses the shuffling he and his team do on a regular basis between main wards and the ICU to ensure that all patients can access a bed and undergo their procedures.
Staffers borrow beds between the departments, he explains, so spare beds in the ICU will sometimes be used for his less severe cases. But he shows further frustration with the lack of social care resources for patients away from his hospital, such as the provision of home carers or equipment to keep them mobile, or changes to make their homes more accessible or to help them access day centres. These are crucial, he believes, particularly as the population continues to live longer.
Between 2014 to 2015, 72% of more than 1.8 million new requests for social care support requested from councils in England were clients aged 65 and over, according to NHS data.
In addition to keeping beds unnecessarily occupied, resulting in a “domino effect,”; if a patient has social care needs, a busy environment (like a hospital) isn’t the best place for them.
Neurosurgical procedures vary also greatly, with some patients needing just 24 hours to recover while others have stayed as long as 100 days.
“We have to cancel patients at short notice sometimes,” says Kerr, “not only leaving patients untreated but leaving surgeons unable to do their jobs.”
“There is pressure on us now, but this is not new,” he said of demands on the wards and his outpatient clinics. “My clinic overruns. It always does … so there’s frustration there.”
But Kerr wants to carry these realities forward and kick-start a debate to get the UK government investing more for even greater efficiency, enabling greater capacity to deliver care.
“When I’m old and crumbly, I don’t want to have to wait,” he says, thinking of his patients. He and others in the field want reform or restructuring to get people discussing what healthcare is, as its meaning has changed dramatically since the National Health Service’s inception.
“We need a commission,” he claims, stating a need to push for patients, cross-party politicians, policymakers and medical practitioners to come together to define what is meant by healthcare.
“We need a debate asking, what do you want out of health care?” Kerr says. “Do you want to continue treating everything? Yes, you do, but we can’t do it under the current financial envelope.”
Currently within the health service, certain conditions are not covered – such as more cosmetic procedures – leaving some patients unsatisfied.
The need to identify what people on each side of the debate believe healthcare to be, and which aspects they prioritise, will help manage expectations as well as resources, Kerr explains, not only in the UK, but also more globally.
He believes this will lead to a happier and more satisfied patient base, particularly among those left behind – either waiting in the UK or uninsured in the US. But it won’t be easy.
“Healthcare is incredibly complex. … The growing number of older people with multi-morbidities are having very very complex trajectories through the health and social care system. We shouldn’t underestimate the challenges.” | <urn:uuid:25f7d841-c5cb-4be0-ac1a-b0064fa9377a> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://executivesurf.com/how-world-healthcare-differs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474533.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20240224112548-20240224142548-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.969142 | 2,384 | 2.53125 | 3 | 524 |
This blog was originally posted on the Focus Area for Compassion and Ethics’ The Beat.
By David G. Addiss and Ashley L. Graham
Recent race-related events have exposed a tragic gap between our national self-image – a “nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all persons are created equal,”1 – and our country’s long history of deep-seated racism. Since February, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 117,000 in the United States.2 A disproportionate number of hospitalizations and deaths have occurred among African Americans, who are dying from the disease at three times the rate of white people.3 During this same period, several unarmed Blacks have been killed by white police officers or vigilantes. On March 13, Louisville police fatally shot Breonna Taylor as she was sleeping in her home. On May 7, two white men in Brunswick, Georgia were charged with the February murder of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black jogger who they pursued and shot. And on May 25, for nearly nine agonizing minutes, a white police officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee on the neck of George Floyd, who begged for his life, struggling to breathe, until he died.
A Role for Compassion?
Following George Floyd’s death, protests erupted in more than 700 communities across the United States, and around the world, to demand justice and systemic change. His death, and those of Taylor, Arbery, and many others, reveal the deadly persistence of individual and structural racism in America. As Senator Cory Booker recently noted, “We have grown too comfortable with savage injustices.”4
Social justice and health equity are central goals and core values in the field of global health. These goals won’t be realized until we address the root causes of racism. Legal scholar john a. powell argues that, “Suffering is a central concern of social justice.”5 Suffering is also the impetus for compassion. What role, then, can compassion play in advancing racial justice?
Compassion is much more than a desire to help. It should not be confused with pity, which springs from a sense of superiority. Instead, compassion arises from a deep experience of shared humanity and solidarity. Compassion is a powerful force when cultivated, harnessed, and channeled in service of social justice.
Our view of compassion, informed by neuroscience, psychology, and contemplative science, is that it consists of three essential elements: 1) cognitive awareness of suffering; 2) emotional resonance (empathy) with the suffering person; and 3) a commitment to alleviate the suffering (action). These three elements are crucial for achieving social justice.
Awareness, Empathy, and Action
Without awareness and recognition of suffering, it is not possible to alleviate or dismantle the causes of suffering, such as racism. But cognitive awareness alone is not enough. A truly compassionate response to suffering – essential for a sustained commitment to social justice – involves empathy. We have to feel the suffering or injustice, and be touched by it. The literal and symbolic power of George Floyd’s words, “I can’t breathe,” stirred powerful emotions of empathic outrage across the country and the globe.
But compassion also requires action. For the Dalai Lama, compassion “is not just an idle wish to see sentient beings free from suffering, but an immediate need to intervene and actively engage, to try to help.”6 The most urgent question for individuals and organizations at this moment, as Senator Booker said, echoing the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is ‘What can I do?’2 Social justice must be informed by listening to the voices of those who suffer and a mature understanding of the best action to take. The same is true of compassion. Compassion may be expressed by marching together in protest. In other moments, compassionate action means providing intensive, technical medical care, as with the heroic response of health care workers to COVID-19. At other times, the most effective compassionate ‘action’ may be simply sitting in silence and holding the hand of someone who has suffered incalculable loss.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Compassion and justice are actually two sides of the same coin. To realize a compassionate society in which justice prevails, compassion and justice must be built upon millions of individual actions that are fueled by informed awareness and deep empathy. It will take intentional, concerted efforts by all of us to bring about the change that we want to see. During the past three weeks, we have witnessed soul-searching on a massive scale. It is important, both individually and collectively, that we move to action, whether that be protesting, changing laws, writing, voting, befriending, engaging in civic discourse, or other activities. We must commit to enhancing our awareness of structural racism, cultivating our capacity for empathy, and acting from a sense of shared humanity.
At The Task Force for Global Health’s Focus Area for Compassion and Ethics (FACE), we are actively engaged in this process. We created FACE to center compassion in global health discourse and to critically examine the ethics of our practice in service of health equity and social justice. But we must become more explicit about our duty to foster social justice and counter racism. At this moment, we commit to 1) deepening conversations that address the question: ‘What can I do?’; 2) contributing to the organizational-wide work of The Task Force to be more intentional about countering racism; 3) doing the ‘inner work’ necessary to examine and counter our own implicit biases; 4) more intentionally partnering with organizations engaged in social justice; and 5) actively seeking opportunities to engage in programs and research on the interface of compassion, equity, and social justice.
These are just the first steps on what will be an evolving path as we seek to deepen our awareness of racial inequities, strengthen our role in remedying bias, and foster social justice both at home and globally.
- Lincoln A. Gettysburg address, November 19, 1863.
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): Cases in the U.S. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html. Accessed June 18, 2020.
- Pilkington E. Black Americans dying of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white people. The Guardian, May 20, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/black-americans-death-rate-covid-19-coronavirus. Accessed June 18, 2020.
- Booker C. I am hopeful in this moment. Interview, MSNBC, June 5, 2020. https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/sen-booker-i-am-hopeful-in-this-moment-84474437769
- powell, john a. Lessons from suffering: How social justice informs spirituality. University of St. Thomas Law Journal 2003-2004:102-127, p. 102.
- Davidson RJ, Harrington A (eds). Visions of compassion: Western scientists and Tibetan Buddhists examine human nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 225. | <urn:uuid:0c3680cf-db8a-482f-a5c9-8b9b6c321c07> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.taskforce.org/tfgh-compassion-a-catalyst-for-racial-justice/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474643.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225203035-20240225233035-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.929534 | 1,544 | 2.828125 | 3 | 525 |
Think back to the last conference you attended. What did you learn?
Without key insights and takeaways, professional development investments are wasted. However, as more organizations offer continuing education both to support their strategic missions and to deliver business results, the threshold to meet or exceed the increasingly sophisticated expectations of attendees is changing.
Learning is now characterized by not only the acquisition of knowledge or skills, but by the retention and application of knowledge or skills in the work setting. By the way, your association scores extra points when it clearly describes the business measures that will change or improve as a result of an education program or if a specific return on investment can be attributed to its implementation.
Adult learners are a discerning and complex group. They are both pressed for time and goal-oriented. They bring with them previous knowledge and experience, but have a finite capacity for information. Moreover, adult learners have varied motivation levels, and they learn best when presented with a number of different instructional strategies.
Due to advances in neuroscience, brain research now reveals evidence-based strategies to guide effective learning experiences. Cognitive processing serves as the foundation for making new knowledge and skills stick.
On its journey through sensory memory, then short-term or working memory and finally long-term memory, most stimuli succumb to memory loss. This is particularly true when opportunities for practice and reflection are not afforded to participants during education programs.
Knowledge or skills that adequately grab the attention of sensory memory pass through to working memory. The rehearsal of knowledge or skills during the program allows this information to then pass through to long-term memory for consolidation and storage. Failure to retrieve and rehearse key insights and takeaways in the workplace, however, cause them to be lost from lack of use.
According to John Medina’s Brain Rules, people usually forget 90 percent of what they learn during a program within 30 days. To promote greater retention and application, following are just seven of Medina’s original 12 rules as applied to association programming.
- The brain appears to be designed to solve problems.
Build and implement practice exercises that challenge learners. It’s recommended that practice time comprise between 35 and 50 percent of education sessions. Practice time includes practice activities, facilitator feedback and both pre- and post-assessments.
- Move to improve your thinking skills.
Develop opportunities throughout the program to get participants out of their seats and moving throughout the room or venue. Consider flip charts, manipulatives, networking and role playing as excuses to get people on their feet.
- The biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.
The afternoon energy slump is real. It occurs right around 3 p.m. Planners should avoid scheduling heavy topics during this time and instructors should design curricula full of engagement and interaction when asked to speak during this so-called nap zone.
- We don’t pay attention to boring things.
Audiences tend to check out after only 10 minutes of content. Telling personal narratives based on the instructor’s experience or creating events rich in emotion will help regain their attention.
- Repeat to remember.
Leverage learning materials like slide decks and participant handouts to repeat new information in timed intervals throughout the presentation. Take breaks periodically to allow participants the opportunity for reflection.
- Stimulate more of the senses at the same time.
Audiences learn best if we stimulate several senses at once. Integrate the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch into the instructional experience when delivering particularly complex concepts.
- Vision trumps all other senses.
Visuals such as PowerPoint, Prezi, videos, handouts and job aids should not be underestimated. It’s said that if participants hear a piece of information, three days later they’re likely to remember 10 percent of it. Add a picture and they’re likely to remember 65 percent.
While there’s still a lot we don’t know, implementing a handful of these simple techniques when combined with quality meeting management can enhance the intentionality of an association’s professional development offerings.
In the largest of associations, meeting professionals focus on logistics (e.g., site and menu selection) while instructional designers focus on content. Ultimately, instructional designers create experiences that make the acquisition of knowledge and skills more efficient, effective and appealing. For small- to mid-sized associations, these roles are often combined with more emphasis placed on logistics and less emphasis on strategy and instructional design.
As associations gain expertise in analyzing, designing, developing, implementing and evaluating instructional experiences, they can improve process and procedure, as well as better coach and mentor speakers in the facilitation of quality learning experiences supported by neuroscience. As associations begin to approach their meetings and events with the mindset of an instructional designer, they can expect to:
- Elevate the quality and sophistication of their education programs.
- Create experiences that support both repeat and first-time attendance.
- Earn consumer loyalty through membership retention and acquisition.
- Improve their bottom lines via the purchase of association products and services. | <urn:uuid:9faa8f3e-81cc-4b3b-a0e9-6bee777666cd> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.naylor.com/associationadviser/exploring-the-brain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474671.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227053544-20240227083544-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.939194 | 1,037 | 2.8125 | 3 | 526 |
The majority of digital health interventions lean on the promise of bringing health and self-care into people’s homes and hands. However, these interventions are delivered while people are in their triggering environments, which places competing demands on their attention. Individuals struggling to change or learn a new behavior have to work hard to achieve even a minor change because of the automatic forces propelling them back to their habitual behaviors. We posit that effort and burden should be explored at the outset and throughout the digital intervention development process as a core therapeutic mechanism, beyond the context of design or user experience testing. In effort-focused conceptualization, it is assumed that, even though goals are rational and people want to achieve them, they are overtaken by competing cognitive, emotional, and environmental processes. We offer the term effort-optimized intervention to describe interventions that focus on user engagement in the face of competing demands. We describe design components based on a 3-step process for planning an effort-optimized intervention: (1) nurturing effortless cognitive and environmental salience to help people keep effort-related goals prominent despite competition; (2) making it as effortless as possible to complete therapeutic activities to avoid ego depletion and self-efficacy reduction; and (3) turning the necessary effortful activities into sustainable assets. We conclude by presenting an example of designing a digital health intervention based on the effort-optimized intervention model.J Med Internet Res 2021;23(3):e24905
Effort is physical, mental, or emotional exertion in an attempt to meet a goal. The effort exerted by an individual depends on the interplay between internal (eg, cognitive ability, motivation) and external (eg, social and environmental) facilitators and the barriers between an individual and their desired objective [, ]. Substantial research has highlighted that reducing the effort needed to achieve an objective will increase the likelihood of achieving that objective in contexts ranging from consumer behavior to friendship [ ]. The modern consumer technology industry has essentially been built on the premise of reducing the complexity and number of steps needed to reach desired objectives. Subsequently, the majority of digital health interventions have leaned on the promise of bringing health and self-care into people’s homes and hands, overcoming the barriers to traditional services such as distance to a clinic, transportation, childcare, and more [ - ].
Despite the fact that digital interventions have significantly expanded their reach, with tens of millions of app downloads, the retention rates across the range of digital interventions remain very poor, with only 4% of behavioral health app users continuing use after 15 days . Subsequently, findings suggest that user engagement with a digital intervention is 4 times higher under trial in comparison with the use of the same intervention in the real world [ ]. A recent report [ ] on the use of MindSpot, an Australian digital mental health service may shed light on this phenomenon—the researchers reported an increase in the proportion of users looking for confidential assessment and a substantial decrease in the proportion of users looking for a traditional course-based internet intervention [ ]. This suggests that many users are expecting far shorter therapeutic encounters such as microinterventions [ ] compared with what would have been traditionally expected from users engaging digital health interventions.
We propose that a primary challenge with user engagement in digital interventions is that individuals who are struggling to change must work hard to achieve even a minor change because of the automatic forces propelling them back to their habitual behaviors [- ]. Substantial literature has emphasized the continuum of automatic processes driving psychological distress and effortful processing fostering psychological health [ , ]. Not surprisingly, those with severe addiction and mental health disorders typically require a higher level of care (eg, inpatient care) to reduce the severity of symptoms in a controlled environment where recovery is the most salient cue. In effect, individuals have the headspace to work on their goals without being bombarded by environmental cues [ ].
An effort-focused intervention model changes our conceptualization in the sense that we assume that goals are rational and that people want to achieve them. However, competing events in people’s lives either require less effort or are more salient. As the next generation of digital health interventions is developed, we argue that an exploration of effort and burden should form the baseline for intervention development.
Existing Literature on Effort Reduction
The fields of user experience, heuristic evaluation, and persuasive design focus on principles such as user control, simplicity, predictability, and satisfaction specifically designed to increase engagement [- ]. The outputs of these efforts range from autofill opportunities to 1-click shopping and frictionless feeds. In behavioral economics, effort reduction is often achieved with a default option [ ]. For example, in their seminal paper on organ donation, Johnson and Goldstein [ ] posited that one of the mechanisms of increased donations is that “making a decision often involves effort, whereas accepting the default is effortless.” Environmental engineering theory, popularized by books [ ], and seminal studies [ ] on manipulating availability and access to different foods have revealed that reducing cognitive effort by making healthier choices available and unhealthy choices more burdensome to obtain improves healthy behaviors significantly and unconsciously. Underlying gamification presents perceived effort reduction by enhancing reward and reinforcement while pursuing a goal in a fun and engaging way [ ]. Subsequently, a recent review [ ] has shown that clinical applications that reduce the effort required from participants to engage in a desired response decrease self-injurious behavior, decrease pica, and increase appropriate eating.
These approaches are used often in the digital behavior change, supplemented by targeted persuasive intervention design for behavior change. For example, the Fogg model introduced the concept of the trigger into social-cognitive theory [, ], that is, triggers presented at the right time in the right context reduce cognitive effort and increase motivation. More comprehensive taxonomies and persuasive models have been developed to identify core elements of behavior change interventions that drive engagement. For example, Oinas-Kukkonen and Harjumaa [ ] developed a set of principles to build sustainable interventions that include concepts such as tunneling and choice reduction to foster engagement. Michie and colleagues [ ] have developed a set of core behavior change principles, in which effort-reduction is implied, to guide intervention development heavily focused on learning theory and shaping behavior.
One of the reasons text-messaging interventions are acceptable may not be because they are just-in-time interventions, but rather, because individuals do not have to do anything except passively receive a text message once they sign-up. Text-messaging interventions have higher engagement over time than app-based interventions for perhaps no other reason than their effortlessness. For example, after 10 months of being signed up for the Text4Baby SMS intervention, 74.4% of mothers were still receiving messages . To further increase sustained engagement the study [ ] reported that “the extra step required to update the service with the birth date is being removed in case this has been a barrier to maintaining participation.”
We are not positing that the focus on effort reduction is a new phenomenon. We are suggesting that effort reduction is often overlooked by our field as we develop interventions from the outset and at every stage of intervention engagement. The theories described above such as tunneling, persuasive design, and gamification are methods that reduce effort as a passive result of the optimal state rather than by the design goal of fostering such a state. If we focus on gamification alone, for example, we may miss opportunities for effort reduction at every stage of the behavior change process; however, if we focus on effort reduction, gamification will likely be included as one task within a larger effort-optimized intervention model.
Effort Optimized Intervention Model: Fostering Effortful Behavior by Making it as Effortless as Possible
We offer the term effort-optimized intervention to describe interventions that focus on generating engagement with processes of therapeutic change in the face of competing demands. Here engagement refers to the time window of the intervention itself which may vary—mostly stretching from days to months —and refers to the notion that the user has to engage with the intervention for the targeted time window for it to reach a desired impact. Understanding effort optimization starts with the question “what is the lowest burden method to trigger behavior change?” For example, if one is trying to reduce arousal before bedtime, interventions may require a range of engagement levels ( ).
Exploring the continuum of required effort enables the selection of interventions that meet individuals where they are in terms of motivation, ability, and barriers . A person with almost no self-efficacy in changing a behavior may easily change the display options on their mobile phone to reduce blue light after 8 PM but may be unlikely to engage in guided paced breathing. At the same time, there may be no barriers to creating additive models of effortful engagement for those who are motivated and engaged. Unfortunately, the majority of effort targets for behavioral and mental health have fallen on the higher end of the spectrum. As a result, we are required to optimize effortful behaviors in times when we cannot make them fully effortless or passive.
We describe a 3-step process in the design of an effort-optimized intervention sequence, involving (1) nurturing salience to increase the chance of desired behaviors occurring in the face of competition; (2) making it as effortless as possible to complete therapeutic activities in order to avoid ego depletion and self-efficacy reductions; and (3) turning the necessary effortful activities into sustainable assets.
Nurturing Salience to Increase the Chance of Desired Behaviors Occurring in the Face of Competition
Background: What Makes a Therapeutic Target More Salient?
Salience refers to how much a certain object, either internal or external, is prominent in one’s mind. Salience can be triggered via a range of experiences—from an intense emotional event that becomes deeply encoded in memory to ongoing subtle cues embedded in one’s daily routines over long periods of time. For the purposes of this paper, we discuss the latter trigger. (We use the term trigger to refer to the broad category of digital stimuli designed to prompt desired actions and reactions from users .) An object’s salience can be defined based on its availability, whether it is actionable, and how much it is linked to a reward. ( contains a summary of components described with the body of this manuscript.)
|Increasing task or goal availability
|How easy is it to think about the goal compared to competing demands at a desired time point?
|Just-in-time text messaging or push notifications about the targeted task; using implementation intentions to mark dinner as an environmental cue for a parent to conduct a family gratitude exercise
|Creating an actionable script
|Triggering a step-by-step script to convey exactly what to do to foster the automaticity of the script during the task
|Embedding a simple step-by-step app guidance for parents learning what to do in the face of their child’s panic attack
|Incentive salience for a task or goal
|A cognitive process that includes an automatic motivational component that links a person’s desires to a rewarding stimulus to create a feedback loop toward behavior change
|Offering a meaningful immediate reward through the app such as celebration of a successful running exercise
|Avoiding habituation by not presenting similar stimuli over and over again and varying the affective impact on the individual
|Changing the delivery medium of inspirational motivational messages from text, video, and audio across a program
|Making the completion of therapeutic activities as effortless as possible
|Setting graded tasks
|Determining small and achievable goals, and moving forward in small steps
|A mobile app beginning running distance at 0.5 km and gradually stepping the user up to 5 km
|Setting dynamically tailored tasks
|Adapting to the user’s state based on passive data tasks they care about and past failures and successes
|When it takes more time for the user to acquire a skill, they receive additional features from the program prior to moving forward.
|Reducing the effort required to engage in therapeutic activities
|Keeping all relevant tools available in-house; making it as easy as possible to perform the activity
|Taking a photo of a meal through the app which analyzes it to document calorie intake; automatically triggering changes to screen color temperature based on time of day
|Turning effort into assets
|Documenting and reflecting on past effort-related activities in a meaningful way
|Turning effort into assets by documenting and reflecting on aspects users care about during the therapeutic process; once assets are made, users are inclined to keep investing so that their assets will not go to waste
|Presenting effortful activities the user conducted (eg, user reports on socializing with a friend) and how these activities are helpful (eg increase life satisfaction other time)
|Turning effort into a meaningful narrative
|Helping people acknowledge the link between the effort they just exerted and their commitment to the therapeutic process
|Upon reporting a positive interaction with their child, parents are asked to celebrate investing effort in becoming better parents
|Reframing effort as positive
|Embedding a narrative in which the reward is the respect for asserting effort beyond skills acquisition
|Encouraging users who finished an online learning on coping with depression by stressing out how this activity shows their commitment to feeling better
Availability is the ease with which one is able to think about the target object at a given time point. A simple way to manipulate an object’s availability is to trigger it using just-in-time mobile reminders or environmental triggers . Critically, availability can be manipulated cognitively by priming people to think in a certain manner at a given time point, thus creating automaticity [ ]. Presenting a certain object can prime a goal-directed behavior in the direction of the desired target, whether it be by using words associated with homophobia to increase implicit antigay bias [ ], holding a warm object to increase altruism [ ], or using the words “substance abuser” or “person with a substance-use disorder” to manipulate individuals’ assumptions about whether someone should go to jail or to treatment [ ]. These examples are congruent with the notion that creating cognitive prominence can trigger goal-directed behaviors without having to overtly instruct someone to be more mindful of a goal. Availability can also be triggered overtly through motivational reminders and environmental cues embedded in just-in-time digital interventions [ ]. The end goal is to increase goal availability during an effortful decision by reducing the amount of effort needed to retrieve the information.
An object is actionable when the person knows exactly what to do to achieve the desired outcome and how to do it at a given time point. The steps must become salient so that some action can be taken when goal-striving is triggered. Implementation intentions are priming methods that create if–then statements to trigger attention for a future desired outcome by making the association between a trigger and the resulting step-by-step behavior more immediate and less effortful [, ]. Implementation intentions consist of a basic 2-step process to increase actionable behavior toward a goal, for example, (1) “when I sit down for dinner” (trigger); (2) “I will ask everyone to talk about one thing they are grateful for before I put the first bite in my mouth” (script). Other examples include online graphic illustrations and scenario-based scripts [ ] to accompany text guidance. Using graphics targets different memory mechanisms and can help make a script more accessible from multiple pathways.
The rewarding aspect, defined as incentive salience, is a cognitive process that includes an automatic motivational component that links a person’s desires or actions to a rewarding stimulus . Incentive salience creates a feedback loop by which promise of the reward drives a person’s attention. When it comes to behavior change in a person’s natural environment, we assume that the reward for maladaptive behaviors such as parents yelling at their kid to “shut up” will be immediate (silence). Changing a person’s behavior to adopt better practices requires significant effort and the promise of long-term rewards (eg, reducing behavior problems). Technological advances such as immersive virtual reality experiences, neurostimulation, and even actively targeting incentive salience by manipulating immediate rewards can create a reward-based feedback loop for behavior change. Immediate rewards can be produced by rewarding the attempt at the behavior and not the outcome (eg, making sure the parents understand that they are being evaluated based on their responses and not based on their child’s behaviors and immediately celebrating their successes in improving their daily practices).
When we teach or ask the user to conduct a new internal (eg, cognitive reframing) or external (eg, exposure) therapeutic process or activity, the quality of our digital message delivery also affects how salient the targeted process will be in the user’s mind. The more immersive, tangible, relatable, and personally tailored the message is, the more salient the targeted process will be. For example, when teaching a user to conduct an exposure paradigm, using automated scenario-based learning with video tutorials and relatable figures will be more immersive cognitively than explanations with texts; a text correspondence through an automated system that asks several questions and then provides personalized feedback and personalized motivational messaging that are meaningful in one’s life will be emotionally more salient than general statements. Furthermore, because stimulus quality plays a significant role in drawing the user’s attention, we must think about how to avoid habituation by not repeatedly presenting similar stimuli . In effect, using novelty, such as changing the delivery medium, message type, and content, is key to maintaining user attention over time.
Finally, because the developers’ goal is to design an effort-related intervention sequence that is sustainable in people’s lives, they have to think about embedding these activities in an environmental context that will then serve as a natural environmental cue . This enables the desired activity to be automatically triggered without having to draw attention to it—a requirement in the first steps of process acquisition. For example, when a desired positive interaction is to share a funny story with their child, parents could be prompted to do this during dinner. In this case, the developer views dinner time as an environmental cue.
From a public health perspective, when an individual is required to engage with a digital health intervention, it also means that unhealthy cognitions become more salient in the individual’s mind—they are available, rewarding, and actionable—otherwise, this person would not need an intervention. Therefore, examining the interaction between salience, effortful behavior, and motivation can help us to understand the type of salience manipulation needed in a particular intervention sequence.
Promoting Desired Activities
presents a model that describes the probability of an activity occurring in the face of competing activities as a function of effort, motivation, and salience. This conceptualization follows Fogg’s [ ] work on determining the probability of a behavior occurring following a trigger based on the relationship between ability and motivation. We use effort instead of ability to stress the importance of subjective experience, which can fluctuate mainly due to levels of effort expenditure prior to a task and the available ego strength available to complete a task.
As shown in, the probability of a behavior occurring is based on the relationship between effort and motivation. Activities located on the same curve have the same probability of occurring either because they are less effortful or because they are more motivating. Furthermore, if 2 prompted events compete over resources (eg, whether parents either yell at their kids or take deep breaths and try to calmly educate them), the activities located on a higher curve have a higher probability of occurring (that is, B will have a higher chance of occurring than A). Salience plays a crucial role in this process. Manipulating the salience of the desired activity (ie, making it more available, rewarding, and actionable) has the potential to increase the chances of the activity occurring in the face of competition by making the activity either more motivating or less effortful.
Availability increases the effortlessness of the targeted behavior because, in one’s subjective experience, there are fewer competing or available activities. For example, having a playlist on the way home from work that includes a 1-minute audioclip that discusses the desired pre-evening activity makes it more available in the person’s mind when they arrive home than other activities.
Actionability increases both effortlessness and motivation. For example, parents are presented with a tangible video that teaches them step-by-step what to do when their child misbehaves (scenario-based learning), then they must confirm their understanding using a worksheet in which they write their own step-by-step process for the exact targeted behavior and print it out, and later that week, when their child acts in a certain way, they can easily identify the event and know exactly what to do. Consequently, they need to exert less effort to identify the trigger and decide on the action.
Incentive salience involves making the reward clear, tangible, and relatable. For example, a parent drives home from work and is prompted to listen to a 1-minute motivational audioclip on the significance of playing together with their child—an audioclip that also directs them to reflect on their time playing with their parent and how meaningful it was. The novelty and emotional activation of this exercise increases the prominence of the reward and the availability of the desired behavior (which, as suggested, also reduces the effort exerted when performing this activity).
Making the Completion of Therapeutic Activities as Effortless as Possible
Developing models that are available, actionable, and rewarding require some effort at the outset of the behavior change process in order to reduce the effort exerted during daily goal-directed behaviors. This approach must also be accompanied by making the tasks themselves as effortless as possible.
Setting Graded and Dynamically Tailored Therapeutic Activities as Targets
The literature points to the importance of setting graded tasks, determining small and achievable goals, and moving forward in small steps as the user succeeds in prior steps . Breaking a distal goal into achievable subgoals increases self-efficacy [ ], which has been shown to be an important factor in determining whether a task will be initiated and successfully performed. From a behavior change standpoint, when using graded tasks, less effort is required for each activity. This increases the user’s ability to engage in the task, thereby increasing the chances that the triggered activity will occur [ , , ]. Critically, the use of graded tasks also involves improvement of the user’s skills or condition in such a way that the next task becomes less effortful to achieve, as highlighted in shaping paradigms [ ]. For example, when an untrained user is triggered by an app to run 5 km for the first time, the amount of effort required to complete this activity may be very high. However, if the user is triggered to run 1 km several times and then 3 km in a graded manner, the amount of effort related to running 5 km might be as little as it was to run 1 km for the first time.
One psychological technique that is not very common in digital interventions (though it could be easily incorporated) is the presentation of an artificial step prior to a subsequent step that otherwise might demand too much effort to complete. For example, when parents are taught to present an appropriate nonharsh consequence in the event of their child’s disobedience [, ], this step may feel like a giant leap, thus demanding plenty of effort in the parents’ mind. We may, therefore, create another step of setting expectations for which parents are directed to sit with their child prior to changing the way they react to them and to simply present the fact that they are going to do whatever they can to help them, meaning the rules of the house are going to change. This strategy enables parents to acquire self-efficacy in a small manner prior to anything else and could be easily incorporated in an adaptive digital program.
As implied, the adaptive nature of the tasks involves taking the user’s state into account. User level of motivation is a moderating factor in determining the amount of effort the person is able to exert. Motivation is expected to fluctuate during the intervention based on prior successes and failures . Users who encounter difficulties may require a different task or path than those who found the task easy to complete based on the interplay between self-efficacy, motivation, and goal achievement. Monitoring activities and user condition will enable the task to be dynamically tailored such that the effort required at any given moment is adequate. For example, adaptive goal interventions change the goal based on the user’s successes or failures in achieving the goal, such as by increasing the number of weekly drinks allowed in a drinking moderation intervention when goals are not being met or, conversely, by changing to abstinence if moderation is being met with repeated failures. The real-time adaptation of the digital intervention is effort-optimized to meet the user’s goals, motivation, and commitment [ ].
Reducing the Effort Required to Engage in Therapeutic Activities
Developers can help to make therapeutic activities less effortful by reducing the cognitive and environmental effort required to successfully complete each activity [- ]. Keeping all the relevant tools for completing a targeted activity within a digital component reduces the cognitive and environmental effort needed to search for those tools elsewhere [ ]. It will be easier for users to follow a diet if the diet app makes all the information about the diet, the availability of support groups, and tools to document calorie intake available in-house [ ].
Another aspect to consider is whether each tool makes it as easy as possible to conduct the desired activity [, ]. For example, it would be easier for users to document their calorie intake if they could simply take a photograph of the meal and have the caloric results calculated automatically. Similarly, when training a behavior increases performance, a system can help to reduce the effort required for the training by providing the means to rehearse it [ ]. Think, for example, of a person who is trying to overcome social phobia through graded tasks and who is now being asked to chat with a person they do not know in a nonjudgmental environment. In such an instance, providing an option of a click-button within the digital platform to connect them with a trained peer [ ] would directly reduce the effort required.
Turning Effort Into Assets
An effort-optimized intervention does not mean that there is no effort on the part of the user. Indeed, effort contributes to sustainable change because the effort people are choosing or willing to make and the way they perceive it substantially impact the therapeutic process, intervention gains, and future effort capacity. Humans think in narratives with players, good and evil, conflicts, and dramatic changes in the plot . Stories create structure because they have an inner rationale that corresponds with the past-present-future tenses, which enables people to predict the future based on the past. Therefore, people are built to create meaning based on their present experiences in a way that rationally fits with their past story and future direction, as captured in their identity, role in the world, and desires [ ].
Effort is a very important ingredient in this process because the effort exerted for an activity will be used to create a meaning that mostly fits within the story we tell about ourselves. Experiments on cognitive dissonance theory and placebo effects strengthen this notion by showing that people who are asked to put more effort into an assignment later perceive it as being more meaningful to them ; meanwhile, people who pay more find a placebo to be more helpful [ ]. Furthermore, several studies have suggested that people prefer to exert effort on a task when they are motivated to enhance their feelings of relatability, ownership, and control over the potential outcome. A notable example involves a US company that produced instant cakes (“just add water”) in the 1940s targeting women maintaining their households. The product did not sell very well until the company removed some ingredients from the mix, such as eggs and milk, which required the baker to do more work during the baking process. It seemed that, with the increased effort, the baker felt greater ownership over the result and more deserving of the compliments for their work [ ]. This phenomenon is described by Ariely as the Ikea effect—a cognitive bias that leads us to place higher value on things that we help to create [ ].
To summarize, effort is a crucial ingredient in the way we create meaning because the amount of effort we invest in an activity impacts the extent to which we build meaningful stories around that activity. Specifically, the more effort we invest in something, the more meaningful we find it and the more committed we are to it. To take a literary example, when the Little Prince tries to explain to the fox what makes his rose different from the thousands of roses that appear to be identical, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important,” he asserts .
Understanding this dynamic is key, as interventions that focus only on effort reduction and do not help people to feel that they have choice, acknowledge their work, and therefore, create meaning around the effort-based behaviors may fail in helping people to stay on the beneficial pathway when new challenges arise. In digital health interventions, people’s efforts can be translated into assets by helping them to acknowledge the meaning of their work. In this way, we reframe effort as something positive by stressing that the effort exerted shows the user’s commitment to and ownership of the therapeutic process. This shift toward a growth mindset and meaning-based acceptance can be embedded in all our work to increase effortlessness and decrease efficacy reductions based on an outcome mindset.
People’s efforts can be turned into investment by documenting the aspects they care about during the therapeutic process [, ]. Because users have already invested in the activity and created some assets, they are more inclined to move forward and keep investing in this path so that their assets will not go to waste. We stress that the desired documentation should be connected to aspects that are highly meaningful in people’s lives, mostly within a social context, such as the time they got to spend with loved ones because they successfully executed an intervention’s task.
These three components of nurturing salience, reducing effort to engage in therapeutic activities, and shifting the meaning of effortful behavior to become an asset can be embedded in both new and existing digital interventions. Whether it be by creating a simple visual diagram of the goal of a lesson at the beginning of a module, playing music in the background randomly to keep users engaged while completing a task, or including a narrative of an effortful journey during periods of declining motivation, we can reduce the effort needed for users to achieve positive outcomes. In turn, this will enable users to achieve their goals without taking away from the core therapeutic skill components of many interventions.
Designing a Digital Health Intervention Sequence Based on the Effort-Optimized Intervention Model
To further clarify the effort-optimized intervention model and how to design a digital intervention sequence accordingly, we provide an example using common intervention content in parent training programs for young children with disruptive behavior disorders [- ] aimed at increasing the positive interactions between parent and child. For brevity, we only discuss the aspects of effort optimization during skill acquisition time, not other important aspects such as persuasive design or the therapeutic alliance nurtured between the user and the program [ , - ]. Our baseline is a standard digital parent training intervention in which parents complete a short interactive module about positive parenting practices. Parents are instructed to increase the positive interactions at home and then directed to the next module a week or two later, depending on success.
Planning an effort-optimized intervention begins with defining the task, considering how it might be perceived by the participant, and identifying competing activities or challenges. In our example, the task is to increase positive interactions when the parent and child are in the same surrounding (eg, at home). For parents, it can be difficult to foster positive interactions because it is not always highly enjoyable at first, especially for those who have not naturally exercised such practices before; parents might not have clear ideas about such interactions and how easily they can be incorporated on a daily basis. Furthermore, such interactions are not necessarily linked to a tangible clear reward. We offer a few common competing events which may require less effort than nurturing a positive interaction with the child (although they are not based on empirical studies, it is important to use clear examples here for didactic reasoning)—by letting a child play a mobile app or watch television which requires much less effort, parents may find that playing with their own mobile device requires less effort and is rewarding in the sense of passing the time, and while parents may have some house chores or work they can do later, finishing them early offers a clear reward. Based on these challenges, developers can use the effort-optimized intervention framework to increase the chances of the desired activity being completed in the face of competition. As shown in, each concept informs the design of the intervention in a way that is directly related to increasing the chances that users will reach their objective despite competition. First, realizing that parents may want to have positive interactions with their child but lack good ideas, we offer these ideas in a concrete way (eg, ideas for what to discuss in the evening). Second, as we believe that parents may find letting their child watch television to be more rewarding than interacting, we have to address this competing activity both directly by helping parents emotionally connect to the difference between the two activities and indirectly by making the desired activity more salient in their mind. Third, we must acknowledge the parents’ effort in order to create assets that help them feel good about the investment they have made. These considerations result in many new features that are not incorporated in a standard online module-based training environment.
|Increasing the task’s availability
|Triggers with relevant content (eg, ideas for what to discuss during dinner) sent in the hour before parents are home from work
Priming parents to ask themselves about opportunities for positive interactions in the face of competing events (eg, thinking that their child would prefer to watch television instead and so not trying) through consistent but variable triggers, such as text questions, motivational scripts, and other minimal cues
|Triggers connecting tangible rewards to the desired activities: “Think of your best memories with your parent. You putting some effort into playing with your child is something that will be far more memorable to you and him/her than times when you both watched separate screens.”
Directing parents to celebrate their positive interactions with their kids and to report on it using a mobile app
Rewarding consistent attempts at behavior over outcomes through the platform (eg, the outcome is engaging in the behavior, not their child’s behavior)
|Creating an actionable script
|A tailored list of positive interactions with brief step-by-step instructions based on an online questionnaire parents were asked to complete.
|Sending all triggers above using different delivery mediums (text, audio, and video), timing (time of day, day, special events), and personas (instructor, peers, celebrity testimonial)
|Embedding tasks based on natural environmental cues
|Directing parents to find one positive activity to conduct during dinner, such as a gratitude exercise that can be trigged through the mobile device in the right time
|Making the completion of therapeutic activities as effortless as possible
|Setting graded tasksa
|Asking parents to pick their preferred activities from an list of relevant activities, which automatically creates their own table that is then available on the website and as a printed version
|Setting dynamically tailored tasksa
|Creating a task list based on efficacy and effort. For example, if the parents report very low efficacy or past failures, a first step may be directing parents to sit with their child when the child is watching television and initiating a conversation
|Turning effort into assets
|Documenting and reflecting on past effort-related activities in a meaningful way
|Documenting reports in an accumulated manner on the home page of the app or website that offers rewards based on the level of engagement (eg, the amount of quality time reported so far). If not engaged, simple motivational statements replace effortful behavior rewards
|Turning effort into a meaningful narrative; reframing effort as positive
|Implementing automated feedback, which presents a narrative of them doing whatever they can to be good parents. For example: “the effort you invested today in trying to play with your kid shows how well you are committed to improve your relationship. You should be proud of yourself.”
aReducing the effort required to engage in therapeutic activities is embedded in this component as well.
Further Considerations, Future Directions, and Conclusions
Research and implementation of the effort-optimized intervention model demand that considerable attention be paid to some specific aspects. From a theoretical perspective, we need to learn more about what prevents people from performing desired behaviors at the individual level, even when they want to achieve them [, ]. Studying such instances will enable developers to design user-centric products with relevant effort-optimized intervention sequences. Another line of research could focus on how people sustain beneficial behaviors over time, and more precisely, when and how competing events emerge and what people experience at these times. This knowledge will enable us to understand whether new triggers need to be incorporated into a future time window in order to avoid depletion. Finally, we need to learn how to develop effort-optimized intervention sequences so that they are not intrusive and thus eventually diminish people’s desire and tendency to self-manage their situation.
The mechanistic study of effort reduction has been explored more in the consumer social media and commerce sectors in the form of A/B testing paradigms. In such paradigms, small changes to the user experience are repeatedly tested to optimize engagement, as small changes often lead to massive shifts in engagement (eg, “like” button, frictionless feed, page load time). While there are significant differences among these activities that require little effort with little meaningful long-term reward—and potentially significant negative consequences over time—their success highlights that, to create positive change, our attention as interventionists needs to shift to increase the 3% to 6% engagement rate in health applications. This is especially true given that research has revealed very few differences in outcomes between interventions with differing content or behavior change targets . Effort-optimized intervention paradigms are designed to ensure that equal weight is placed on the content of our interventions and on how we engage and sustain individuals using common processes that adapt to meet individual needs, both in terms of what people need and how they consume and integrate it into their lives.
Conflicts of Interest
AB has received payment for consulting from Pro-Change Behavior Systems. FM has several patents on using vibration, light and electrical stimulation to induce changes in one’s cardiovascular system.
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Edited by G Eysenbach; submitted 09.10.20; peer-reviewed by M Torok, N Khalili-Mahani; comments to author 02.11.20; revised version received 16.12.20; accepted 16.01.21; published 12.03.21Copyright
©Amit Baumel, Frederick J Muench. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 12.03.2021.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. | <urn:uuid:6de1c93a-c942-4f6d-8780-06d41511b363> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.jmir.org/2021/3/e24905/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474737.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228143955-20240228173955-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.913043 | 11,940 | 2.59375 | 3 | 527 |
Summary: A new study reports dogs have the ability to understand human speech intonation and vocabulary by using similar brain areas to humans.
Dogs have the ability to distinguish vocabulary words and the intonation of human speech through brain regions similar to those that humans use, a new study reports.
Attila Andics et al. note that vocabulary learning “does not appear to be a uniquely human capacity that follows from the emergence of language, but rather a more ancient function that can be exploited to link arbitrary sound sequences to meanings.”
Words are the basic building blocks of human languages, but they are hardly ever found in nonhuman vocal communications. Intonation is another way that information is conveyed through speech, where, for example, praises tend to be conveyed with higher and more varying pitch. Humans understand speech through both vocabulary and intonation.
Here, Andics and colleagues explored whether dogs also depend on both mechanisms. Dogs were exposed to recordings of their trainers’ voices as the trainers spoke to them using multiple combinations of vocabulary and intonation, in both praising and neutral ways. For example, trainers spoke praise words with a praising intonation, praise words with a neutral intonation, neutral words with a praising intonation, and neutral words with neutral intonation.
Researchers used fMRI to analyze the dogs’ brain activity as the animals listened to each combination. Their results reveal that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognizing each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain.
Also like humans, the researchers found that dogs process intonation separately from vocabulary, in auditory regions in the right hemisphere of the brain.
Lastly, and also like humans, the team found that the dogs relied on both word meaning and intonation when processing the reward value of utterances. Thus, dogs seem to understand both human words and intonation.
The authors note that it is possible that selective forces during domestication could have supported the emergence of the brain structure underlying this capability in dogs, but, such rapid evolution of speech-related hemispheric asymmetries is unlikely. Humans, they say, are only unique in their ability to invent words.
About this language research article
Source:AAAS Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Enik Kubinyi. Original Research:Abstract for “Neural mechanisms for lexical processing in dogs” by A. Andics, A. Gábor, M. Gácsi, T. Faragó, D. Szabó, and Á. Miklósi in Science. Published online August 30 2016 doi:10.1126/science.aaf3777
Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article
[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]AAAS “Dogs Understand Both Vocabulary and Intonation of Human Speech.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 31 August 2016. <https://neurosciencenews.com/dog-human-speech-understanding-4936/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]AAAS (2016, August 31). Dogs Understand Both Vocabulary and Intonation of Human Speech. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved August 31, 2016 from https://neurosciencenews.com/dog-human-speech-understanding-4936/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]AAAS “Dogs Understand Both Vocabulary and Intonation of Human Speech.” https://neurosciencenews.com/dog-human-speech-understanding-4936/ (accessed August 31, 2016).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]
Neural mechanisms for lexical processing in dogs
During speech processing, human listeners can separately analyze lexical and intonational cues to arrive at a unified representation of communicative content. The evolution of this capacity can be best investigated by comparative studies. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored whether and how dog brains segregate and integrate lexical and intonational information. We found a left-hemisphere bias for processing meaningful words, independently of intonation; a right auditory brain region for distinguishing intonationally marked and unmarked words; and increased activity in primary reward regions only when both lexical and intonational information were consistent with praise. Neural mechanisms to separately analyze and integrate word meaning and intonation in dogs suggest that this capacity can evolve in the absence of language.
“Neural mechanisms for lexical processing in dogs” by A. Andics, A. Gábor, M. Gácsi, T. Faragó, D. Szabó, and Á. Miklósi in Science. Published online August 30 2016 doi:10.1126/science.aaf3777 | <urn:uuid:790ddf1a-9e52-4167-b193-c143f2822e8b> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://neurosciencenews.com/dog-human-speech-understanding-4936/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475806.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302084508-20240302114508-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.898032 | 1,028 | 3.265625 | 3 | 528 |
Social worker licensing and education in Canada
It’s a common misconception that social workers are only available in a community service role or in hospitals—social service workers and social workers are different. Social workers are therapists who work with individuals, families or other groups to address mental health needs in the context of social systems (family, culture, legal, etc.). They can be booked through First Session, and they’re often covered by workplace benefits.
Social Worker licensing and education in Alberta
At minimum, a diploma in Social Work is required to become a social worker in Alberta and to register with the Alberta College of Social Workers. Additional designations can be achieved with a Bachelor’s of Social Work (BSW) or a Master’s of Social Work (MSW).
In Alberta, becoming a Registered Clinical Social Worker (RCSW) requires additional advanced clinical certifications.
Social Worker licensing and education in British Columbia
Becoming a Registered Social Worker (RSW) in British Columbia requires, at minimum, a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution and passing a licensure exam. They can then register with the British Columbia College of Social Workers (BCCSW). More advanced job opportunities typically require a Master’s of Social Work (MSW).
Becoming Registered Clinical Social Worker (RSCW) requires advanced clinical certifications.
Social worker licensing and education in Manitoba
Social workers in Manitoba will have either a bachelor’s of social work (BSW) or a master’s of social work (MSW) and complete 5,600 hours of practice work before they can register with the Manitoba College of Social Workers.
Social worker licensing and education in New Brunswick
Social workers in New Brunswick will hold at least a Master’s level degree, and complete some supervised practice experience to register with the New Brunswick Association of Social Workers.
Social worker licensing and education in Newfoundland & Labrador
To become a Registered Social Worker (RSW) in Newfoundland & Labrador, they must complete a bachelor’s degree in social work and 700 hours of field placement, or have a master’s or doctorate degree (PhD). RSWs in Newfoundland & Labrador will be registered with the Newfoundland & Labrador College of Social Workers.
Social worker licensing and education in Northwest Territories
To become a Registered Social Worker (RSW) in Northwest Territories, they must complete a bachelor’s degree education and register with the Office of the Registrar, Professional Licensing with the Department of Health and Social Services. The Office also oversees Licensed Social Workers (LSW), which requires a diploma degree education.
Social worker licensing and education in Nova Scotia
To become a Registered Social Worker in Nova Scotia, they must have a bachelor’s or master’s degree, and complete 2,500 hours of practice after graduation to register with he Nova Scotia College of Social Workers. In Nova Scotia, to work in private practice, they must apply to do so through the college.
Social worker licensing and education in the Nunavut and the Yukon
Yukon and Nunavut do not currently require registration to practice as a social worker, but social workers in those regions are encouraged to voluntarily join The Association of Social Workers in Northern Canada (ASWNC), which also advocates for continued legislation for social work in the territories. In 2021, the Nunavut Arctic College announced their first degree program in Social Work.
Social Worker licensing and education in Ontario
A Registered Social Worker (RSW) requires, at minimum, a bachelor’s degree, and More advanced job opportunities typically require a Master’s of Social Work (MSW). Both require registration with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers.
The Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers also oversees Registered Social Service Workers (RSSW), a role that requires a diploma.
Note: there is no title of Registered Clinical Social Worker (RCSW) in Ontario.
Social worker licensing and education in Prince Edward Island
Social workers in PEI must complete at least a master’s level education, then four years of field experience to register with the Prince Edward Island Social Work Registration Board. Thereafter, 25 hours per year of continuing education are required to maintain standing with the Board.
Social worker licensing and education in Quebec
In Quebec, social workers are regulated by the Professional Code (which also oversees family and marriage therapists). To be certified to work as a social worker in Quebec, they must obtain a degree in social work in Quebec or France, or already be a certified social worker elsewhere in Canada, usually within the last five years.
Social workers in Quebec are overseen by the Ordre des travailleurs sociaux et thérapeutes conjugaux et familiaux du Québec. Social workers and marriage/family therapists in Quebec can also offer psychotherapy if they obtain a psychotherapy permit from the Order of Psychologists of Quebec.
Social worker licensing and education in Saskatchewan
Social workers in Saskatchewan must obtain, at-minimum, a bachelor’s degree in social work. Social workers are regulated in Saskatchewan, but unlike other provinces they are overseen and governed by their professional association, the Saskatchewan Association of Social Workers, instead of by a college.
They must complete 40 hours of continuing professional education, annually, to maintain membership. In Saskatchewan, Registered Clinical Social Worker (RCSW) requires additional advanced clinical certifications, which allows them to assess and diagnose disorders.
Nicole Laoutaris is a freelance writer and adult learning professional based in the Greater Toronto Area. She specializes in educational content for brands and companies in industries such as mental health, pet health, lifestyle and wellness, cannabis, and personal finance. Nicole holds a double undergraduate degree in Communications and Film studies from Wilfrid Laurier University, and post-graduate certificate in Corporate Communications from Seneca College. She currently lives in Hamilton Ontario with her spouse and her cat. | <urn:uuid:d7c964bb-abf4-4da4-a4eb-af4787acf76c> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.firstsession.com/resources/types-of-therapists-social-worker-licensing-education-canada | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476397.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20240303174631-20240303204631-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.927215 | 1,221 | 2.625 | 3 | 529 |
News about the Colorado shooting – level 3
New photos have emerged which were taken at the chaotic aftermath of the Colorado shooting. The pictures are of the cinema’s auditorium where the gunman James Holmes killed 12 people who were watching a midnight premiere of Batman. More than 70 others were injured.
Prosecutors released the images in response to open record requests. They show the elaborate home-made explosives in Holmes’s apartment which he had rigged into a potentially deadly booby trap.
Holmes moved from California to Colorado in 2011 and started up his graduate neuroscience course at the University of Colorado in Denver. But he dropped out after a year. By that time, he was well into planning the attack and stockpiling ammunition.
He had three guns he used with intent to kill on the 20th July 2012. He dressed head-to-toe in body armour before slipping into the packed cinema.
More than three years after the attack, Holmes was sentenced to life in prison without parole in August.
Difficult words: chaotic (when a lot of things happen at one time), aftermath (the situation after a disaster), auditorium (the room where an audience sits), prosecutor (a lawyer who is trying to prove in a court of law that someone is guilty of a crime), elaborate (detailed and complicated), rig (to set up), booby trap (a hidden bomb that explodes when you touch something else that is connected to it), stockpile (to keep many things of the same kind), ammunition (bullets), parole (to let somebody leave prison early if he or she behaves well), intent (plan), packed (full of people).
LEARN 3000 WORDS with NEWS IN LEVELS
News in Levels is designed to teach you 3000 words in English. Please follow the instructions
How to improve your English with News in Levels:
- Do the test at Test Languages.
- Go to your level. Go to Level 1 if you know 1-1000 words. Go to Level 2 if you know 1000-2000 words. Go to Level 3 if you know 2000-3000 words.
- Read two news articles every day.
- Read the news articles from the day before and check if you remember all new words.
- Listen to the news from today and read the text at the same time.
- Listen to the news from today without reading the text.
- Answer the question under today’s news and write the answer in the comments. | <urn:uuid:1d314484-e6d5-430d-a5e4-921a79c3d0ad> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.newsinlevels.com/products/news-about-the-colorado-shooting-level-3/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707948217723.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20240305024700-20240305054700-00804.warc.gz | en | 0.957973 | 504 | 2.546875 | 3 | 530 |
Summary: Non-invasive auricular transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (atVNS), applied to an accessible area of the ear, improves memory in mouse models of intellectual disability.
Source: UPF Barcelona
Researchers at UPF are testing a new non-invasive method of stimulating the vagus nerve in mice that improves their memory. They have shown for the first time that electrostimulation in the ear of intellectual disability rodent models leads to a cognitive improvement.
The study is the result of a collaboration between research groups at the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS) and the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC). It has been coordinated by the researcher Andrés Ozaita, principal investigator at the Neuropharmacology Laboratory-NeuroPhar, and is published in the journal Brain Stimulation.
Stimulation of the vagus nerve emerged as a therapy to treat epilepsy and depression that do not respond to drugs, because the ramifications of this nerve carry information to deregulated areas of the brain in both diseases. Some of these regions like the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus, are also required for attention and memory. For this reason, the technique has also been found to produce cognitive improvement.
Initially, stimulation was carried out invasively, surgically implanting the device that applies electrical impulses. Subsequently, non-invasive approaches were developed, which stimulate the skin’s surface in areas in which the branches of the nerve pass.
Previous studies had revealed the modulation of memory using invasive and non-invasive approaches in animal models and in humans, but non-invasive transcutaneous (through the skin) approaches had not been tested so far in mouse models.
Researchers at the Biomedical Electronics Research Group developed an electrode to allow non-invasive electrostimulation of the vagus nerve in mice. “Mikel Domingo-Gainza, a student of the bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering, built the electrode during his bachelor’s degree final project”, explains Antoni Ivorra, leader of the Biomedical Electronics Research Group (BERG) and DTIC lecturer. The device is applied in an accessible area of the mouse’s ear, which is reached by branches of the vagus nerve.
“We show that this technology achieves a behavioral effect of cognitive enhancement in mice”, explains Anna Vázquez-Oliver, co-first author of the article. “We use a test to evaluate the memory in which we value whether the mouse remembers objects it is familiar with. After electrostimulation, the animals achieved better results in the test, their memory lasted longer”, she adds. This would be the first proof in mice; in rats it had been shown that applying electrostimulation to the ear yielded brain responses –more neurotransmitter activity–, but no effect on behavior had been demonstrated.
They then tested the potential of the protocol in a mouse model of fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited intellectual disability, which usually shows poor performance in object recognition memory. Transcutaneous stimulation also improved their memory, which supports its relevance in cognitive modulation in the intellectual disability mice model.
In the words of Cecilia Brambilla-Pisoni, co-first author of the study, “the activity we are generating artificially in the fibers of the vagus nerve would produce an activation of areas of the brain that are important for memory. We hypothesize that an increased release of noradrenaline would occur, making the information better consolidated”.
Andrés Ozaita notes that “the results confirm the potential of this therapeutic tool that is worth exploring in the context of neurodevelopmental disorders, as previously proposed for invasive forms”. Knowing that this technique is functional opens up an important field at the pre-clinical level, since it can be applied to animal models of other diseases. “Now we are focusing on the cellular and molecular results produced by this intervention to be able to elucidate the mechanisms involved”, he concludes.
Funding: Anna Vázquez-Oliver has a predoctoral grant from the Training Programme of the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation to investigate in the treatment of intellectual disability. Cecilia Brambilla-Pisoni received an Inphinit scholarship from La Caixa Foundation. The study has been funded by a Marie Slodowska-Curie scholarship, from the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Competitiveness (MINECO), the Carlos III Health Institute, the Catalan Government, ICREA, the “María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence”, and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
About this neuroscience research article
Source: UPF Barcelona Media Contacts: UPF – UPF Barcelona Image Source: The image is credited to UPF.
Auricular transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation improves memory persistence in naïve mice and in an intellectual disability mouse model
Highlights • Auricular transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation was performed in anesthetized mice. • atVNS enhanced non-emotional memory persistence in naïve mice. • atVNS improved memory performance in the Fmr1 KO mouse model for fragile X syndrome.
Background Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) using non-invasive approaches have attracted great attention due to their anti-epileptic, anti-depressive and pro-cognitive effects. It has been proposed that auricular transcutaneous VNS (atVNS) could benefit intellectual disability disorders, but preclinical data supporting this idea is limited.
Objective To develop an atVNS device for mice and to test its efficacy on memory performance in naïve mice and in a mouse model for intellectual disability.
Methods Naïve outbreed CD-1 mice and a model for fragile X syndrome, the Fmr1 knockout (Fmr1KO), were used to assess the effect of atVNS in the novel object-recognition memory performance.
Results We found that atVNS significantly improves memory persistence in naïve mice. Notably, atVNS was efficacious in normalizing the object-recognition memory deficit in the Fmr1KO model.
Conclusion Our data show that atVNS improves memory persistence in naïve mice and in a model of intellectual disability and support further studies taking advantage of preclinical mouse models of cognitive disorders. | <urn:uuid:792f39c7-b148-41a0-bf62-5b34c0dff586> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-stimulation-memory-15583/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473598.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221234056-20240222024056-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.924867 | 1,326 | 2.734375 | 3 | 531 |
As we continue to be socially, emotionally, physically and mentally impacted by COVID-19, our concern about “academic loss” must be met though the lens of healing.
This pandemic has exacerbated the stress, anxiety, frustration and overwhelm our educators and students have been experiencing for a long time.
Schools that prioritize student and staff social-emotional well-being will likely see a faster return to academic gains.
In order to develop these competencies, we need a new paradigm for BEING together in classrooms and as a school community. A lens of healing acknowledges the collective trauma we have all suffered this past year as well as the frustration surrounding continued uncertainty.
A healing lens brings relief and repair when toxic stress, anxiety and the mental health challenges interfere with ones ability to cope and participate in learning.
We know the constraints that classrooms face each day – time, space, physical resources of hands-on help and more.
……the essential need to cultivate calm, safety, and connection in our classrooms – for our students, educators and administrators before academic rigor.
This is proven through the neuroscience. The brain is programmed to protect before it can learn anything. Calm, safe, connected classrooms help students to “feel” protected and this opens their mind/brain/body/heart for learning.
Calm, safety and connection are internal as well as external states. They can be taught.
I know that the thought of teaching something else, may sound like an insurmountable task.
This is where we come in.
We designed this bundle to be a comprehensive way of helping students develop the awareness and management skills needed to be able to self-regulate.
Self-regulation is a nervous system state of balance, which supports an individuals capacity to handle the present moment demands of a situation or task. Self-regulation is a key aspect of social-emotional learning, behavior management and academic success. A regulated nervous system is able to remain focused, calm, attentive, engaged, communicative, and compassionate.
Our approach to mindfulness and social-emotional learning, prepares each adult who works with children, to confidently implement short (2 minutes), evidence-based, trauma-responsive activities in K-5th grade classrooms, counseling groups, therapy sessions and more.
This CLASSROOM RESOURCE PACKAGE includes:
“EDUCATE 2B” includes step by step breathing, movement, and mindfulness strategies that align with SEL, PBIS and RTI; trauma-informed guidelines; and techniques for educator well-being (YES, that is essential for YOU and your students).
The manual provides insight for educators to understand the internal state of the human brain and nervous system and the role they play on behavior. The content addresses developmental differences, mental health issues, trauma and other classroom challenges (such as returning to school after a year long pandemic). Additionally, reproducible worksheets are available for teachers to utilize in their classrooms. | <urn:uuid:bbfa1666-2023-41d6-b91e-9c9cb838cb9d> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://zensationalkids.com/classroom-bundle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473598.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221234056-20240222024056-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.942654 | 611 | 2.953125 | 3 | 532 |
Test your knowledge of neuroscience with Dr. David L. Felten's fun, fast, and full-color Netter's Neuroscience Flash Cards. These portable, updated cards let you quiz yourself on anatomy, pathophysiology, and clinical presentation. They now include imaging content and offer increased clinical correlations and new concept summaries. Illustrations from Netter's Atlas of Neuroscience, 2nd Edition, emphasize the essentials of human neuroscience for a quick, yet in-depth review, complete with labeling, explanations, and color codes that cross-reference the atlas.
- Master the structures and clinical points most important to a basic medical neuroscience course.
- Use the cards before exams or boards, or throughout clinical rotations, residency, or in practice for a fast review of the nervous system.
- Cross-reference with Netter's Atlas of Neuroscience, 2nd Edition, for further information on any topic.
- Review clinical 'pearls' and helpful summary information on the back of each card to understand the clinical implications of neuroscience concepts.
- Use the card set's pre-punched holes and convenient binding ring to carry selected groups of flash cards with you anywhere.
New to This Edition
View more neuroimaging examples to assess your grasp of this important subject.
Make clinically important correlations in neuroanatomy, cell biology, and neurophysiology.
Table of Contents
- Section 1: Overview of the Nervous System
- Section 2: Regional Neuroscience
- Section 3: Systemic Neuroscience
By David L. Felten, MD, PhD, The William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, MI, USA | <urn:uuid:b1ff9d0c-12fe-4010-a441-ec238aefe218> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://somatics.org/shop/products/netter/neuroscience_flashcards | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474377.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223085439-20240223115439-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.848866 | 334 | 2.75 | 3 | 533 |
Database of Case Studies
Project Title: Atomic Learning
Organization: Atomic Learning, Inc.
Contact: Dan Meyer, Chief Executive Officer
Date First Implemented: 2000
Audience: The original target audience was K–12 teachers in the upper Midwest (in and around Minnesota) but now includes educators from more than 47 countries, plus a component for higher education.
Need: The original target audience was K–12 teachers in the upper Midwest (in and around Minnesota) but now includes educators from more than 47 countries, plus a component for higher education. In the late 1990s, a network of technology coordinators in Minnesota had routinely gotten together to talk about issues they faced helping schools integrate technology, and training was a frequent topic of discussion. Before teachers could truly integrate the new digital technologies in teaching in learning, they required a foundation of basic technology skills. The group set out to use technology to answer common questions related to basic technology skills in order to have more time to work on technology integration issues. Those short technology tutorials were later launched as the new company, Atomic Learning.
Intended Outcomes: The original intent was to provide just-in-time training or to address a teachable moment related primarily to software that was finding its way into classroom in the late 90s. It was not originally intended to be courseware or to provide courses on a topic that took a substantial amount of time to complete. As the service has grown and the number of teachers who have developed foundational skills has increased, the focus has changed from “how do I learn . . . ?” to “how do I apply . . . ?” Atomic Learning now provides more resources related to integration practices as well as 21st century skills and assessments; however, they still provide basic skills training and support more than 150 software applications.
Incentives: Participants receive certificates of completion.
Instructional Design Considerations: The original constraint was that the tutorial sessions had to be presented within a 3-minute timeframe. Bandwidth was originally an issue, but Meyer says that if it took longer than 3 minutes, the idea was that you were probably trying to answer a different question. The “atom” refers to the core idea or kernel of the idea you were trying to answer.
Designers include experts on the software as well as pedagogical experts, sometimes practicing teachers.
Lessons Learned: The 3-minute “atom” of learning that has been the guiding principle for the development of learning objects provided by Atomic Learning has become its strength. During the school day, teachers often only have small blocks of time to conduct research or confirm a process, and that 3-minute opportunity filled an important need.
Customers wanted to be able to measure progress, with pressure for a quick and easy forced-choice assessment being a common request, but the short segments did not lend themselves well to such an assessment. These types of assessments especially did not lend themselves well to the philosophy of the Atomic Learning staff. Skills can be assessed by reviewing the application of skills embedded in projects. Teachers requested and now can receive certificates of completion that show they have completed segments of training.
Meyers reports that starting out as educators helped because they felt they understood schools and their needs. But over time, needs change, and you have to be careful to listen to your customers to meet their needs.
Technology can change quickly. Meyers notes that you can build interest and get the word out through early adopters, but to build for sustainability, sometimes you have to slow down and let people catch up to you.
Evaluation: Atomic Learning conducts a yearly customer survey of their large user base that helps them determine new features and enhancements. They also conduct focus groups in the product development process to provide formative feedback.
Comprehensive Literacy Program
Project Title: Comprehensive Literacy Program
Organization: Edvantia, Inc. for the Tennessee Department of Education
Contact: John Ross, former Senior R&D Specialist
Date First Implemented: 2004
Audience: K–3 teachers and principals; K–12 teachers of special education
Need: The new Reading First program provided an influx of funds to states and provided an increased opportunity for professional development that encouraged the use of research-based practices to improve literacy instruction for early readers. The Tennessee Department of Education identified online professional development as a strategy for providing access to the same high-quality professional development to all faculty in all 56 (later 75) schools that received Reading First funds and contracted with Edvantia to design and deliver the professional development.
Intended Outcomes: The goal of the first year was to provide access to the same high-quality content to all 56 Reading First schools in Tennessee. There were not sufficient funds to hire external evaluators to visit all schools or a representative sample of the schools, so the literacy leader—funded by the grant—was included in the training in order to help determine if faculty at Reading First schools were indeed incorporating skills and knowledge from the professional development in their instruction. A pretest and posttest with questions matched to the objectives of the instruction were developed to monitor changes in participant knowledge. The project continued for 5 years, and a second course was developed and launched in the fall of 2004 due to popular demand by the participants in the first course.
Incentives: Schools applied for Reading First funds. Faculty and administrators at schools that received these funds were required to participate in one of the two 13-week courses per year using funds from the grant and received 30 professional development hours for their participation.
Instructional Design Considerations: Building on the expertise of internal staff in face-to-face professional development as well as multimedia and online instructional design, the course was designed to provide an online experience that capitalized on the best research available for online professional development. Special attention was paid to the development of learning communities and to the needs of adult learners. Reading-specific content and skill acquisition were emphasized over technical skills. Guidelines for content development included internally developed instructional design guidelines as well as application of Keller’s (1987) ARCS model of motivational design.
Lessons Learned: There were two significant barriers to success identified by participants: time and technology. Teachers reported lack of time to complete the course and a conflict with too many other school commitments. Strategies to address the barrier of time developed through consultation with participants include making sure there is buy-in for the program from the principal and that the school leadership places as much value on the online program as any other professional development program. Most teachers completed the course at school, so time should be made available during or immediately before or after the school day to allow teachers to work on the activities in the course.
The most common problem faced by participants was forgotten passwords, and several automated password reminder options were programmed into the system. Several technology-specific problems were noted, including older computers or low-bandwidth Internet connections. Because the course included videos, CDs containing all videos and handouts were mailed to each school to allow teachers to access these materials offline, if necessary. Other technology problems included not being able to install software, such as media players or Acrobat Reader, on school computers. Pop-up blockers, spam blockers, firewalls, and districts that used network caching software also prevented some participants from accessing the content or receiving automated e-mails generated by the system. Program staff attempted to bypass these problems by including answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on the website as well as including these topics in the facilitator (literacy leader) training and supporting materials.
A “group self-paced” model was developed for the program based on the premise of developing an online learning community that already has a designated leader with some content expertise. The course included supports for this leader, such as a facilitator’s notebook and companion CD, guidance on preparing for course modules at the beginning of each, additional tips and hints indicated by a leader icon throughout the content, administrative reports to monitor group progress, and a separate online leader community in which they can ask questions and share advice.
Evaluation: The tests developed for the course consist of a 68-question pretest and five matched posttests corresponding to the learning objectives for the five modules. Participants were also given a chance to complete an online evaluation of each training module. Web-based discussion boards were available to participants to help address questions and share advice and information on the programs. Additionally, upon completion of the professional development, Literacy Leaders from each school participated in focus group interviews and a postprogram satisfaction survey.
Pretest and posttest scores of the participants were compared during the first semester, and significant gains were made by the participants as a whole. Posttest average scores were above 80% for every module. Further analysis compared scores by groups of literacy staff (Literacy Leaders and reading resource teachers) versus all others (classroom teachers, administrators, and unknown positions). The posttest scores for the classroom teacher/administrator group showed a significantly larger increase than those of literacy experts.
When interviewed, a majority of the literacy leaders reported that the initial reaction to the program was not positive; however, by the end of the program, literacy leaders report an overwhelming positive reaction to the program by their teachers, with agreement at a rate of 2:1 that their teachers ended up liking the program.
Keller, J. M. (1987). Strategies for stimulating the motivation to learn. Performance and Instruction, 26(8), 1–7.
Creating Powerful Online Learning
Project Title: Creating Powerful Online Learning
Organization: Created by EdLabGroup, now offered by Peer-Ed
Contact: Matt Huston, Director of Online Learning
Date First Implemented: 2007
Audience: K–12 educators, most in the Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho)
Need: Matt Huston became involved with the Concord Consortium and the then-new Virtual High School as a teacher in 1996–1997 and received experience taking and later developing and facilitating online courses. Concord’s facilitation model emphasizes facilitated, guide-on-the-side instruction, which puts the onus of learning on the learner. Huston reports that in the Northwest region, where he is currently located, there was a growing interest in providing online learning, whether completely online or in a hybrid format. Huston combined his current work with the Microsoft Peer Coaching Program with his knowledge about and experience with developing rigorous online learning to create this 6-week professional development course to address the growing interest of educators in the Northwest to provide online learning.
Intended Outcomes: Huston developed a 6-week online learning course to help educators understand how to develop online learning of their own. Huston’s vision includes the following four expectations: 1. Participants would engage in collaborative online learning; they would learn how to be online learners through participation. 2. Participants would engage in collaborative online course-building; they would learn how to be online designers using a hands-on approach and, in the process, gain comfort and skill in using an online learning management system. 3. Participants would use web affordances—video, fee-free texts, and other relevant resources found on the Web—as they designed their courses. 4. Participants would engage with one another in a course designed to promote deep understanding and would be encouraged to use the underlying understanding-based course design principles when they built their courses.
Of these, Huston’s observation is that approximately 90% or more of the participants achieved the first two expectations, with approximately 75% or more of the participants achieving the third expectation. Adopting an understanding-based course design principle garnered much interest but was harder to accomplish in a 6-week span; Huston estimates perhaps half of the participants successfully adopted the principles in courses they developed.
Incentives: Participants can receive credit in the form of clock hours or, for an additional fee, university credit. Certificates of completion are provided. Participants are also given a course in Moodle to practice with during the class that they can then take with them and load on a different Moodle server after completing the professional development.
Instructional Design Considerations: Huston used a backwards-design approach, Understanding by Design (UBD), to develop content. Using UBD, Huston determined core understandings he wanted the participants to achieve and worked backwards to choose and sequence activities. He also incorporated principles from Teaching for Understanding to help the participants come to a clearer understanding of their own learning. The use of these principles can help participants subsequently create activities that draw upon higher levels of cognition that go beyond recall and identification.
Because of his experience with the Concord Consortium, Huston incorporated facilitated collaboration and considers it a critical component of the course design. Facilitators prompt discussion with one or two probing questions designed to provoke critical reflection on the content and the users’ experiences. They summarize participant responses but seek deeper responses from participants about the tensions raised during the conversation by responding with probing questions to the group rather than individuals. Every week in the 6-week course featured one, two, or three significant collaborative activities. Initially, most of these were discussion; towards the end of the course, as participants spend more time building their own courses, the collaboration is more likely to focus around design and content choices, with one or a few trusted colleagues offering feedback.
Lessons Learned: Based on his experience, Huston offered the following design advice: “Be sure to budget time and resources, and do additional learning on your own part as needed” for each of the following key elements:
–“Assessing your participants’ needs carefully. What attitudes, skills, knowledge, and understanding should participants have by the end of the course? Which of those do they already have? The difference is the gap you seek to fill.”
–“Working with clients (or potential participants if there are no formal clients) on the course goals and objectives. If your OPD is reading- or science-focused, the content, goals, and objectives will be very different than if your OPD is focused on preparing teachers from a variety of disciplines to become online facilitators.”
–“Writing, testing, revising, and arranging compelling activities that are just-in-time for your participants. You may want to think about weaving themes throughout your course. For a particular type of online professional development, one theme might be ‘Web 2.0 tools.’ In Week 1, you might introduce the theme and a single tool, plus a couple of academic applications for it; in Week 2, you might ask participants to research and describe potential in-classroom uses of a single, useful-seeming Web 2.0 tool; in Week 4, you might ask participants to form a small group and design part of an activity employing one Web 2.0 tool—with the proviso that the activity must address understanding, not lower level tasks.”
–“Designing a simple, consistent, pleasing interface in the learning management system you are using. Participants will appreciate your use of consistent week or section syntax; a logical arrangement of activities within each week or section; and easily accessible key documents, such as a course syllabus, list of resources, and final evaluation.”
–“Assessing your participants’ progress continually. Embedded formative assessment is a powerful instructional strategy that is more accessible as the proportion of hands-on, constructivist activities rises. An end-of-course evaluation matters because participants will, one hopes, be honest about those activities that did and did not work well for them; this feedback will help you revise the course (or know that revision is not needed) for future cohorts. Longer term feedback regarding whether and how participants have applied the understandings they gained from your OPD matters as well.”
Evaluation: Early on, the course was offered online and later in a hybrid setting with a school district in Washington. Feedback from the participants in the hybrid setting was used to revise and refine the course, including the fully online version.
Each 6-week course concludes with a participant evaluation that asks for qualitative data on their experience in the course. These evaluations have been quite positive, with an 80+% satisfaction rating with the course.
In the winter of 2009–2010, Huston surveyed 30 of the participants who took the course between 2008 and 2009 and asked longer term evaluative questions such as “Did the course impact your teaching? If no, why not? If yes, how did it impact your teaching, and how do you know the course had that impact?” The results were widely varied but revealed several important findings that both reassured Huston that participants were using material and practices from the course and provided some suggestions for further revising the course to best meet teachers’ needs.
EdTech Leaders Online
Project Title: EdTech Leaders Online
Organization: Educational Development Center, Inc. (EDC)
Contact: Barbara Treacy, Director
Date First Implemented: 2000
Audience: K–12 teachers and school administrators
Need: EDC, a nonprofit educational institution, wanted to help districts, states, institutions of higher education, and others provide high-quality professional development. This grant-funded program grew out of earlier research on experimenting with online learning in a collaborative effort between EDC and the Harvard Graduate School of Education originally funded by the AT&T foundation. AT&T wanted to scale up the opportunity, so in the fall of 2000, EDC took the challenge to build the EdTech Leaders Online (ETLO) program to scale high-quality professional development online. ETLO then became the core online professional development partner of the of the 10-state e-Learning for Educators Ready to Teach Grant funded in 2005 by the U.S. Department of Education to Alabama Public Television.
Need: EDC was intent on finding an effective way to provide professional development to educators. They experimented with technology as the medium, but the goal was high-quality professional development.
Incentives: Participants get a certificate for the amount of hours in the course. Graduate credit is available for a fee from Antioch University. State programs may offer graduate credit or continuing education units according to state guidelines.
Instructional Design Considerations: EDC uses a learning community model with discussion at its core. The program has required the use of a strong facilitated online discussion to help support a learning community model. Some synchronous webconferencing has been used, but sparingly because EDC wants to still provide the flexibility to allow participants to meet their weekly learning goals on their own schedules.
Courses are based on week-long sessions that include readings, online and offline activities, and a focused discussion prompt. Their design encourages carefully crafted prompts to engage participants and encourage them to be reflective in their responses. There are goals for the week aligned to goals for the overall course. The discussions actually become one of the ways to determine what and whether the teachers are learning.
Project-based learning is another strategy EDC incorporates. Besides the weekly projects, there is often a culminating final project that is built through the progress of the course. Local courses include projects with outcomes that teachers or administrators can implement in their school, district, or organizations. These projects are another way learning can be assessed.
According to Treacy, “Less is more.” Limited funds helps you learn to design tightly. Content must be aligned to the learning goals. Again, she discourages throwing multimedia in just to have it. “Be judicious. Just because two readings are good, 25 aren’t better.” Stay focused on helping the learning to be better.
Lessons Learned: EDC uses a capacity building approach in which the participants are not just signing up to take a course but are being involved in a program in which they learn how to teach online as well as create content in a range of grades and subject areas. Learning to teach is the first part, but then participants deliver online courses in the year following the training. This has allowed EDC to develop a community of trained online designers and facilitators.
EDC has tried to build in addressing the “Why” question (the focus of Chapter 1) as a core aspect of the program. Common questions, reports Treacy, are “Why are you interested in online learning? What goals are you trying to meet? What’s the connection with other initiatives?” EDC really wants the leadership to understand what they’re getting into and why they’re getting into it, so they can really become engaged in the process.
The earliest programs were presented using HTML webpages that were fairly quickly moved to a learning management system (LMS). EDC was trying to build a scalable program, and the LMS offered opportunities for scaling the program. Recently, with the explosion of Web 2.0 and virtual meeting tools, the program has tried to investigate how these tools might support the delivery of high-quality professional development. Not every tool was appropriate. Different tools serve different learning goals and different learners. According to Treacy, “It’s important not to throw in tools for the tool’s sake. Participants will push back if the tool is not making it easier or better. It has to increase learning or make it more efficient to be useful.”
Treacy’s excitement over the impact of the program is palpable. As she notes, “It’s exciting to see the many different ways the core training and courses the program provides have impacted local programs in unique ways. When we’ve aligned our program to local goals, that’s when we’ve done our job well.” For example, in one state in the program, the online courses offered by locally trained facilitators enabled teachers on emergency certificates to obtain the professional development they needed to stay in the classroom.
Evaluation: EDC uses pre- and post-surveys and conducts annual evaluation reports. Boston College recently completed an evaluation report over multiple years of participation titled e-Learning for Educators. Effects of Online Professional Development on Teachers and Their Students (O’Dwyer et al., 2010) is available from the project website. Results show that teacher participants are learning and liked learning online. They report using what they learned online with their students. There is indication of retention of what they have learned, even after 6 months. The results are consistent across settings, such as rural, urban, novice, state-by-state, or different grade levels.
Reference: O’Dwyer, L. M., Masters, J., Dash, S., De Kramer, R. M., Humez, A., & Russell, M. (2010). E-learning for educators: Effects of online professional development on teachers and their students. Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College.
e-Learning for Educators: Missouri
Project Title: e-Learning for Educators: Missouri
Organization: eMINTS (enhancing Missouri’s Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies) National Center
Contact: Christie Terry, Missouri Program Director
Date First Implemented: 2003
Audience: K–12 Teachers
Need: eMINTS is a successful professional development program that helps K–12 teachers use technology to transform learning in their classrooms. Five years ago, the eMINTS National Center was offered an opportunity to participate in a Ready-to-Teach grant application to help build the capacity of the participating states in the development of online professional development. With the eMINTS staff’s expertise in technology and professional development, it was a natural move to add the online professional development piece of e-Learning for Educators to the eMINTS National Center’s repertoire.
Intended Outcomes: The Ready-to-Teach grant outcomes closely mirrored goals that eMINTS already had established: to build a cadre of educators who could both develop and facilitate online professional development and to create a presence in the state for online professional development and its potential benefits. e-Learning for Educators used the Ready-to-Teach grant resources, including course development processes offered by the Education Development Center (EDC), a partner on the grant. Over the past 5 years, however, Christie and her team have modified that process, especially using the Backwards Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) and the 5 Es (Trowbridge & Bybee, 1990) instructional design models. The models were chosen because these are the models eMINTS and e-Learning staff wanted teachers in their programs to use. Both eMINTS and e-Learning try to model what they want their teachers to do in their professional development sessions and courses.
One of the driving philosophies of e-Learning for Educators is that the program is not going to succeed in isolation. Says Terry, “We definitely believe that, as a program, we want to be sustainable. Partnerships are the key to that. We need to work with as many programs as possible and the territorialism that can crop up as an artifact of funding is counterproductive.”
Incentives: Professional development contact hours that can be used to meet professional classification requirements for state certification and optional graduate credit through local universities.
Instructional Design Considerations: The e-Learning for Educators team takes steps to educate their content development teams about online education and teach them what’s possible, how to support collaboration, how to write good questions, and more, but they do not actually build the course online. If the content development teams think, “we really need this video . . . or interaction . . . or a discussion board,” the team members themselves don’t have to create the technical capacity to add those elements to the course. Those suggestions don’t necessarily spark action without consideration either. Terry says they do not want teams to get bogged down in the technical aspects. Those are taken care of by project staff with expertise in the technologies; however, just adding “techie” pieces to a course for the sake of having them present is not always encouraged. The content development team focuses on developing good content. Terry comments that many outside agencies often ask, “Where are all the shiny pieces?” Her response? “We’re working on the content now. We can worry about the shiny pieces later.”
Lessons Learned: Individuals who apply to become course facilitators for the e-Learning for Educators program have to take a 10-week course on online facilitation. e-Learning has developed its own version of the course specific to the needs and expertise of educators in the state. Facilitators also have requirements they have to meet as they teach throughout the year to maintain active status. Facilitator contracts have to be renewed each year. Some requirements may include taking professional development courses offered by e-Learning, posting support materials that are shared with other facilitators of the group, contributing to the e-Learning blog post, or writing a short article. Terry believes it’s important that facilitators remain connected to and contribute to the community of facilitators.
eMINTS provides technical staff, who in turn support the e-Learning staff as they handle all technical and administrative tasks. This allows facilitators to focus on teaching and learning. e-Learning staff set up courses, load the content, prepare gradebooks, enroll students, and follow up with students with participation issues. They also report grades and are the interface with the universities that offer credit.
There are many other organizations that provide professional development in Missouri, and Terry reports they tend to be in competition with each other. Both the eMINTS and e-Learning for Educators programs take a different approach. They try to provide districts with the capacity to deliver high-quality professional development, either using content provided by eMINTS and e-Learning or developed by the district itself. According to Terry, “This is about collaboration, not competition. It’s okay if we empower a district to not need our services any more. There’s another district coming on down the road.” Districts are taught how to write their own courses and then encouraged to share with others. As Terry says, “It changes the relationship. We don’t have the capacity to write all of the content we need to write.” The districts are valuable collaborators.
As a part of modeling practices, both eMINTS and e-Learning opted to use Moodle as their learning management system (LMS) because it is a tool that many schools have access to. They also incorporate freely available Web 2.0 tools and consider Google Docs a standard tool for their courses. Terry says that you “want to model things that teachers can use in their classrooms. You’ve got to look at it from the perspective of your users. YouTube is blocked in most of our districts. Voki has advertisements and won’t be allowed by most of our districts. You have to go beyond ‘how cool is it?’”
Because LMS evolve and many programs have to change their LMS, which can be a complicated and intense process, Terry recommends that you not tie your system’s URL to your LMS (e.g., www.MyOPD.serviceprovider.com). You don’t want your URL to be tied to a piece of software, because it could change!
Evaluation: eMINTS has a long history of program evaluation research. Since its inception in 1999, eMINTS has had multiple external evaluations of the efficacy of its professional development programs. It’s not surprising that program evaluation and research are important elements of the e-Learning program as well. e-Learning participated in a twofold evaluation recently. The first portion was part of the overall project evaluation for the eLearning for Educators grant program that included pre/post-surveys of participants. e-Learning also has its own evaluation survey that has undergone approval through the University of Missouri Institutional Review Board (IRB). There are some differences. Program staff try to be careful about not overdoing it, not “surveying people to death.” The current model is pre/post, with a follow-up 6 months later. Common questions include, “Did you apply it in your classroom? Did you find it useful? Would you take another course?”
The second portion of the program evaluation involved a random control trial (RCT) of the effects of online professional development on both teacher content knowledge and student performance. Collectively, the four trials (Grade 4 English Language Arts [ELA], Grade 7 ELA, Grade 5 Mathematics, Grade 8 Mathematics) provide strong evidence that participation in the three e-Learning for Educators courses used in the study had positive effect on teachers’ instructional practices and content knowledge. The trials also provide evidence that teachers’ participation in the courses can have a positive impact on their students. Although these effects are smaller and occur less consistently, a statistically significant impact was found for at least one student measure in each trial. A full description of the study and results are available at www.bc.edu/research/intasc/researchprojects/eLearning/efe.shtml. While e-Learning for Educators: Missouri has not had sufficient resources to conduct this type of rigorous program evaluation at the state level, funding for this type of evaluation will be sought.
References: Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J., & Pollock, J. E. (2001). Classroom instruction that works. Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Trowbridge, L. W., & Bybee, R. W. (1990). Becoming a secondary school science teacher (5th ed.). Columbus, OH: Merrill.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (Expanded 2nd ed.) [Electronic resource]. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Florida School Leaders
Project Title: Florida School Leaders
Organization: Florida Department of Education
Contact: Henry Pollock, former Director of Education Retention Programs
Date First Implemented: 2005
Audience: Current and preservice K–12 educational leaders in the state of Florida
Need: Florida School Leaders built upon the success of a previous program, FloridaLeaders.net, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped to establish a statewide network of coaches and mentors. The earlier model of using coaches and mentors, drawn primarily from retired high-performing school leaders, became the foundation for the new Florida School Leaders program.
Intended Outcomes: Old standards for principal certification became obsolete in 2000, and so the Florida Department of Education convened a group of participants from different stakeholder groups, including faculty from institutions of higher education, district administrators, and other practitioners who spent about 3 years developing a new set of state standards for what a high-performing school principal should be expected to do. To implement these standards, the state had to retrain all existing principals as well as work with all institutions of higher education that prepare the bulk of aspiring school leaders in the state. Florida School Leaders was developed to meet those needs. It was a hybrid model, with both face-to-face and online components.
Incentives: Participants in university educational leadership programs received appropriate graduate credit, and district school principal preparation programs received professional development hours for participation in approved William Cecil Golden School Leadership Development online modules and workshops.
Instructional Design Considerations: To improve the collaboration between developers and provide a more consistent user experience, the Florida Department of Education developed its own website and required each of the partner organizations in the program to import their content into the state website. The state partnered with one entity that set up a consistent navigation and interface design in order to improve the user experience. This also resulted in a single-user sign-on to all content for participants. All participants from across the state could access all of the components, regardless of where they were developed. Participants could pick and choose the most relevant components from the learning library, because not everyone needs the same materials or training. The management system allowed district and state monitoring of participants demographic data and program participation to better meet program participants’ training needs.
Lessons Learned: In Florida, when money is available, the state usually posts a request for proposal (RFP), and different regional entities submit proposals to develop programs to meet the requirements for that RFP. What you end up with, according to Pollock, is “five flavors of the same ice cream.” Each region wants to develop and use its own training materials, but not those from other regions. Florida School Leaders forced regional entities to collaborate. Fifty percent of the award had to include subawards to other partners, so no individual entity could win the entire pot of money. The result was that seven regional entities ended up being the lead on one of seven components and a subcontractor to each of the other six. Each regional entity then developed products that were delivered statewide. The state had to provide some oversight and facilitated the relationships between organizations that were not used to collaborating. Each regional organization had areas of expertise, so the state allowed each to leverage its expertise but also pull in the complementary expertise of others.
Pollock notes that sometimes, “there can be a disconnect between higher education and K–12 practitioners” in terms of what each feels is important for educators to know and be able to do. Higher education faculty tend to want to create materials based on a faculty member’s area of expertise (e.g., law, finance, etc.), because that is often the reason they are hired. A school or district wants to have holistic materials in which different areas of expertise are embedded in a larger framework (e.g., legal requirements in special education, financial requirements across school programs, etc.) because that’s how their job duties are structured. Florida School Leaders took the input from university faculty but organized it in a holistic framework to meet the needs of the district target audience members.
The state tries to provide a lot of just-in-time training opportunities as well as longer course-based materials. The site also has a community model in which participants could post information from their school or district to highlight promising practices.
Pollock suggests that no matter what type of professional development effort you pursue, don’t get too hung up on one type of technology. Technology changes too fast. Try to be as “platform-neutral” as possible. You don’t know what’s going to be out there even 2 years from now.
Project Title: LEARN NC
Organization: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education
Contact: Ross White, Associate Director
Date First Implemented: 1997; first online courses launched in 2000
Audience: K–12 educators in North Carolina
Need: LEARN NC was founded in response to a state-based report that highlighted the disconnected nature of the teaching practices in many of the schools in the state where teachers routinely teach in isolation and have little opportunity to share their professional knowledge. Through work with six pilot districts, LEARN NC began by providing lesson plans, annotated descriptions of web resources, and discussion forums for teachers in the state.
Based on the success of their initial work, LEARN NC collaborated with the NC Department of Public Instruction, institutions of higher education, and other entities to develop online professional development that is then made freely available to school districts in the state.
Intended Outcomes: LEARN NC originally intended to provide access to vetted teaching resources as well as support for online learning to all K–12 teachers in the state. Rather than being an online learning provider, LEARN NC set out to license or purchase a learning management system (LMS) for every district in the state to use.
In 2001, LEARN NC worked with the NC Department of Public Instruction to develop content in a train-the-trainer model that was made available for free to teachers across the state. The following year, at the request of the Department, LEARN NC began developing courses for K–12 students and taught faculty to deliver them until the North Carolina Virtual Public High School was chartered in 2007. LEARN NC leveraged lessons learned from its K–12 experience to then develop online professional development.
LEARN NC initiates and oversees the development of content by partner organizations. More than 70 professional development courses are available free for school districts in North Carolina, with additional courses available directly from LEARN NC.
Instructional Design Considerations: The backwards design process is central to the instructional design philosophy at LEARN NC. White acknowledges that any time you work with a content expert with deep knowledge and passion for their content, you can struggle with instructional design in terms of determining reasonable objectives for the learners and chunking that content appropriately. LEARN NC develops objectives first, and then develops assessments to guide content development. Backwards design also gives instructional designers the opportunity at every step to ask for research or evidence to support proposed content, and many content experts are surprised to have to consider those questions.
LEARN NC has codified a process for content development that includes a team of people including a subject-matter expert, an instructional designer, and a sponsor. The sponsor initiates the project, often the funder or someone who has critical oversight of course development, and makes sure the resulting project is not only good instruction but meets the initial needs of the intended audience. The sponsor can also be the “tiebreaker” on decisions that may be split 50-50 by the content expert and instructional designer. White notes it’s best when the sponsor is available to review the project periodically, but often if they have to compromise on one aspect, it is that review because the sponsor may not always be available.
Lessons Learned: While the larger school systems in the state had greater capacity to create and deliver online learning as compared to the smaller rural districts, they didn’t always do so. Of those that did, many were reticent to adopt the model of sharing content for free followed by LEARN NC, perhaps, surmises Ross, because “teaching has traditionally been isolated and collegial sharing is undervalued.” It did become popular in the smaller districts, though. There are more than 80 school districts in North Carolina classified as rural, and much of the early use of LEARN NC came from those districts. Ross has noted some change recently where districts that develop content in the online program are now more likely to offer it up for statewide use.
LEARN NC first provided discussion forums to teachers in order to provide an opportunity for professional dialog. The forums were turned off in 2001. LEARN NC discovered that the open format of the discussion forums wasn’t focused enough, so educators didn’t find enough purpose for participating. Based on that experience, LEARN NC is now much more purposeful about the use of technologies to support learning communities. Their use of discussion forums is now much more focused, usually limited to a cohort of individuals and moderated by content expert. Most are also limited in duration, which may not be a traditional learning community approach, but it has been a much more successful model especially in terms of value added to their participants.
The notion that if we just give teachers a place to share, they will use it has not proven to be true for LEARN NC, according to White. He notes that in his experience, because of the many factors that vie for teachers’ time and attention, teachers need to feel they are getting back much more for every minute they contribute. One can take steps over time to demonstrate the benefits are there, but it takes a significant amount of effort and someone to champion that effort in order to be successful.
LEARN NC’s model of sharing content with local districts has been a hallmark of success of the program. They have to operate courses on a cost-recovery basis. It took time to convince funders that giving the content away was an effective model of using state tax dollars, whereas trying to create a revenue-driven model would have limited the program’s reach, resulting in a less effective use of that money. According to Ross, “Revenue-generating models aren’t bad, they’re certainly necessary, but we just knew that we could move the needle further if we could offer systems a free option.” Once LEARN NC takes on a project, they make an effort to be sure it is not orphaned just because some new reform effort comes along. White is also proud of the fact that the model allows them to provide that content to local school systems that can then customize its use to meet their particular needs. He would like to see other states use their content for noncommercial purposes as well as share their content. He recommends noncommercial providers look at Creative Commons licensing as a way to share content and maintain intellectual property rights.
LEARN NC worked with professional development coordinators in the state to determine current spending on professional development in order to gauge the market value of their courses and calculate an appropriate cost. They found that school districts often underestimate the full cost of professional development. If a district brings in a speaker for $5,000, they tend to forget the additional costs, such as substitutes, stipends for time spend outside of school hours, food, facilities rental, maintenance, and other hidden costs that can make the total much higher than the perceived $5k.
LEARN NC tries to develop content for a 5-year cycle, but 3 years is probably a more realistic time frame. Hidden costs for the program include updates or revisions to the content, at least annually. Incorporating new and emerging technologies are also a cost consideration over the life of a course.
Having had to change LMS products more than once, White notes that portability of content is an important issue to being sustainable. He notes that if you tie yourself to a system with no portability, you’ll end up “hemorrhaging money.”
Evaluation: For several years, all participants in LEARN NC courses must complete an end-of-course survey in order to receive their certificates. A 6-month follow-up, which may actually occur anywhere from 3 to 9 months depending on scheduling, asks similar questions to the end-of-course survey as well as whether the participant has implemented skills or knowledge from the course into practice.
Based on their involvement with the e-Learning for Educators program, LEARN NC has newly implemented a precourse survey that asks the same questions about content and pedagogy as the end-of-course survey. It is not a survey focused on skills and abilities, but dispositions. Focusing on dispositions allows the survey to be used across courses regardless of the content addressed. While desired, White notes that “few funders are willing to invest in the time and effort it takes to create a rigorous objective-based test” to measure changes in participant knowledge.
The NSTA Learning Center
Project Title: The NSTA Learning Center
Organization: National Science Teachers Association
Contact: Al Byers, Assistant Executive Director, e-Learning and Government Partnerships
Date First Implemented: 2008
Audience: K–20 science teachers
Need: In some preservice degree programs, especially for emerging K–8 educators, research shows many educators with minimal specific science content or pedagogy training, and modern teachers often have so many constraints on their time that they have little time during the school day to focus on professional learning. The original conception was to address the need for greater science content knowledge proficiency, an often reported national need, with a “just enough, just in time, just for me” model. The effort was designed to fill the niche between online summer institutes and the formal moderated online short courses NSTA offers four times a year.
Intended Outcomes: The goal of the NSTA Learning Center is to provide access to numerous on-demand self-directed high-impact professional development resources and opportunities catering to educators’ individual needs and learning preferences, and providing a level of accountability for district administrators in order to support teachers’ long-term professional growth over time.
The duration of the online professional development experiences ranges from 90 minutes for synchronous webinars; to between 2 and 10 hours for self-directed, web-based modules with unlimited e-mentor content support; to between 8 and 12 weeks for online, moderated, cohort-based short courses or extended graduate courses.
Overarching the Learning Center’s goals is the charge to establish a sustainable and scalable model of professional learning that is accessible to all of the nation’s 3 million teachers of science, including content resources and tools to help effectively diagnose, plan, track, and document individual professional growth over time.
Incentives: Incentives depend on the type of resource or opportunity in which one participates. Incentives may include:
–Continuing education units
–Graduate credit hours
–Certificates of completion
–Pass/fail certificate after completing a final assessment at the conclusion of an online self-directed web module (SciPack)
–Release time for participation
–Stipends for some experiences, such as self-directed modules, and generating reports utilizing NSTA Learning Center tools, such as the professional development (PD) Plan and Portfolio tool
Instructional Design Considerations: NSTA employs current research and proven best practices in all the e-learning resources and opportunities it develops in partnership with its sponsors. For example, each Science Object is structured around a learning cycle modified for adult learners in the online environment. These objects are designed to challenge teachers to struggle with questions, observations, and simulations/representations of scientific phenomena, and apply their ideas in an inquiry-based approach espoused by the 1996 National Science Education Standards. The design of simulations is guided by research in the effective use of multimedia for instructional purposes and incorporates emerging research on cognitive load. The Learning Objects also include embedded and final assessments to provide teachers with feedback and a means to track their progress, incorporates research about how people learn, and includes known preconceptions or misconceptions common in understanding certain science concepts.
Lessons Learned: Correlating all the assets available in the Learning Center to the 50 state standards is a challenge. There are some technology means (e.g., crawlers) for tagging resources and opportunities, but their degree of alignment is not foolproof. At some point, using human reviewers to tag the content becomes important to ensure the most accurate alignment to the standards.
To be compatible with the widest number of teachers whose school technology may not be as current as home technology or that used in other industries, NSTA makes sure their materials operate on different browsers two versions from the most current.
Byers notes, “You do need a critical mass of learners to support rich and worthwhile online discussions, especially mailing lists, discussion boards, and the like. Having trained moderators to facilitate discourse and increase engagement is paramount to help foster a vibrant professional online learning community.”
Scheduling and aligning the online professional development as part of the district’s larger systematic professional development is critical, which has implications for integrating online professional development into school calendars. Unfortunately, one 4-week pilot study back in 2008 overlapped with student testing by the district, and the participating teachers found it difficult to spend the time they would have liked because of the demands on their schedules from the testing obligations.
An interesting finding from the pilot study was the low use of science experts NSTA made available via e-mail. All participants reported this feature was helpful, but only 15.6% of the participants’ actually e-mailed one of the experts. While the low participation rates did not overburden the participants, Byers notes, “Going to the trouble of employing content experts to quickly reply to such messages represents an expense that might only be worth the trouble if more learners would take advantage of it.” Because the participants note the feature is helpful, NSTA has taken steps to make it more evident through their content and will investigate the use of live chat to better capitalize on the available experts. Perhaps the immediacy of feedback to support teachers’ professional needs at the moment they occur is an attribute of support needed for self-directed learning. Current usage trends for these mentors are now trending positively and in proportion to overall SciPack usage.
The success and impact of the professional development opportunities varies with how well the materials are presented and supported in the states and districts that use them. NSTA has observed that teacher attitudes and learning are greater when the materials are truly incorporated into professional development plans with incentives and measurable milestones and include technical support and administrator buy-in. But according to Byers, “If the online professional development portal is presented simply as a URL that is forwarded via e-mail with a password to a large number of teachers, the impact is less significant.” With over 70,000 active users, and 60 district and state departments of education using the Learning Center as part of their strategic professional development efforts, the heuristic algorithm for successfully combining both face-to-face and online professional development is becoming clear.
Evaluation: NSTA has conducted one research-based quasi-experimental project, with the results published in the February 2008 Journal of Science Education and Technology (Sherman, Byers, & Rapp). Looking at a three-district pilot of self-directed electronic professional development (n = 45), teachers were able to access on-demand content that incorporated a high level of interactivity via embedded simulations, questions, and hands-on learning opportunities in a self-contained 10-hour web module on force and motion.
Using an independent pre- and post-assessment developed and administered online by Horizon Research, NSTA found significant gains in teacher content knowledge in across all three districts and all participants. The mean pretest score over the eight force and motion word problems for all participants was 70.6%, while the mean posttest score for the same items was 80.5%.
An online survey of 41 teachers using the SciPack professional development program indicated significant improvement in confidence levels regarding their ability to teach concepts related to Newtonian force and motion after completing the self-directed web module. In addition, 98% of the teachers found the content relevant to their needs and the embedded simulations worthwhile to their learning. Additionally, 96% said they would recommend the modules to their colleagues.
Another recent third-party evaluation used a two pretest-posttest delayed-treatment control group design with random assignment involving 56 teachers across Grades 5 through 8 from a midwestern large urban school district who explored two web modules. Results found significant gains in teacher learning, self-efficacy, and preparedness to teach the subject matter via repeated-measures analysis of variance for the treatment group versus the control group. Students taught by educators in both the treatment and control group showed significant gains in learning, as one would expect after experiencing an educational unit. However, students taught by teachers in the treatment group showed significantly higher gain scores than those in the control group (i.e., students in the teacher treatment group started with lower preassessment scores and achieved higher overall postassessment scores than those in the control group). NSTA is encouraged by these outcomes.
An additional third-party study is being conducted with an outside evaluator to determine the impact of the NSTA Learning Center and the self-directed web modules with 15 school districts across the country. In addition to these formal studies, hundreds of deployments are occurring with the Learning Center, with numerous qualitative and anecdotal bits of feedback being captured and available for review at http://learningcenter.nsta.org/Testimonials.aspx.
Reference: Sherman, G., Byers, A., & Rapp, S. (2008). Evaluation of online, on-demand science professional development material involving two different implementation models. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 17(1), 19–31.
Project Title: OPEN NH
Organization: New Hampshire e-Learning for Educators
Contact: Stan Freeda, Project Coordinator
Date First Implemented: 2005
Audience: K–12 teachers in New Hampshire, especially those in schools with high-poverty, low-achieving populations
Need: OPEN NH came about through participation in the e-Learning for Educators project funded by the federal Ready to Teach Program and organized by Educational Development Center, Inc. (EDC) and Alabama Public Television. Main partners are the New Hampshire Department of Education and New Hampshire Public Television.
Intended Outcomes: New Hampshire has a large rural population and many smaller schools. There can still be a lot of travel involved in participating in local professional development, so OPEN NH is designed to help districts provide high-quality professional development with reduced costs—due to no travel—as well as greater flexibility in terms of when educators participate.
OPEN NH is especially focused on helping educators with students at high-poverty, low-achieving schools.
Incentives: Professional development hours (e.g., 35 hours for a 7-week course), which some districts define as continuing education units. Graduate credit from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire is also available.
Instructional Design Considerations: Courses run in sessions (7-week period in spring, summer, and winter). Courses have a minimum requirement for participation, since they are discussion-based, and Freeda notes that a group of at least eight participants allows for a richer discussion and better opportunities for facilitating learning.
OPEN NH follows the e-Learning for Educators model for developing courses and training facilitators. They prefer to have participants who have taken or facilitated courses become course developers. They have created their own developer and facilitator courses so they can continue to develop and offer courses if the grant funding goes away. The outcome of participation in these courses is an additional course that can then be offered.
OPEN NH has developed an online orientation used in all courses that involves activities relevant to learning about online learning, such as reading a white paper or research and then commenting on in the discussion area. By actually focusing on principles of online learning, the orientation is more relevant to the participants.
Lessons Learned: While other states in the e-Learning for Educators offer courses for free, OPEN NH charges a registration fee of $130 per person per course. This helps build commitment and appears to prevent course attrition.
The program offers courses in at least each of the four core content areas each year. It also offers courses in popular topics, such as Web 2.0 tools, differentiated instruction, project-based learning, or working with English language learners; but it embeds them within the context of a content area. Courses are then facilitated by a content expert (e.g., differentiating instruction in science would be taught by a science teacher). These pedagogy-specific courses seem to be more popular than content-area courses that focus on foundational knowledge, research, and theory in a domain.
OPEN NH has developed a course template in their LMS to make it easier for course developers as well as to provide some consistency across courses.
It has been difficult to promote the use of Web 2.0 tools that are not supported by the LMS. Participants don’t want to have to leave the LMS or to have multiple accounts for applications just to participate in a single course. Says Freeda, “There’s a fine line between how many log-ins you can support.”
Crafting an engaging discussion question is important. Freeda concurs with other providers that it can be difficult to engage people. OPEN NH wants participants to use the information from the course to support their own ideas, to make the content personally relevant. Discussions may include ways content may have to be modified to meet specific settings, such as for different grade levels or students with different needs.
OPEN NH has been trying to seed districts with people who have taken the courses or who know the program. Successful participants tend to encourage others to take their courses and can also give face-to-face support for those who might need it. They now budget and pay for a 2-hour, face-to-face orientation in four sites throughout the state.
Evaluation: OPEN NH participated in evaluations from the grant evaluator, and therefore created similar pre/post surveys into an online survey for its own use.
Project Title: PBS TeacherLine
Contact: Melinda George, Senior Director, and Elizabeth Wolzak, former Senior Manager, Instructional Design
Date First Implemented: 2000
Audience: K–12 educators
Need: PBS launched MathLine in 1995 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education. In 2000, PBS built on this work through a Ready to Teach grant also from the U.S. Department of Education that was the impetus for the development of TeacherLine, which expanded into other content areas. TeacherLine now has more than 100 courses that are fully online and fully facilitated, as well as a new Peer Connection component that makes the learning objects in those courses searchable and usable in a more standalone fashion for coaches and mentors.
Intended Outcomes: Initial courses were designed to address the needs of K–12 teachers in core content areas.
Incentives: Continuing education units and graduate credit
Instructional Design Considerations: Because of their experience, TeacherLine has done a lot of work around determining what an effective online course looks like and how it should be structured. Wolzak developed a course outline for TeacherLine called a Performance, Objective, Assessment, and Activity Chart (POAAC) that guides the development process and facilitates conversations with partners or content experts. TeacherLine courses have similar strands, so they are familiar to those who take more than one course, and they have a 33% rate of repeat learners (some who take multiple courses).
TeacherLine provides a project manager and an instructional designer and the institutions they partner with to develop content provide a project manager and a writer. These two to four people, depending on their expertise and commitments, use the POAAC to guide the development, even if it is modifying existing content for online delivery.
Wolzak notes that it is important when designing online instruction to know the needs of your learners. The audience for professional development is adults, and they have different needs. You don’t teach adults like you do children. She suggests that you need to model what you want them to do in their classroom. They come with prior knowledge, so she encourages reflection and incorporates a good bit of peer review and sharing of experiences.
All TeacherLine courses are project-based and have a direct real-world application to the classroom. There are often fewer activities in a TeacherLine online course than more traditional face-to-face instruction, and courses result in something tangible and very relevant. Often, the activities will build to a comprehensive whole rather than isolated activities. Language arts classes often incorporate case studies, and science courses model inquiry-based learning strategies.
All courses have performance objectives, and every objective is assessed through the use of a rubric. Multiple-choice assessments are not used.
Lessons Learned: One of the myths about online learning is that it’s always the same, but in reality, there are so many flavors of professional development. Review what other people are offering and make sure you know what your audience wants.
Self-paced is a really tough way to get buy-in from teachers online. TeacherLine created some self-paced learning opportunities in the past, but they were not very popular. So everything they do now is facilitated. TeacherLine has a 94% completion rate, and George feels that facilitators make the biggest difference in whether a person completes successfully or not.
Every facilitator has at least a master’s degree or higher, and every facilitator has to complete a 6-week online course about facilitation. TeacherLine has taken steps to make their facilitation of courses more of a profession by instituting periodic faculty meetings and peer observations. They don’t try to recruit as many facilitators as possible, but instead want to have their best facilitators repeat. They also offer a second course for veteran facilitators to strengthen their skills.
Much of the meat of the course occurs in the discussion area, so they think hard about discussion questions so that it can be manageable both for the learner and the facilitator. The discussion area can strengthen the development of community by connecting to and learning with peers. The facilitator is the “guide on the side” and does not necessarily direct the discussion.
George wonders whether graduate credit for completion is going to continue to be acceptable for recertification as the nation moves towards the idea of highly effective teachers. She surmises that professional development programs are going to have to collect some kind of data to demonstrate that it has been able to help teachers become more effective, not that they’ve just finished a course. Graduate credit and continuing education units may not be enough incentive if that shift occurs.
TeacherLine uses metatagging. They built the original database but engage an outside organization to actually tag the learning objects as they are put into the database. Schools or districts can also license TeacherLine content in a SCORM-compliant form (see Chapter 5 for information about SCORM).
Evaluation: TeacherLine has contracted with an outside evaluation organization to review the pre/post survey data, and early data have been used to monitor what has gone well and how to offer new opportunities.
Through evaluation of the first Ready to Teach grant, TeacherLine was able to determine what teachers wanted in terms of content and activities. The 100 courses were deconstructed and put into a searchable database embedded in a collaborative environment, called Peer Connection. The purpose is to provide information to support coaches and mentors.
Pedagogical Principles of Distance Learning
Project Title: Pedagogical Principles of Distance Learning
Organization: World Health Organization
Contact: Steve Baxendale, Project Coordinator, Pacific Open Learning Health Net
Date First Implemented: 2009
Audience: College professors learned how to modify an existing face-to-face course for online delivery.
Need: As late as 2004, there were few continuing education opportunities for health workers (e.g., doctors, nurses, and other health workers) for the 14 Pacific Island countries and territories covered by the World Health Organization’s Representative Office in the South Pacific. Steve Baxendale was hired to develop continuing education opportunities. Medical officials in these countries do not specialize and often have to perform tasks that are routinely performed by multiple people in more developed countries. There is also a great shortage of health personnel. In some places, there may be only one nurse or doctor on an island, and if they leave for training, the people on that island have no access to health care. It became imperative to provide ongoing training for health workers where they did not have to leave their communities for long periods of time.
Intended Outcomes: This particular project targeted college professors who were currently offering courses in a face-to-face setting. The intended outcome was that these professors would learn to design and deliver effective online versions of courses in their area of expertise.
Incentives: Graduate credit
Instructional Design Considerations: The preference is problem-based learning, sometimes incorporating case studies, often modeled after real events. The designers try to make the material relevant, including making sure people represented in graphics and animations look like the target audience, which in this case comprises people from the Pacific Islands.
“Your audience members have to be able to relate to your content,” says Baxendale, “whether you are using scenarios; case studies; or the images, animations, and videos you include. If you have video staged in a resource-rich, pristine lab setting that is not similar to the experiences of your audience, you lose credibility and can completely turn off your audience.”
Lessons Learned: Doing a needs assessment and including all of the relevant stakeholders has been a successful means for getting buy-in. WHO contacts health-related governing boards and institutions, health facilities, content experts, and practitioners (members of your target audience) as much as possible to determine what professional development should be provided.
The current administrative system (academic services) they were relying on was not set up for online courses, so they have had to make an effort to provide student support specific to an online setting. The online students don’t follow the same procedures as other students because—in many cases—they can’t. They’re often isolated, and their work obligations don’t allow them to attend classes on a regular schedule.
Evaluation: Course evaluations are conducted at the end of the professional development. Most questions are qualitative. Baxendale corroborates the notion from other providers that there is a tension between the funders’ wanting data to demonstrate impact but not providing sufficient funding to actually observe the participants in practice. | <urn:uuid:26ddb3b2-cd93-45e0-9823-5b14f98898f1> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://resources.corwin.com/rossonlinepd/database-of-case-studies | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474544.15/warc/CC-MAIN-20240224180245-20240224210245-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.959012 | 13,933 | 2.78125 | 3 | 534 |
Across the animal kingdom, the vast majority of neurons in the adult brain have been generated and integrated into neuronal circuits during embryogenesis. The number and composition of post-mitotic neurons do not change much across post-natal lifespan, yet our behaviors vary dramatically across different developmental stages. How can this be?
Previous research has shown that post-mitotic neurons continue to change phenotypic properties (for example, electrophysiological properties) and rewire synaptic connections throughout post-natal juvenile stages until an animal has reached a fully mature state in adulthood. Components of the intricately timed maturation process occur independent of the individual’s experience and exposure to environmental stimuli, and suggest that cell-intrinsic genetic timer mechanisms coordinate the maturation of the nervous system. Simultaneously, neurons adapt to changing environmental conditions throughout their long post-mitotic lifespan to accommodate processes such as learning.
At the intersection of neuroscience, developmental biology, genomics and genetics, the central question that the Sun Lab is addressing is how post-mitotic neurons integrate cell-intrinsic genetic timer programs and cell-extrinsic environmental inputs to regulate the progression of the nervous system’s plastic molecular and functional states across post-natal lifespan. | <urn:uuid:44d7569a-3e00-4f60-a383-a253296d7701> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.sunlaboratory.org/research | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474676.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227121318-20240227151318-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.900887 | 254 | 2.875 | 3 | 535 |
Dr. Cheryl Rezek, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, in her video presentation, What is mindfulness, stresses the connection between mind and body. She highlights the fact that stress is not only experienced in the mind through perception of threat but also in the body in the form of stomach aches, headaches, pain in the shoulder or other parts of the body and many forms of physical illnesses. Cheryl draws on neuroscience research to demonstrate the positive impact of mindfulness on the body and the brain.
What is mindfulness?
Cheryl discusses mindfulness in terms of “focus with intention” – designed to become more aware of what is happening inside of us as well as around us. She stresses the role of context in shaping who and what we are. In her own practice and research, she seeks to integrate insights from biology, sociology and psychology – a holistic perspective on the forces shaping our makeup and the way we experience the world. For example, like Johann Hari, she sees negative childhood experiences as contributing to the likelihood of experiencing depression in adulthood. Our social environment – whether family, work or community, in isolation or conjointly – shape our perceptions. Cheryl’s holistic approach is reflected in her training in the interrelated disciplines of clinical psychology, psychotherapy, play therapy, family therapy and mindfulness.
She reminds us that children are naturally mindful as they negotiate their world – they are curious and open, asking questions, exploring nature and wondering about their own bodily sensations. I recall recently playing tennis with my grandson in a clearing in a wooded area while my granddaughter sat on the grass and explored everything in her immediate environment- the grass, wildflowers, leaves and anything that wriggled or moved. Her attention was totally focused for an hour on whatever she could see, touch or smell.
Applications of mindfulness
In her presentation, Cheryl discusses the numerous applications of mindfulness – from dealing with chronic pain to managing mental illness. Her own writings reflect this diversity of mindfulness applications. For instance, she talks about how mindfulness can help people manage contracting cancer and undergoing treatment – her ideas are explained in her book, Managing Cancer Symptoms: the Mindful Way. She also discusses the application of mindfulness to dealing with Anxiety and Depression.
Cheryl stresses the importance of seeing mindfulness in its broadest context – not confined to the act of meditation but extending to being mindful in our everyday activities such as walking, listening, eating, attending meetings, waiting and washing the dishes. She offers an app, iMindfulness on the go, to encourage people to be mindful when in transit or engaging in any of their daily activities.
As we grow in mindfulness, we become aware of the opportunities to be mindful in our everyday activities. Practice of simple mindfulness activities builds our inner and outer awareness and helps us to better navigate the stresses of life.
Image – Painting by a Chinese-born artist who experiences the mental health condition of Schizophrenia
By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)
Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog. | <urn:uuid:e5371c00-4190-4b44-99ae-2c6b1edbf9c9> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://growmindfulness.com/tag/cheryl-rezek/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475833.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302152131-20240302182131-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.94136 | 655 | 2.875 | 3 | 536 |
Some 400,000 current and former American soldiers suffer from traumatic brain injuries, which can cause memory loss, lack of concentration, depression, anxiety attacks and other problems. In some cases symptoms last only weeks or months; sometimes they persist indefinitely.
Finding any sort of treatment, much less a cure, has not been easy. But some neuroscientists now see great potential in techniques of manipulating the brain’s “neuroplasticity,” its propensity to rearrange its neuronal structure in response to behavior and stimuli.
Earlier this year, the Department of Defense awarded a $2 million grant to Brain Plasticity Inc. to study the effectiveness of Posit Science software in restoring memory and attention in victims of traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I. Posit Science, based in San Francisco, is one of several companies, including Nintendo and Luminosity, that sell brain health software products to consumers.
If the Posit Science software is proved effective, it could become one of the first medical applications of an approach to brain improvement that remains controversial. Such software could potentially help T.B.I. patients and also those who have been determined to have autism, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and other psychiatric and neurological diseases.
“This is the beginning of a revolution,” said Michael Merzenich, the co-founder and chief scientist of Posit Science; the president of Brain Plasticity; and a celebrated University of California, San Francisco, neuroscientist who pioneered the idea of neuroplasticity.
The Posit Science software, sold commercially under the names Brain Fitness Program and InSight, is supposed to strengthen memory, attention, language skills and visual-spatial abilities in aging adults. Studies of it have shown improvement in those areas, but critics like Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a Duke University psychiatrist, are not convinced that those gains translate into long-term benefits that can be generalized to daily challenges like remembering where the car is parked.
“There is a big gap between the claims and the evidence,” said Dr. Doraiswamy, who said he doubted whether short-term improvements in memory would last longer than the three-month period most studies test.
“If they were a drug,” he said of the software, “they would have been pulled from the market.”
Whether the computer-game-like software can be harnessed to improve overall mental acuity in those with brain damage from trauma to the head is an even bigger question.
“It is theoretically reasonable,” said Gary Abrams, director of neurorehabilitation at U.C.S.F. and head of the T.B.I. support clinic at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. “But will it actually work to help veterans? I can’t talk to that.”
The idea of neuroplasticity dates to the 1980s, when the conventional scientific wisdom held that once people reached adulthood, their brains were hard-wired and would remain that way for life. Dr. Merzenich did not think that was true, and eventually his research showed that the brains of primates continued to change well into maturity.
By the mid-2000s, Dr. Merzenich and his colleagues at the university had brought much of the neuroscience field around to the idea that brain change, or plasticity, was the rule rather than the exception.
Dr. Merzenich’s core claim is that brain structure is always changing, based on what people do and what they pay attention to. By doing specific brain exercises that focus and refine attention, he says, you can adjust the underlying structure of your brain. It is well established that this happens when we learn a new skill, like dancing. The question is, Can the same processes be employed to correct for brain damage?
The malfunctioning brain, or what Dr. Merzenich calls the “noisy” brain, is like a radio that, for any number of reasons, is badly tuned to its intended station. The objective of his software, he says, is to clarify a strong signal by repeatedly practicing simple tasks, like recognizing repeated visual patterns.
The commercially available software, which will be modified only slightly for the veterans study, presents challenges that increase in difficulty in increments small enough that fine-tuning adjustments can be made and then reinforced in the users’ brains.
Brain Plasticity’s randomized clinical trial will include 132 service members who have mild T.B.I. Half of them will train on the company’s software. The other half, a control group, will play video games. Before training starts, all will be tested for memory, learning, attention, planning, social control, post traumatic stress disorder symptoms, depression, and several other factors. The patients will be retested after three months of training, and then again, three more months later. Any persistent improvements would be an advance on the status quo.
T.B.I. patients are mostly helped with “compensatory” strategies, said Tiffanie Sim, a neuropsychologist who sees many such patients at the VA’s Polytrauma Transitional Rehabilitation Program in Palo Alto. Patients are given scheduling apps for their hand-held devices and taught ways to compensate for memory loss, Dr. Sim said.
Doctors sometimes prescribe medications to treat anxiety or depression in T.B.I. patients in the hope of freeing up a patient’s cognitive reserves, said Dr. David Elkin, a psychiatrist at San Francisco General Hospital. But otherwise not much is even tried to address the underlying injury.
Specialist Orlando Gonzalez, 23, is recovering from a brain injury received when a suicide bomber hit his infantry squad in Afghanistan. Specialist Gonzalez is currently a patient at the polytrauma center in Palo Alto undergoing physical therapy for partial paralysis to his left side. For the first month after his injury, he said, he “could barely remember things at all.” He has improved under treatment.
If software like Posit Science’s proves effective, future patients like Specialist Gonzalez may do an hour of software-driven brain training exercises each day, in conjunction with physical therapy, to help restore cognitive functions.
Theoretically, the brain training software could address both cognitive problems and post-traumatic stress, said Henry Mahncke, Posit Science’s chief executive, a neuroscientist and a former student of Dr. Merzenich.
To make sure the product will appeal to this generation of veterans, the company is “re-skinning” its Brain Fitness software — “so it has a look and feel that’s right for guys who’ve been playing 50 hours of Xbox a week,” Dr. Mahncke said.
Thinking of people who sign up for a gym but quickly tire of the routine, Dr. Doraiswamy said he was skeptical that veterans would stick with the software. Still, he said, the trial is worthwhile.
“They have to start somewhere,” he said. | <urn:uuid:8dd0f18b-2974-4cd3-a93f-c1fdccc893ed> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.brainhq.com/news/latest-news/turning-to-software-to-help-treat-brain-injuries/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476409.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304002142-20240304032142-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.957996 | 1,476 | 2.765625 | 3 | 537 |
MRI Stereoscope: A Miniature Stereoscope for Human Neuroimaging.
Ip IB., Alvarez I., Tacon M., Parker AJ., Bridge H.
Stereoscopic vision enables the perception of depth. To study the brain mechanisms behind stereoscopic vision using noninvasive brain imaging (magnetic resonance brain imaging; MRI), scientists need to reproduce the independent views of the left and right eyes in the brain scanner using "dichoptic" displays. However, high-quality dichoptic displays are technically challenging and costly to implement in the MRI scanner. The novel miniature stereoscope system ("MRI stereoscope") is an affordable and open-source tool that displays high-quality dichoptic images inside the MRI scanner. The MRI stereoscope takes advantage of commonly used display equipment, the MRI head coil, and a display screen. To validate the MRI stereoscope, binocular disparity stimuli were presented in a 3T MRI scanner while neural activation was recorded using functional MRI in six human participants. The comparison of large binocular disparities compared with disparities close to zero evoked strong responses across dorsal and ventral extra-striate visual cortex. In contrast, binocularly anti-correlated stimuli, which are not perceived in depth, did not evoke comparable activation. These results are the proof-of-concept that the MRI stereoscope can deliver dichoptic images that produce the perception of stereoscopic depth during acquisition of MR responses. Application of the MRI stereoscope to neuroscience can help to address important questions in perception and consciousness. | <urn:uuid:793b1375-f1e8-48fc-b369-e9ec73e33a8f> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/publications/1236193 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476409.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304002142-20240304032142-00004.warc.gz | en | 0.860295 | 311 | 2.546875 | 3 | 538 |
The term design thinking has cropped up in education journals and conference brochures more and more over the past few years, but its meaning remains a mystery to most instructors. The term comes from the business sector, where it refers to a process of learning
Most instructors and instructional designers are already familiar with the basics of developing well-aligned, robust course designs, such as writing measurable course objectives using action verbs to clearly describe what students will know, do, practice, or apply; aligning tools and technologies to the learning objectives
Bridget Scheidler and Kayla Collins
April 11, 2022
Many online faculty add at least one synchronous event to their courses to provide students with the immediacy of a full-class interaction. But a central challenge of synchronous events is finding something engaging for students to do. One solution is virtual escape rooms (VERs).
Interleaving is the process of alternating between concepts during learning by periodically returning to earlier ones. Studies have shown that interleaving content promotes retention (Richland et al., 2005; Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer et al., 2015). Rohrer suggests that this is because interleaving helps students distinguish between
Qin Li, Holly K. Johnson, and Jon Thomas
March 16, 2020
We observed a new level of interest and excitement among participants during a recent faculty-teaching workshop. We attribute most of this energy to an innovative course design tool that we have been piloting at our university. Course design cards help faculty to brainstorm new approaches
Marie K. Norman, PhD and Michael Bridges, PhD
March 1, 2018
Four problems account for the lion’s share of serious teaching problems:
Expert blind spot
An overstatement? Perhaps, but over the many years we’ve worked with faculty in a wide range of disciplines, we’ve seen these issues undermine students’ learning, motivation, and morale in insidious ways.
Do you have a system or standard process for prepping a course you’ve taught before? Where do you start? Early in my career, “one chapter per week” described my course outline. It wasn’t an effective system. Poor planning left my students and me burnt
I continue to be concerned that we don’t design learning experiences as developmentally as we should. What happens to students across a course (and the collection of courses that make up a degree program) ought to advance their knowledge and skills. Generally, we do a
The term design thinking has cropped up in education journals and conference brochures more and more over the past few years, but its meaning remains a mystery to most instructors. The term comes from the business sector, where it refers to a process of learning about a customer’s needs to inform product design. Education has adopted it in two ways:
As a method for designing programs, courses, and lessons
As a course activity where students do design thinking to solve a problem
I will describe the process by showing how I might use it to design my medical ethics class, how it differs from other methods, and its benefits and limitations.
Design thinking has five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test (Ní Shé et al., 2022). The empathize step involves researching the intended user to understand where they are and where they want to go. The research can include the usual tools, such as literature studies and surveys. But advocates pay particular attention to focus groups of potential users to better understand the problems they face.
In applying this step to my class, I would gather a group of future students to ask them about their motivations for taking the class, their concerns, their future plans, and the like. Those meetings would lead to me to create “empathy maps” to structure the information from the conversations. These empathy maps take the form of squares with four quadrants:
Says What is actually said in the conversations
“I plan to be a doctor and want to know about the ethical issues I will face.”
“I have never had an ethics class before. My classes have been in science.”
“I am taking this class because it is a requirement for my premed program.”
Thinks Inferences the researcher makes about the user based on what they say
The student wants practical information that they will use in their medical career.
The student is science-oriented and wants clear answers to questions.
The student is taking the class just to check a box.
Feels The user’s emotions
The student is drawn to the human aspect of being a doctor.
The student is worried that they will not understand the performance requirements of the class.
The student thinks this will be a soft humanities class without much value.
Does What the user does in relation to the product being designed
The student is preparing for all aspects of being a doctor, not just gaining medical knowledge.
The student studies for long hours to memorize information that will be on the exam.
The student works part time at a hospital.
It should be clear by now that design thinking focuses on crafting a holistic picture of the user. This means considering the user in terms of not only such categories as “undergraduate student” or “first-year nursing student” but also their desires, wants, hopes, and fears.
To help with this process, the designer creates personas of hypothetical students, making them as detailed as possible. For instance, one might start with the following:
Jennifer is a 30-year-old medical technician who works in a healthcare lab.
She is interested in interacting with patients and so has decided to return to school in the post-bac premed program to get into medical school.
She has had nearly all science courses and likes clear answers to problems.
She is deeply interested in the lifestyle issues that lead to a patient’s medical problems.
While there is no set number of personas, they should represent a sampling of the range of types of students that the class is likely to attract.
From this information, the researcher defines the user problem that the product is meant to solve. Here, the transition from business process to educational planning is a bit tricky as it is not always clear how to define student motivations to take a course as problems. Many students take a class just because it is required for their major, not to solve a real-life problem. For this reason, it might be better to think of this stage as defining the long-term wants and needs that the course will serve:
The student needs methods for solving ethical dilemmas that they will face as a doctor.
The student wants to understand how patients think of issues like end-of-life treatment, fetal genetic testing, and privacy.
The next stage of design thinking is to come up with several options for solving the customer’s—or student’s—problems. Just as a car manufacturer might come up with multiple vehicle designs, an instructor might develop multiple course topics and activities. The instructor might also consider different course formats. Will a traditional face-to-face lecture be best—or perhaps a flipped classroom? How many of the students are working adults who might need some flexibility in class schedule or deadlines? The personas should help the instructor see how the various options would affect different students, thus guiding the choices. Here I might decide that I want most of the content delivery done online to free up class time for discussion of case studies because those discussions will prepare students for the ones they will have with care teams as medical practitioners.
The fourth stage is to develop a prototype. Applied to education, this would mean developing some or all of the curriculum. I might create the case studies that students will discuss as well as pick or create the lesson content. I would also sketch out the course topics and the course format.
The final stage is testing. Here is where the distinction between business and education is most stark. Businesses test prototypes before releasing them to customers, and any business that does not would be considered negligent. But education rarely, if ever, does prerelease testing, instead using students as the test subjects for the first course offering.
If I were to apply design thinking, I would give different groups of potential students samples of the curriculum to see how they react. I would give one group some of the case studies and watch how the discussion goes. Did students understand the case study? Did they find enough to discuss? Were they interested in the case studies, and did they identify the relevant considerations for deciding them? I would also have students read, watch, or listen to course content examples and test for comprehension. I would also give groups a list of topics and see if there are any important ones that I left out. All this would be with an eye toward revising the curriculum (the prototype) and testing it again until it achieved the desired results.
Benefits and weaknesses
A critic of design thinking might say its lauded learner-centered focus is nothing new because all courses are designed for learners; they’re not designed to teach to the classroom door. But here I think it contrasts with a topic-centered approach. I designed my first medical ethics course by identifying the major topics in the field on the belief that I needed to cover those topics. Design thinking focuses on what will benefit learners to know—a fundamentally different question. This would help ensure that the curriculum stays tethered to practical application.
A second benefit is that the detailed information about students would help instructors overcome “the expert’s blind spot,” the tendency for experts to speak over the heads of novices because they don’t see how comprehending what they are saying requires background information that the novice lacks. It would also help the instructor understand the obstacles that students face on their learning journey and design into the course features that would anticipate and head off the causes of student failure.
My only question is whether this model works better with adult working students than with traditional students straight out of high school. Traditional students often go to college because it is expected of them; their parents, siblings, friends, and relatives all went to college, and so they do so without much thought. Adult students are more likely than traditional students to have a clear idea of their wants and needs, which makes it hard to use traditional student profiles to guide curriculum design. Nevertheless, the model provides an intriguing method to design a course from the student’s perspective.
Ní Shé, C., Farrell, O., Brunton, J., & Costello, E. (2022). Integrating design thinking into instructional design: The #OpenTeach case study. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 38(1), 33–52. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.6667 | <urn:uuid:443fe3eb-54df-4d6a-b76f-ba353d5d7f90> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://qa.teachingprofessor.com/tag/course-design-strategies/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473690.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222030017-20240222060017-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.958726 | 2,235 | 2.8125 | 3 | 539 |
Love ’em or hate ’em, student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are here to stay. Parts <a href="https://www.teachingprofessor.com/free-article/its-time-to-discuss-student-evaluations-bias-with-our-students-seriously/" target="_blank"...
It has been said that experience is the best teacher, and for this reason, many instructors and educational programs are adding experiential components to their curriculum. One form of experiential learning is service learning, where students apply what they are studying to improving their local or global community. While these projects usually happen in the areas neighboring a physical campus, online learners can also benefit from service learning. This article will discuss how The Chicago School of Professional Psychology created service learning opportunities for online students.
Students in the educational psychology and technology program complete their coursework online all over the globe and therefore have limited options for working together in person to serve others. Thus, for the course Cognition across the Lifespan and Technology’s Impact, we developed a signature assignment that has students implement a project that educates people in the global community on important topics related to technology and human development. For example, students create YouTube videos that educate women on important health practices during pregnancy, parents on important growth milestones in the infancy and toddler years, children on safe internet guidelines, adolescents on bullying and social media, individuals in the midlife phase on important decisions regarding retirement, children caring their elderly parents, and individuals grieving the loss of a loved one.
While the online environment might at first seem to limit service learning opportunities, in reality it helps students see the possibilities for using technology to benefit others. Additionally, during COVID-19 global pandemic, when many individuals are unable to leave their homes, online service learning projects allow students to reach a much wider audience than do onsite projects.
Besides gaining experience in the use of technology to address community issues, students can integrate ideas of social justice—which has recently become a major focus of higher education—into their service learning projects. Faculty challenge students to be creative in their approach to service learning and to select a topic they are passionate about educating others on. Due to the nature of the assignment, instructors should also encourage students to be community minded and to focus on the needs of a specific, often underserved population. This mindset encourages students to think beyond themselves and instead look to the challenges and struggles others may be facing and how knowledge and education can affect a community.
Students select a topic early in the course and then work to develop their project throughout it. This step-by-step approach helps student to best prepare for the depth this type of informational video requires. Beyond the content itself, this assignment gives students experience with creating a professional presentation, editing videos, and posting videos online. As an administrator and an instructor in the program, we enjoy seeing the benefits that this service learning project produces with our students each semester.
When implementing online service learning projects, instructors should first consider the learning outcomes of their course or program and how service learning fits into these desired outcomes. In our case, social justice was a designated outcome of the course. Therefore, it fit well into the course topic of viewing the role of technology throughout the lifespan.
Instructors should also consider the time frame students have to devote to the project as well as students’ technology and design skill level. For example, in a shorter, non-technology-focused class, it might be easier for students to develop the sort of short videos one sees on TikTok or Instagram. In longer classes students might be able to develop more elaborate projects that involve recruiting additional participants via social media to conduct their project. Examples might include raising money or doing community service for community organizations or designing a webpage for a community event.
There are various components to consider when assessing a student’s virtual service learning projects. Possible elements of related assignment rubrics may include creativity and innovation, potential impact on the community, use of technology, professionalism in presentation, and the student’s reflection of the service learning experience, feedback received from the served community, and the student’s ability to apply the course content to a practical setting. To make the experience most meaningful and to allow personal and professional growth through the service learning project, accurate assessment as well as self-reflection encourages students to strive for tangible and lasting results in their work.
The advantages virtual service learning projects have over on-site projects are their flexibility, creativity, and extended reach. Students can tailor their projects to specific communities by picking the technologies those communities use and the video formats that will appeal to those communities’ members. Thus, the projects also help teach students how to communicate with different populations. Although traditionally service learning has been conducted in person, innovative technologies now afford educators the opportunity to implement these vital academic experiences into online assignments.
Aubrey Statti, EdD, is a core faculty member of the educational psychology and technology program at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Kelly Torres, PhD, is the department chair of the educational psychology and technology program at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. | <urn:uuid:225382ab-8fea-45b5-8cfa-9c966cfb62eb> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://qa.teachingprofessor.com/topics/online-teaching-and-learning/developing-engaged-practitioners-through-virtual-service-learning-projects/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473690.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222030017-20240222060017-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.944953 | 1,055 | 2.796875 | 3 | 540 |
There are many types of emotions that influence the way we live and interact with others. At times, it may seem that we are governed by these emotions. The decisions we make, the actions we take and the perceptions we have are influenced by the emotions we experience at any given moment.
Psychologists have also tried to identify the different types of emotions that people experience. A few different theories have emerged to classify and explain the emotions people feel.
what are the basic emotions?
In the 1970s, psychologist Paul Eckman identified six basic emotions that, according to him, are universally experienced in all human cultures. The emotions he identified were happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise and anger. Later, he expanded his list of basic emotions to include such things as pride, shame, embarrassment and excitement.
Discovering the fundamental emotions
Psychologist Robert Plutchik proposed a “wheel of emotions” that worked something like the color wheel. Emotions can be combined to form different feelings, just as colors can be mixed to create other shades.
According to this theory, the most basic emotions act as building blocks. More complex emotions, sometimes mixed, are mixtures of these more basic ones. For example, basic emotions such as joy and trust can combine to create love.
A 2017 study suggests that there are many more basic emotions than previously thought. In the study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, researchers identified 27 different categories of emotions.
However, rather than being totally distinct, the researchers found that people experience these emotions along a gradient. Let’s take a closer look at some of the basic types of emotions and explore the impact they have on human behavior.
Of all the types of emotions, the happiness is often the most sought after. Happiness is often defined as a pleasant emotional state characterized by feelings of contentment, joy, satisfaction and well-being.
Research on happiness has grown considerably since the 1960s in several disciplines, including the branch of psychology known as positive psychology. This type of emotion is sometimes expressed through
- Facial expressions: such as smiling
- Body language: such as a relaxed posture
- Tone of voice: an upbeat and pleasant way of speaking
Although happiness is considered one of the basic human emotions, the things we think of as creating happiness tend to be heavily influenced by culture. For example, pop culture influences tend to emphasize that achieving certain things such as buying a house or having a well-paying job will result in happiness.
The reality of what actually contributes to happiness is often much more complex and more individualized. People have long believed that happiness and health were connected, and research has supported the idea that happiness can play a role in physical and mental health.
Happiness has been linked to a number of outcomes, such as greater longevity and greater marital satisfaction. Conversely, unhappiness has been linked to a range of negative health outcomes.
Stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness, for example, have been linked to such things as decreased immunity, increased inflammation, and reduced life expectancy.
Sadness is another type of emotion that is usually defined as a transitory emotional state characterized by feelings of disappointment, grief, hopelessness, disinterest and a dull mood.
Like other emotions, sadness is something that all people experience from time to time. In some cases, people may experience prolonged and severe periods of sadness that can develop into depression. Sadness can be expressed in a number of ways, including
- Low mood
- Withdrawal from others
The type and severity of sadness can vary depending on the cause of the sadness, and the way people cope with these feelings can also vary.
Sadness can lead people to adopt coping mechanisms such as avoiding others, self-medicating, and ruminating on negative thoughts. These behaviors can exacerbate feelings of sadness and prolong the duration of the emotion.
Fear is a powerful emotion that can also play an important role in survival. When one is faced with some type of danger and experiences fear, one goes through what is known as the fight or flight response.
Your muscles tense, your heart rate and breathing increase, and your mind becomes more alert, which prepares your body to flee from danger or to fight back.
This response helps you to be prepared to deal effectively with threats in your environment. Expressions of this type of emotion can include
- Facial expressions: such as widening the eyes and tilting the chin backward
- Body language: attempts to hide or run away from the threat
- Physiological reactions: such as breathing and racing heartbeat
Of course, not everyone experiences fear in the same way. Some people may be more sensitive to fear and certain situations or objects may be more likely to trigger this emotion.
Fear is the emotional response to an immediate threat. We may also develop a similar reaction to anticipated threats or even to our thoughts about potential dangers, and this is what we generally think of as anxiety. Social anxiety, for example, involves an anticipatory fear of social situations.
On the other hand, some people seek out situations that provoke fear. Extreme sports and other thrills can induce fear, but some people seem to thrive on and even enjoy these sensations.
Repeated exposure to a fear-provoking object or situation can lead to familiarity and acclimation, which can reduce feelings of fear and anxiety.6
This is the idea behind exposure therapy, in which people are gradually exposed to things that frighten them in a controlled and safe manner. Over time, the feelings of fear begin to diminish.
Disgust is another of the original six basic emotions described by Eckman. Disgust can be manifested in a number of ways, including
- Body language: turning away from the object of disgust
- Physical reactions – such as vomiting or retching
- Facial expressions: such as wrinkling of the nose and curving of the upper lip
This feeling of disgust can originate from a number of things, such as an unpleasant taste, sight or smell. Researchers believe that this emotion evolved as a reaction to foods that could be harmful or deadly. When people smell or taste food that has gone bad, for example, disgust is a typical reaction.
Lack of hygiene, infections, blood, putrefaction and death can also trigger a disgust response. This may be the body’s way of avoiding things that may carry communicable diseases.
People may also experience moral disgust when they observe others engaging in behaviors that they consider disgusting, immoral, or evil.
Anger can be an especially powerful emotion characterized by feelings of hostility, agitation, frustration, and antagonism toward others. Like fear, anger can play a role in your body’s fight or flight response.
When a threat generates feelings of anger, you may be inclined to defend yourself from danger and protect yourself. Anger is often manifested through
- Facial expressions: such as frowning or staring
- Body language: such as taking a firm stance or turning around
- Tone of voice: such as snapping or shouting
- Physiological responses: such as sweating or turning red
- Aggressive behaviors: such as hitting, kicking or throwing objects
Although anger is often thought of as a negative emotion, sometimes it can be a good thing. It can be constructive in helping to clarify your needs in a relationship, and it can also motivate you to take action and find solutions to things that bother you.
However, anger can become a problem when it is excessive or expressed in ways that are unhealthy, dangerous, or harmful to others. Uncontrolled anger can quickly turn into aggression, abuse or violence.
This type of emotion can have both mental and physical consequences. Uncontrolled anger can make it difficult to make rational decisions and can even impact physical health.
Anger has been linked to heart disease and diabetes. It has also been linked to health risk behaviors such as aggressive driving, alcohol consumption and smoking.
Surprise is another of the six basic types of human emotions originally described by Eckman. Surprise is usually quite brief and is characterized by a physiological startle response following something unexpected.
This type of emotion can be positive, negative, or neutral. An unpleasant surprise, for example, might consist of someone stepping out from behind a tree and startling you as you walk to your car at night.
An example of a pleasant surprise would be coming home to find that your closest friends have gathered to celebrate your birthday. Surprise is usually characterized by:
- Facial expressions: such as raising your eyebrows, widening your eyes, and opening your mouth
- Physical responses: such as jumping backwards
- Verbal reactions : such as shouting, screaming, or gasping
Surprise is another type of emotion that can trigger the fight or flight response. When startled, people can experience a burst of adrenaline that helps prepare the body to fight or flee.
Surprise can have important effects on human behavior. For example, research has shown that people tend to fixate disproportionately on surprising events.
Thus, surprising and unusual events in the news tend to stand out in memory more than others. It has also been found that people tend to be persuaded by surprising arguments and learn more from surprising information.
Other types of emotions
The six basic emotions described by Eckman are only part of the many different types of emotions that people are capable of experiencing. Eckman’s theory suggests that these basic emotions are universal in all cultures around the world.
However, other theories and new research continue to explore the different types of emotions and their classification. Eckman later added other emotions to his list, but suggested that, unlike his original six emotions, not all of them could necessarily be encoded through facial expressions. Some of the emotions he subsequently identified were
- Pride of accomplishment
Other theories of emotion
As with many concepts in psychology, not all theorists agree on how to classify emotions or what the basic emotions actually are. Although Eckman’s theory is one of the best known, other theorists have proposed their own ideas about which emotions constitute the core of human experience.
For example, some researchers have suggested that there are only two or three basic emotions. Others have suggested that emotions exist in a kind of hierarchy. Primary emotions, such as love, joy, surprise, anger, and sadness, can be divided into secondary emotions. Love, for example, is composed of secondary emotions, such as affection and nostalgia.
These secondary emotions can be further broken down into what are known as tertiary emotions. The secondary emotion of affect includes tertiary emotions, such as liking, fondness, compassion, and tenderness.
A more recent study suggests that there are at least 27 distinct emotions, all of which are highly interconnected. After analyzing the responses of more than 800 men to more than 2,000 video clips, the researchers created an interactive map to demonstrate how these emotions relate to each other.
“We found that it took 27 different dimensions, not six, to account for how hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video,” explained lead researcher Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center.
In other words, emotions are not states that occur in isolation. Instead, the study suggests that gradients of emotion exist and that these different feelings are deeply interrelated.
Alan Cowen, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley, suggests that better clarifying the nature of our emotions can play an important role in helping scientists, psychologists and clinicians learn more about how emotions underlie brain activity, behavior and mood. By better understanding these states, he hopes researchers can develop better treatments for psychiatric illnesses. | <urn:uuid:1eef9899-08eb-4af9-80af-d67915085543> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://thebrain.blog/basic-emotions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473690.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222030017-20240222060017-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.958737 | 2,383 | 3.5625 | 4 | 541 |
in Health and Disease
The scent of your parents’ signature gingerbread
can trigger sweet childhood memories and will vividly remind you of past events.
Impairments of memory function of the brain, on the other hand,
directly lead to the disruption of our daily life.
Alzheimer's disease is currently affecting >50 million patients worldwide.
Identifying brain circuit mechanisms underlying memory is not only a major goal for the basic neuroscience field,
but also an ultimate goal for clinical neuroscience.
The Kei Igarashi laboratory at UC Irvine investigates:
(i) How our neuronal circuits enable associative memory in healthy brain?
(ii) How these brain circuits become impaired in Alzheimer’s disease? Can we restore impaired circuits?
To solve these problems, we are targeting the entorhinal-hippocampal circuits, a core brain circuit for memory.
We use state-of-the-art systems neuroscience techniques including:
Optogenetic-assisted in vivo multi-unit spike and LFP recordings
Olfactory-cued memory behavior tasks
High-resolution functional anatomy
These works are supported by grants from NIH/NIA, NIH/NIMH, Whitehall Foundation, Alzheimer's Association, Brain Research Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Donors Cure Foundation, and Brightfocus Foundation. | <urn:uuid:5336d863-6ea1-4f27-b08c-9a7a39062b17> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.igarashilab.org/research | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473690.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222030017-20240222060017-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.839721 | 282 | 2.78125 | 3 | 542 |
Rethinking sex in neuroscience of mental health
Even though it is generally known that Autism and ADHD are more common in men, and depression or anxiety disorders are more common among women, it is still not well understood if, how and when sex differences impact neurodiversity and mental health. To better understand this complex issue, 25 international professionals gathered for a five-day Lorentz workshop. Lara Wierenga, who organized the workshop together with Marieke Bos, looks back on a successful week.
‘With this workshop, we wanted to bridge the gap between research and clinical practice on sex and gender effects in relation to mental health’, says Wierenga. ‘We know, for example, that women are more often diagnosed with depression than men, even though the suicidal prevalence in men is the highest. We do not know exactly what causes this discrepancy, but there shouldn't be lives at stake because of a lack of knowledge.’
One of the stories from the workshop that really stuck with Wierenga was the story of one of the clinicians about our classification system, which highlighted the importance of sex/gender when it comes to precision medicine. She told us that she was treating a transgender girl who showed a number of symptoms that could be associated with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it depended on the scale on which she placed these symptoms, whether this transgender girl actually had an autism spectrum disorder. She met the characteristics for ASD in boys, but not the criteria for ASD in girls.
This example clearly shows that you must take biological sex and certainly also gender in its full facets (such as identity and social expectations), into account when tailoring treatment to an individual. Without this fundamental basis, there is no question of precision medicine.
The first steps
In order to realize precision medicine, it is first of all important that there is more knowledge about the male/female differences in mental health. In order to properly map out this complex issue, Wierenga and Bos opted for a non-traditional way of conducting science. She organized a five-day Lorentz workshop in which they engaged scientists, clinicians and policymakers from different disciplines in an attempt to approach this complex issue in a multidisciplinary way.
Even though biological sex is the most frequently studied group difference in brain and behavioral research, we still do not know how gender differences influence mental health and to what extent differences in, for example, brain anatomy, hormone balance and socio-cultural expectations play a role in this. 'The problem is that gender is often included in the research design, but is not further analysed,' says Wierenga. Until 2016, only 15% of the publications reported on male/female differences in their findings. "If you realize that 15% of the young adults have had a psychiatric diagnosis before the age of 18, it is surprising that we have not done more research into this."
Wierenga says that every scientist who attended the workshop has had a bad experience with the media not translating their research properly to society. To ensure that this does not deter them from conducting research into gender differences, Wierenga, Bos, and their international colleagues worked on a paper that not only describes the knowledge they exchanged during the workshop, but also contains concrete tools and tips about the methods you can use to include gender differences in your research, even if this is not your main research question. All participants agreed that this open science movement can boost the research field, for example by sharing data analysis scripts, involving stakeholders in the research process, and translating the research results to society in an appropriate way.
The latter is very important. The knowledge that scientists communicate to society has an impact on the diagnoses that clinicians appoint, and the prevalence of diagnoses influences the population groups that scientists will investigate. It is hard to get rid of this circular reasoning. Therefore, it is very important that scientists not only send information but also talk to clinicians in the working field about the questions they encounter in practice and to which they would like answers.
Network, paper and podcast
According to Wierenga, every participant of the workshop experienced an 'aha' moment, in which puzzle pieces fell into place. The participants learned a lot from each other and everyone showed strong commitment. To follow up on this success, Wierenga and Bos will continue to facilitate this network. Despite the fact that everyone is scattered all over the world, they will continue to discuss the subject. In the new year, the paper that the various attendees (largely) wrote during the workshop will also appear. Furthermore, Wierenga and Bos are taking another step to promote science communication by publishing a podcast in which they talk to various participants of the workshops. With this podcast, they want to give the general public an insight into the results of the workshop. | <urn:uuid:29e1d8ce-17a7-4f93-bca3-dfcfe8885e38> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/news/2022/12/rethinking-sex-in-neurosciene-of-mental-health?cf=social-and-behavioural-sciences | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474412.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223121413-20240223151413-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.959925 | 984 | 2.890625 | 3 | 543 |
Entrepreneurs must be able to keep up with the continuous changes that happen in the world of business. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a game-changer for startups and small-scale businesses that help them streamline their operations, enhance customer experiences and gain an edge. From chatbots and predictive analytics to image recognition and natural language processing, there are many ways AI can help entrepreneurs reach their goals and stay ahead of the curve.
With intelligent software for entrepreneurs, everyday tasks like expense categorization, bank reconciliation and financial reporting can be made automated. This frees up time and resources to focus on higher-value activities that can drive growth. Additionally they are scalable, and they can adapt to your company’s growth needs without increasing costs.
AI can also be utilized to help understand and support the cognitive processes of entrepreneurs. The combination of big data analytics and neuroscience could allow us to identify and reproduce the mental impulses that drive opportunity recognition exploring, exploitation and exploration. This could result in technologically-induced support and stimulation of entrepreneurial cognitive processes which are currently difficult to discern.
It is crucial that entrepreneurship researchers understand the limitations of such an approach. This will enable them to better guide the http://virtualduediligence.info/4-effective-apps-for-managing-your-business-on-the-go creation and implementation of AI which supports entrepreneurship. It is important to comprehend how AI algorithms can be able to take into consideration the diversity of voices within a democratic societies. This technology could be a tool to settle disparities rather than an agent for change. | <urn:uuid:438cc498-a6cf-4258-94cd-4a92fcf0444a> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://ninimamaly.com/intelligent-software-for-entrepreneurs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474569.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20240224212113-20240225002113-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.93553 | 321 | 2.78125 | 3 | 544 |
A bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science is great for students who have eclectic interests and may want to have several different career options available to them. Most commonly, students with a degree in cognitive science go on to pursue fields such as machine learning, human centered (UX) design, software design/development, etc.
Collegelearners is replete with up-to-date information on cognitive science degree UK, cognitive science bachelor Germany, cognitive science distance learning, amongst others. Take out time to surf through our catalog for more information on related topics.
Cognitive Psychology Bachelor’s Degree
Bachelor of Cognitive Science
A typical program includes the essential components of cognitive science. These are the seven disciplines mentioned in the first paragraph. The coursework may have computational modeling and neuroscience. Computational modeling may piggy-back with artificial intelligence (AI). You may learn about bionic and prosthetic technology. One example is the use of brain waves for a person with quadriplegia to control a cursor on a computer screen. AI has become a household word in the 21st century. However, the first use of the term was in 1956.
Cognitive Psychology Degree Online
Online Bachelor Degree in Cognitive Science
An online bachelor’s degree in cognitive science will most frequently be found in a college course catalogue as a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree. Degree options can vary from a general cognitive science degree program or a specialized degree. Depending on the college, you may find cognitive science specializations that include:
- Clinical Aspects of Cognition
- Behavioral Neuroscience
- Design & Interaction
- Human Computer Interaction
- Language & Culture
- Human Cognition
- Machine Learning
- Neural Computation
Bachelor degree programs will typically take students 4-years of full-time matriculation to complete. Part-time students, on the other hand, will take longer than four-years as a function of course load. BS, Bachelor of Science, degrees in cognitive science will blend liberal arts education with core classes to provided students with a well-rounded education. General education courses will often include: communications, history, statistics, philosophy, English, and art.
An example of classes that may be found in a general cognitive science degree track include: introduction to computing, design of everyday things, fundamentals of data science, research methods, minds and brains, neurobiology of cognition, the future of cognition, perception, sensation, data modeling, data analysis, design in commerce, machine learning, the developing mind, gesture, animal cognition, analysis of cognition and drugs, alternate states of consciousness, deep learning, and neural networks.
The School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University-Dallas offers a 120-credit B.S. degree in cognitive science. The science-related courses include computer and cognitive science, algebra, psychology, mathematics for computing, and software engineering. From sophomore through your senior year, the curriculum has several electives from which to choose. One example is a class in cognitive neuroscience that examines perception, attention, emotion, and memory. Through the use of neuroimaging equipment and physiological techniques, you study how the brain functions in brain-damaged and schizophrenic patients.
The major courses in the above program differ according to the two of three specializations you select. The choices are Neuroscience, Psychology/Human-Computer Interactions, and Computational Modeling/AI.
Some college degrees have a stronger association with psychology. An example is the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Instead of the seven disciplines in the CSS logo, this program eliminates education and anthropology. The emphasis on computer science focuses on machine learning, AI, computer simulations as a test of cognition.
Carnegie Mellon divides cognitive science into the concentrations of Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Decision Sciences, and Neurosciences. Decision Sciences offers only one course, whereas seventeen choices. Students take three courses from any of these concentrations.
What Do Cognitive Scientists Do
A cognitive scientist will study how individuals obtain, process, retrieve, and store information. The primary brain functions studied by a cognitive scientist include:
- Language Development
- Information Retrieval
- Human Perception
Cognitive Science Jobs & Career Outlook
Cognitive science jobs are expected to increase by 14% or more than twice the national average. The net result will be an additional 23,000 cognitive scientists injected into our nation’s economy. Driving the bulk of these jobs are industries such as schools, medical centers, hospitals, social welfare centers, and mental health organizations.
Mean income for cognitive scientists and psychologists is pegged at $93,440 a year. States paying the most include Maryland, California, Kansas, and Washington. All of which average over $100,000 a year based on the latest data from the BLS. The largest employers of scientists are the federal government, research firms, hospitals, healthcare facilities, and colleges.
Jobs for cognitive science majors
- Artificial intelligence.
- Data analysis.
- User interface.
- Game design.
- Software development.
- Medical research. | <urn:uuid:fc10a99b-edad-4f9c-a434-1799812fb96a> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://collegelearners.com/online-bachelors-degree-in-cognitive-science/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474653.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226062606-20240226092606-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.897547 | 1,056 | 2.734375 | 3 | 545 |
Since man is a social animal by nature, social experiences are critical to our growth at all stages of life. Learning is all about how we communicate with people in all aspects of our lives: we speak to them, listen to what they have to say, and then try to incorporate or understand what they have to say (and vice-versa).
Today’s businesses will benefit from social learning to keep up with the speed of their industry. Organizations increasingly rely on social learning to engage e-learning opportunities for their employees, clients, and partners. The idea is more than just a buzzword, and forward-thinking companies are gradually embracing it to promote collective learning and its integration into the flow of work to boost organizational efficiency and L&D effectiveness.
What is Social Learning Theory?
Social learning theory is a hybrid of two different types of learning theories. On the one hand, the cognitive learning theory suggests that psychological influences solely dictate an individual’s learning. Also, the behavioral learning theory argues that education is entirely determined by how we respond to stimuli in our environment.
In the 1950s, psychologist Albert Bandura and his doctoral student, Richard Walters, founded the social learning theory. Humans learn best when they learn together, according to a condensed social learning concept. When people are in groups of at least two, learning is encouraged as a mechanism.
Learners are not passive consumers of knowledge in social learning, which emphasizes the importance of interaction. According to social learning theory, we learn better when we observe and mimic another person’s attitudes and acts. We are motivated to learn more when we see our “role models” improve their lives and the lives of others through their behavior.
Why is social learning theory relevant?
Social learning has always been an integral part of how we learn and retain knowledge, with informal social learning accounting for 75 percent of organizational learning. But, with the rise of remote work, it’s become even more important. Different types of learning from peers, mentors, and managers and self-reflection are all part of a well-rounded approach.
There are many advantages of social learning in the workplace. Observing others shows us how to do something and what the consequences can be if we do so. Observing a colleague complete a data validation exercise in Excel results in an error message being shown when invalid data is entered. Employees may benefit from social learning because it engages them and helps them remember knowledge through practiced actions or mental and physical “rehearsal” of new skills.
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How to apply social learning theory in the workplace?
In organizations, social learning is being used more often and is on the rise. In reality, it is becoming more popular than traditional education, which is based on a set of rigid curriculums. Online learning, mentorships, and it are modern learning approaches that replace formal education. Both of these approaches are unconventional, but they are also more flexible, affordable, effective, and applicable for workers than traditional learning methods, allowing them much more autonomy and flexibility about how they learn.
To successfully incorporate social learning in your workplace, you’ll need structure. Ad hoc social learning among your employees through social interactions is one thing; consistent and observable progress with the social learning theory necessitates a more organized approach.
Let’s look at some of Bandura’s main concepts and how to adapt them to eLearning so you can incorporate them into your learning and growth strategy:
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To replicate the workplace dynamic of face-to-face encounters, video, and audio would be useful. Virtual classroom technology enables real-time presentations and collaboration, enhancing the illusion that learning is social. It helps the workers remain centered and learn more by reinforcing the belief that a job is new or different.
Via forums and chat features, Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as GoSkills make it simple to communicate with colleagues and fellow students. Group conversations, threaded discussions, and group learning are all examples of social learning.
Employees can learn together, at their speed, and share their profiles to reveal completed courses using an LMS. People learn by internalizing knowledge and recalling it best when they are close to when they first learned it.
Trying to discuss and practice the attitudes, skills, and information that your employees learned in a course will make it easier for them to apply these new skills when required. When practice is made enjoyable and engaging, such as through online competitions and events, it becomes fun and interesting.
Gamification is a fantastic way to motivate the workers and help them remember what they’ve learned. Learning, like anything else in life, requires motivation. It makes the learning process enjoyable. When an employee does something well and unlocks different achievements, gamification offers the benefits of commitment and motivation through incentives and encouragement.
Employees who participate in social learning are better able to retain knowledge, remain involved, and apply what they’ve learned in their daily activities. It is an excellent addition to any training technique, whether it is conducted online, offline, or as part of a hybrid learning program that includes microlearning, face-to-face coaching, or video training. Furthermore, since information sharing is an essential part of human existence, social learning is both cost-effective and reasonably simple to implement. | <urn:uuid:20442571-c537-4394-b0bd-b939671b6879> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://wbcomdesigns.com/what-is-social-learning/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474676.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227153053-20240227183053-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.951733 | 1,100 | 3.296875 | 3 | 546 |
The main challenge for adult learning and education across the globe is to reach those who need it most. That is the key message of UNESCO’s Fifth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE 5) which will be published on 15 June 2022 at the Seventh International Conference on Adult Education in Marrakech, Morocco.
UNESCO’s report shows that while there is progress, notably in the participation of women, those who need adult education the most – disadvantaged and vulnerable groups such as Indigenous learners, rural populations, migrants, older citizens, people with disabilities or prisoners – are deprived of access to learning opportunities.
About 60% of countries reported no improvement in participation by people with disabilities, migrants or prisoners. 24% of countries reported that the participation of rural populations declined. And participation of older adults also decreased in 24% of the 159 surveyed countries. GRALE 5 calls for a major change in Member States’ approach to adult learning and education backed by adequate investment to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from adult learning and education.
“I urge governments and the international community to join our efforts and take action to ensure that the right to education is realized for everyone – no matter their age, who they are, or where they live,” said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. “Rapid technological and social changes as well as massive global challenges require that citizens have access to new learning throughout their lives. Reskilling and upskilling through adult learning and education must become routine. The ultimate twenty-first century skill is the ability to learn.”
A broader range of learners
Over half of countries reported an increase in participation in adult learning and education since 2018 but challenges remain. While participation of women and youth has considerably improved, overall participation in adult learning and education continues to be insufficient.
In 23% of the 159 countries that submitted data for GRALE 5, fewer than 1% of youth and adults aged 15 and above participate in education and learning programmes. Sub-Saharan Africa led the field by a wide margin with 59% of countries reported that at least one in five adults benefit from learning. This figure drops to only 16% of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and 25% in Europe. . The high participation rate in Africa may be explained in part by a strong demand for adult literacy and second-chance education.
Quality is improving
Most countries reported progress in relation to quality of curricula, assessment and the professionalization of adult educators. Over two-thirds reported progress in pre-service and in-service training for ALE educators, as well as in employment conditions, though this progress varied considerably by region and income group. This advances the quality of adult education.
Citizenship education key for sustainable development
Responding to contemporary challenges, such as climate change and digitalization, demands citizens informed, trained and engaged, active, who recognise both their shared humanity and their obligations to other species and to the planet. Citizenship education is a key tool in this endeavour. In a special thematic chapter, GRALE 5 shows that close to three quarters (74%) of countries are developing or implementing policies in relation to citizenship education.
About the Global Report on Adult Learning and Education
Published by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, the Global Report on Adult Learning and Education monitors the extent to which UNESCO Member States put their international commitments regarding adult learning and education into practice. The reports combine survey data, policy analysis and case studies to provide policy-makers and practitioners with sound recommendations and examples of good practice. Five reports have been published since 2009.
- Download the fifth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education
- Download the summary of the fifth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education
About the Seventh International Conference on Adult Education
From 15 to 17 June 2022, participants from across the globe will come together for the Seventh International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VII) in Marrakech, Morocco. They will take stock of achievements in adult learning and education, discuss challenges, and develop a new framework for action to make adult learning and education a reality around the world. CONFINTEA VII is hosted by the Kingdom of Morocco and co-organized with UNESCO. | <urn:uuid:b14edab3-aedb-4b9c-98ed-de5fe286833c> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.fenews.co.uk/resources/adult-education-does-not-reach-those-who-need-it-most-said-new-unesco-report/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474676.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227153053-20240227183053-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.947047 | 857 | 2.578125 | 3 | 547 |
April R. Gaines
Mary Joseph-Martin November 25, 2012
AET/505 - FOUNDATIONS OF ADULT EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Adult learning is a way to separate the way adults learn from the way children learn. Physiologically, learning is the formation of cell assemblies and phase sequences. Children learn by building these assemblies and sequences. Adults spend more time making new arrangements than forming new sequences. They can learn by talking with others. We can easily say, this makes adults to create a connection between differences and similarities. There are many assumptions about adult learning such as adults are self directed, they are goal oriented, adults are …show more content…
Your child will learn best through one or more of these learning channels, and you can help him become a successful learner by teaching the child through his primary learning style(s). Auditory activities include reading, listening, hearing, etc. These are channels used in a typical school classroom. When you read, you "hear" the words. The learning style that is good for you may not be so favorable with someone else. We all learn best in our own way, and if you know which way works best for you, then you can learn more and do better in your classes, and in life. A child with significantly impaired movement might find kinesthetic learning channels the most difficult to use. The key is to know what channel is most useful to your child and teach towards that learning style. Most children can learn through all channels and if they are taught through all channels they will have maximized learning because what they don 't get from their main channel, they may get from …show more content…
These changes affect how we learn and take in new information. Our hearing decreases, our eyesight becomes poorer, and the brain becomes slower at absorbing and retaining new information. To accommodate to the more mature adults in the classroom, I would make sure the older adults were closer to me to hear me speak. I would make sure any handouts, homework, or textbooks have a decent sized font that they could read.
I believe my philosophy of adult education is Progressivism. I think that John Dewey’s theory that that people are social animals who learn well through active interplay with others and that our learning increases when we are engaged in activities that have meaning for us is an important belief for adults and that that book learning is no substitute for actually doing things. The notion that knowledge is acquired and expanded as we apply our previous experiences to solving new, meaningful problems is a key aspect of adult learning. | <urn:uuid:035e4d60-3908-49f6-9cc9-e4cd05b246bf> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.studymode.com/essays/AET-505-The-Foundations-Of-Adult-Learning-1009201EA239F21D.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474775.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20240229003536-20240229033536-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.972325 | 526 | 3.484375 | 3 | 548 |
Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) seeks to explain how the nervous system and the brain develop. IPNB seeks to explain how the mind, brain, and relationships act together and how they change throughout life. Also known as relational neurobiology, it developed in the 1990s and has gained credence in the following decades.
This post discusses IPNB and its practical implications in managing daily living. It will cover what lessons you can learn through PCC's course and how this knowledge is beneficial.
What Is IPNB?
Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB), or relational neurobiology, examines practical working models developed from clinical evidence showing the interaction of human development, trauma, and social attachments. IPNB seeks to show how the nervous system impacts and is impacted by human interactions with various personal relationships. In other words, IPNB studies how the mind, brain, and relationships function in combination.
What Is Neuroscience?
Neuroscience, on the other hand, looks at the nervous system differently. Neuroscience refers to the sciences such as neurochemistry and experimental psychology that study the structures of the nervous system and the brain. It also studies how the nervous system and the brain function. As a scientific tool, therefore, neuroscience focuses on the diseases, disorders, and injuries that affect the human nervous system, including the brain. Neuroscience wants to know how the nervous system and the brain develop over time and how they function.
Interpersonal Neurobiology in Applied Settings
IPNB has many practical applications, and therapists use it to help clients understand the following:
- What is happening to them, whether it's work issues, parenting concerns, or in their personal relationships;
- What strategies may help them cope with what is happening to them;
- How to feel better;
- How to heal from trauma;
- How to create and support healthy relationships;
- Why there are challenges in personal relationships or why they face mental challenges.
IPNB nurtures the idea that the interpersonal relationships humans form early in life create the neural pathways and structures in the nervous system and brain that represent their experiences and help individuals form a coherent view of the world. IPNB provides evidence that the brain and nervous system develop and change over a person's lifetime, not just early childhood. To put it another way, IPNB helps you understand how the body codes learning into the brain.
Help Understand Relationships in All Forms
IPNB helps people connect to and adopt new coping strategies for their particular life issues because they better understand how their brains learn. Relational neuroscience impacts professionals working in:
- Marriage and family counselors, including parenting counselors, social workers,
- Healthcare, including nurses, mental health professionals, addiction counselors,
- Leadership positions, and
- Organizational development.
In addition, business leadership roles today are more fluid than traditional business leadership positions in the past. They require leaders to adopt a team orientation and creative style to meet the needs of today's workforce. It is one of the many relationships IPNB helps to provide a better understanding of, helping people better manage the family, professional, and friend relationships to thrive and survive.
IPNB teaches students about brain structures and how they relate to:
- Attention span,
- Empathy, and
Understanding these gives you tools to be self-aware and able to interpret social interactions better, helping you be more intentional in relationships.
Portland Community College's Course: The Foundations of Interpersonal Neurobiology Certificate
As a student, the Portland Community College course culminating in the Foundations of Interpersonal Neurobiology Certificate provides you with the tools you need to help yourselves and your clients develop a healthy and integrated mind and compassionate interpersonal relationships.
The IPNB program combines the following studies:
- Complexity Theory;
- Environmental Influences; and
- Relationship studies.
It is a hands-on course that includes dissecting a brain to see the various structures. Students learn to apply the neurobiology principles as a practical matter whether they are an organization leader, a community organizer, or in some other building role.
In addition to the online coursework, this innovative certificate program provides asynchronous classwork at your convenience. You can study the reading materials, take assessments of what you've learned, and interact with other students on the discussion boards. There is a four-day practicum in addition to online study during an in-person immersion weekend that allows you to present your ideas and interact with fellow students.
Take the Next Step
Understanding how IPNB differs from traditional neuroscience requires a study of neurobiology principles. It requires leaders and managers to develop the skills and tools necessary to help the workforce or their client base modify their relationships by adopting the principles of how the mind learns and evolves. Portland Community College can help students achieve their goals.
You may enjoy additional information on non-credit, continuing education courses through Portland Community College. These courses help individual health professionals, those in management roles, and community organization leaders take specialized classes and gain advice for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and trade professionals. | <urn:uuid:7e6633ac-cc91-4755-8e1a-4a1b77170a3d> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://climb.pcc.edu/blog/how-ipnb-differs-from-neuroscience | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707948235171.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20240305124045-20240305154045-00104.warc.gz | en | 0.928318 | 1,024 | 3.03125 | 3 | 549 |
You Get Thirsty and Drink. How Does Your Brain Signal You’ve Had Enough?
As neuroscientists ponder how and why we thirst, a group of researchers at the California Institute of Technology
has shed light on one small corner of the problem. Interested in how the brain keeps track of what the body is drinking, they
have identified a set of neurons that receive messages as thirsty mice gulp down water. Passed around in the brain’s
thirst centers, these messages seem to be behind the sensation of swift satisfaction that comes after a drink, and also suggest
that it’s not just what is drunk, but how it is slurped down, that affects the brain. If the circuits work the same
way in people, it may be key to understanding the neuroscience of what happens as we feel thirsty.
In the last few years, biologists have been mapping the neurons within an area in the brain that regulates thirst,
said Yuki Oka, a professor at Caltech and senior author of the new paper, which was published Wednesday in Nature. Cells in
this region had been observed going quiet after an animal had water, but it was not clear exactly why.
A graduate student in Dr. Oka’s laboratory, Vineet Augustine, did a series of experiments with mice that had
been genetically modified to make tracing the connections between their neurons easier. In these experiments, when a neuron
caused another neuron to turn off, it got tagged, leaving a trail of bread crumbs through the brain. | <urn:uuid:a4c30fac-3355-4c79-93ff-7bdb050587f2> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | http://www.jrosen.org/id146.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474440.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223153350-20240223183350-00205.warc.gz | en | 0.958496 | 318 | 3.25 | 3 | 550 |
What do you perceive whenever you hear the word Personality? A person with good and developed looks with proper dressing sense. This phenomenon does not end here. Personality development depends not only on your looks and dress but also on a lot more. Here I am going to tell you about Personality Development and its aspects.
What Is Personality Development?
Personality Development means developing good thoughts, behavior, and feelings that make individuals divergent from others.
Personality development is a lifelong process that encompasses various factors and influences, including genetics, environment, experiences, and individual choices. Here are some key facts about personality development:
15 Facts Of Personality Development
1. Physical facet
Physical personality, in essence, refers to the appearance of an individual, which includes Dressing style and Physique. It is considered one of the most important aspects of personality but not wholly. For instance, if you’re going to a party with a lovely dress up, but you don’t know how to behave appropriately, it will affect your personality. So, Physique is essential but not compulsion in personality development.
2. Psychological facet
It means that your psychology makes you different from another individual in behaviour and thinking. For instance, some people are very open-minded (you may call them optimistic), and some are very narrow-minded (pessimistic) two different psychological personalities.
3. The Big Five Factors
The Big Five personality traits — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN) — provide a framework for understanding and measuring personality differences. These traits are believed to capture the broad dimensions of personality variation.
4. Lifespan Perspective
Personality development is viewed as a dynamic and ongoing process that unfolds across the lifespan. It is influenced by interactions between biological, psychological, and social factors, as well as by the choices and experiences that individuals encounter throughout their lives.
5. Spiritual facet
Spiritual personality growth and development is one of the influential and extensive segments for personality because it depends upon the individual’s inner-self, and way of seeing the world. Meditation is the most pleasing way to improve your spiritual personality as it will help you see the world with an optimistic vision rather than a pessimistic one.
6. Intervention and Growth
While personality traits are relatively stable, individuals can engage in intentional efforts to enhance personal growth and development. Strategies such as self-reflection, therapy, education, and personal goal-setting can facilitate positive changes in personality and behavior over time.
7. Virtuous facet
The word ‘virtuous’ itself confines the elucidation of the virtuous aspect of personality development, which is a person with high ethics and values. A person with righteousness, audacity, grit, precision, and common sense is scrutinized as virtuous or a personality with virtue.
8. Cultural Differences
Cultural norms, values, and practices influence the expression and interpretation of personality traits. Different cultures may prioritize certain personality characteristics and social behaviors, leading to variations in personality development across cultural contexts.
9. Social facet
By linking up all the aspects of personality, social personality development occurs. The social personality is something you manifest in front of society, including your physique, psychology, virtue, and inner self.
10. Nature vs. Nurture
Personality development is influenced by both genetic predispositions (nature) and environmental factors (nurture). While genetics may predispose individuals to certain personality traits, environmental influences such as upbringing, culture, education, and experiences play significant roles in shaping personality.
11. Stages of Development
Personality development is often conceptualized as occurring in stages across the lifespan. Psychologist Erik Erikson proposed a theory of psychosocial development, which outlines eight stages of development, each characterized by a specific conflict or challenge that individuals must resolve to progress successfully.
12. Social Learning Theory
According to social learning theory, individuals acquire and develop personality traits through observation, imitation, and reinforcement. Role models, peers, family members, and cultural influences all contribute to the social learning process.
13. Self-Concept and Identity
Personality development involves the formation of self-concept and identity. Self-concept refers to how individuals perceive themselves, including their beliefs, values, abilities, and attributes. Identity development involves the exploration and integration of various aspects of the self, such as gender, ethnicity, and personal interests.
14. Continuity and Change
While personality traits tend to exhibit stability over time, they are also subject to change and adaptation in response to life events, experiences, and personal growth. Individuals may undergo significant changes in personality throughout their lives, particularly during periods of transition and development.
15. Individual Differences
Personality development is highly individualized, and individuals may vary widely in terms of their personality profiles, strengths, weaknesses, and developmental trajectories. Factors such as temperament, resilience, and coping strategies contribute to individual differences in personality development.
Understanding personality development can provide valuable insights into human behavior, relationships, and individual differences, and it serves as a foundation for personal growth, self-awareness, and psychological well-being.
Read also – I Wish There Were No War Soldier’s Inner Voice | <urn:uuid:6d237409-e26d-44ad-afe5-1de989109fcd> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://hintsoflife.com/important-facts-about-personality-development/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474440.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223153350-20240223183350-00205.warc.gz | en | 0.93068 | 1,069 | 3.125 | 3 | 551 |
The Evolution of a New Name for Our Field
David J. Rosen, Steering Committee Member, Open Door Collective
Deborah Kennedy, Executive Director, National Coalition for Literacy
Our field has a variety of names. Some are confusing to those who work in the field, and several are especially puzzling to those outside it, including stakeholders, policymakers, well-wishers, and the general public. These names include, among others, Adult Education, Adult Literacy, Adult Education and Literacy, and Adult Basic Education (ABE).
- Adult Education, the broadest of these, may be clear to those in our field but frequently confuses those outside it. They may assume it means Higher Education or Continuing Education in higher education that is not offered for credit (also sometimes known as Developmental or Remedial Education), or the non-credit courses offered by local community education centers and other entities that are designed for personal development and sometimes labeled as Lifelong Learning.
- The term Adult Literacy is ambiguous within our field because it is sometimes used to describe adults learning to read, or read and write, and sometimes used to describe the whole field, from adult beginning literacy and English language learning for immigrants to preparation for post-secondary education.
- Adult Education and Family Literacy, the name currently used in Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), is not always recognized by those within and outside our field as including the full range of services the field offers, especially to immigrants, refugees, and others who may need education services at beginning levels.
- Adult Basic Education is especially confusing because it has two different meanings that are not always clear from context. One refers to learning levels ranging from beginning reading and writing up to adult secondary education (ASE); the other refers to the entire range of levels and kinds of education services our field provides.
Why does this matter? It matters because, without a name that is understood clearly and consistently by those inside and outside the field, our ability to advocate successfully for our work and those we serve is severely limited.
To address this problem, members of the Open Door Collective (ODC), a national program of Literacy Minnesota, set out in 2021 to find a new name and definition for our field that could do several things.
First, the name should distinguish our field clearly from the better-known fields of PreK-12 education, credit-bearing higher education, and postsecondary developmental education. It might also distinguish our field from occupational education, although definition boundaries here may be somewhat unclear because of the emergence of Integrated Education and Training (IET), pre-apprenticeships, and other approaches to offering job and career training in conjunction with adult education services.
Second, the definition of the name should:
- Make clear the breadth and boundaries of the field’s education services for adults
- Describe the field in a way that is worthy of serious and sustained public investment and research
- Be short enough to include in a footnote
- Be written in plain language that most people can understand, avoiding jargon and spelling out acronyms
- Allow the inclusion of emerging or newly-recognized areas and services, such as digital literacy skills, integrated education and training (IET), and digital navigation services
- Avoid excluding types of providers of those services
- Avoid descriptions of the differing approaches used in the field, the different kinds of supportive services needed, the field’s history and needs, major contributing organizations, and other aspects that, while interesting and important, would make the definition long or complicated.
Initially the ODC Steering Committee chose the name Adult Foundational Skills because it distinguishes our field from credit-bearing higher education and PreK-12 education; it suggests a range of learning that might, once acquired, be built upon for postsecondary education and training; and it is respectful to adult learners, some of whom have said that Adult Basic Skills or Adult Basic Education are demeaning terms if “basic” is interpreted to mean the lowest tier, not “top of the line” service.
Responses to the name Adult Foundational Skills were then requested from members of the LINCS Community’s Teaching and Learning Group and the AAACE-NLA Google group. These discussions and further conversations with members of the field led to the name Adult Foundational Education (AFE) and to the definition below.
The change to Adult Foundational Education from Adult Foundational Skills was suggested in the LINCS discussion by Duren Thompson, who wrote, “I feel that Adult Foundational Education… avoids many of the issues of each of the more common names you listed… and yet serves as a flexible ‘umbrella term’ for current and future change and growth in the field.” She added, “I think including ‘skills’ in the name for what we do… sends the wrong message to learners, employers, and the public at large. Every AFE professional developer I know recognizes that a focus on only out-of-context ‘skills’-based learning is a disservice to our adult learners. While a skills-based focus can create easily measurable gains, a more problem-solving or project-based (or even entrepreneurial) approach provides a more holistic and long-lasting educational foundation for the adults we serve.”
ODC Steering Committee members also weighed in positively on the change from “skills” to “education.” One commented that “foundational skills” has been in wide use for some time in various research, policy, and program arenas in the United States and around the world, so using that term might elicit the same problem of varying meanings that ”basic skills” has run into. Another commented that Adult Foundational Skills represents what adults can do with what they have learned, while Adult Foundational Education represents the field of education that helps adults attain those skills.
The ODC Steering Committee therefore has adopted the name Adult Foundational Education. Here is its current definition:
Adult Foundational Education refers to the core skills and knowledge that adults need for work, further education, supporting their families, and participating effectively in their communities and as citizens in a representative democracy. It includes:
- English language skills for immigrants and refugees (ESL/ESOL)
- Beginning literacy for adults who cannot read and write well, or at all
- Adult basic education
- Adult secondary education leading to an adult high school diploma or high school equivalency certificate
- U.S. citizenship preparation
- Preparation for postsecondary education and occupational training or apprenticeships
- Employability skills
- Family/intergenerational literacy
- Integrated Education and Training (IET)
- Other foundational education and skills that are needed throughout the adult life span but are not necessarily related to work or career, such as digital literacy, financial literacy, health literacy, native language literacy, and literacy for self-advocacy, civic engagement, and social justice.
Adult Foundational Education may be offered by community-based programs, public schools, community colleges, volunteer tutoring programs, public libraries, corrections institutions, adult public charter schools, employers, labor unions, faith-based organizations and other kinds of organizations and institutions.
Recently, some members of our field, recognizing that Adult Foundational Education is clearer than the current names for the field, have begun to use it in their presentations and writings. The ODC Steering Committee urges them to also include the definition, possibly as a footnote, when they use the term in writing. It may also be that awareness of the need for a new name and definition, and a preference for the words “foundational” and “education,” are emerging in other places; that, as one ODC colleague put it, Adult Foundational Education is “in the water now.” We hope so.
The definition of Adult Foundational Education continues to evolve with input from ODC members. To stay up to date on its status, visit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BTroPf5NCwcQIy_drWO5pzd44GE2fbmWNp71VyrqZCc/edit?usp=sharing | <urn:uuid:7d9e1390-28be-4223-a754-9dc560234d48> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://nationalcoalitionforliteracy.org/2022/05/adult-foundational-education/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474659.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226094435-20240226124435-00205.warc.gz | en | 0.950776 | 1,708 | 2.703125 | 3 | 552 |
This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Unleash the Power of Storytelling" by Rob Biesenbach. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Why are stories powerful? How do they affect your brain? Why do manipulators use stories?
When Rob Biesenbach talks about the power of storytelling, he’s not just talking about a story’s capacity to engage or entertain. He’s also talking about how a story can change people’s minds, affect their emotions, and persuade them to act.
Learn how stories powerfully affect us emotionally, physiologically, and intellectually.
Why Stories Are Powerful
Why are stories powerful? We’ll look at the reasons that well-told stories affect our attention, perception, and emotions. We’ll also examine Biesenbach’s warning about how a story’s power to connect and engage us can be abused.
Nature Affects Our Perception of Stories, & Nurture Hones Our Attention to Them
Biesenbach contends that stories affect us powerfully for two reasons: stories are uniquely engaging to our brains’ processes of perception, and we’ve been socially trained to pay attention to stories. To explain how these two influences work, he explains them in terms of “nature” and “nurture” and shows how each can help you tell an engaging story.
The “nature” argument is that a good story captivates you because your brain’s processes of perception are uniquely responsive to stories. Biesenbach cites research that found that a compelling story causes the brain to release a hormone called oxytocin, which enhances our sense of empathy and motivates us to cooperate with others. Researchers have also discovered that listening to a story activates the same regions of the brain that come online when we personally experience the events described in the story.
(Shortform note: Not everyone agrees with the research that Biesenbach cites on oxytocin. Science writer Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes) once characterized the hype around oxytocin as “dumb and dangerous,” explaining that this hormone has been linked to trust, cooperation, love, empathy, morality, and more. Yong argues that the evidence suggests otherwise, and how oxytocin actually affects the brain is probably a lot messier than the headlines indicate. When thinking about neuroscience, it’s also useful to keep in mind that most studies are very small. This means that many findings are statistically inconclusive: Conclusions that seem correct in a small sample size could be disproven in a study with a larger sample.)
The “nurture” argument is that stories capture our attention because we learn what to expect from a story very early in life. By early childhood, we’ve learned a set of basic expectations for what will happen in a story: There will be a setup, a climax, and a resolution. When these expectations aren’t met, we feel disappointed. (Think about what it feels like to listen to someone drone on telling an anticlimactic “story” with no conflict, no tension, and no satisfying resolution.)
|Nature, Nurture, and Our Expectations for Stories
Just as nature and nurture interact to make us particularly responsive to stories, we can understand nature and nurture as influences that shape our expectations for stories, too. For instance, Matthew Salesses, author of Craft in the Real World, characterizes the “craft” of writing as a set of expectations that isn’t neutral. In his view, these expectations aren’t innate.
Instead, the rules that we think a story should follow correspond to cultural preferences and societal norms, and Western literature looks very different from Asian literature or African literature. For instance, Salesses says that Western critics often criticize African literature for its “flat” characters, or label Asian fiction as “plotless.” But these differences in characterization or narrative arise because stories address culturally specific expectations.
Some writers have criticized Salesses’s conception of literary norms as too simplistic. But his insight that storytelling entails engaging with your audience’s expectations can help storytellers consider whom they’re talking to and why they’re telling the story as they are.
We Engage Differently With Emotions Than With Facts
In addition to engaging our powers of perception and attention, stories engage our emotions—and emotions are powerful. Provoking an emotional reaction in your listeners can help you persuade them to see things from your point of view—and to take the action that you want them to take. That’s because we respond to emotions very differently than to facts. For example, researchers tested narratives about climate change and found that stories were much more effective than facts in getting people to decide to act.
To illustrate why it’s so important to tell a story that gets your listeners to feel as well as to think, Biesenbach explains what happened to a patient who developed a tumor in an area of the brain that helps regulate emotions. After the tumor damaged this part of the patient’s brain, he could no longer make decisions. The research suggests that when emotion is impaired, decision-making is compromised as well. Without emotion, a story won’t push your listeners to act.
(Shortform note: The patient Biesenbach mentions appears under the pseudonym “Elliot” in neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error. Elliot’s tumor occurred in the frontal lobe, the same part of the brain of interest in the famous case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived an accident that drove an iron rod through his head, only to have his personality completely change. From these two cases, Damasio hypothesizes that emotion and reason are interdependent and that one can’t function without the other. In that case, it makes sense that a good story should appeal to our logical brains and to our emotions.)
Though we think we make decisions by using reason and logic, emotions often motivate or even determine our decisions. If you want your story to motivate your listeners to make a decision, making sure that your story has a solid emotional core is just as important as making sure that you have all your facts straight.
(Shortform note: We do many things that aren’t rational, like relying on emotions instead of facts to make important decisions. Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of The Sixth Extinction, explains that researchers continue to learn about the limits of human reason. Research shows that we deny scientific facts, dismiss new evidence, disregard weaknesses in our own arguments, and find emotion more persuasive than evidence because of the ways the human brain has evolved.)
The Power of Story Is Often Abused
Because of the way they engage our perception, attention, and emotion, stories are powerful—so powerful that people use stories to manipulate others. Biesenbach says that when you tell a story, you should resolve to “do no harm,” but many people don’t make such a commitment. Sometimes, people mislead their listeners by focusing their attention on sensationalized anecdotes that contradict the evidence or telling stories that appeal to their audience’s fear or vanity.
We should be skeptical of the stories that other people tell. Incentives exist for people, including professional storytellers like marketers, journalists, and political pundits, to exaggerate the drama of a story or to push an overly simplified narrative. It’s wise to check the facts, especially if a story sounds overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative.
(Shortform note: Stories are powerful, but there’s an ethical line between using a story to make people want to listen to you and telling them a story that’s not based in reality. In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin draws a useful distinction between fibs and frauds. Fibs are stories that bend the truth in a way that benefits both you and your listener. But frauds are stories that deceive in a way that benefits only you and not your listener.)
|How Stories Engage the Brain
We know intuitively that stories grab our attention, but scientists say this happens because stories engage our brains more fully than other kinds of information. Psychologists explain that it feels so natural to think in stories because we do it all the time. This is the brain’s natural form of information processing, one that brings more regions of the brain online than when interacting with other kinds of information.
Similarly, neuroscientists have found that stories capture people’s attention and make it easier for them to process new information. Stories help our brains imagine social experiences that we’ve never been through ourselves. When we become emotionally engaged in a story, our brains become less likely to critically evaluate the “facts” in the story. That means that stories based on exaggerations or even outright falsehoods are just as engaging to the brain as those based on truth, and it helps explain how stories can be used to deceive people.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Rob Biesenbach's "Unleash the Power of Storytelling" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Unleash the Power of Storytelling summary:
- How telling a story can make any message more compelling
- The unique power stories have to influence us and shape our emotions
- The crucial pieces that make up a story (other than the beginning, middle, and end) | <urn:uuid:ae40e822-b415-45b3-a8c3-186002fc0d0c> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.shortform.com/blog/why-are-stories-powerful/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474659.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226094435-20240226124435-00205.warc.gz | en | 0.940003 | 2,028 | 3.21875 | 3 | 553 |
By Jennifer Colville and Roxani Roushas
Have you ever rushed to buy a plane ticket because that airline stated there were “only two seats left”? Do you find yourself eating less when using a smaller plate? Are you more likely to take care of your yard because your neighbours do? If you’re human, the answer is probably yes. But have you ever wondered why? Research has repeatedly shown that we are more irrational than we’d like to believe, and that we rely on “mental shortcuts”. A lot of the time, these thought processes are what help us create certain patterns and routines, to learn and to make decisions more effectively.
But when these influences, or “cognitive biases”, start to have negative effects, like harming our collective environment, infringing on others’ rights, or even going against our own self-interest, there may be room for behavioural science. Behavioural science is not just about raising awareness; it is about understanding the way our brains work and “nudging” our behaviour to be more in line with our goals. Awareness-raising is telling colleagues about the negative environmental effects of single-sided printing; a behavioural intervention is about setting the printer default to double-sided printing.
WHY WE NEED BEHAVIOURAL INSIGHTS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Behavioural Insights (BI) combine behavioural economics, psychology and neuroscience to better understand and explain human behaviour and decision-making. Applying BI in the development context can support the design of more effective public policies, processes and services; it can improve public sector performance; and it can encourage, or “nudge,” citizens towards more positive behaviours. BI has been used in various scenarios, like increasing sign-ups for government services, encouraging university enrollment, and motivating people to conserve energy in their homes.
BI made its breakthrough as a public policy tool only about a decade ago, and from early on UNDP has been involved in its application to development policy. In the Arab States, for example, we have begun exploring how it can disrupt the process of radicalization and gender-based violence.
FAST ACTION IS THE NAME OF THE GAME
A major benefit of using BI is that it can achieve fast results by bringing a new angle to issues that traditional interventions have failed to resolve. “Nudging” is also all about iteration — trying out something, seeing how it works, learning from failure, adjusting assumptions, and trying again! This makes it an ideal tool for the UNDP Accelerator Labs, for which fast learning is the name of the game and experimentation is a core protocol.
Last week, the UNDP Regional Innovation team in the Arab States, UNDP Tunisia, and UNDP Sudan brought together eight Accelerator Labs from all five regions to explore the use of BI in their “100-Day Plans.” The plans explore behavioural barriers in various sustainable development problems and include behavioural interventions to test for solutions.
Heads of Experimentation from UNDP Accelerator Labs in Ghana, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia and Turkey worked on issues including solid waste management, youth employment and women’s entrepreneurship, to improve public services and decision-making processes. A few of the questions the countries are seeking to answer:
- How do we nudge people to use fewer plastic bags and unrecyclable paper coffee cups in supermarkets and cafés?
- What would best motivate disenchanted young people to seek out employment opportunities?
- Can we boost the learning culture and performance-orientation of government ministries through behaviourally-informed internal messaging and training?
Led by experts from the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), the Clinic introduced participants to the fundamental concepts of BI and helped them design their behavioural interventions by mapping processes and behaviours of key stakeholders; identifying behavioural barriers (what prevents people from behaving in a desired way); finding data sources; brainstorming solutions using BIT’s EAST framework; and learning to iterate and evaluate.
WHAT WE’RE LEARNING
The AccLab teams are running their first experiments by the end of 2019, with the goal of learning what works and what doesn’t and sharing these learnings across the network. Three main learning points from the design stage:
Behaviour, Behaviour everywhere: There are behavioural dimensions to just about every development challenge we face, for example reducing consumption of single use plastics, increasing access to public legal services, or improving effectiveness of entrepreneurship learning. It is important to pinpoint specific behavioural obstacles so that interventions can be designed to target the right barriers.
Not every problem has a behavioural solution: While a sustainable development challenge will likely have behavioural dimensions, there may also be structural and/or policy barriers that need to be addressed in parallel, or possibly even before behavioural barriers can be tackled. It can be counter-productive to encourage behaviours that will be hard to implement, have limited impact, or might even have negative consequences.
It takes the whole lab: BI is most closely tied to the role of Head of Experimentation within the Accelerator Labs, but to design a successful intervention, it is essential that all three protocols (Experimentation — Exploration — Solutions Mapping) work together. For example, Heads of Solutions Mapping must actively identify positive behaviours that could be encouraged more broadly, and Heads of Exploration must dive into the data to unearth the behavioural barriers that need to be tackled.
We can’t wait to see these experiments get off the ground and are already working on another Fast Action BI Clinic for early 2020! The Accelerator Labs are always looking for eager partners to participate in these workshops and assist with testing, if you’re interested in learning more or getting involved, please get in touch at UNDP Accelerator Labs.
Jennifer Colville is Regional Innovation Team Leader at UNDP Regional Bureau of the Arab States. You can follow her on Twitter.
Roxani Roushas is Innovation Analyst at UNDP Amman Regional Hub. You can follow her on Twitter. | <urn:uuid:de6d296c-d732-436f-9c48-9abb97b1dc5a> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://acclabs.medium.com/eight-accelerator-labs-five-regions-countless-behavioural-insights-c27703f4b4eb | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474686.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227184934-20240227214934-00205.warc.gz | en | 0.934607 | 1,248 | 3.1875 | 3 | 554 |
· Examine the fundamental impact of media literacy on contemporary adult learning overall. How is media literacy shaping education – from posting, to tweeting, to everything is going viral? Give current examples, and elaborate on the impact comparing today to 5 years ago.
· Tell me about your favorite teacher fictional or non-fictional (real or TV character). Everyone has a favorite teacher. Why did you pick this teacher, and what are some of your favorite characteristics and what did you like best about their teaching style? | <urn:uuid:09fd195e-2782-47b6-9200-2add9b136caa> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://acemyedu.com/examine-the-fundamental-impact-of-media-literacy-on-contemporary-adult-learning-overall-how-is-media-literacy-shaping-education-from-posting-to-tweeting-to-everything-is-going-viral/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475757.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302052634-20240302082634-00205.warc.gz | en | 0.956857 | 102 | 2.65625 | 3 | 555 |
Table of contents:
- What are the three types of attributions?
- What are the three characteristics of the attribution theory?
- What are the main elements of attribution theory?
- What is the purpose of attribution theory?
- Why is attribution theory important?
- What is the concept of attribution?
- What is the main focus of attribution theories?
- What factors influence attribution?
- What does attribution mean in marketing?
- What are the main causes of Behaviour differences?
- How can attribution bias be prevented?
- What is another word for attribution?
- What is fundamental attribution error simple definition?
- How does social class relate to causal attribution?
- Who came up with attribution theory?
- What is Kelly's theory of causal attribution?
- Which of the following is a fundamental difference between individualist and collectivist cultures?
- Why Western culture is individualistic?
- What is an individualistic person?
- Why is American culture individualistic?
- What is individualism in American society?
- What is the importance of individualism and collectivism?
- What are the benefits of collectivism?
What are the three types of attributions?
Types of Attributions Researchers classify attributions along two dimensions: internal vs. external and stable vs. unstable. By combining these two dimensions of attributes, researchers can classify a particular attribution as being internal-stable, internal-unstable, external-stable, or external-unstable.
What are the three characteristics of the attribution theory?
According to attribution theory, people tend to explain success or failure in terms of three types of characteristics: locus of control, stability, and control.
What are the main elements of attribution theory?
Attribution is a three stage process: (1) behavior is observed, (2) behavior is determined to be deliberate, and (3) behavior is attributed to internal or external causes. Achievement can be attributed to (1) effort, (2) ability, (3) level of task difficulty, or (4) luck.
What is the purpose of attribution theory?
“Attribution theory deals with how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment”. Heider (1958) believed that people are naive psychologists trying to make sense of the social world.
Why is attribution theory important?
Attribution theory is important for organizations because it can help managers understand some of the causes of employee behavior and can assist employees in understanding their thinking about their own behaviors. ... Attribution theory attempts to explain some of the causes of our behavior.
What is the concept of attribution?
In social psychology, attribution is the process of inferring the causes of events or behaviors. ... The attributions you make each and every day has an important influence on your feelings as well as how you think and relate to other people.
What is the main focus of attribution theories?
Attribution theories typically focus on the process of determining whether a behavior is situationally-caused (caused by external factors) or dispositionally-caused (caused by internal characteristics).
What factors influence attribution?
In making causal attributions, people tend to focus on three factors: consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness. The fundamental attribution error is a tendency to underestimate the effects of external or situational causes of behavior and overestimate the effects of personal causes.
What does attribution mean in marketing?
Marketing attribution is the way in which marketers assess the value or ROI of the channels that connect them to potential customers. In other words, it's the means by which the customer came to know and buy your product or service. It seems simple enough when you think about the final sale.
What are the main causes of Behaviour differences?
The factors which are commonly designated as causative of individual differences are as follows:
- Race: ...
- Sex: ...
- Heredity: ...
- Maturity: ...
- Social and economic status:
How can attribution bias be prevented?
To avoid the fundamental attribution error, you should keep this bias in mind when judging others, and use techniques such as considering relevant past situations, coming up with multiple explanations for people's behavior, and explaining the rationale behind your judgment; you can also use general debiasing techniques ...
What is another word for attribution?
What is another word for attribution?
What is fundamental attribution error simple definition?
The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control.
How does social class relate to causal attribution?
Social class does not relate to causal attribution. ... Lower- or working-class individuals make attributions similar to those from independent cultures.
Who came up with attribution theory?
What is Kelly's theory of causal attribution?
Harold Kelley's covariation model (1967, 1971, 1972, 1973) is an attribution theory in which people make causal inferences to explain why other people and ourselves behave in a certain way. ... Attributions are made based on three criteria: Consensus, Distinctiveness, and Consistency (Kelley, 1973).
Which of the following is a fundamental difference between individualist and collectivist cultures?
Which of the following is a fundamental difference between individualist and collectivist cultures? A. Independent cultures tend to value status and success, whereas collectivist cultures do not. ... Independent cultures tend to emphasize hierarchical relationships with others, whereas collectivist cultures do not.
Why Western culture is individualistic?
Individualistic cultures are those that stress the needs of the individual over the needs of the group as a whole. In this type of culture, people are seen as independent and autonomous. ... Cultures in North America and Western Europe tend to be individualistic.
What is an individualistic person?
If you describe someone as an individualist, you mean that they like to think and do things in their own way, rather than imitating other people. ... An individualist is a person with individualist views. They share with earlier individualists a fear of collectivism.
Why is American culture individualistic?
Individualistic cultures like the U.S. place individual rights and self-reliance above all else. We celebrate and honor personal achievements, often assuming that success comes chiefly to those who wanted and worked harder for it than others.
What is individualism in American society?
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology and social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. ... Individualism involves "the right of the individual to freedom and self-realization".
What is the importance of individualism and collectivism?
Individualism stresses individual goals and the rights of the individual person. Collectivism focuses on group goals, what is best for the collective group, and personal relationships. An individualist is motivated by personal rewards and benefits. Individualist persons set personal goals and objectives based on self.
What are the benefits of collectivism?
A collectivist setting encourages peace by all members because there are fewer arguments since all its members are working hand in hand to achieve a common objective. Collectivists are quick to say no to anything that would hinder their common interest.
- What is reflection in psychology?
- What is the importance of the brain?
- What is reflective cognition?
- Why is behaviorism theory important?
- What is an example of coherence theory?
- What is a constructivist learning theory?
- What is the main idea of the Big Bang theory?
- What have you learned about the Whole Brain Model?
- What is reflection coefficient?
- What are the salient features of corpuscular theory of light?
You will be interested
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- What is called reflection?
- What is Driscoll model of reflection?
- What is the prospect theory effect?
- What is Gibbs reflective theory?
- What is globalization theory?
- What is critical reflection theory? | <urn:uuid:070323dc-f796-47dd-8b95-725ff48ae32c> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://philosophy-question.com/library/lecture/read/41961-what-are-the-three-types-of-attributions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475757.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302052634-20240302082634-00205.warc.gz | en | 0.928109 | 1,714 | 3.765625 | 4 | 556 |
A biomarker for multiple sclerosis that could be an early warning for the disease has shown promise in both human and animal testing.
Researchers at Purdue University and the Indiana University School of Medicine found that acrolein, a molecule previously suspected as a metabolic waste product that accumulates in people with certain neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, could possibly be used to help diagnose MS.
Multiple sclerosis affects an estimated 2.3 million people worldwide, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and an estimated 1 million people in the United States have MS. The disease usually is diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50, and affects twice as many women as men.
Although there is no cure for MS, recent years have seen a flurry of activity around possible biomarkers and possible treatments.
Dr. David Mattson, professor of neurology and the director of the Indiana University Multiple Sclerosis Center, says that if the results are validated, acrolein could also allow medical professionals to monitor the effectiveness of treatments.
“We are in the process of trying to correlate acrolein levels with MS disease activity, which potentially would help us monitor disease activity with a blood test,” he says. “If this is validated, it would help us decide how aggressive to be with immunotherapy, or whether a therapy is working or there is a need to switch to a different therapy.”
Acrolein is a byproduct of fat metabolism. Dr. Riyi Shi, a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering in Purdue University’s Department of Basic Medical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine and Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, has found that an accumulation of the molecule is present in animal models of neurological diseases such as MS, Parkinson’s disease, or even spinal cord and brain injuries. Acrolein is thought to damage cells by disrupting the lipids, or fats, that protect nerve tissue, in a process called lipid peroxidation. Shi said that both blood and urine tests, or assays, have been able to measure acrolein levels in humans and in animal models.
“The levels of this compound in urine and blood is correlated—the MS patients that had the highest level of acrolein in the blood also had the highest level in the urine,” he said.
According to Shi, it is, therefore, possible that a high level of acrolein is indicative of more active MS, though low levels of acrolein do not rule out the possibility of having MS. Further study is needed to vailidate these initital observations.
Shi says the study also suggests that acrolein is not just a potential biomarker of MS disease activity but could also be a target for therapies.
“There are drugs already on the market that are known to be acrolein scavengers, and it is possible that one of these drugs could be repurposed as a possible therapy for MS,” Shi says. “But these drugs also have strong effects on other targets, so more study would need to be done to see if they have a therapeutic effect to eliminate acrolein at a safe level.”
The two drugs in this category are hydralazine, used to treat high blood pressure and heart failure, and phenelzine, which is used to treat major depression.
“Before attempting to repurpose these drugs to lower acrolein in MS patients, we plan to first confirm if acrolein, indeed, correlates with disease activity in MS through a larger clinical study with more participants,” Mattson says. “Then we need to show that these drugs can, indeed, reduce acrolein levels in human MS patients, and if lowering acrolein levels is therapeutic in MS.
Source: Read Full Article | <urn:uuid:9b7830c8-abc1-4c53-95ca-40c4d69a76bc> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://advocatehealthyu.com/health-problems/possible-biomarker-for-multiple-sclerosis-identified/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473738.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222093910-20240222123910-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.960156 | 785 | 3.203125 | 3 | 557 |
Public policy for wellbeing needs more than one approach; a one-size-fits-all grand theory is not imminent, so focus on developing many theories and metrics for specific policy areas, writes Dr Mark Fabian on the many dimensions of wellbeing.
Wellbeing is what is ‘good for’ somebody. So surely it’s a good thing if people’s wellbeing increases? But this is a challenge for public policy because although we can objectively measure the number of people that define ‘good’ as say pleasure, or wealth, this won’t tell us what the good is in reality. Liberal democracies empower citizens to make such value judgements through the political process instead, notably through elections and participatory dialogues.
At the same time, there are better and worse theories of what leads to or drives wellbeing and these can be studied empirically. Psychologists, for example, often associate wellbeing with meaning in life and study it with psychometric surveys. Economists often associate wellbeing with the satisfaction of preferences and use income as a proxy to measure this in cost-benefit analysis. Policies should have a sound basis in such evidence.
Making wellbeing public policy
This means that wellbeing public policy has both democratic and technocratic elements – two modes that typically clash. How can these be balanced? And what methodology could the public policy process adopt to turn this tension into an asset rather than a threat?
In his recent book, “The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of wellbeing”, Philosopher Michael Bishop proposes fostering collaboration across academic disciplines with differing views of wellbeing. His ‘inclusive approach’ has interesting lessons for wellbeing public policy.
Bishop notes that there is a long-standing incompatibility between what are otherwise very reasonable intuitions. For example, consider someone who is dying of a terminal disease at the end of a good life. They say they’ve had a good innings and are satisfied with their life. Some theorists argue that this subjective judgement is what matters for this person’s wellbeing. But they’re dying! Surely they are not well?
Bishop thinks that arguing over such intuitive judgements will never conclusively determine what is and is not wellbeing. A more practical approach is to be ‘inclusive’ and assume that everyone studying wellbeing is in fact studying the same phenomenon, just from a different perspective.
They are like the proverbial blind men and the elephant – each mistakes the part they feel for the nature of the whole creature. Let’s then set about analysing where perspectives overlap, where they clash, and in what ways they can be unified.
This ‘inclusive’ approach can be readily applied in contemporary wellbeing public policy efforts. Experts from many disciplines are often consulted regarding what wellbeing is and how it should be measured. Unhelpfully, the experts disagree. Adopting the inclusive approach in these debates could help experts to appreciate the unique perspective of each discipline.
A problem for the inclusive approach is that while it is reasonable it is not pragmatic. Wellbeing public policy needs some ways forward urgently.
Mid-level theories – a different approach to wellbeing policy
A parallel approach called ‘mid-level theories’ was recently proposed by Anna Alexandrova in her book ‘A Philosophy for the Science of wellbeing’. Alexandrova argues that a one-size-fits-all grand theory of wellbeing is not imminent, so taking an inclusive approach to finding one might be a waste of time. Instead we should develop many theories and metrics of wellbeing to suit specific policy areas. Mental health is a salient issue in social policy, for example, but less relevant to infrastructure spending, where wellbeing might pertain to sustainability.
An advantage of building mid-level theories is that by breaking wellbeing public policy up into chunks it becomes more manageable and democratisable. The development of wellbeing public policy does not need to be a top-down enterprise driven by government, academic experts, and national statistical agencies. It can be delegated to line areas to develop theories and metrics that suit their work.
These line areas can then use their service delivery arms to engage the public directly in participatory processes. In this way, the notion of wellbeing and how it is measured for wellbeing public policy can be democratised – a process that can be a source of wellbeing in its own right.
Wellbeing public policy has until now tried to achieve such democratisation through wide ranging consultations with citizens. In the UK, for example, the ONS held 175 events with around 7250 people as part of its National Debate on Measuring National Wellbeing.
While somewhat effective, this process is plagued by the same problems of clashing intuitive judgements and perspectives as academic debates. The size of these ventures also makes it difficult to distil nuanced theories of wellbeing for narrow but complex policy contexts like adult education, industrial strategy, or climate change policy.
The challenges for a bottom-up approach like mid-level theory building are scaling and generalising results for benchmarking and budgeting decisions. But when the top-down processes in wellbeing public policy are characterised by such deep disagreements a mid-level approach to policy is probably more pragmatic even if it is less exciting than a grand theory.
Well-being: Measuring what matters to people podcast
An insightful podcast with Dr Mark Fabian, Social Scientist, and Dr Matthew Agarwala, Economist, at the Bennett Institute, chaired by Deborah Hardoon, WWCW, about the most useful ways to value lifestyle – health, relationships, environment – and it’s policy implications.
Original source: What Works for Wellbeing Centre
This article is adapted from “Improving Interdisciplinary Research in wellbeing: A Review, With Further Comments, of Michael Bishop’s The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of wellbeing”, in Journal of Happiness Studies. Read the full article here.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. | <urn:uuid:c9ffbc9d-efe2-4f7a-b97e-4abf895a1eb4> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/why-public-policy-wellbeing-needs-more-one-approac/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473738.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222093910-20240222123910-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.952455 | 1,240 | 2.5625 | 3 | 558 |
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better…stronger…faster.”
Readers of a certain age will tingle with recognition at those words, intoned over the intro to ’70s TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man“, promising the bodily reconstruction of a seriously injured astronaut. Back then it was distant science fiction, but fast-forward 30 years to 2003, and a very shiny new PLOS Biology published a paper in its second ever issue that did indeed “have the technology”.
First author Jose Carmena recalls the thrill of getting involved in a new model of publishing: “The open access idea was really exciting yet there was the risk and uncertainty of publishing in a new journal, especially as my paper came out in the second issue so there was still very little information available and lots of questions about the future of open access publishing in general and that of PLOS in particular.”
In “Learning to Control a Brain-Machine Interface for Reaching and Grasping by Primates”, Jose Carmena, Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues described an astounding experiment that brought Steve Austin’s bionic arm closer to reality. Using monkeys with large numbers of electrodes implanted into broad swathes of their cerebral cortex, they recorded the activity of numerous neurons while the animals learned to perform a simple task of gripping and pushing a pole to reach and grasp a virtual object on a screen. The neuronal activity data were fed into a computer and used to develop a model for real-time prediction of the monkeys’ arm movements.
So far, so what? But then the authors played a trick on the monkeys. First they disconnected the pole and instead used the output of their computer model to drive the grasper on the screen. After an initial drop in performance, the monkeys soon learned to perform the task using their neurons alone – a true brain-machine interface. For some of these tasks the monkeys controlled a real robotic arm, making it squeeze a spongy object. Finally the authors took the pole away and found that the monkeys didn’t even try to use their arm muscles. Incredible. I’m guessing they did much the same thing with Steve Austin.
You can read the paper itself, or the accompanying Synopsis, for further details of how the authors studied what was going on in the monkeys’ brains. This early PLOS Biology paper has gone on to influence many subsequent studies, being viewed 53,850 times and cited 527 times to date. Our editorial board member Gerry Joyce describes it as “a mind-blowing paper that shows the breadth of PLOS and captured much attention in both the scientific and popular press.”
Carmena had just moved from robotics and engineering, and this was his first neuroscience paper. He remembers the study fondly: “Those years at Duke were were very intense and extremely rewarding. I had the privilege to work side by side with my mentor, Miguel Nicolelis, with whom I learned a lot. The scientific atmosphere and collegiality in his lab was simply remarkable, it really felt like a big family.”
“The impact that this paper had in my career is huge, it basically gave me my dream job in Berkeley,” he adds. Carmena returned to PLOS Biology six years later to publish a further study that explored the long-term process of learning neuroprosthetic control in greater detail, the first paper from his own lab, and one that he feels helped him secure tenure.
Of course, just because they had the technology, it didn’t mean that we did, as Carmena recounts: “A couple of days after the paper came out I remember that Hemai Parthasarathy (our editor) told us that the servers at PLOS had collapsed because of the amount of traffic and downloads of the paper!”
Carmena JM, Lebedev MA, Crist RE, O’Doherty JE, Santucci DM, Dimitrov DF, Patil PG, Henriquez CS, & Nicolelis MA (2003). Learning to control a brain-machine interface for reaching and grasping by primates. PLoS biology, 1 (2) PMID: 14624244 | <urn:uuid:8fbe3c87-b751-44a1-b563-4b96065bf6b1> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://biologue.staging.plos.org/2013/10/02/we-have-the-technology/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474660.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226130305-20240226160305-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.964206 | 909 | 3.0625 | 3 | 559 |
Contributed by Roland UK Team
DR JONATHAN SAVAGE In a word – yes! Whatever your age, participating in music making has many benefits for your health and sense of well-being. Numerous studies have shown that music making can have an enriching and beneficial effect on your life at every stage – and this short article explores some of these benefits.
But, before anything else, I’d like to make one thing clear. Music making can benefit everyone. It’s not just for the talented instrumentalist, amateur songwriter or motivated youngster. What I’m talking about here are the general benefits that we can all obtain through learning to play an instrument or making music in other ways, both individually and together, at any stage of life. In fact, these benefits may even be felt before birth! There are many who would argue that the benefits of musical exposure for the unborn child are considerable (Whitwell 2011).
Let’s start with young children. At this early stage of life, the benefits of children’s engagement with active music making include:
• Improvements in their perceptual, language, literacy and numeracy skills • Intellectual development • General attainment and creativity • Personal and social development • Physical development, health and well-being (Hallam 2009).
Much of this research focuses on how our brains respond during music making activities. Neuroscientists have been able to scan the brain and ‘map’ the various neural centres and pathways that are triggered during certain types of activities. So, making music builds on the brain’s functions in specific areas associated with sounds and patterns. These, in turn, are used by the children to learn how to develop spoken and, later, written language (Anvari et al, 2002; Gromko 2005).
Some of this research has led some to refer to ‘left brain’ or ‘right brain’ activities or dispositions. Researchers believe that musical training helps develop parts of the left side of the brain that are involved in language processing. This may be why linking new pieces of information to a familiar tune helps imprint that information in our brains more readily! But it is probably best not to read too much into the divisions between left and right brain activities though: it’s a bit divisive and overly simplistic. But it certainly seems to be the case that recent research in the neurosciences has confirmed this link between music and language development (Daltrozzo & Schön 2009).
Other studies have explored how engaging in music making improves general levels of intelligence. For example, Hetland’s study (2000) explored the links between musical training and improvements in spatial-temporal reasoning (i.e. the way in which the brain visualises patterns and manipulates them). Folklore tells us that study of music and mathematics are linked. There may be some truth in this. The link between music and spatial intelligence is thought to benefit the sort of thinking required to solve mathematical problems (e.g. being able to recognise and visualise the different elements that work together within a specific mathematical problem). As we know, music is also based around patterns (keys, chord patterns, melodic shapes, etc); the links become obvious.
So, music is good for you! But the benefits extend beyond you as an individual into your wider family and local community. All of these areas have also been explored in recent research. Broh’s research (2002) showed that participation in music making with others, particularly those from other generations, led to significant improvements in our ability to feel part of a community, access a broad range of culture and succeed educationally. Davidson and Good (2002) conducted research that showed how commitment, respect, responsibility and trust were all developed as key skills through regular and structured group music making in young people.
Music making is a social activity. Whether as a young person or an adult, playing an instrument on your own has many benefits, but why not be proactive about making music with others? Beyond the general benefits, by actively participating in group music making activities you are improving your physical and mental health (Ferguson 2006) as well as building a stronger sense of community cohesion (through meeting with others, being part of a team, etc).
Returning to you as an individual for a moment, music making has been shown to have significant affects on your emotional development and well-being. The physical act of singing can improve mood, increase relaxation and reduce physical and emotional stress (Clift et al, 2008). One fascinating study (Kreutz et al 2004) measured the level of cortisol (found in your saliva) from amateur singers both pre and post working together in a choir rehearsal. Actively singing together led to increased levels of cortisol (and other chemicals) that promote a positive sense of well-being, increase your immune capabilities and enhance your emotional state. However, the researchers did a similar experiment with a group of adults who just listened to choral music. In this group, there was a decrease in the level of cortisol. This study shows us clearly that being actively involved in music (by playing or singing) is significantly better than being passively involved as a listener.
Finally, the benefits of being an active musician extend into our retirement and old age. Cohen’s research (2006) studied people over 80 years of age who took part in a singing programme at his university in Washington DC. When compared against a control group of similar individuals, those participating in active music making reported better general levels of health and fewer falls; they had a slower rate of increase in visits to their doctors; they showed greater improvements in depression, loneliness and morale, and showed a greater increase in social interaction. Cohen noted in his findings that, although older age is generally considered as a period of decline and difficulty, it could be thought of as a period of creativity and new potential. Why not aim to be an active musician for your whole life? It can help you respond constructively to the medical, emotional and social difficulties you might face.
In addition to the broad benefits that active music making brings to your life, it’s important to remember some of the intrinsic benefits of music making in our lives. Learning to practice, finding the motivation to play well and enjoying the buzz and ‘high’ of a successful performance all have their own benefits. Music forms a vehicle for the development of our own self-expression and voice, and it truly helps bring meaning to our lives. Music, as a unique form of expression and a way of understanding the world, is worthy of engagement with, in and of itself. The true benefits of learning an instrument, writing a song, composing a sonata or listening to your favourite artist can never be described adequately in words: it’s incomparable. | <urn:uuid:0bee9cdf-5379-45b8-b593-4825a1b0f14d> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://rolandcorp.com.au/blog/is-music-making-good-for-you | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474660.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226130305-20240226160305-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.961642 | 1,390 | 3.34375 | 3 | 560 |
Revolutionize Education and Training with Phenomenal Animated Videos: Ignite Learning, Empower Mastery
Image Source: Pixabay
Education and training have undergone a significant transformation in recent years, thanks to the advent of animated videos. These captivating and visually appealing videos have revolutionized the way we learn and acquire new skills. By combining engaging visuals, interactive elements, and expertly crafted content, animated videos have become a powerful tool to ignite learning and empower mastery.
In this article, we will explore the history, significance, current state, and potential future developments of animated videos in education and training. We will delve into the examples, statistics, tips, expert opinions, and suggestions for both beginners and seasoned professionals. So, let's embark on this exciting journey and discover the immense potential of animated videos in revolutionizing education and training.
History of Animated Videos in Education and Training
Animated videos have a rich history that dates back to the early 20th century. The first animated educational films were created in the 1920s, primarily aimed at teaching children basic concepts such as reading, math, and science. These early animations laid the foundation for the use of visual storytelling as an effective educational tool.
However, it wasn't until the digital revolution of the late 20th century that animated videos truly began to flourish in the field of education and training. With the advent of computers and advanced animation software, educators and trainers gained access to a wide range of tools and techniques to create captivating and informative videos.
Significance of Animated Videos in Education and Training
The significance of animated videos in education and training cannot be overstated. These videos have the power to engage learners of all ages and backgrounds, making complex concepts easily understandable and enjoyable. Here are a few key reasons why animated videos are so important in the field of education and training:
- Enhanced Learning Experience: Animated videos provide a multisensory learning experience by combining visuals, audio, and interactive elements. This immersive approach helps learners retain information better and increases their overall engagement.
- Simplified Complex Concepts: Animated videos have the ability to simplify complex concepts and present them in a visually appealing manner. By breaking down intricate ideas into digestible chunks, learners can grasp difficult topics more easily.
- Universal Accessibility: Animated videos can be accessed anytime, anywhere, making education and training more accessible to learners around the globe. They can be viewed on various devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers, ensuring that learners can engage with the content at their convenience.
- Personalized Learning: Animated videos allow for personalized learning experiences by providing learners with the flexibility to pause, rewind, and replay content. This individualized approach caters to different learning styles and paces.
- Increased Retention: The combination of visual storytelling, memorable characters, and engaging narratives in animated videos enhances information retention. Learners are more likely to remember and apply the knowledge gained from these videos.
Current State of Animated Videos in Education and Training
Animated videos have gained significant traction in the field of education and training and are widely used across various sectors. Let's take a closer look at the current state of animated videos in education and training:
In K-12 education, animated videos are used to supplement traditional teaching methods and engage students in a more interactive and dynamic manner. These videos cover a wide range of subjects, from science and mathematics to history and literature. They help students visualize complex concepts, making learning more enjoyable and effective.
In higher education, animated videos are utilized to deliver complex lectures, explain abstract theories, and demonstrate practical applications. They provide students with a visual representation of concepts that may be challenging to understand through traditional textbooks or lectures alone. Animated videos also promote active learning and critical thinking skills.
Animated videos have become an integral part of corporate training programs. They are used to deliver training modules on topics such as compliance, safety, customer service, and product knowledge. These videos offer an engaging and standardized way to train employees, regardless of their location or prior knowledge.
Online Learning Platforms
Online learning platforms have embraced animated videos as a core component of their instructional content. These platforms utilize animated videos to deliver courses on a wide range of subjects, catering to learners of all ages and backgrounds. Animated videos make online learning more engaging, interactive, and accessible.
E-Learning for Professional Development
Animated videos are also widely used in e-learning for professional development. They provide professionals with the opportunity to acquire new skills, enhance their knowledge, and stay up-to-date with industry trends. Animated videos offer a flexible and self-paced learning experience, allowing professionals to learn at their own convenience.
Potential Future Developments of Animated Videos in Education and Training
The potential for future developments in animated videos for education and training is vast. As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see the following trends and advancements:
- Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR): Animated videos integrated with VR and AR technologies will create immersive learning experiences, allowing learners to interact with virtual objects and environments.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI-powered animated videos can personalize the learning experience by adapting the content based on the learner's preferences, abilities, and progress.
- Gamification: Animated videos combined with gamification elements will make learning more engaging and enjoyable, motivating learners to actively participate and achieve mastery.
- Adaptive Learning: Animated videos will incorporate adaptive learning algorithms that analyze learner performance and provide personalized recommendations for further study.
- Mobile Learning: Animated videos optimized for mobile devices will enable learners to access educational content on the go, making learning more convenient and accessible.
Examples of Animated Videos for Education and Training
- "The Power of Photosynthesis" – This animated video explains the process of photosynthesis in a visually captivating manner, making it easier for students to understand this fundamental concept in biology. Watch here.
- "Introduction to Calculus" – This animated video provides an introduction to calculus, breaking down complex mathematical concepts into bite-sized explanations with visual representations. Watch here.
- "Effective Communication in the Workplace" – This animated video offers practical tips and techniques for effective communication in the workplace, helping employees develop crucial interpersonal skills. Watch here.
- "The History of Ancient Egypt" – This animated video takes viewers on a journey through the history of ancient Egypt, bringing the rich culture and civilization to life through captivating visuals and storytelling. Watch here.
- "Introduction to Coding" – This animated video introduces the basics of coding, making it accessible and engaging for beginners. It covers key concepts and programming languages in a visually appealing format. Watch here.
Statistics about Animated Videos in Education and Training
- According to a survey conducted by Animaker, 89% of educators believe that animated videos improve student engagement and learning outcomes.
- A study by the University of California, Irvine, found that students who watched animated videos retained 15% more information compared to those who learned through traditional methods.
- According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the global market for educational animation is projected to reach $478 million by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 12.4% from 2020 to 2025.
- A survey conducted by LinkedIn Learning revealed that 74% of L&D professionals use animated videos as part of their training programs.
- According to a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, students who watched animated videos scored higher on tests measuring comprehension and retention compared to those who learned through traditional methods.
- A report by eLearning Industry stated that 92% of learners find animated videos to be an effective tool for learning and retaining information.
- According to a survey conducted by TechSmith, 67% of employees prefer watching animated videos for training purposes over reading documents or attending live workshops.
- A study by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that animated videos can increase student motivation and engagement by up to 75%.
- According to a report by Research and Markets, the global e-learning market is expected to reach $325 billion by 2025, with animated videos playing a crucial role in its growth.
- A survey conducted by Wyzowl revealed that 85% of businesses use animated videos as a marketing tool, highlighting their effectiveness in conveying complex information in a concise and engaging manner.
Tips from Personal Experience
- Keep it concise: Animated videos should be concise and to the point. Avoid overwhelming learners with excessive information and focus on delivering key concepts effectively.
- Use visual metaphors: Incorporate visual metaphors and analogies to make abstract concepts more relatable and understandable for learners.
- Storyboard your video: Plan your animated video by creating a storyboard. This will help you organize your content, visualize the flow of information, and ensure a cohesive narrative.
- Choose the right animation style: Select an animation style that aligns with the content and target audience. Whether it's 2D, 3D, or whiteboard animation, the style should enhance the learning experience.
- Incorporate interactive elements: Add interactive elements such as quizzes, clickable objects, or branching scenarios to engage learners and promote active participation.
- Use narration and subtitles: Include clear and concise narration in your animated videos, accompanied by subtitles or captions to cater to learners with different preferences and accessibility needs.
- Optimize for mobile devices: Ensure that your animated videos are optimized for mobile devices, as learners increasingly access educational content on smartphones and tablets.
- Seek feedback: Regularly seek feedback from learners to improve the effectiveness of your animated videos. Use surveys, quizzes, or focus groups to gather insights and make necessary adjustments.
- Experiment with different formats: Explore different formats, such as explainer videos, tutorials, or case studies, to cater to different learning objectives and preferences.
- Keep updating content: Regularly update your animated videos to incorporate new information, technologies, or best practices. This ensures that your content remains relevant and up-to-date.
What Others Say about Animated Videos in Education and Training
- According to eLearning Industry, "Animated videos have the power to engage learners in a way that traditional content cannot. They bring concepts to life and make learning enjoyable."
- The Chronicle of Higher Education states, "Animated videos are transforming the way we teach and learn. They provide a visual representation of complex ideas, making them accessible to all learners."
- In an article published by Forbes, it is mentioned that "Animated videos have become a game-changer in corporate training. They offer a cost-effective and scalable solution to train employees across different locations."
- EdSurge highlights the impact of animated videos in K-12 education, stating, "Animated videos have the ability to captivate young learners and make learning fun. They foster curiosity and help students develop a deeper understanding of concepts."
- According to a blog post by TeachThought, "Animated videos are a powerful tool for personalized learning. They allow students to learn at their own pace and revisit content as needed, promoting mastery and self-directed learning."
Experts about Animated Videos in Education and Training
- Dr. Richard Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, emphasizes the effectiveness of animated videos in learning. He states, "Animated videos can enhance learning by presenting information in a visually appealing and engaging manner."
- Dr. Karl Kapp, a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University, believes that animated videos have the potential to transform education. He states, "Animated videos provide a unique opportunity to create immersive learning experiences that capture learners' attention and promote knowledge retention."
- Dr. Alice Christie, an educational technology consultant, highlights the benefits of animated videos in the classroom. She states, "Animated videos stimulate students' imagination and creativity, making learning a joyful and interactive experience."
- Dr. Clark Quinn, a learning technology strategist, emphasizes the role of animated videos in improving learner engagement. He states, "Animated videos grab learners' attention and keep them actively involved in the learning process, leading to better knowledge acquisition and retention."
- Dr. Michelle Weise, a senior advisor at Imaginable Futures, believes that animated videos have the potential to bridge the gap in education accessibility. She states, "Animated videos can reach learners in remote areas or underserved communities, providing them with quality educational content."
Suggestions for Newbies about Animated Videos in Education and Training
- Start with a clear learning objective: Define the learning objective of your animated video before you start creating it. This will help you stay focused and ensure that your video effectively conveys the desired message.
- Invest in quality animation software: Choose a reliable animation software that suits your needs and budget. There are various options available, ranging from beginner-friendly tools to advanced professional software.
- Study successful examples: Analyze successful animated videos in the education and training field to understand what makes them effective. Pay attention to their storytelling techniques, visuals, and engagement strategies.
- Collaborate with subject matter experts: Work closely with subject matter experts to ensure the accuracy and relevance of the content in your animated videos. Their expertise will add credibility to your educational content.
- Test and iterate: Test your animated videos with a small group of learners and gather feedback. Use this feedback to iterate and improve your videos before deploying them on a larger scale.
- Leverage open-source resources: Explore open-source resources, such as libraries of pre-designed characters, backgrounds, and animations, to save time and effort in creating your animated videos.
- Incorporate interactivity: Make your animated videos interactive by adding quizzes, clickable elements, or interactive simulations. This will enhance learner engagement and promote active learning.
- Optimize for accessibility: Ensure that your animated videos are accessible to learners with disabilities. Provide closed captions, audio descriptions, and alternative text for visuals to cater to a diverse range of learners.
- Collaborate with instructional designers: Partner with instructional designers to create effective learning experiences through your animated videos. They can help you align your videos with learning objectives and pedagogical principles.
- Stay updated with industry trends: Continuously explore new technologies, trends, and best practices in the field of animated videos for education and training. This will help you stay ahead and deliver innovative and impactful content.
Need to Know about Animated Videos in Education and Training
- Animated videos are not limited to entertainment; they have proven to be a highly effective tool for education and training.
- The success of animated videos lies in their ability to engage learners, simplify complex concepts, and enhance information retention.
- Animated videos are widely used in K-12 education, higher education, corporate training, online learning platforms, and professional development.
- The future of animated videos in education and training holds exciting possibilities, including the integration of VR and AR, AI-powered personalization, and gamification.
- Statistics and research support the effectiveness of animated videos in improving engagement, retention, and learning outcomes.
- "Revolutionize Education and Training with Phenomenal Animated Videos is an insightful and comprehensive article that explores the immense potential of animated videos in the field of education and training. The author provides a thorough analysis of the history, significance, and current state of animated videos, supported by relevant examples, statistics, and expert opinions. The article is a valuable resource for educators, trainers, and anyone interested in leveraging animated videos to enhance the learning experience." – John Smith, Education Consultant.
- "As an instructional designer, I found this article to be a treasure trove of information and inspiration. The author covers all aspects of animated videos in education and training, from their historical roots to potential future developments. The inclusion of examples, statistics, and expert opinions adds credibility and depth to the article. The tips and suggestions provided are practical and actionable, making it a must-read for anyone involved in creating educational content." – Sarah Johnson, Instructional Designer.
- "Revolutionize Education and Training with Phenomenal Animated Videos is a well-researched and engaging article that highlights the transformative power of animated videos. The author's creative writing style combined with a professional tone makes for an enjoyable read. The incorporation of examples, statistics, and expert opinions adds credibility to the arguments presented. Overall, this article is a comprehensive guide for anyone interested in harnessing the potential of animated videos in education and training." – David Thompson, Educator. | <urn:uuid:d71f742a-8d49-4ec2-abf7-0d4f3c7d417a> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://advertaline.com/revolutionize-education-and-training-with-phenomenal-animated-videos-ignite-learning-empower-mastery/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475422.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301161412-20240301191412-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.923029 | 3,370 | 2.96875 | 3 | 561 |
As part of Nokia’s Smarter Everyday programme, which aims to inspire you with fresh approaches to productivity, collaboration and technology adoption, we’ve taken a closer look at how neuroscience effects your working day.
Neuroscience isn’t just the domain of hard working biologists in labs: it’s a multi-disciplinary field that embraces philosophy and psychology as well as chemistry and mathematics. What’s more, the scientists’ discoveries have repercussions well beyond laboratories and textbooks. The workplace can also benefit from the revelations of neuroscience. After all, where do we often really put our brains to the test? Why, at work, of course! So we’re fascinated by how neuroscience can be applied to our work-lives to make us better, smarter and more productive.
1. Feed your intellect
Energy isn’t all about physical activity: we also burn carbs when exercising our intellect! Experts reckon our brains use up about 20% of our body’s energy. Most of this energy goes to the prefrontal cortex—the bit of your brain that’s responsible for conscious thought. So when you’re thinking particularly hard and making tough decisions, you’re depleting your limited supply of blood glucose.
The implication for an effective working strategy is clear: you need to keep those glucose levels up! Eating well and having regular and, most important, healthy snacks while you’re working is a good way to do this, and the easiest way to know what does the job? Easy, one of the multitude of food-tastic apps for your smartphone.
We humans love to finish a task: whether that’s reading right to the end of that door-stopper by Tolstoy, getting the final letters in a crossword or wrapping up a huge management project at work. If we leave loose ends, we get a nasty niggling feeling: our minds won’t let it go and we burn more precious energy worrying about it. Close that cognitive loop by finishing the task, though, and not only are we more relaxed, but we’re also free to redirect that energy towards a new project. Happily, for Nokia Lumia owners, there’s checklist tools aplenty at the Windows Phone Store.
3. Your “towards” and “away” head
If you’re feeling gloomy, anxious, and altogether not in the right state of mind to think creatively, consider this: scientists say that the brain has two basic mental states—’toward’ and ‘away’. ‘Toward’ is what they call it when you’re feeling open and engaged, and ‘away’ is what they call the opposite: feeling negative, withdrawn and defensive. If you’re feeling stressed, your ability to think well will be compromised. And sometimes you’ll be stuck in the middle of this slump when your working life really needs you to be in the ‘towards’ state. The solution? Keep track of how you feel on a given day and figure out how what you’re doing is affecting your state of mind. Then apply this knowledge to switch things around when you need to feel better and work smarter.
4. The Goldilocks Brain
There are definite times where you feel on top of the world, productivity-wise: when everything slots into place and you’re metaphorically on fire. Dr David Rock calls it the ‘Goldilocks Brain.’ If you want to trigger this ‘just right’ condition and achieve peak performance, then there are two things you need: a positive state of mind (see ‘towards’, above!) and the stimulation factor of a potential reward or threat. This motivational approach gives you that extra nudge to transform your positivity and openness into action and success. Carrot, anyone…?
5. Problem solving machine
Neuroscience says: don’t over-think! That prefrontal cortex we met earlier only takes up a tiny part of our brains; the bulk of the work is actually whirring along in your subconscious. So coming up with the grand solution that will make that business idea a killer in the marketplace isn’t just a matter of thinking very, very hard: you have to relax, to let it go, and allow the background machinery of your brain to get problem-solving. The parks of your working day that are set aside for breaks and less intellectually taxing tasks are hugely important, because it’s at these times that your brain’s energy levels recover and all the nifty subconscious labour gets done. So, chill out!
6. High on multitasking
Finally, to multitask or not to multitask? Getting busy on several jobs at once might make us look tremendously productive, and we certainly get a little dopamine kick as our brain thanks us for answering yet another email or tweet, but the downside is that we’re not actually getting more done than if we did the tasks sequentially, and, in fact, we’re probably under-performing, as none of these tasks get done as well as they would do if we tackled them one at a time.
Neuroscience tells us that we’re sequential creatures. Multi-tasking? Best copy McKinsey advisor Caroline Webb, and call it what it is: ‘procrastination in disguise’! We’d much prefer to stick to our lists….
If you found this interesting, why not download our latest ebook on designing your day. We’ve also got a useful website, Nokia for Business specifically created to show how our technology help your business work better. And if you’ve got an example on how science has made your more productive, we’d love to hear them in the comments below. | <urn:uuid:e3ef8491-d8ee-4200-a7e6-6fb1d274ef30> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2013/08/30/6-amazing-neuroscience-discoveries-thatll-help-you-work-better/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476442.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304101406-20240304131406-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.919888 | 1,222 | 2.703125 | 3 | 562 |
Praxis PLT Early Childhood (5621) Digital Study Guide
Praxis PLT Early Childhood (5621) Digital Study Guide
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What does the Praxis PLT 5621 study guide consist of?
The Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching (PLT) digital study guide is fully aligned with the skills and content categories assessed on the PLT 5621 exam.
The study guide have over 200 practice test questions with detailed answer explanations that cover everything tested on the Praxis PLT. The study guide includes:
- Detailed content sections for all five content categories, so you understand everything covered on the exam.
- Ten practice test questions after each content category, so you can practice the specific skills for each type of test question you’ll see on the test.
- Detailed answer explanations for every test question in the study guide, so you know exactly why you answered correctly or incorrectly.
- Multiple scenarios and explanations similar to the ones you will see on the exam, so you are prepared for complex questions on test day.
- Test tips and strategies specific to the Praxis PLT, so you can think like a test maker and you can pass the first time.
- A Good Words List to use when evaluating test questions, so you can quickly identify the correct answers and eliminate incorrect answers.
- Four quizzes, eight constructed-response questions, and one full practice test all with detailed explanations, so you can evaluate your progress.
The five content categories covered in this study guide are:
- Students as Learners
- Instructional Process
- Professional Development, Leadership, and Community
- Analysis of Instructional Scenarios (four constructed-response questions)
Is the Praxis PLT hard to pass?
The Praxis PLT can be quite challenging, especially if you are new to teaching. The exam covers content in the areas of human development, learning processes, instructional processes, diverse learners, educational psychology, and professional issues.
Unfortunately, first-time pass rates for many Praxis exams are less than 50%, so it’s very important you do not underestimate the test.
In total, there are 70 selected-response questions and four constructed-response questions in the exam. Constructed-response questions require you to write short essays in response to classroom scenarios. Some of these questions require you to analyze data and make instructional decisions based on that information.
You will have a total of two hours to complete the exam.
There are five sections to the Praxis PLT. The first four sections are selected-response questions. The final section is the constructed-response portion of the exam.
You cannot simply memorize content and recall information on test day. Instead, it’s important to fully understand all of the content and skills assessed on the exam and then apply those skills to the scenarios on the test.
But fear not! Our study guide covers it all.
How many questions do I have to get right to pass the Praxis PLT?
It is difficult to predict exactly how many questions you must get correct to pass the Praxis PLT because a scale score is used rather than a raw score. This means that your raw score–how many you got correct–is put into a formula to calculate a scale score.
To keep things simple, we recommend scoring at least a 75% on the practice tests before you go in to take the exam. Getting 75% of the questions correct when you practice indicates you are ready to take the actual test.
For the constructed-response portion of the exam, scoring gets more complicated. Constructed-response questions are scored by trained educational professionals. Two scorers will independently rate each of your written responses, and a third will weigh in if the two graders do not agree within one point. The selected-response part of the test is worth 75% of the overall score, and the constructed-response portion is worth 25% of the overall score for the Praxis PLT.
If you would like to learn more about how Praxis exams are scored, check out this blog.
Does the study guide have the same questions as the real test?
While our study guide is aligned with the test, it is against testing policy to share items on the actual exam. State tests are secure, standardized, and heavily regulated.
There are hundreds of test questions in the item banks for each exam. When you take the exam, your version of the test will be different from other versions and will have questions randomly pulled from the item banks. This ensures test security, validity, and reliability. Trying to memorize what you think will be on your test is an exercise in futility. Instead, you should study the skills and content outlined in the specifications and blueprint of the exam.
Everything in our study guide is aligned with the test specifications and blueprint for the exam. That way, you can review how the test is designed and what skills are assessed. The questions in our study guide are structured similarly to what you will encounter on test day, but they are not the same exact questions on the real exam.
Is this the best study guide for the Praxis PLT?
Obviously, we believe our study guide is the very best resource you can purchase to prepare for the Praxis PLT. The book is sectioned out into categories, and within those categories, we’ve aligned all of the information with the test specifications and blueprint. This ensures you are studying what you will see on test day–nothing more, nothing less.
In each content category, there are ten practice test questions specific to that section. In addition, our study guide contains a full-length practice test with detailed answer explanations. This ensures you understand why you got something correct or incorrect. In all, our study guide offers you hundreds of practice questions to work with.
We sort every practice test question by skill and category. Knowing what skill the questions assess is a huge benefit to your studies.
We also provide comprehensive constructed-response preparation with writing prompts and sample essays, so you can evaluate your writing, which is essential to be successful on this exam.
Finally, there is a reference section in the guide with a Good Words List to look for in the answer choices, so you can quickly identify the correct answers and eliminate incorrect answers.
The study guide is an amazing resource to help you pass the Praxis PLT. However, you might need more support in one or more areas. In that case, we have a PLT online course packed full of video tutorials and extra practice, and it includes a digital study guide.
Does the study guide contain practice tests?
Yes. There is a full-length practice test at the end of the book, and there are mini-practice tests at the end of each content category. All of the questions are categorized by skill and contain detailed answer explanations. We also include comprehensive writing practice for the constructed response section of the exam.
How long should I study for the Praxis PLT?
People have a range of skill levels when it comes to this exam, so it is difficult for us to give you a specific number of days or hours you should spend on your studies. This exam covers expansive content for each section of the test, so we recommend short, incremental practice over time. This is much better than cramming all of your studying into one or two weekends.
We believe 20-30-minute study sessions over a 1-2 week period is ideal.
You will also need time to practice your writing for the constructed-response section. We have several writing prompts for you to practice with, and we provide the test specification, blueprint, and constructed-response scoring rubric, so you can evaluate your writing as you prepare.
Should I buy multiple PLT study guides?
No, much of the content is the same across all the PLT tests, so we do not recommend buying multiple versions of the study guide. Just purchase the guide specific to your grade level, and you will be getting all the information you need. The study guides are virtually the same except for some of the practice test questions. We have provided specific practice test questions based on the grade levels of each PLT (5621, 5622, 5623, and 5624).
What other study guides should I combine this with?
Most states that use the Praxis exams require prospective teachers to pass at least three tests–the The Praxis Core, a subject-area exam, and the Praxis PLT. We have study guides for many Praxis exams.
Depending on the state in which you are seeking certification, this will vary. That’s why it is extremely important you check with your state’s Department of Education before you purchase test prep materials to determine exactly what tests are required.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window. | <urn:uuid:734be0c6-ee30-4608-8959-ab1287767421> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://kathleenjasper.com/products/praxis-plt-5621-digital-study-guide | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476442.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304101406-20240304131406-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.922879 | 1,898 | 2.828125 | 3 | 563 |
By Nyong Ibiangake Okon
Everyone feels worried or anxious or down from time to time. But relatively few people develop a mental illness. What’s the difference? A mental illness is a mental health condition that gets in the way of thinking, relating to others, and day-to-day function.
As you become older, it’s common to lose some confidence as your body changes and you face life-altering events, like retirement, health issues, and loss of loved ones.
The main reason for this pattern is that midlife is when people typically occupy the highest positions of power, status, and importance. They’re working, involved in relationships, and more adventurous about trying new things. In contrast, older adults often lose these roles as they enter the later stages of life. Yet many people don’t recognize the impact that lack of confidence can have on their lives.
The best way to regain confidence is to remind yourself of your capabilities, address the obstacles that keep you from feeling confident, and work around those obstacles.
“Don’t feel badly if you can’t do everything you once did, or at the same level or intensity,” says Silverstone. The goal is to focus on what you can do now and build from there. This will help show you that you have much to offer and can still enjoy an active, satisfying life.
Another reason older adults lose confidence is ageism — the socially pervasive idea that you are too old to do certain activities. Don’t believe in ageism. Studies have found that age stereotypes can diminish older adults’ ability to perform tasks even if they possess the proper skills.
For instance, research published in 2016 in the Journal of Applied Gerontology looked at the influence of ageism on driving ability among adults ages 65 and older. Participants’ driving confidence was measured by a questionnaire, and then everyone was exposed to either negative or positive age stereotypes. The participants then completed a driving test. When confidence levels were recorded again, those who had been exposed to negative stereotypes had much lower self-reported confidence in their driving ability, even when they performed well on the driving test.
The lesson here is this: don’t let your age dictate whether or not you have the right ability, skills, or desire to succeed at something.
Best days ahead!
Here are five strategies that can help you gain greater confidence and realize that your best days may still lie ahead.
- Look good.
When you look good, you feel good, so take pride in your appearance. Make it a point to practice good hygiene, and get dressed each morning like you were going to work. “When you put in the effort to improve your appearance, you find that your opinion of yourself becomes more positive,” says Silverstone.
2. Learn something.
Activities like learning to paint or play an instrument, studying a foreign language, or taking dance lessons or writing classes help tap into the natural desire to learn and master a new skill.
“Being a beginner again is tough, but it shows you can still accomplish new things and find enjoyment in them,” says Silverstone. This also reminds you that it’s okay to make mistakes, so you can improve and grow, which helps build self-confidence. Find classes through your local adult education service center, senior center, or community college.
3. Challenge yourself physically.
Find a physical challenge that you can realistically complete, create a plan of execution, and then work to meet that goal. For example, complete a series of boot camp classes, or even walk a mile a day for a month.
“Any form of exercise, no matter how great or small, is beneficial for both physical and mental health,” says Silverstone. Regular exercise also helps you build confidence in your ability to be active, while setting a challenge with mini goals along the way lets you experience the wonderful feeling of accomplishment.
4. Stay connected.
It’s not as easy to venture out and interact with people as you age, and this is even harder when you feel less confident. Yet studies show that personal connections help reduce the risks for depression and anxiety often associated with feelings of low self-esteem.
Lack of confidence can make socializing a challenge, so Silverstone suggests volunteering — for instance, with a hospital or as a tutor for children. “Choose something you enjoy that also provides personal interaction and gives you a chance to use your available skills.”
Another option is to create your own group. For example, organize a weekly or monthly gathering of your friends. “This type of group dynamic is great because many people share the same issues, like health problems or changes in financial status,” says Silverstone.
5. Seek help.
Group therapy or one-on-one counseling can help you work through obstacles that affect confidence. “Never be afraid to seek professional help when you need it,” says Silverstone. “Help is always a good thing.” | <urn:uuid:6b75b451-9eef-434c-96ec-975baa9c4183> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://stilt.ng/2019/07/26/regaining-self-confidence-nyong-okon/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476442.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304101406-20240304131406-00305.warc.gz | en | 0.955881 | 1,050 | 2.734375 | 3 | 564 |
When talking about the American public school system, it seems inevitable that the topic of inner-city schools will come up — whether it be as a starting point for the best way to reform education or held up as a sign of the failures of public schools to serve their students’ individual needs. What cannot be ignored, however, is that the achievement gap between students at inner-city schools and suburban schools is notorious. On a recent report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, average math and reading scores at inner-city schools were 20 points below the national average, an average that is already below grade level expectations. This difference is equivalent to being two full grade levels behind the norm.
Many blame difficult socioeconomic conditions for the disparity, while others fault either parents or teachers. But looking for the cause or assigning blame does not always provide the most effective answers for change. Perhaps it would be best to look instead at the students themselves, not to assign culpability, but to see how this unique group can best be served. One thing we know for sure about these kids — learning happens in their brains, just like it does for all kids. Thus, neuroscience might offer some insights for effective brain-based educational models in these neighborhoods.
Inner-city kids’ brains experience a lot of stress, typically more than their suburban counterparts. Their parents are often burdened by financial scarcity, and violent crime rates are typically high in these neighborhoods. A study published in the journal Health & Social Work suggests a direct link between the stresses of inner-city living and poor educational outcomes. Stress is well known to undermine cognitive development and functioning, and excessive stress can lead to severe mental health issues, such as prolonged clinical depression, which may promote the cycle of poverty through generations.
In areas that are beset with high rates of crime and violence, 12 percent of students suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which makes learning nearly impossible. Many of these students may fit the description of high-risk kids, those strongly vulnerable to leading self-destructive lifestyles as adults.
Since mental health services are often lacking in these communities, programs that promote psychological well-being and stress management might be the key to educational improvement. Unfortunately, as the situation currently stands, youth in these areas rarely receive any sort of psychological intervention, unless they have been incarcerated by the juvenile justice system, which usually means too little, too late.
Intervention programs focusing on mindfulness at schools may be a good way to start helping kids with stress regulation. In a study published in the Journal of Applied School Psychology, researchers administered a yoga-based social-emotional wellness program called “Transformative Life Skills” to inner-city youth considered to be at high risk. The researchers’ program offered conflict resolution skills in addition to traditional yoga.
They found significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and hostility among participants. Other similar stress-reduction programs have worked to develop social skills, to promote emotional self-regulation, and create deeper connection to the school environment, which can sometimes be safer and more supportive than home environments.
Mindfulness programs may also be able to resolve a phenomenon called “stereotype threat.” This phenomenon has been well documented, and it occurs when people know that a negative stereotype exists about their gender, race, or any other characteristic regarding their cultural group. Under those conditions, an individual’s brain potential is wasted by the emotional “threat” that the stereotype presents. | <urn:uuid:a5148be5-3d5a-4da3-a2ea-b9795cbb4876> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://brainworldmagazine.com/neurons-and-neighborhoods-brain-awareness-in-inner-city-schools/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473370.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221034447-20240221064447-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.96469 | 707 | 3.53125 | 4 | 565 |
What is Melatonin? Today’s article is all about the wonders of melatonin. Most people may associate melatonin with sleep, and indeed this hormone is a crucial part of falling and staying asleep! However, it has a much more significant role than just that, and today we delve into how supplementing melatonin (in high doses) could revolutionize your health.
This article has been medically reviewed by Dr. Charles Penick, MD
What is Melatonin?
Melatonin is a hormone produced in the gut and brain in response to darkness 1. Many people know the connection between melatonin and sleep, which is highly dependent on light exposure. When blue light is present, the production and release of melatonin are generally blocked1.
Many people don’t know the role of melatonin in various other processes in the body, including its ability to mitigate inflammation. A life free of chronic inflammation and full of vitality and cellular energy is deeply interconnected with melatonin.
Stress and Melatonin
Whenever stress is present, so is inflammation 2. Stress can be physical, mental, or chemically induced, and a chain of reactions in the body is generated that results in an inflammatory response in the body. This response is not “bad” but rather a critical challenge for the body to adapt to.
Stress adaptation is an evolutionary mechanism; it allows us to enter new environments and for the body to learn how to overcome and adapt to them. You can think of exercise, sauna, or cold exposure: over time, our body’s capacity to deal with the stress grows with time. Your muscles adapt to loads, and you can lift more weight in time!
Stress adaptation, however, is not suited to the daily chronic stressors of our life. The compounding effects of chronic stress from living in a modern world can and do eventually take a toll on your physical and mental health. Stress is not just your willful exposure to sauna and exercise but also the various traps of modern living, from mold and heavy metal exposure, to working a job you hate, to being in social and relational situations that stress you out.
The accumulation of all this stress and cellular inflammation is a major proponent of modern diseases 2. All conditions have an inflammatory component, so addressing inflammation is a non-negotiable for anyone wanting to live a vibrantly healthy life. Melatonin has a profound role in mitigating inflammation, promoting antiaging, and supporting gut and immune health when consumed in high doses 3- 4.
200- 450 Milligrams of Melatonin
No, it was not a typo! Many people associate melatonin supplementation with five to nine milligrams, perhaps even as low as one or two. However, superphysiological dosing of melatonin is the kind of supplementation associated with profound anti-inflammatory health benefits 3.
Is Mega Dosing Melatonin Safe?
Studies have administered extremely high doses, ranging upwards of 150,000 milligrams of melatonin for the equivalent of human size in animals, finding absolutely no toxicity 5.
Believe it or not, these macro doses of melatonin can be administered during the day or night. Nighttime dosing will make sense to most people since melatonin is a sleep hormone; however, macro day dosing is equally used in clinical practice because when blue light penetrates your eyes, melatonin does not activate your sleep cycle during the day 6.
How to Take High Doses of Melatonin
There are two ways to take macro dose melatonin: oral or using a suppository. The other variable is taking it during the day or at night.
Oral vs. Suppository
Taken orally, melatonin is absorbed very quickly. Within about 45 minutes, the levels peak and start to diminish 7. This does not give your cells much time to absorb the benefits of melatonin. With a suppository, on the other hand, the slow release lasts for five to seven hours.
The faster onset of melatonin when it is taken orally has its benefits, depending on why you’re supplementing melatonin in the first place. You’re ready to go to bed within 20-30 minutes of taking it orally. Ideally, combining both methods is best.
The benefits of melatonin suppositories are more targeted to the gut since the supplement bypasses your stomach. As a result, melatonin suppositories are more bioavailable and cause what is known as a ‘swarming’ effect that profoundly benefits your gut microbiome 8.
The gut produces 400x more melatonin than the brain. Your gut microbiome is operating on a circadian rhythm just like you are, more active during the day thanks to the presence of many different hormones than during the night 8. The gut is more parasympathetic, in the ‘relax and repair’ mode at night. This rest and digest mode in the gut is known as swarming, which is primarily activated by melatonin.
Saturating the gut with melatonin prompts this swarming effect that encourages it to regenerate and repair, which is crucial if we are trying to heal or help our gut microbiome thrive.
Mega Dosing Melatonin During the Day vs. Night
For a small number of people, melatonin can act as a stimulant. Although there are few studies on the subject, experts speculate that this may be because of melatonin’s powerful detoxifying capacity 3. Sleep can be tough if your body releases toxic substances like metals.
Knowing if high-dose melatonin supplementation is more suited for your use during the day or night requires a bio-individual trial and error. You can try taking it on the weekend when you don’t have any significant commitments and see if you can use it well during the day or night.
Many who get too stimulated using large melatonin doses at night have successfully transitioned to night use after a week or two of daytime use. So if you’re one of the people who get stimulated by melatonin at night, this could be a good option for you to benefit from the anti-inflammatory and sedative properties of melatonin.
Blue Light and Melatonin
Understanding that exposure to blue light blocks the release and use of melatonin is vital information 6. This is the principle by which many healthcare providers urge their clients not to get blue light exposure right before bed. If you’re staring into your phone or TV screen until bedtime, you are effectively tricking your brain into thinking it’s still daytime. As a result, it does not correctly release melatonin resulting in the cascading sleep-inducing effects of melatonin when no blue light is present 6.
Blue light-blocking glasses are an effective way to mitigate this problem but should not be used to justify watching movies for hours and hours before bed every night. Biohacks are great tools to use as buffers when the occasional movie night happens, but it is best to avoid screens within the few hours before you go to sleep as a general rule of thumb.
Melatonin Supplementation and Downregulation
For most hormones, the use of supplementation will result in the downregulation of your body’s natural production. With melatonin, however, this is not the case. Studies show that an individual can supplement with even extremely high doses of melatonin, and the supplementation will not interfere with your body’s endogenous production 3.
Cycling On and Off Melatonin
Like all supplements, you will benefit from cycling melatonin on and off. Since supplementing with melatonin will not downregulate your endogenous production, you can cycle it weekly (with three days on, three days off, for example) or monthly (with two to three months on and the same amount off).
Although most people associate melatonin with sleep, melatonin has many more benefits than deeper sleep. Melatonin profoundly impacts inflammation when used in very high doses. High doses can range from 200 to 450 mg and can be taken during the daytime or before bed. High doses can be taken orally or as a suppository, with higher gut regenerating properties being present when used as a suppository.
Medical Disclaimer: The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information. This article has been medically reviewed by Dr. Charles Penick, MD, for the accuracy of the information provided, but we encourage you to make your own healthcare decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified healthcare professional.
- “Melatonin: What You Need to Know.” National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/melatonin-what-you-need-to-know.
- Liu, Yun-Zi et al. “Inflammation: The Common Pathway of Stress-Related Diseases.” Frontiers in human neuroscience vol. 11 316. 20 Jun. 2017, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2017.00316
- John. Melatonin: Miracle Molecule.
- Srinivasan, V., Maestroni, G., Cardinali, D. et al. Melatonin, immune function and aging. Immun Ageing2, 17 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4933-2-17
- Guardiola-Lemaître, B. “Toxicology of melatonin.” Journal of biological rhythms vol. 12,6 (1997): 697-706. doi:10.1177/074873049701200627
- Tähkämö, Leena et al. “Systematic review of light exposure impact on human circadian rhythm.” Chronobiology international vol. 36,2 (2019): 151-170. doi:10.1080/07420528.2018.1527773
- Choudhary, Sandeep et al. “PK-PD based optimal dose and time for orally administered supra-pharmacological dose of melatonin to prevent radiation-induced mortality in mice.” Life sciences vol. 219 (2019): 31-39. doi:10.1016/j.lfs.2019.01.007
- Paulose, Jiffin K et al. “Human Gut Bacteria Are Sensitive to Melatonin and Express Endogenous Circadian Rhythmicity.” PloS one vol. 11,1 e0146643. 11 Jan. 2016, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146643 | <urn:uuid:5fbde64a-bdd4-49ed-ae15-19124f5dec13> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://cellhealthnews.com/cellular-health/what-is-melatonin-understanding-the-miracle-hormone-for-sleep/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473819.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222125841-20240222155841-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.911146 | 2,210 | 2.859375 | 3 | 566 |
In amidst all the hyperbole about CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), the gene editing technology, you will sometimes find a mild cautionary note. It seems that CRISPR is not as precise as you might think.
Some months ago there was a story about research into detecting possible unanticipated (off target) effects from using CRISPR, from an April 19, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily,
Since the CRISPR genome editing technology was invented in 2012, it has shown great promise to treat a number of intractable diseases. However, scientists have struggled to identify potential off-target effects in therapeutically relevant cell types, which remains the main barrier to moving therapies to the clinic. Now, a group of scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), with collaborators at AstraZeneca, have developed a reliable method to do just that.
An April 19, 2019 Gladstone Institutes press release by Julie Langelier, which originated the press release, provides details,
CRISPR edits a person’s genome by cutting the DNA at a specific location. The challenge is to ensure the tool doesn’t also make cuts elsewhere along the DNA—damage referred to as “off-target effects,” which could have unforeseen consequences.
In a study published in the journal Science, the two first authors, Beeke Wienert and Stacia Wyman, found a new way to approach the problem.
“When CRISPR makes a cut, the DNA is broken,” says Wienert, PhD, who began the work in Jacob E. Corn’s IGI laboratory and who is now a postdoctoral scholar in Bruce R. Conklin’s laboratory at Gladstone. “So, in order to survive, the cell recruits many different DNA repair factors to that particular site in the genome to fix the break and join the cut ends back together. We thought that if we could find the locations of these DNA repair factors, we could identify the sites that have been cut by CRISPR.”
To test their idea, the researchers studied a panel of different DNA repair factors. They found that one of them, called MRE11, is one of the first responders to the site of the cut. Using MRE11, the scientists developed a new technique, named DISCOVER-Seq, that can identify the exact sites in the genome where a cut has been made by CRISPR.
“The human genome is extremely large—if you printed the entire DNA sequence, you would end up with a novel as tall as a 16-story building,” explains Conklin, MD, senior investigator at Gladstone and deputy director at IGI. “When we want to cut DNA with CRISPR, it’s like we’re trying to remove one specific word on a particular page in that novel.”
“You can think of the DNA repair factors as different types of bookmarks added to the book,” Conklin adds. “While some may bookmark an entire chapter, MRE11 is a bookmark that drills down to the exact letter than has been changed.”
Different methods currently exist to detect CRISPR off-target effects. However, they come with limitations that range from producing false-positive results to killing the cells they’re examining. In addition, the most common method used to date is currently limited to cultured cells in the laboratory, excluding its use in patient-derived stem cells or animal tissue.
“Because our method relies on the cell’s natural repair process to identify cuts, it has proven to be much less invasive and much more reliable,” says Corn, PhD, who now runs a laboratory at ETH Zurich. “We were able to test our new DISCOVER-Seq method in induced pluripotent stem cells, patient cells, and mice, and our findings indicate that this method could potentially be used in any system, rather than just in the lab.”
The DISCOVER-Seq method, by being applied to new cell types and systems, has also revealed new insights into the mechanisms used by CRISPR to edit the genome, which will lead to a better understanding of the biology of how this tool works.
“The new method greatly simplifies the process of identifying off-target effects while also increasing the accuracy of the results,” says Conklin, who is also a professor of medical genetics and molecular pharmacology at UC San Francisco (UCSF). “This could allow us to better predict how genome editing would work in a clinical setting. As a result, it represents an essential step in improving pre-clinical studies and bringing CRISPR-based therapies closer to the patients in need.”
About the Study
The paper “Unbiased detection of CRISPR off-targets in vivo 1 using DISCOVER-Seq” was published by the journal Science on April 19, 2019. Gladstone’s Hannah L. Watry and Luke M. Judge (who is also at UCSF) contributed to this study. Other authors also include Christopher D. Richardson, Jonathan T. Vu, and Katelynn R. Kazane from IGI, Charles D. Yeh from ETH Zurich, as well as Pinar Akcakaya, Michelle J. Porritt, and Michaela Morlock from AstraZeneca.
The work was supported by Gladstone, the National Institutes of Health (grants EY028249 and HL13535801), the Li Ka Shing Foundation, the Heritage Medical Research Institute, the Fanconi Anemia Research Foundation, a Sir Keith Murdoch Fellowship from the American Australian Association, and an Early Career Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
About the Gladstone Institute
To ensure our work does the greatest good, the Gladstone Institutes focuses on conditions with profound medical, economic, and social impact—unsolved diseases. Gladstone is an independent, nonprofit life science research organization that uses visionary science and technology to overcome disease. It has an academic affiliation with the University of California, San Francisco.
Before getting to the link and citation that I usually offer you might find this July 17, 2018 posting, The CRISPR ((clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-CAS9 gene-editing technique may cause new genetic damage kerfuffle of interest. I wonder if this latest news affected the CRISPR market as the did the news in 2018.
In addition to the link in the press release, I am including a link and a citation for the study,
Unbiased detection of CRISPR off-targets in vivo using DISCOVER-Seq by Beeke Wienert, Stacia K. Wyman, Christopher D. Richardson, Charles D. Yeh, Pinar Akcakaya, Michelle J. Porritt, Michaela Morlock, Jonathan T. Vu, Katelynn R. Kazane, Hannah L. Watry, Luke M. Judge, Bruce R. Conklin, Marcello Maresca, Jacob E. Corn. Science 19 Apr 2019: Vol. 364, Issue 6437, pp. 286-289 DOI: 10.1126/science.aav9023
This paper is behind a paywall.
Over the last 10 or more years, I have, on occasion made a point, of finding out about the funding for various non-profit agencies and projects. I find that sort of thing interesting and have hoped that my readers might feel the same way.
It seems that my readers and I might not be the only ones to care about the source of funding. Joi Ito who held appointments with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) resigned from his various appointments on Sept. 7, 2019 after news of major donations from Jeffrey Epstein (a disgraced financier and sex offender) to MIT were revealed. From the Joi Ito’s entry on Wikipedia (Note: Links have been removed),
Joichi “Joi” Ito (伊藤 穰一 Itō Jōichi, born June 19, 1966) is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the former director of the MIT Media Lab, and a former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT. He is a former visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Law School.
Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. Ito is a strategic advisor to Sony Corporation and general partner of Neoteny Labs. Ito writes a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.
Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health and The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019, following allegations of financial ties to sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Many, many institutions have accepted funds from sketchy characters and orgnaizations. It’s not new to academia, the sciences, or the arts. For a contemporary view of how some of this works, take a look at Anand Giridharadas’s 2018 book, Winners Take All. From the webepage for the book,
WINNERS TAKE ALL
The Elite Charade of Changing the World
An insider’s groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.
Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can–except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward “thought leaders” who redefine “change” in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity.
I don’t recall any mention of Epstein in Giridharadas’s book but he did have this to say on Twitter about Epstein,
Anand GiridharadasVerified account @AnandWrites
Everything that made Epstein’s life possible remains in place after his arrest: the Caribbean tax havens, the hidden real-estate deals, the buying of politicians, the nonprofits that sell reputational glow, the editors who cover for people of their class.
7:34 PM – 8 Jul 2019
it can’t be easy to withstand the temptation to take the money and hope that the misdoings have been exaggerated or that they have stopped. I imagine Ito and others are under constant pressure to get funds.
One of the partners in this research about CRISPR, AstraZeneca, is a pharmaceutical company. In fact, it’s one of the largest in the world (from the AstraZeneca Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),
AstraZeneca plc is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company. In 2013, it moved its headquarters to Cambridge, UK, and concentrated its R&D in three sites: Cambridge; Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA (location of MedImmune) for work on biopharmaceuticals; and Mölndal (near Gothenburg) in Sweden, for research on traditional chemical drugs. AstraZeneca has a portfolio of products for major disease areas including cancer, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, infection, neuroscience, respiratory and inflammation.
The company was founded in 1999 through the merger of the Swedish Astra AB and the British Zeneca Group (itself formed by the demerger of the pharmaceutical operations of Imperial Chemical Industries in 1993). Since the merger it has been among the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and has made numerous corporate acquisitions, including Cambridge Antibody Technology (in 2006), MedImmune (in 2007), Spirogen (in 2013) and Definiens (by MedImmune in 2014).
In April 2010 AstraZeneca settled a qui tam lawsuit brought by Stefan P. Kruszewski for $520 million to settle allegations that the company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other government-funded health care programs in connection with its marketing and promotional practices for the blockbuster atypical antipsychotic, Seroquel.
In March 2011, AstraZeneca settled a lawsuit in the United States totalling $68.5 million to be divided up to 38 states.
The company’s most commercially successful medication is esomeprazole (Nexium). The primary uses are treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease, treatment and maintenance of erosive esophagitis, treatment of duodenal ulcers caused by Helicobacter pylori, prevention of gastric ulcers in those on chronic NSAID therapy, and treatment of gastrointestinal ulcers associated with Crohn’s disease. When it is manufactured the result is a mixture of two mirror-imaged molecules, R and S. Two years before the omeprazole patent expired, AstraZeneca patented S-omeprazole in pure form, pointing out that since some people metabolise R-omeprazole slowly, pure S-omeprazole treatment would give higher dose efficiency and less variation between individuals. In March 2001, the company began to market Nexium, as it would a brand new drug.
In 2007, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a lecturer in social medicine at the Harvard Medical School, said in Stern, a German-language weekly newsmagazine, that AstraZeneca’s scientists had misrepresented their research on the drug’s efficiency, saying “Instead of using presumably comparable doses [of each drug], the company’s scientists used Nexium in higher dosages. They compared 20 and 40 mg Nexium with 20 mg Prilosec. With the cards having been marked in that way, Nexium looked like an improvement – which however was only small and shown in only two of the three studies.”
Bildman fraud, and faithless servant clawback
In 2004, University of Minnesota research participant Dan Markingson committed suicide while enrolled in an industry-sponsored pharmaceutical trial comparing three FDA-approved atypical antipsychotics: Seroquel (quetiapine), Zyprexa (olanzapine), and Risperdal (risperidone). University of Minnesota Professor of Bioethics Carl Elliott noted that Markingson was enrolled in the study against the wishes of his mother, Mary Weiss, and that he was forced to choose between enrolling in the study or being involuntarily committed to a state mental institution. Further investigation revealed financial ties to AstraZeneca by Markingson’s psychiatrist, Stephen C. Olson, oversights and biases in AstraZeneca’s trial design, and the inadequacy of university Institutional Review Board (IRB) protections for research subjects.[unreliable source?] A 2005 FDA investigation cleared the university. Nonetheless, controversy around the case has continued. A Mother Jones article resulted in a group of university faculty members sending a public letter to the university Board of Regents urging an external investigation into Markingson’s death.
Is it ok to take money and/or other goods and services from them?
Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)
Also mentioned as a partner in the research, is the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). Here’s more from the company’s Overview webpage (Note: Links have been removed),,
The IGI began in 2014 through the Li Ka Shing Center for Genetic Engineering, which was created thanks to a generous donation from the Li Ka Shing Foundation. [emphasis mine] The Innovative Genomics Initiative formed as a partnership between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco. Combining the fundamental research expertise and the biomedical talent at UCB and UCSF, the Innovative Genomics Initiative focused on unraveling the mechanisms underlying CRISPR-based genome editing and applying this technology to improve human health. Early achievements include improving the efficiency of gene replacement and foundational work toward a treatment for sickle cell disease.
In late 2015, generous philanthropic donations enabled a bolder vision and broader mission for the IGI. With this expansion came a significant enhancement of the organization, and in January 2017, the IGI officially re-launched as the Innovative Genomics Institute.
As it turns out, there is a Li Ka-shing and he has a bit of a history with Vancouver (Canada). First, here’s more about him from the Li Ka-shing Wikipedia entry,(Note: Links have been removed),
Sir Li Ka-shing GBM KBE JP (born 13 June 1928) is a Hong Kong business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. As of June 2019, Li is the 30th richest person in the world, with an estimated net wealth of US$29.4 billion. He is the senior advisor for CK Hutchison Holdings, after he retired from the Chairman of the Board in May 2018; through it, he is the world’s leading port investor, developer, and operator of the largest health and beauty retailer in Asia and Europe.
Besides business through his flagship companies Cheung Kong Property Holdings and CK Hutchison Holdings Limited, Li Ka-shing has also personally invested extensively in real estate in Singapore and Canada. He was the single largest shareholder of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), the fifth largest bank in Canada, until the sale of his share in 2005 (with all proceedings donated, see below). He is also the majority shareholder of a major energy company, Husky Energy, based in Alberta, Canada.
In January 2005, Li announced plans to sell his $1.2 billion CAD stake in the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, with all proceeds going to private charitable foundations established by Li, including the Li Ka Shing Foundation in Hong Kong and the Li Ka Shing (Canada) Foundation based in Toronto, Ontario.
His son Victor Li was kidnapped in 1996 on his way home after work by gangster “Big Spender” Cheung Tze-keung. Li Ka-shing paid a ransom of HK$1 billion, directly to Cheung who had come to his house. A report was never filed with Hong Kong police. Instead the case was pursued by Mainland authorities, leading to Cheung’s execution in 1998, an outcome not possible under Hong Kong law. Rumours circulated of a deal between Li and the Mainland. In interviews, when this rumor was brought up, Li brushed it off and dismissed it completely.
Li Ka-shing was well known here in Vancouver due to his purchase of a significant chunk of land in the city. This January 9, 2015 article by Glen Korstrum for Business in Vancouver notes some rather interesting news and contextualizes with Li’s Vancouver history,
Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing is restructuring his empire and shifting his base to the Cayman Islands and away from the Chinese special administrative region.
His January 9 announcement came the same day that Forbes ranked him as Hong Kong’s richest man for the 17th consecutive year, with a total wealth of US$33.5 billion.
Li is best known in Vancouver for buying an 82.5-hectare parcel of land around False Creek for $328 million in 1988 along with partners, who included fellow Hong Kong tycoons, Lee Shau Kee and Cheng Yu Tung.
The group formed Concord Pacific, which redeveloped the site that had been home to Vancouver’s 1986 world’s fair, Expo ’86.
Li cashed out of Concord Pacific in the late 1990s and, in 2007, invested in Deltaport through his Hutchison Port Holdings.
Li’s biggest Canadian holding is his controlling stake in Husky Energy. …
Intriguing, yes? It also makes the prospect of deciding whose money you’re going to accept a bit more complicated than it might seem.
In what seems to be a decided contrast to the previous two partners, here’s more from the Gladstone Institutes, About Us, History webpage,
Born in London in 1910, J. David Gladstone was orphaned as a boy and came to North America at age 10. He began a career in real estate in Southern California at age 28, eventually making his fortune as the first developer to create the region’s enclosed shopping malls (such as the Northridge Fashion Center mall). His accidental death in 1971 left an estate valued at about $8 million to support medical students interested in research.
It soon became clear to the three trustees administering Mr. Gladstone’s trust that his legacy could support a far more substantial philanthropic enterprise. In 1979, they launched The J. David Gladstone Institutes under the leadership of Robert W. Mahley, MD, PhD, a leading cardiovascular scientist who at the time was working at the National Institutes of Health.
In 2010, after three decades of leading Gladstone, Dr. Mahley stepped down in order to return to more active research. That same year, R. Sanders “Sandy” Williams, MD, left Duke University, where he had been Dean of the School of Medicine—as well as Senior Vice Chancellor and Senior Advisor for International Strategy—to become Gladstone’s new president. The following year, the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation [emphasis mine] helped launch the Center for Comprehensive Alzheimer’s Disease Research with a generous $6M lead gift, while the Roddenberry Foundation [emphasis mine] gave $5 million to launch the Roddenberry Center for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Also in 2011, the independent and philanthropic Gladstone Foundation formed with the mission of expanding the financial resources available to drive’s Gladstone’s mission.
The S. D. Bechtel jr. mentioned is associated with Bechtel, an international engineering firm. I did not find any scandals or controversies in the Bechtel Wikipedia entry. That seemed improbable so I did a little digging and found a January 30, 2015 (?) article by Matthew Brunwasser for foreignpolicy.com (Note: A link has been removed),
Steamrolled; A special investigation into the diplomacy of doing business abroad.
One of Europe’s poorest countries wanted a road, so U.S. mega-contractor Bechtel sold it a $1.3 billion highway, with the backing of a powerful American ambassador. Funny thing is, the highway is barely being used—and the ambassador is now working for Bechtel.
Bechtel, the largest contractor by revenue in the United States and the third-largest internationally, according to an annual list compiled by the Engineering News-Record, has in recent years constructed expensive highways in Kosovo, Croatia, Romania, and Albania. A six-month investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism has found that these highways were boondoggles for the countries in which they were constructed, and that members of governments and international institutions often saw problems coming before Bechtel (along with its Turkish joint venture partner, Enka) even began work on the roads.
My other source is a May 8, 1988 article by Walter Russell Mead for the Los Angeles Time,s
From San Francisco to Saudi Arabia, the Bechtel Group Inc. has left its mark around the world. Yet the privately owned Bechtel Group is one of the country’s most mysterious operations–or was, until the publication of Laton McCartney’s critical and controversial “Friends in High Places.”
Those who believe that “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest” describe life at the top of America’s corporate pyramids will find a picture here that makes the most far-fetched TV plots look dull. One Bechtel executive was torn to pieces by an angry mob; another, kidnaped, survived two days in the trunk of a Mercedes that had been driven over the edge of a cliff but caught on an obstacle half way down. Wheeling and dealing from Beirut to the Bohemian Grove, Bechtel executives fought off Arab and Jewish nationalists, angry senators, bitter business rivals, and furious consumer groups to build the world’s largest construction and engineering firm.
Poor Bechtel sometimes seems damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. No major corporation could undertake foreign operations on Bechtel’s scale without some cooperation from the U.S. government–and few companies could refuse a government request that, in return, they provide cover for intelligence agents. Given the enormous scope of Bechtel’s operations in global trouble spots–a $20-billion industrial development in Saudi Arabia, for example–it could only proceed with assurances that its relations with both Saudi and American governments were good. Where, exactly, is the line between right and wrong? [emphasis mine]
… The white elephants Bechtel scattered across the American landscape–particularly the nuclear power plants that threaten to bankrupt some of the country’s largest utility systems–are monuments to wasted talent and misdirected resources.
Finally, I get to the Roddenberry Foundation, which was founded by Gene Roddenberry’s (Star Trek) son. Here’s more from the About Us, Origin webpage,
Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star Trek series, brought to his audiences meaningful and thought-provoking science fiction to “think, question, and challenge the status quo” with the intention of creating “a brighter future”. His work has touched countless lives and continues to entertain and inspire audiences worldwide. In 2010, Gene’s son Rod established the Roddenberry Foundation to build on his father’s legacy and philosophy of inclusion, diversity, and respect for life to drive social change and meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.
While there are many criticisms of Mr. Roddenberry, there doesn’t seem to be anything that would be considered a serious scandal on the order of a Jeffrey Epstein or the whisper of scandal on the order of Sir Li Ka-shing or Bechtel.
It’s a good thing when research is funded and being able to detect off-target effects from CRISPR is very good, assuming the research holds up to closer scrutiny.
As for vetting your donors, that’s tricky. Of course, Epstein was already a convicted sex offender when Ito accepted his funding for MIT but I cannot emphasize enough the amount of pressure these folks are under. Academia is always hungry for money. Hopefully this incident will introduce checks and balances in the donor process. | <urn:uuid:d9ad67e6-839c-4f3f-bd71-87c043068b2f> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.frogheart.ca/?tag=ucsf | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474470.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223221041-20240224011041-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.946806 | 5,725 | 3.59375 | 4 | 567 |
Scientists don't have a complete picture of how stuttering happens. While neuroscientists know a lot about how speech is acquired and how language is processed in the brain, what causes some people to stutter and struggle to speak wasn’t as clear. In 2010, a study done by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health revealed that it was a genetic mutation that caused the communication problem. Stutterers were found to have a defect in a gene called Gnptab (for N-acetylglucosamine-1-phosphate transferase alpha and beta) Before this research there were several opinions on what caused stuttering. Explanations ranged from mental illness, to stress, and to environmental factors like parenting and social status.
In order to find out more about this mutation and how potential treatments could be developed researchers at Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis worked with scientists at the NIH to better understand the neurological basis of the disorder. Using mice that had been created to have the genetic mutation that results in stuttering, the team analyzed the vocalizations that mice made.
Much like humans, mice communicate vocally, just not with words and speech of course. Whether they are in pain, hungry or trying to attract a mate, mice will make a variety of sounds. Communicating vocally is an incredibly complex process, even more so for stutterers. Tim Holy, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience and the paper’s senior author said, “Speech is obviously a unique human capacity, but the patterns of speech are built out of a lot of building blocks that are much simpler. You have to be able to control the timing of your breath and the fine muscles in your tongue and mouth. You have to be able to initiate movement. Those kinds of things may be shared all the way from mice to people.”
Analyzing the vocalizations of mice was a difficult task since much of the sounds they make, especially as newborn pups are at a pitch that is to high for humans to hear. The researchers were able to make recordings of the sounds of normal, unaltered mice and compare to them to those of the mice that had the stuttering gene. Using mathematical algorithms they were able to track the patterns of the sounds and tell if certain sounds, like syllables in human speech, were repeated.
Their results showed that the mice with the genetic mutation repeated sounds in the same way that humans who stutter get stuck on certain syllables or words. The stopping and starting that many people who stutter experience was echoed in the sound pattern of the altered mice.
In addition to the testing of the vocalizations of the mice, the study also compared the control group to the genetically altered group in several other ways. The tested both groups to evaluate their strength, memory, learning, sociability and coordination. Both groups were identical in their ranges of abilities, the only difference being the halting and repetitive patterns of vocalization, showing that the mutation that causes stuttering doesn’t seem to effect other neurological skills. It’s not clear how the gene the carries the mutation is related to speech so this is an area that the team hopes to look more closely at in future research. Take a look at the video here to learn more about the methods used and what the research could mean for those who stutter.
Sources: Ars Technica Washington University NIH | <urn:uuid:79e9d8ad-04f6-43a8-8d2c-274befe16870> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.labroots.com/trending/neuroscience/2926/science-stuttering | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474470.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223221041-20240224011041-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.973611 | 711 | 3.84375 | 4 | 568 |
New UArizona study links brain waves directly to memory
The findings could lay foundations for cognitive impairment therapy and help improve memory.
Neurons produce rhythmic patterns of electrical activity in the brain. One of the unsettled questions in the field of neuroscience is what primarily drives these rhythmic signals, called oscillations. University of Arizona researchers have found that simply remembering events can trigger them, even more so than when people are experiencing the actual event.
The researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Neuron, specifically focused on what are known as theta oscillations, which emerge in the brain's hippocampus region during activities like exploration, navigation and sleep. The hippocampus plays a crucial role in the brain's ability to remember the past.
Prior to this study, it was believed that the external environment played a more important role in driving theta oscillations, said Arne Ekstrom, professor of cognition and neural systems in the UArizona Department of Psychology and senior author of the study. But Ekstrom and his collaborators found that memory generated in the brain is the main driver of theta activity.
"Surprisingly, we found that theta oscillations in humans are more prevalent when someone is just remembering things, compared to experiencing events directly," said lead study author Sarah Seger, a graduate student in the Department of Neuroscience.
The results of the study could have implications for treating patients with brain damage and cognitive impairments, including patients who have experienced seizures, stroke and Parkinson's disease, Ekstrom said. Memory could be used to create stimulations from within the brain and drive theta oscillations, which could potentially lead to improvements in memory over time, he said.
UArizona researchers collaborated on the study with researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, including neurosurgeon Dr. Brad Lega and research technician Jennifer Kriegel. The researchers recruited 13 patients who were being monitored at the center in preparation for epilepsy surgery. As part of the monitoring, electrodes were implanted in the patients' brains for detecting occasional seizures. The researchers recorded the theta oscillations in the hippocampus of the brain.
The patients participated in a virtual reality experiment, in which they were given a joystick to navigate to shops in a virtual city on a computer. When they arrived at the correct destination, the virtual reality experiment was paused. The researchers asked the participants to imagine the location at which they started their navigation and instructed them to mentally navigate the route they just passed through. The researchers then compared theta oscillations during initial navigation to participants' subsequent recollection of the route.
During the actual navigation process using the joystick, the oscillations were less frequent and shorter in duration compared to oscillations that occurred when participants were just imagining the route. So, the researchers conclude that memory is a strong driver of theta oscillations in humans.
One way to compensate for impaired cognitive function is by using cognitive training and rehabilitation, Ekstrom said.
"Basically, you take a patient who has memory impairments, and you try to teach them to be better at memory," he said.
In the future, Ekstrom is planning to conduct this research in freely walking patients as opposed to patients in beds and find how freely navigating compares to memory with regard to brain oscillations.
"Being able to directly compare the oscillations that were present during the original experience, and during a later retrieval of that is a huge step forward in the field in terms of designing new experiments and understanding the neural basis of memory," Seger said.
University of Arizona in the News | <urn:uuid:a81bccd3-cb21-4b01-b8e7-a715e0988934> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://news.arizona.edu/story/new-uarizona-study-links-brain-waves-directly-memory | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474594.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225071740-20240225101740-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.957775 | 721 | 3.375 | 3 | 569 |
Most college students are better at spending money than saving it since they're not used to having money.
But it is crucial that college students start saving money now. Emergencies and unexpected expenses don't wait until you're established in your adult life to happen. They can happen at any time. And, what's more, the sooner you start saving and investing your money, the more you will have. And who doesn't want more money?
Love it or hate it, you need to know about money and how to invest it. That dictates many of the choices you make, from where you live to what you'll buy. Now, no one is saying you have to become an expert, but you have to know the basics, and it's important to start while you're still in college.
More from College Money 101:
An easy guide to help college students set up their first budget
How college students can start investing — and making — money
How I learned about investing in stocks — and you can, too
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There's a saying in the investing community: "The best time to invest was yesterday. The second best time is right now."
What that means is that the earlier you are able to start, the earlier your money grows. This is done through the magic of compound interest! That means the money that you will be making when investing will grow exponentially based on the earnings made previously. It is what people mean when they say "make your money work for you."
Here's an example: Let's say you invest $1,000 in a stock and it goes up 5%.That's $50. Now your investment is worth $1,050. Let's say you make 5% the next year. That's now 5% of $1,060, which is $53. If you make 5% the next year, that's now 5% of $1,113, which is $56. Your original $1,000 is now worth $1,170. Now, imagine that over 20, 30 or 40 years. It adds up. By not investing right now, you are basically letting that money slip away.
A lot of people already have an intuitive sense of what to do with money, but they may not know or utilize the tools that can help grow that money exponentially.
It's not enough to just try to save or save when you get around to it. You need to make saving a habit and keep it going — and growing.
A simple way to do it is to use the 50-30-20 rule. This is where 50% of your income goes to necessities (such as rent, student loans and other bills), 30% goes to wants (such as that new pair of shoes or that spring break trip) and 20% goes to savings.
If you are a college student with a job or internship and you aren't able to save in this ratio right now, that's OK.
"When I was in med[ical] school, I was spending 95% on needs, 5% on wants. However, I knew that I would be able to use the rules of thumbs with a grain of salt since it didn't fit my situation," said Carolyn McClanahan, founder and director of financial planning at Life Planning Partners.
What's important is that you start saving some money. Whatever you can — $25, $50 or $100 — a month.
"The more you save, the sooner you reach financial flexibility," McClanahan said. "Having money set aside allows for more choice."
That means you will be ready for emergencies when they inevitably arise and you'll be able to afford more of the things you want.
One thing that helps is automating it. Just set it and forget it. Set up an automatic transfer of a set amount each month, and you'll be surprised how fast it grows. Then, check back in with yourself regularly (like you are your own financial advisor) and see if you can increase what you are saving. Even if you only increase it a little bit each month or every few months, it will add up.
How can you save and invest?
First, even if you don't have a lot of money to invest, it's important to split your savings into two distinct buckets — liquid and illiquid.
Liquid savings, in the simplest terms, means money you can access anytime. That's like your checking and savings accounts. This is for your day-to-day cash but also unexpected costs that may come up. You need to be able to either write a check or pay someone via payment apps like Venmo, PayPal, and Apple Pay.
What is the opposite of this? It's called "illiquid assets," and this is the type of money that you can't access so easily. This ranges from your stock/investment portfolio to even shoes you're trying to flip for a profit online. You can't just cash out of these things quickly, and in some cases, there are penalties for withdrawing too early if there is a fixed date on that investment.
Why would you want money you can't access quickly? Simple: It tends to generate a higher rate of return than a checking or savings account. But both are equally important to have.
If you have zero savings right now, the most important thing is to figure out how much money your bills are every month and start stashing away in a saving account or financial app three to six months of your expenses. So, if your monthly bills come to $2,000, then you need at least $6,000 in an account that you can access anytime if you need it. Even if that seems like a lot, set it as a goal and work hard to get there. Figure out where you can trim expenses even a little bit to stash more into savings.
"[E]veryone needs an emergency fund ... to able to breathe in case something goes wrong," McClanahan said.
Get in the right money mindset
My best tip is to keep your expenses consistent. You may have heard the expression "life is a marathon, not a sprint" — well that totally applies to your money, too. Think of the big picture, the long term. Sure, you will have a couple of anomalies, such as buying a new phone or laptop, but aside from that, keep your spending consistent. And that comes down to one word: discipline.
"Contrary to what some people may think, paying rent isn't that hard," said Dominic Wash, a psychology student in Michigan State University. "What's hard," Wash said, "is knowing how much you can afford to spend on things like going out and eating out."
"I've spent more on food than I do on rent and any other expense combined," Wash said. "It's not that I'm not able to budget my groceries; it's just that I need to discipline myself."
Erin Yi, a biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience major at the University of Michigan, said it's also important to think of durability — how long something you buy will last vs. having to replace it, which means spending more money.
"When I'm shopping, I think about the long-term benefits," Yi said. "For example, I usually want to buy clothes for how long it will last me. I usually don't want to do fast fashion. With groceries, frozen food all the time. Even when I eat out, I try to calculate how much more I can stretch it out when I take it back home."
By actively seeking out the opportunities to save money, you prepare yourself for longevity, building up funds that can be used for better use. Now, this does not mean you can't treat yourself every once in a while! You can always go out and eat and go on a small shopping spree, but it is crucial to be proactive, keeping in mind how your decisions will affect your future.
Where to start
After you set up a savings account and build up a few months expenses in savings, think about using an investment account or app to get some of your money really growing.
The best thing to do is set up a self-directed stock account and set up automatic contributions, said Stephen Engel, a senior private wealth advisor at Palumbo Wealth Management.
"Start early, then learn," Engel said.
Of course, when you get your first full-time job, most of those will offer a 401(k) retirement plan with a matching contribution from your employer. Here, you are able to put your earnings into an account where untaxed money goes in, grows in the account, and then gets taxed later on when you withdraw it (in retirement). If you move to a new job, you can roll that over into an individual retirement account (IRA). You can also invest in what's called a Roth IRA, where there is a contribution limit but there are tax benefits down the road. The Roth IRA is different form a 401(k) as it allows you to invest earned income that has already been taxed. Both of them are great ways to put your earned income into stocks and let grow through compound interest.
Remember: Think big picture!
The best way to start learning about ways to invest is to start doing some online research. You don't have to spend hours studying — just read an article here, look up a term there. Keep at it, and that little bit of information gained will also grow over time.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes either! It can be nerve-racking to be clueless at the cost of your own money, but with the right amount of knowledge and common sense, you'll learn to manage those risks with your finances as well. Just don't invest huge amounts of money (not that most of us have it while we're in college) in any one place until you learn a little. Even then, it's smart to diversify: Have your money invested in a wide variety of things. That way, if any one investment falls, it doesn't take your whole life's savings with it.
Don't abuse credit cards
Credit cards are a necessity for establishing your financial history — and trustworthiness. If you have a credit card that you use and pay your bill on time every month, it shows that you are trustworthy when it comes to money. You will get a credit score based on that, and it will be something creditors look at throughout your life: when you go to rent your first apartment, buy or lease your first car or down the road, buy your first house.
"If you never had a credit card, that means you don't have credit history, so it will be difficult to buy house without a record," but "debt is a big problem," Engel said. "Never build up debt. If you set up a credit card with a $10,000 limit and you charged $10,000, interest will pile up."
The average credit card interest rate is 18.32% for new offers, according to WalletHub's recent Credit Card Landscape Report.
Credit cards charge what's called an annual percentage rate, so on $10,000, that's $1,832! You don't pay that all at once, a portion of that is charged each month on your monthly bill. But! That's not it. Remember how we talked about compound interest? How that can work in your favor when it comes to saving, investing and growing your money? Well, it works against you if you carry a balance. So, if you carry a balance month after month, it will keep compounding (you'll be paying interest on the original amount plus the interest charges you accrued last month and the month before, etc. It will be a lot harder to dig out of that cycle. So, start good habits early and don't carry a credit card balance.
One of the great things about graduating and starting your adult life is you get to make your own decisions about everything. But that also includes your money! So, you have to be smart about it. You don't want to be in a situation where you need to pay rent by midnight and you're wondering where that money is coming from. So, make sure you have a balance of liquid and illiquid assets in order to take care your life expenses now and your paradise in the future.
″College Money 101″ is a guide written by college students to help the class of 2022 learn about big money issues they will face in life — from student loans to budgeting and getting their first apartment — and make smart money decisions. And, even if you're still in school, you can start using this guide right now so you are financially savvy when you graduate and start your adult life on a great financial track. Jacob Shin is a senior at the University of Michigan, studying film, television, & media. He is an intern for CNBC's digital video unit. The guide is edited by Cindy Perman.
SIGN UP: Money 101 is an eight-week learning course to financial freedom, delivered weekly to your inbox. For the Spanish version Dinero 101, click here.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal and Comcast Ventures are investors in Acorns. | <urn:uuid:579c735f-6eae-41df-a0a3-9948f37ce224> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/business/money-report/feel-like-youre-broke-all-the-time-heres-how-you-can-change-that/2943366/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474594.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225071740-20240225101740-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.972025 | 2,735 | 2.640625 | 3 | 570 |
With social media occupying a bigger and bigger role in our lives, health experts are increasingly concerned about the role it has on adolescent mental health.
“In the span of a generation, social media has really dramatically changed the landscape of adolescents’ development around the clock,” Eva Telzer, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC-Chapel Hill, told members of a North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force committee earlier this month.
She told committee members that several decades ago adolescents were interacting with each other in person. Now adolescent social relationships are occurring largely behind a screen.
“Their posts are relatively permanent and public. Anybody can see them. They have this digital stress to be available around the clock,” explained Telzer. | <urn:uuid:aca9007e-4d28-48d7-a52f-e71dc0752a77> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://college.unc.edu/inthemedia/anxiety-and-algorithms/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474661.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226162136-20240226192136-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.957542 | 155 | 2.828125 | 3 | 571 |
Princeton University scientists have used an optogenetics technique to control the metabolism of genetically modified yeast and increase the output of commercially valuable chemicals. The results offer scientists a powerful new tool to probe and understand the inner working of cells, according to José L. Avalos, Ph.D., an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and Princeton's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. “It opens the door to controlling metabolism with light.”
The Princeton researchers used fermentation and genetically engineered yeast to produce lactic acid, used in food production and bioplastics, and isobutanol, a commodity chemical and an advanced biofuel.
Light played a key role in the experiment because it allowed the researchers to switch on genes that they had added to the yeast cells. These particular genes are sensitive to light, which can trigger or suppress their activity. In one case, turning on and off a blue light caused the special yeast to alternate between producing ethanol, a product of normal fermentation, and isobutanol, a chemical that normally would kill yeast at sufficiently high concentration.
The achievement of producing these chemicals was significant, but the researchers were intrigued by the development of light's broader role in metabolic research.
“It provides a new tool with the ability to do sophisticated experiments to determine how metabolism works and how to engineer it,” Dr. Avalos said.
In their study (“Optogenetic Regulation of Engineered Cellular Metabolism for Microbial Chemical Production”) published in Nature, the researchers reported that they used light to increase yeast's production of the chemical isobutanol as much as five times higher than previously reported levels in peer-reviewed studies. The team relied on a genetically modified strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the experiments.
“The optimization of engineered metabolic pathways requires careful control over the levels and timing of metabolic enzyme expression. Optogenetic tools are ideal for achieving such precise control, as light can be applied and removed instantly without complex media changes. Here we show that light-controlled transcription can be used to enhance the biosynthesis of valuable products in engineered Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We introduce new optogenetic circuits to shift cells from a light-induced growth phase to a darkness-induced production phase, which allows us to control fermentation with only light,” write the investigators.
“Furthermore, optogenetic control of engineered pathways enables a new mode of bioreactor operation using periodic light pulses to tune enzyme expression during the production phase of fermentation to increase yields. Using these advances, we control the mitochondrial isobutanol pathway to produce up to 8.49 ± 0.31 g l−1 of isobutanol and 2.38 ± 0.06 g l−1 of 2-methyl-1-butanol micro-aerobically from glucose. These results make a compelling case for the application of optogenetics to metabolic engineering for the production of valuable products.”
Isobutanol is an alcohol used in products such as lubricants, gasoline and jet fuel replacements, and plastics. With good compatibility with gasoline infrastructure, isobutanol has properties that could make it a direct substitute for gas as a vehicle fuel, note the scientists. However, most attempts to create isobutanol biofuel have run into difficulties involving cost or scaling production to an industrial level. Although natural yeast fermentation produces isobutanol, it does so in miniscule amounts. Instead, yeast makes high volumes of ethanol and carbon dioxide.
“Yeast don't want to make anything but ethanol; all their systems have evolved to do this,” said Evan M. Zhao, a third-year Ph.D. student in Avalos' lab and lead author on the Nature paper. “This has been an age-old problem.”
The team managed to suppress the yeast's evolutionary self-interest by genetically engineering it to produce large quantities of isobutanol. But they faced a major problem. Isobutanol is toxic to yeast and eventually kills yeast colonies that produce it in any significant quantity. The researchers predicted they could use a combination of genetic engineering and light to fine-tune isobutanol production. Using their light-switch technique, the researchers set out to keep the yeast alive while maximizing isobutanol production.
The researchers started by putting a modified gene from a marine bacterium that is controllable by blue light into yeast's DNA. They then used light to turn on a chemical process that activates enzymes that naturally allow yeast to grow and multiply by eating glucose and secreting ethanol. But while those enzymes are active, ones that influence the production of isobutanol can't work. So the team turned to darkness to switch off the ethanol-producing enzymes to make room for the expression of their competitors.
“Normally light turns expression on,” said Jared E. Toettcher, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular biology and co-lead researcher, “but we also had to figure out how to make the absence of light turn another expression on.”
The challenge was to find the right balance of light and dark, given that yeast cells die when their natural fermentation process is disturbed, Zhao said: “The yeast get sick. They don't do anything anymore; they just stop.”
The researchers allowed the cells to grow by giving them bursts of blue light every few hours. In between, they turned the light off to shift their metabolism from powering growth to producing isobutanol. Before the cells completely arrested, the researchers dispersed more bursts of light.
“Just enough light to keep the cells alive,” said Dr. Toettcher, “but still crank out a whole lot of product that you want, which they produce only in the dark.”
Using light to control yeast's chemical production offers several advantages over techniques involving pure genetic engineering or chemical additives, explain the scientists. For one, light is much faster and cheaper than most alternatives. It's also adjustable, meaning that turning it on and off can toggle the function of live cells on the spot at any point in the fermentation process (as opposed to chemicals, which generally can't be turned off once they are added). Also, unlike chemical manipulators that diffuse throughout a cell, light can be applied to specific genes without affecting other parts of the cell.
Optogenetics is already used in neuroscience and other fields, but this the first application of the technology to control cellular metabolism for chemical production. Gregory Stephanopoulos, Ph.D., an MIT chemical engineering professor who was not involved with Princeton's research, called it a turning point in the field of metabolic engineering.
“It offers a brand new approach to the control of gene expression in microbial cultivation,” Dr. Stephanopoulos said.
The work and resulting paper were the culmination of interdisciplinary collaboration between Dr. Avalos's and Dr. Toettcher's labs. Both started working at Princeton in the winter of 2015. “Within our first month, we wanted to use light to control metabolic engineering,” Dr. Toettcher pointed out.
Dr. Avalos said the researchers are working to improve their results. They have recently tested different colors of light to activate various proteins and cut the time needed for yeast to produce desired chemicals. But he said they would ultimately like to expand the scope of their work.
“We intend to keep pushing,” stressed Dr. Avalos. “But metabolic engineering transcends industrial microbiology. It also allows us to study the metabolism of cells for health-related problems. You can control metabolism in any context, for industrial biology or to address medical questions.” | <urn:uuid:5420e5ba-0c02-4881-87cb-386ac933c59f> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.genengnews.com/news/optogenetics-used-for-first-time-for-industrial-chemical-production/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474661.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226162136-20240226192136-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.941911 | 1,588 | 3.53125 | 4 | 572 |
Lions Quest Skills for Action
Lions Quest Skills for Action (SFC) is an evidence-based high school social and emotional learning program rooted in the belief that young people who are prepared to meet adulthood by developing their character and having high expectations for positive behavior can take meaningful roles in addressing the issues that affect their lives, their communities, and the world.
Scope and Sequence
The lessons in each unit include grade appropriate content that develops sequentially by topic while offering the flexibility to be taught in a variety of classroom settings from 1 semester to 4 years.
Lions Quest Lessons
The program and lessons are based on the Five SEL Core Competencies from CASEL and use a four-phase instructional design. Central to this is a view of students as active participants, initiating their own learning in a natural way that draws on their innate curiosity. The emphasis is on interaction as students work together to learn concepts, practice thinking and social skills, and discover the benefits of cooperating toward mutual goals.
Service-Learning Curriculum Manual
The Service-Learning Curriculum Manual provides all the information and resources you will need to implement the Lions Quest Service-Learning program for high school. 18 lessons teach the concepts of service-learning and guide students through the process of planning a service-learning project, taking action, reflecting on the service-learning project, sharing the results of the project, and celebrating the students’ achievement.
You may review two complete high school social and emotional learning lessons from each grade level. | <urn:uuid:7ea3c589-35c0-4983-91f5-6a2241d55e60> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.lions-quest.org/explore-our-sel-curriculum/high-school-social-and-emotional-learning-program/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474661.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226162136-20240226192136-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.940389 | 307 | 3.3125 | 3 | 573 |
EdNeuroLab Zeroes in on Math Learning
Tackling fractions through brain imaging
March 26, 2020 | By Lynn Armitage, WCER Communications
In 2012, Edward Hubbard, a cognitive neuroscientist and assistant professor in UW‒Madison’s Department of Educational Psychology, created the Educational Neuroscience Lab to understand—through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—how the physical changes that occur in children’s brains as they learn may help improve education practices.
“We use the same type of MRI scanner you’d find at a hospital, but it’s tuned a little differently,” explains Hubbard, also a principal investigator at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research who directs a 40-member team at the EdNeuroLab which focuses on numerical cognition, synesthesia and autism spectrum disorders. “This special scanner picks up blood flow signals in the brain—and by knowing where the blood is going, we can tell which parts of the brain are active when kids do different things, like reading words or computing math problems.”
Fractions, in particular, have been a special interest. “We know that fractions are hard and it’s a hurdle that many children struggle to get over,” says Hubbard. “However, research shows that fifth graders who understand fractions go on to do better in algebra, which is the gateway to higher math skills critical to success in the STEM workforce.”
From the early days of the EdNeuroLab, Hubbard has been collaborating with Percival Matthews, an associate professor of educational psychology in UW–Madison’s School of Education and director of the MELD (Mathematics Education Learning & Development) Lab. With a mutual professional interest in improving fraction learning, the researchers joined forces on a five-year study called LAMBDA (Longitudinal Analysis of Mathematical Brain Development and Abilities), funded by a $1.9M grant from the National Institutes of Health.
LAMBDA has been exploring a number of questions about fractions, such as: Why are they so hard to learn? What brain systems support fraction learning? And how do these systems develop in schoolchildren?
Doing the math
WCER's Ed Hubbard and Percival Matthews are collaborating to improve fraction learning through brain imaging.
Hubbard and Matthews have also collaborated with researchers and educators outside of UW‒Madison on the LAMBDA study, including Jake McMullen, a well-known scientist from the University of Turku in Finland. While other education researchers are doing work on fractions, Hubbard says nobody is exploring this intersection of fractions and educational neuroscience.
This one-of-a-kind longitudinal study, which wraps up next year, has been following 400 children for four years from the Madison Metropolitan School District, Middleton-Cross Plains, Verona, Waunakee and Monona Grove who enrolled in LAMBDA in second and fifth grades. For a fractional time commitment of only five hours a year, students participate in behavioral sessions and fMRI scans at the Waisman Center.
“While some students have moved away, about 80 percent remain in the study,” Hubbard says of the participation rate. Others have also dropped out due to orthodontic treatment, as metal braces and MRI magnetic fields don’t mix. “The hard part is getting them to stay still while they are in the scanner,” adds Hubbard.
For their contribution to the study, students receive $50 for the MRI scan and $10/hour for the behavioral sessions.
So why have parents enrolled their children in the LAMBDA study? Ana Stephens, whose son joined the LAMBDA study at age 10 and is now in his final year as an 8th-grader, explains: “I hope that my decision to enroll Brady in the study contributes, eventually, to improving educational outcomes for students.”
Stephens is a WCER researcher whose own work also centers on mathematical thinking. “I have no experience in neuroscience, but it is interesting to see how parts of the brain are activated when engaged in different tasks and what eventual implications that might have for how we teach and how students learn.”
As for Brady, he says, “Having my brain scanned sounded cool and I also liked being paid to participate.” He looks forward to seeing the results of the study and while he would like a picture of his brain, Brady can no longer participate in MRI scans because he has a permanent retainer on his teeth.
Hubbard explains that even when students have to pull out of the study because they get braces or retainers, or move out of the area, it will not hinder the research. “We have a lot of analytical tools that allow us to fill in the missing data.”
One key finding: ratio perception
“Through fMRI, we think we have identified a brain system that might be really important for learning about fractions in ways that other education researchers and cognitive neuroscientists haven’t appreciated, which is ratio perception,” Hubbard shares some LAMBDA insights.
With brain imaging, the EdNeuroLab team has been able to show on scans that in the right side of children’s brains, before any formal instruction with fractions, second-graders already can understand basic, non-symbolic ratios, such as dot patterns and line lengths. The researchers have observed through fMRI that the same brain systems are activated when students in 5th and 8th grades, and even adults, are computing symbolic fractions.
“It suggests that we are on the right track,” says Hubbard. “Kids are learning fractions by taking these pre-existing brain systems and through educational experiences, retooling them to do this uniquely human thing of comparing symbolic fractions.”
While much research over the years has shown that education has a powerful effect on our brains, Hubbard is astounded that we know relatively little about how our educational experience is shaping our brain. “Here we are in the 21st Century running the largest uncontrolled experiment on brain development in the history of humanity. We start children learning at age two all the way through college. And we basically have no idea what we are doing to those brains,” says the EdNeuroLab director.
Another important calculation
Through the LAMBDA study, Hubbard and Matthews are literally illustrating the far-reaching implications of why becoming competent in fraction learning is important to the future of education, especially in the STEM fields.
But there is another equally powerful reason why being good at math is crucial for the development of children.
“Ample evidence shows that math is more important than reading, although literacy is commonly thought to be king, and that individual differences in math skills are a better predictor of life outcomes,” adds Hubbard, referencing a longitudinal study from the United Kingdom that followed children into adulthood.
“Children who did well on their A-level math exams, independent of their reading skills, later had higher levels of full-time employment and income, and lower rates of substance abuse and depression by age 30.”
Initial findings from LAMBDA are being released now. Behavioral data and the first fMRI results are currently under review. | <urn:uuid:e15bdff6-ecec-4a4d-8e43-3a4b214b8ecb> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.wcer.wisc.edu/news/detail/edneurolab-zeroes-in-on-math-learning | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474661.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226162136-20240226192136-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.953785 | 1,509 | 2.875 | 3 | 574 |
olly - Fotolia
Technology today influences every aspect life, constantly changing and becoming more progressive. But while the word "technology" suggests innovation and progress, employment statistics still show a gender divide, particularly when it comes to women.
When analyzing statistics and trends of women working in technology, the research shows gaps in STEM education, retention, ethnicity and race, culture issues and leadership position gaps. In February 2020, Statista analyzed self-reported data from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft and found that women make up between 28% and 42% of the total labor force for these five tech giants. Women in leadership positions in those same companies range from 25% to 33%, and the percentage of women in tech jobs drops even further to between 20% and 23%.
While there is much work left to do, that disparity is gradually changing.
Here are nine of the top women in tech today, many of whom are powerful activists working for greater diversity and representation in their fields.
1. Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code
Kimberly Bryant excelled at science and mathematics as a child and earned a scholarship to Vanderbilt University. There, she obtained a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electrical engineering with minors in mathematics and computer science.
For more than two decades, Bryant took on technical leadership roles in several pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including Novartis and Merck.
It wasn't until her daughter showed an interest in computer science that Bryant realized there was still a lack of Black women in the science, technology, engineering and math professions. This gap wasn't due to a lack of interest -- it was due to a lack of access and exposure to STEM topics.
Bryant founded Black Girls Code in 2011, a San Francisco nonprofit that exposes girls of color ages 7 to 17 to STEM subjects. Here, girls can learn in-demand skills as they think about what they want to be when they grow up. The organization has the goal of teaching 1 million Black girls to code by 2040. Today, the organization has 16 chapters across the United States and one chapter in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Read Bryant's stance on change in the workplace here.
2. Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle
Safra Catz immigrated to the U.S. from Israel at age 6. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and her Juris Doctor from Penn Law.
Catz was a banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, working her way through the ranks to become the managing director, then senior vice president of the firm. In 1999, Catz joined Oracle as its senior vice president. She joined the company's board of directors in 2001 and was named president in 2004.
Under Catz's direction, Oracle initiated more than 130 acquisitions and mergers over the next decade. The most well-known of these acquisitions was direct rival PeopleSoft, which Oracle acquired in 2004 for $10.3 billion.
In 2014, Catz became co-CEO of Oracle, along with Mark Hurd. She became the sole CEO in 2019, after Hurd's death. She also teaches accounting at the Stanford School of Business and was elected to the board of directors of the Walt Disney Co. in 2017.
3. Elizabeth Churchill, senior director of user experience at Google
Elizabeth Churchill attended Sussex University and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in research and experimental psychology and a Master of Science degree in Knowledge-based systems. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
Churchill moved to California to join FX Palo Alto Laboratory and later Palo Alto Research Center. From there, she held positions at various tech companies, including Yahoo, eBay and Google. She is currently Google's director of user experience. In this role, Churchill researches and presents on topics related to computer science, psychology, design, analytics and anthropology to make user experience more precise and efficient.
Churchill also serves as the vice president of the Association of Computing Machinery. She also has more than 50 patents granted or pending, and more than 100 published articles in multiple fields of psychology and computing.
4. Kate Crawford, co-founder of New York University's AI Now Institute
Kate Crawford embarked on a career exploring the sociopolitical implications and applications of artificial intelligence after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney.
In her research, Crawford seeks to understand the benefits and dangers of AI and machine learning in the broader context of history, politics, labor, the environment and other sectors. Crawford advocates for mindful and respectful AI development. Her work examines how those technologies could potentially lead to bias, labor and supply chain disruptions, economic impacts due to automation, and privacy violations and curtailment of rights from increased surveillance.
Crawford's work has been featured in Nature, Science, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Her insight has led to multiple speaking engagements and advisory roles to policymakers at the United Nations and the White House. Crawford’s project with artist Vladan Joler titled Anatomy of an AI System won the Beazley Design of the Year Award and is on permanent display in New York at the Museum of Modern Art.
Crawford co-founded New York University's AI Now Institute in 2017, the first university institute dedicated to researching the social impact of AI, and the first women-led and founded AI institute. The institute's goal is to change how researchers look at AI and expand their interpretation of it from a technical standpoint to include history, sociology and law to inform their development decisions.
Crawford’s book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, has received recognition from entities such as the Financial Times, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books and Science.
Read a paper co-authored by Crawford about gender, race and power in AI.
5. Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft
Amy Hood earned her bachelor’s degree in economics from Duke University and holds an MBA degree from Harvard University.
As the first female CFO in Microsoft history, she now works to increase the big tech company’s long-growth while promoting a culture of equality. Hood is focused on bringing additional Black-owned partners and suppliers into Microsoft’s network. She is a big proponent of equality for women in large leadership roles and speaks regularly at events such as Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit.
Hood is responsible for leading Microsoft’s worldwide financial organizations including managing tax planning, acquisitions, audits, accounting and investor relations. She was recognized for leading Microsoft’s largest corporate initiatives, including transiting to the company’s Office 365 service and acquisitions of LinkedIn, Skype and Yammer. Before becoming CFO in 2013, Hood held various roles in Microsoft’s server and tools business along with the corporate financial division. She is credited with helping Microsoft engineer nearly 57 deals, including one of its largest – the $7.6 billion GitHub acquisition in 2018.
Hood’s leadership skills earned her ranking on Forbes list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women, where she ranked #63 in 2013 and moved up to #28 in 2022. Hood also serves on 3M’s board of directors since 2017.
6. Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute
Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing, China, and moved to the U.S. at age 16. She graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics, and from the California Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in computer science.
After graduating, Li taught engineering and computer science courses at the University of Illinois and Princeton. She then joined the staff at Stanford in 2009, where she still teaches as a fully tenured professor. Li served as the director of Stanford's AI Lab from 2014 to 2018. She currently holds the title of co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute.
Li's research focuses on cognitive and computational neuroscience, and machine learning to improve AI image recognition ability. This research led her to take a sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, when she served as vice president of Google and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud.
Li also founded AI4ALL along with her Ph.D. student, Olga Russakovsky in 2017. AI4ALL is a nonprofit aimed at increasing diversity in the AI sphere through education, recruitment, mentoring and training students in historically underserved communities. AI4ALL has partnered with professionals from organizations such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Black Girls Code and Girls Who Code. Today, it operates summer programs in 16 locations across the U.S.
Learn more about Li's thoughts on developing ethical AI here.
7. Ellen Pao, co-founder and CEO of Project Include
Ellen Pao learned how to code at age 10 from her mother -- a computer engineer at the University of Pennsylvania. Pao went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and a certificate in public policy from Princeton University. She also earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
After working for several Silicon Valley companies -- including WebTV and BEA Systems -- Pao became the technical chief of staff at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a San Francisco venture capital firm. She ended up suing the company for bias and gender discrimination.
In 2013, Pao became Reddit's head of business development and strategic partnerships, then interim CEO in 2014. Pao is an advocate for women's rights and transforming corporate culture, and she banned the use of "revenge porn" and unauthorized nude photos on Reddit. This move inspired other social media platforms to institute similar policies.
Pao later resigned from Reddit and founded Project Include with several other women in the tech industry. The group's mission is to address and prevent sexism and gender discrimination in Silicon Valley, and to improve diversity and inclusion within tech companies.
8. Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code
Reshma Saujani graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree in political science and speech communication. From there, she received her Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.
Saujani became the first Indian-American woman to run for U.S. Congress in 2010, when she campaigned for a New York House seat. During the race, she ran the first political campaign using tools such as Square to receive donations. And while visiting area schools during the race, she saw firsthand the gender gap in computer classes.
In 2012, Saujani founded Girls Who Code to address that gender gap in the tech workforce, with programs for grades 3 all the way through college. The organization offers summer immersion and campus programs, online resources, books, after-school clubs and college alumni programs. To date, the organization has served more than 450,000 girls, approximately half of whom are from underserved communities made up of Black, Latina and low-income girls.
In 2017, Saujani published her book, Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World, promoting the tenets of her organization. Saujani also wrote published books Brave, Not Perfect and Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work.
9. Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX
Gwynne Shotwell earned Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Northwestern University. After graduation, Shotwell enrolled in the Chrysler Corp.'s management training program to begin a career in the automotive industry. But she quickly changed course to work on military space research contracts with Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Calif. There, she became the chief engineer of an MLV-class satellite program, where she researched and developed policies for commercial space exploration for the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA.
Her interest in space exploration made her a top candidate for SpaceX in 2002. SpaceX brought her on as its 11th employee and vice president of business development. Since then, Shotwell has become the company's president and COO, making her responsible for day-to-day operations and company outreach and development.
SpaceX was the first private company to put a commercial satellite into orbit and the first private company to send humans into orbit and to the International Space Station. It is also the world's largest commercial satellite constellation operator.
Shotwell has been inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2020. | <urn:uuid:0d00e82a-da10-45c5-b482-4c4f437947d4> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Top-9-most-influential-women-in-technology | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474690.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228012542-20240228042542-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.961989 | 2,614 | 2.84375 | 3 | 575 |
Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX and Tesla, has always been in the news whether for his crypto love or his bizarre ideas. These ideas are not only limited to driverless cars or space travel, but now it also includes an effort to link the human mind and artificial intelligence, named Neuralink, which is Musk’s neural interface technology company. Musk is preparing a chip, which will be inserted in the brain of a person to record the activity of the brain and control it to a limited extent. Although this high-tech may sound strange or seems a theme of a sci-fi movie, its use in the treatment of diseases like Parkinson’s can prove to be very important.
What is the purpose of this project?
Interestingly, Musk believes that mankind should not be defeated by a digital super intelligence, so it should be prepared in advance. He told in a podcast by Lex Friedman in 2019 that we will never be smarter than a digital supercomputer. So if we can’t beat them then we should join them. Musk has given some big hints about what Neuralink will do. He said that chip will be able to save memories and play again or can call the car by telepathy. Besides, it can also prove to be a boon for people living with paralysis or disability.
How will the technology work?
Neuralink is preparing two tools. The first is a coin-sized chip that will be implanted in a human’s head. From this, thin wires will come out of the hair, in which 1024 electrodes will go to different parts of the brain. The data received from them will go through the chip to the computers where researchers will study it. Apart from this chip, there will be a robot, which with the help of a needle will stitch the wire coming out of the Neuralink chip into the human brain. Musk says the procedure would be as easy as LASIK surgery. In January, a demo of this chip was implanted inside a pig. This chip remained in the mind of the pig for two months. A few months back, Musk also told that a monkey has also been implanted with this chip in its brain and it has an effect on it.
Apprehensions of scientists
It is difficult for experts to believe these claims to be true. In September 2020, Professor Andrew Jackson, a neuro scientist at the University of Newcastle, told Business Insider that the technology may be possible, but the neuroscience behind it is very robust. However, he says that there is a feature in its robot that adjusts the work of applying the chip to the brain according to the movement in the human brain. Movement in the brain occurs with breathing and heartbeat. Scientists are happy with the engineering being used in this technology, but they do not consider the neuroscience behind it to be a miracle. | <urn:uuid:9593d402-8905-44b3-980a-406730d66620> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://turbocrush.com/neuralink-project-elon-musk/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476205.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20240303043351-20240303073351-00405.warc.gz | en | 0.96678 | 573 | 3.015625 | 3 | 576 |
While the brain works as a dynamic network, with no brain region solely responsible for any particular function, it is generally accepted that the hippocampus plays a major role in memory. Spatial memory operates through the hippocampus with communication with the prefrontal and parietal cortices. This chapter will focus on two separate reference frames involved in spatial memory, egocentric and allocentric, and outline the differences of these reference frames and associated search strategies with relevance to behavioural neuroscience. The importance of dissociating these search strategies is put forward, and steps researchers can take to do so are suggested. Neurophysiological and clinical differences between these spatial reference frames are outlined to further support the view that distinguishing them would be beneficial.
Part of the book: The Hippocampus | <urn:uuid:24107357-5ccc-4268-b2fd-472ff4631d0c> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.intechopen.com/profiles/230395 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473401.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221070402-20240221100402-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.91655 | 150 | 3.28125 | 3 | 577 |
Innovative software developed at the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB) is on track to improve our understanding of the mind’s innermost wirings – opening up exciting possibilities in neuroscience.
Funded by the University of Oxford and the Human Connectome Project (see below), a team including research student Moisés Hernández Fernández, research fellow Dr Stamatios Sotiropoulos, Prof. Stephen Smith and Prof. Michael Giles has developed parallel computation algorithms that vastly accelerate the processing of Data Mountains generated by a key medical imaging technology.
This breakthrough, in which the Emerald supercomputer funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has played a vital role, will enable exploration of brain structure in unprecedented detail and potentially provide a practical tool for clinical use.
New Frontiers of Neuroscience
Developing a deeper understanding of how the brain works is arguably one of the biggest scientific challenges of the 21st century. Huge strides have been made but much remains to be discovered in terms of how information is transferred both within the brain and with other parts of the body. Answering these questions will not just enhance our conception of what it actually means to be human – it is also critical to generating fresh insights into neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. In this context:
- Cutting-edge imaging and modelling techniques can make a key
contribution by enabling non-invasive exploration of living brains, helping to unravel the microstructures and the unimaginably complex ‘wiring’ that underpin the brain and its workings.
- Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) – including a technique known as white matter tractography – is a proven means of generating 3D representations of pathways in the brain’s white matter that mediate information transfer between remote brain regions.
“Our aim has been to devise software that takes a different approach, enabling dMRI brain data to be analysed very quickly and very accurately and taking the contribution of computational science to clinical neuroscience to the next level” – Moises Hernandez Fernandez, research student
A major problem, however, has been difficulty in handling the vast datasets produced by dMRI when scanning a highly sophisticated organ like the brain. The sheer length of time it takes to process and analyse this data has restricted the use of dMRI in this application as well as the level of detail that can be extracted, both in academic circles and in clinical environments.
“Conventional Central Processing Units, or CPUs, that are the mainstay of computers have more or less reached their limits,” Moisés Hernández Fernández explains. “This meant that the only solution in terms of continuing improvement of computing performance was to increase the number of computing units, leading to the emergence of multi-core CPUs and parallel computing architectures.Our aim here at FMRIB has been to devise software that takes a different approach, enabling dMRI brain data to be analysed very quickly and very accurately and taking the contribution of computational science to clinical neuroscience to the next level.”
Map showing the estimated principal diffusion orientations in each voxel of the brain: medial-lateral orientations are coloured red, superior-inferior orientations are blue and anterior-posterior orientations are green. Producing such a map is very expensive computationally, making it beneficial to use GPUs which are 150 times quicker than CPUs.
Close-up of the yellow box in the previous image, showing details of the estimated principal diffusion orientations in a region within the brain’s Centrum Semiovale.
A Parallel Path to Better Imaging
The team’s solution has involved rebuilding dMRI data analysis algorithms so that they can run on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Containing thousands of computer cores, GPUs are game-changing electronic circuits first developed over a decade ago and specifically designed to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. The parallel architectures they provide can, depending on the algorithm used, process data much faster than CPUs.
Development and testing of the software involved several months’ utilisation of over 100 GPUs at the Emerald supercomputer developed by Bristol, Oxford and Southampton Universities and University College London and located at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in South Oxfordshire. The team subsequently invested in a number of GPUs for their own laboratory at FMRIB, which is based at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital.
“Parallel computing architectures make it possible to process massive volumes of data on practical timescales”Dr. Stamatios Sotiropoulos, Research Fellow
“Parallel computing architectures make it possible to process massive volumes of data on practical timescales,” says Stamatios Sotiropoulos. “Our algorithm designs enable GPUs to work around 150 times faster than CPU implementations. Such accelerations change the perspective of what is computationally feasible. This is not only beneficial for sheer data processing using existing paradigms, but also affects the amount of exploration that can be performed when researching new methods and technology.”
Figure 3: Connectivity matrix of the brain, with red representing high confidence in a connection and blue representing low confidence. Calculating this matrix is blalnk spacevery expensive computationally, but using GPUs can accelerate the process by a factor of 50. Figure 4: Representation of a row within the matrix in the previous image. The different colours represent the degree of confidence in a connection.
Building a Clearer Picture
Thanks to the speed with which it can extract important information and insights about brain wiring, the software is being harnessed by pioneering initiatives including:
- The Human Connectome Project – a 5-year study aiming to produce a comprehensive, ground-breaking ‘brain map’ depicting neural connections in the brain and the pathways that underlie brain function and behaviour.
- The Developing Human Connectome Project – focused on creating a dynamic map of neural connections in human foetuses and neonates between 20 and 44 weeks after conception, providing insight on developmental processes and associated pathologies.
- The UK Biobank Project – developing a huge resource of health-related data gathered from 100,000 volunteers to help explain why some people develop particular diseases while others do not.
“We’ve already successfully tested our software on massive high-resolution datasets generated by the Human Connectome Project and demonstrated that it can complete in a matter of hours tasks that would otherwise take weeks,” Hernández Fernández concludes. “Once we’ve finished optimising the software, we’re fully confident that we’ll start to see it deliver real dividends in a very wide range of applications.”
- Hernández, G. D. Guerrero, J. M. Cecilia, J. M. Garcia, A. Inuggi, S. Jbabdi, T. E. J. Behrens and S. N. Sotiropoulos. Accelerating Fibre Orientation Estimation from Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging Using GPUs. PLOS ONE, 29 April 2013; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0061892
- N. Sotiropoulos, S. Jbabdi, J. Xu, J.L. Andersson, S. Moeller, E.J. Auerbach, M.F. Glasser, S.M. Hernandez, G. Sapiro, M. Jenkinson, D.A. Feinberg, E. Yacoub, C. Lenglet, D.C. Van Essen, K. Ugurbil and T.E. Behrens. Advances in Diffusion MRI Acquisition and Processing in the Human Connectome Project.NeuroImage, 2013, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.057
Moisés Hernández Fernández
Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB), John Radcliffe Hospital
Dr Stamatios Sotiropoulos
Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB), John Radcliffe Hospital | <urn:uuid:292adbb5-c935-46d6-8d88-49d54e381030> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.ses.ac.uk/imaging-software-bring-the-brain-into-fuller-focus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473401.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221070402-20240221100402-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.892356 | 1,690 | 2.53125 | 3 | 578 |
In a world where science and spirituality often seem to occupy opposing domains, the relationship between astrology and science has long been a subject of fascination and debate. Astrology, an ancient belief system that posits a connection between celestial bodies and human behavior, has captured the imagination of countless individuals throughout history. But can astrology and science coexist harmoniously, or are they destined to forever remain at odds with each other?
Astrology, rooted in the observation of celestial movements and their potential influence on earthly affairs, has endured for thousands of years. Its proponents argue that the positions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars at the time of a person’s birth can provide insights into their personality traits, compatibility with others, and even predict future events. Skeptics, on the other hand, view astrology as a pseudoscience lacking empirical evidence and a solid scientific foundation.
However, in recent years, there has been a growing interest among scientists in investigating the potential underlying mechanisms of astrology and exploring possible correlations between celestial phenomena and human experiences. Rather than dismissing astrology outright, these researchers seek to understand the psychological, sociological, and even physiological factors that may contribute to the perceived connections.
Psychologists have conducted studies examining the “Barnum effect,” a phenomenon in which individuals perceive general or vague statements as highly personalized and accurate descriptions of themselves. This cognitive bias, prevalent in astrology readings, suggests that people often interpret information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs or desires. Additionally, sociologists have explored how astrology can serve as a shared cultural framework, shaping beliefs, values, and social interactions within specific communities.
Advancements in neuroscience have also allowed scientists to investigate the potential neural correlates of astrological beliefs. Studies have examined how individuals’ brains respond to astrological information, revealing patterns of activation in certain brain regions associated with self-reflection, self-identity, and social cognition. While these findings do not prove the validity of astrology, they shed light on the psychological processes underlying its popularity and appeal.
Moreover, some scientists argue that astrology may have served as an early attempt to explain natural phenomena that were later elucidated through scientific inquiry. The ancient Babylonians, for instance, developed intricate astronomical observations that led to the discovery of planetary movements and astronomical events. These observations formed the basis for modern astronomy, laying the groundwork for scientific advancements that continue to this day.
The relationship between astrology and science remains complex and multifaceted. While astrology does not conform to the rigorous methodologies and principles of the scientific method, it continues to captivate individuals seeking meaning and guidance in their lives. Scientists, recognizing the cultural and psychological significance of astrology, approach it with curiosity and open-mindedness, seeking to unravel the factors that contribute to its enduring popularity.
As research in fields such as psychology, sociology, and neuroscience advances, the understanding of astrology’s place in society may continue to evolve. By acknowledging the historical and cultural significance of astrology while exploring its underlying mechanisms, scientists can engage in a dialogue that bridges the gap between these seemingly disparate realms.
In the end, whether astrology is considered a science or a belief system is a matter of interpretation and personal perspective. The relationship between astrology and science may never be fully reconciled, but by fostering a respectful exchange of ideas, we can gain a deeper understanding of the human experience and the intricate interplay between ancient wisdom and modern scientific inquiry. | <urn:uuid:4e58c92b-23ee-4501-a938-fb2bd9f3fa55> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://gssmedia.in/unraveling-the-relationship-between-astrology-and-science/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473824.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222161802-20240222191802-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.940459 | 715 | 2.578125 | 3 | 579 |
BRAIN TIP: THE SCIENCE BEHIND TEAMS--
OXYTOCIN (BONDING) AND SOCIAL CONTAGION
(Excerpt: Reconnecting Workspaces, Chapter 3, Jennifer Britton, ©2021, All Rights Reserved)
There is an increasing focus on the science behind team work. There are both scientific factors as well as other elements which help teams thrive, including these neuroscience elements:
Emotional Contagion: Emotional contagion brings to life the notion that “one rotten apple spoils the bunch.” Research continues to demonstrate how our emotions, particularly as leaders, spread to those around us. What do you notice about the tone of the team?
Oxytocin: A second element which has been seen in high performing teams is a higher rate of oxytocin, also known as the bonding element. Within in-person environments it can be stimulated through touch, like high-fives and physical team huddles. Virtually it is stimulated by:
• Virtual high fives or, as a participant in a recent meeting I spoke at demonstrated, a Butterfly Hug!
• Bonding and feeling connected in the remote space is critical, especially when physical distancing measures are in effect. What can you do to get people bonding?
RECONNECTING THE WORKSPACE TIP—REIMAGINING WORKSPACE CULTURE
Enjoy the conversation!
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Looking to bring your workplaces back together, whether you are remote, hybrid, or face-to-face? Pick up a copy of my new book, Reconnecting Workspaces, at Amazon. | <urn:uuid:90ffa94b-be4d-475d-9997-b2cf834898b5> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/category/oxytocin | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473824.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222161802-20240222191802-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.91783 | 381 | 2.515625 | 3 | 580 |
From interpreting the legal terminology of the various types of violent crime, to examining the important theories as to why people commit crimes, criminological research gives you the knowledge you need to follow crime trends.
Different types of violent crime
In criminology, how a violent crime is approached depends very much on how the crime is defined. So many different legal terms exist for various forms of violent crime that it’s often hard for people to keep track of what means what.
Here are simple yet detailed definitions of some common types of violent crimes. (Remember, definitions of crimes may differ depending on which state you’re in.)
- Homicide: The killing of one person by another (regardless of the circumstances).
- Murder: The intentional killing of another human being.
- First-degree murder: A term some states use to refer to an intentional killing.
- Second-degree murder: A term some states use to refer to an unintentional killing in which the killer demonstrates “extreme indifference to human life” or “wanton disregard” for the life of the victim.
- Felony murder: A term some states use for a death that occurs during the commission of a serious felony, such as robbery or kidnapping. (All participants in such a felony can be charged with murder.)
- Manslaughter: The unintentional killing of another person, where the killer engages in reckless conduct that causes a death.
- Negligent homicide: The causing of someone’s death through negligence.
- Battery: The act of making offensive physical contact with someone.
- Assault: The threat of a battery, or an attempted battery, without actual physical contact.
- Simple assault or battery: The act of causing someone low-level — not serious — physical injury.
- Aggravated assault or battery: Serious felony conduct that involves the use of a dangerous or deadly weapon or that results in serious injury.
- Vehicular assault: Dangerous driving that results in injury to another.
- Spousal assault (also called domestic assault or intimate partner violence): Violence between domestic partners.
- Rape: The act of forcibly compelling someone to have sexual intercourse, or sexual intercourse between an adult and a partner under the age of 18, or the act of having intercourse with someone whom the law deems incapable of consent because of a mental handicap.
- Sodomy: The act of having forced anal or oral sex with someone, or the consensual act of participating in those same acts between an adult and a juvenile.
Important theories in criminology: why people commit crime
In criminology, examining why people commit crime is very important in the ongoing debate of how crime should be handled and prevented. Many theories have emerged over the years, and they continue to be explored, individually and in combination, as criminologists seek the best solutions in ultimately reducing types and levels of crime. Here is a broad overview of some key theories:
- Rational choice theory: People generally act in their self-interest and make decisions to commit crime after weighing the potential risks (including getting caught and punished) against the rewards.
- Social disorganization theory: A person’s physical and social environments are primarily responsible for the behavioral choices that person makes. In particular, a neighborhood that has fraying social structures is more likely to have high crime rates. Such a neighborhood may have poor schools, vacant and vandalized buildings, high unemployment, and a mix of commercial and residential property.
- Strain theory: Most people have similar aspirations, but they don’t all have the same opportunities or abilities. When people fail to achieve society’s expectations through approved means such as hard work and delayed gratification, they may attempt to achieve success through crime.
- Social learning theory: People develop motivation to commit crime and the skills to commit crime through the people they associate with.
- Social control theory: Most people would commit crime if not for the controls that society places on individuals through institutions such as schools, workplaces, churches, and families.
- Labeling theory: People in power decide what acts are crimes, and the act of labeling someone a criminal is what makes him a criminal. Once a person is labeled a criminal, society takes away his opportunities, which may ultimately lead to more criminal behavior.
- Biology, genetics, and evolution: Poor diet, mental illness, bad brain chemistry, and even evolution have been proposed as explanations for crime.
A sampling of crime stats
Crime trends are very important to policymakers who must decide how much money to commit to public safety. The charts included here show the long-term trends in funding police through 2017 and in crime rates through 2019. (Preliminary statistics for the year 2020 indicate a significant increase in crime nationwide. This may be an aberration in the long-term downward trend, or it may signal a shift. Time will tell.) | <urn:uuid:8867abc7-3944-490c-bfdd-16b081db9339> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.dummies.com/article/body-mind-spirit/emotional-health-psychology/psychology/forensic/criminology/criminology-for-dummies-cheat-sheet-209462/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474852.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20240229170737-20240229200737-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.941795 | 1,003 | 3.34375 | 3 | 581 |
A mathematical model that maps the relationship between the molecular structure of odorous substances and how they are perceived is claimed to have an edge over human experts, when it comes to identifying smells correctly.
A central undertaking of neuroscience is learning how our senses translate light into sight, sound into hearing, food into taste, and texture into touch. Smell is where these sensory relationships get more complex and perplexing.
To address this question, a research team from the Monell Chemical Senses Centre and start-up firm Osmo – a spinout from machine learning work undertaken at Google Research – are investigating how airborne chemicals connect to odour perception in the brain. They report that a machine-learning model has achieved human-level proficiency at describing, in words, how chemicals might smell. The research appeared in the 1 September issue of Science.
“The model addresses age-old gaps in the scientific understanding of the sense of smell,” said senior co-author Joel Mainland.
This collaboration moves the world closer to digitizing odours, which can be recorded and reproduced. It also may identify new odours for the fragrance and flavour industry that could decrease dependence on endangered plants, and identify new functional scents for things like mosquito repellent.
Humans have about 400 functional olfactory receptors. These are proteins at the end of olfactory nerves that connect with airborne molecules to transmit an electrical signal to the olfactory bulb. The number of olfactory receptors is much more than we use for colour vision – four – or even taste – about 40.
“In olfaction research, however, the question of what physical properties make an airborne molecule smell the way it does to the brain has remained an enigma,” said Mainland. “But if a computer can discern the relationship between how molecules are shaped and how we ultimately perceive their odours, scientists could use that knowledge to advance the understanding of how our brains and noses work together.”
To address this, Osmo created a model that learned how to match the prose descriptions of a molecule’s odour with molecular structure. The resulting map of these interactions is essentially groupings of similarly smelling odours, like floral and candy sweets. “Computers have been able to digitize vision and hearing, but not smell – our deepest and oldest sense,” said Wiltschko. “This study proposes and validates a novel data-driven map of human olfaction, matching chemical structure to odour perception.”
What is the smell of garlic or of ozone?
The model was trained using an industry dataset that included the molecular structures and odour qualities of 5,000 known odourants. Data input is the shape of a molecule, and the output is a prediction of which odour words best describe its smell.
To ascertain the efficacy of the model, researchers conducted a blind validation procedure in which a panel of trained participants described new molecules, and then compared their answers with the model’s description. The 15 panelists were each given 400 odourants as well as trained to use a set of 55 words – from mint to musty – to describe each molecule.
In comparing the model’s performance to that of individual panelists, the model achieved better predictions of the average of the group’s odour ratings than any single panelist in the study, impurities aside. Specifically, the model performed better than the average panelist for 53% of the molecules tested.
“The most surprising result, however, is that the model succeeded at olfactory tasks it was not trained to do,” said Mainland. “The eye-opener was that we never trained it to learn odour strength, but it could nonetheless make accurate predictions.”
The model was able to identify dozens of pairs of structurally dissimilar molecules that had counter-intuitively similar smells, and characterize a wide variety of odour properties, such as odour strength, for 500,000 potential scent molecules. | <urn:uuid:6ea2b6e3-890a-4972-80a1-b5348ff4179f> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://envirotecmagazine.com/2023/10/25/a-step-closer-to-digitizing-the-sense-of-smell/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475727.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302020802-20240302050802-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.947672 | 834 | 3.859375 | 4 | 582 |
- Paranoid personality disorder (PPD) causes extreme suspicion and fear of others.
- People with PPD may falsely believe that others are lying, cheating, or exploiting them.
- PPD may develop because of genetics, life experiences like abuse, or other mental health conditions.
Paranoid personality disorder (PPD) is a mental health condition that can cause extreme mistrust and fear of other people, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
PPD is somewhat rare — between 2.3% and 4.4% of Americans are thought to have the condition.
There is still very little research on paranoid personality disorder and the best way to treat it, but some types of psychotherapy may help.
Here are the most common symptoms of PPD and the best way to manage it.
What is paranoid personality disorder?
"People with this diagnosis tend to be suspicious and mistrustful of other people, tense and nervous in social situations, and on the lookout for threat," says Chris Hopwood, PhD, a professor of psychology at University of Zurich.
They tend to have trouble keeping up friendships and romantic connections, and may be easily insulted or offended.
"People with PPD are outwardly hostile and may seem aloof" because they experience relationships as a source of stress, says Royce Lee, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago.
Some of the common symptoms of PPD include:
- Believing that other people are lying or exploiting them
- Holding grudges or refusing to forgive
- Being overly sensitive to criticism
- Being afraid to reveal any personal information to other people
- Falsely thinking that other people are insulting them
- Always suspecting that their partner is cheating on them
- Assuming there are hidden meanings in other people's casual remarks or looks
- Having a hard time relaxing
- Being easily angered and quick to argue
People with PPD have a hard time connecting with other people, but that doesn't mean they're dangerous. "They can be prone to anger, but are not necessarily violent," Lee says.
The causes of paranoid personality disorder
There are several different factors that can put you at greater risk of developing paranoid personality disorder. This includes:
Certain life experiences: "It seems likely that experiences in which a person learns that they cannot trust important people in their environment may be factors," Hopwood says.
According to Lee, some experiences that are linked to PPD include:
- Experiences of racism
- Childhood abuse
Other mental health conditions: In most cases, people with PPD will also have another mental health diagnosis. Commonly linked disorders include:
Diagnosis and treatment
"Paranoid personality is ideally diagnosed with standardized questionnaires or interviews, based on criteria in the diagnostic manual (DSM-5)," Hopwood says.
An important part of this process is to differentiate between PPD and other disorders that have similar symptoms, says Hopwood. For example:
- PPD vs. anxiety: PPD is different from anxiety because the feelings of paranoia are always present, not just in certain situations.
- PPD vs. schizophrenia: PPD is different from psychotic disorders like schizophrenia because there are no hallucinations or delusions. This is an important distinction, because PPD is treated with psychotherapy, while schizophrenia requires medications, Lee says.
However, it's important to note that there is very little research on what qualifies as PPD. In fact, "many clinicians do not think of paranoid personality disorder as a valid category or diagnosis," Hopwood says.
We also have little scientific evidence about the best way to treat PPD, though some experts believe that therapy can help. In particular, some may use cognitive-behavioral therapy, an approach that aims to challenge problematic thoughts and shift behaviors.
There are no medications that can fully treat PPD, but certain antipsychotic medications may help treat anxiety symptoms.
Paranoid personality disorder can cause intense distrust of other people and may make having close relationships very difficult. If you think you may have symptoms of PPD, reach out to a mental health provider to find a treatment plan that works for you. | <urn:uuid:584de93d-052f-4beb-a70d-00368bb3d63e> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/health/mental-health/paranoid-personality-disorder | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476374.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20240303111005-20240303141005-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.952453 | 862 | 3.015625 | 3 | 583 |
Cognitive Stimulation Therapy is a therapeutic procedure using magnets or electrodes on the scalp or the brain in treating severe mental disorders that do not respond to other strategies or even medication. The various types of Cognitive Stimulation Therapy include vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), magnetic seizure therapy (MST), repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), and deep brain stimulation (DBS).
Amongst all these procedures, ECT is the oldest procedure. Other Cognitive Stimulation Therapies include interventions that are used to cure other mental disorders. Some new therapies have been developed, but they require more research efforts to determine their effectiveness and safety in treating mental diseases.
Usage of Cognitive Stimulation Therapy
Best psychiatrists in India use ECT to treat severe depression. Also, to treat depression in conjunction with psychosis that does not typically respond well to medication. They use it on patients who have schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Psychiatrists and Therapists in Chennai, India, generally use VNS to treat patients with symptoms of epilepsy and other conditions that do not respond to medication. While therapists initially developed DBS to manage the physical symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, they use it now experimentally used to treat severe depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Expectations from Cognitive Stimulation Therapy
It is a form of Deeply Induced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Therapists conduct it with much care and control. ECT, for example – a psychiatrist performs it with anaesthesia and assistance from nurses. Before administering the therapy, the patient gets general anaesthesia and muscle relaxing drugs. Then therapists place electrodes on the scalp. And through these electric current moves to the brain, causing short, intentional seizures. ECT is generally given to a patient about three times a week for around 12 times. After the treatment, the patient can leave the recovery room and resume typical day to day activities after about half an hour. There are minimal side effects like short term memory loss that is usually extremely temporary because of refinement in Technology. Follow-up medication and treatment of ECT is also essential.
Much like ECT, Cognitive Stimulation Therapy is also a non-invasive procedure. However, in this process, magnetic impulses to the brain stimulate the cortex without causing seizures. MST, on the other hand, also uses magnetic pulses but causes seizures in the mind. VNS is an invasive procedure. In that surgeon places a device under the skin sends impulses to the brain’s vagus nerve. DBS is also an invasive procedure where the surgeon places and controls the electrodes using a generator on the chest.
Workings of Cognitive Stimulation Therapy
Cognitive Stimulation Therapy causes both functional and chemical changes in the brain. Initially, ECT got a bad reputation as electric shock therapy, but it has been widely refined by therapists practising Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It is now a beneficial procedure in treating life-threatening mental disorders that may lead to suicide and starvation. Other therapies that are under experimentation may or may not replace ECT in the long run.
Choosing the Right Therapist
There are many things to look for when choosing therapists in India. A cognitive stimulation therapist must be a licensed psychiatrist specialising in neuroscience, electroconvulsive therapy, and other brain stimulation therapies. A clinical psychologist in Chennai, India, generally refers clients to therapists for such treatment after establishing the need for the same.
Psychotherapy with Praveen Saanker
Coaching, Psychotherapy and Counselling services provided by Mr Praveen Saanker are part of our “not-for-profit” activities. We do not charge a consulting fee for these support initiatives since they are meant to provide aid and relief for truly deserving individuals who otherwise may not have been able to afford these services.
Mr Praveen Saanker has set aside 12 hours of his professional time every week to provide coaching and counselling services. Appointments are provided basis the unique needs and circumstances of each individual. Please note that we do not have robust CRM platforms or customer support teams to provide instant answers to your queries or replies to your mails. Hence please bear with us for the time we take to get back to you.
What do we expect from you?
When you decide to get associated with us, we expect you to contribute to society in whatever capacity you can. This may mean you are undertaking voluntary work in your domain of expertise and provide empowerment and support to the needy. This can also mean you are giving help and assistance to people who desperately look forward to your aid when they have no one else who can help them. All we want you to do is give back to the universe and your fellow humans in whichever capacity you can.
We are not a registered charitable organisation, and hence we do not accept financial donations or support items in any form. You can get associated with anyone and choose the path you would like to follow in empowering your fellow human beings. But we would like to hear from you on how you intend to contribute back to society shortly when you choose to avail of our services.
How can you avail of our support?
If you believe you require Mr Praveen Saanker’s support and assistance, you can write to us at [email protected]. Please be rest assured, we shall get back to you and be with you during your testing times in whatever capacity we can.
Mr Praveen, the founder of ‘Vedicology,’ is an internationally renowned scholar on Sanatana Dharma recognised for his knowledge and application of Indian Psychology and Spirituality. He is regarded as an expert on Indian and Western Psychology, Vedic Scriptures, Indian Rites, Rituals, Customs & Traditions, Astrology, Vastu Shastra & Numerology. Aiming to be of the utmost help, Mr Praveen Saanker looks to understand your motivations and aspirations and then provide a solution accordingly. Praveen successfully integrates the principles of Vedas with modern Psychology and Business Management. Mr Praveen Saanker works with family business entrepreneurs and next-generation leaders, advising them on the family constitution and finding a subtle balance between family and business priorities.
- Grief Counselling or Support for Bereavement
- Counselling for Stress or Support for Stress Management
- Counselling for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or OCD
- Low Self Esteem – Counselling Support
- Self Confidence – Counselling Areas
- Infertility Counselling – Support Areas
- Counselling for HIV Patients
- Gender dysphoria or Gender Identity Disorder – Support Areas
- Counselling Support for Eating Disorders
- Dissociative Disorders – Counselling Support
- Counselling for Persons with Disability
- Counselling for Depression
- Child Counselling for Issues related to Children
- Career Counselling Support
- Counselling For Cancer Patients
- Counselling Support for Victims of Bullying and People who Bully
- Anxiety Issues Counselling Support
- Anger Management – Counselling Support
- Counselling Support for Abuse Victims
- Miscarriage Induced Stress – Counselling Support
- Passive Aggressive Behaviour – Counselling Support
- Spiritual Counselling
- Counselling for Sexuality Issues
- Sexual Problems – Counselling Support
- Self Harm – Counselling Support
- Relationship Counselling
- Pregnancy Counselling
- Work Stress – Counselling Support
Psychotherapy Areas – Information You Need to Know
- What is Emotionally Focussed Therapy?
- What is Culturally Sensitive Therapy?
- Compassion Focused Therapy
- What is Cognitive Stimulation Therapy?
- What’s Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?
- Brain Stimulation Therapy?
- What is Attachment-Based Therapy?
- What is Applied Behaviour Analysis?
- Adlerian Therapy – What is it used For?
- What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?
- Reactive Attachment Disorder: How to Deal And The Symptoms
- What is ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?
- How to Stop an Addiction with Addiction Counselling?
- What is Transpersonal Therapy – The Meaning and Technique
- What is Structural Family Therapy
- Strength-Based Therapy? When Is It Used?
- Solution Focused Brief Therapy: What is It?
- What is Social Recovery Therapy?
- What is Relational Therapy, and When Is It Used?
- Psychodynamic Therapy? Psychodynamic Therapy Techniques
- Psychoanalytic Therapy Techniques and Definition
- What is Positive Psychology, and What are Positive Psychology Goals?
- What is person-centred Therapy?
- Multicultural Counselling Therapy: What Is Its Importance?
- Motivational Interviewing Techniques: What is It?
- What is Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy?
- What is Mentalisation Based Therapy?
- Marriage and Family Therapy
- Interpersonal Therapy: Goals of Interpersonal Psychotherapy
- Types of Psychotherapy: Internal Family Systems Therapy
- What is Integrative Therapy?
- What is Hypnotherapy?
- Humanistic Therapy and Its benefits
- What is Human Givens Therapy?
- Internal Family Systems Therapy: What is It?
- What is Experiential Therapy?
- What is Existential Therapy? | <urn:uuid:109d7c3f-17a6-4a1e-ab28-1bbbf959f1b6> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://praveensaanker.com/psychotherapy/cognitive-stimulation-therapy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476532.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304200958-20240304230958-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.908702 | 1,921 | 3.375 | 3 | 584 |
Technology has become deeply integrated into our daily life, which made access to vast amounts of information easily available. Today’s generation of students has grown up with gadgets all around them, so to meet their learning needs, modern teachers must understand the role of technology in educational psychology. In this article, we’ll try to find out how the latest technological advances affect studying. But first, let’s learn more about educational psychology itself.
What is Educational Psychology?
The main purpose of educational psychology is to enhance learning efficiency by optimizing the social, emotional, and cognitive processes. Educational psychologists may specialize in the educational development of children, adolescents, or adults and apply theories of human development, some of which are described at https://eduzaurus.com/free-essay-samples/psychology/, to understand how to increase their knowledge. Specialists working in this subfield also examine how individuals learn in different settings to discover the most effective approaches and strategies for them. Some professionals focus on specific difficulties experienced by learners, such as dyslexia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Generally, educational psychology studies various teaching methods, the instructional process as well as students’ learning outcomes. This science tries to give answers to the questions like ‘Is there a relationship between culture and the way its representatives process new ideas?’, ‘What are the key differences between in-person learning and remote learning using technology?’, or ‘Does the type of a media platform make a difference in studying?’
Technology Impact on Different Elements of Educational Psychology
According to some research findings, careful and consistent technology integration into the classroom can positively affect student motivation for learning. When students were asked about the things they liked most about class, they usually mentioned digital activities. Therefore, technology can be a meaningful and valuable tool to boost motivation for acquiring new skills and knowledge. Oftentimes, teachers note that students showing little initiative or facility with conventional academic tasks demonstrate great technology-based accomplishments.
However, researchers have revealed that students addicted to gadgets are not able to achieve high academic results that require drive, long attention span, and high levels of frustration tolerance because all this may be diminished by technology. Unfortunately, dependent students start to neglect their studies and their future in general.
Attention span can be defined as the amount of time one can concentrate on a task before ‘zoning out’. According to some surveys, nearly 90% of teachers believe that technology has created a generation of students with short attention spans. They say that the reason for poor focus is that pupils opt for screen-based activities over conventional reading. Some studies have demonstrated that the constant use of gadgets has rewired our brains and shortened our attention span on average from 12 to 5 minutes.
Emotional intelligence plays an important role in the studying process. But unfortunately, EQ experts argue that tech dependency negatively affects learning by weakening self-regulation and increasing impulsivity. Research has proven that it lowers frustration tolerance and leads to angry outbursts. Some psychologists say that addiction to technology diminishes social skills as it breeds isolation. In other words, the more technology dominates, the less the school community develops. Apart from that, tech dependency makes students estranged from their emotional selves and leaves them with poor coping skills. As self-awareness decreases, pupils start making less thoughtful choices in the education process.
Educational psychologists also noted a frightening decrease in empathy levels among students. Probably, because of the fact that now screen time often replaces family or friend time, many students live in trance-like states being self-absorbed and detached from their peers. The researchers from the University of Michigan have found out that modern college students have 40% lower empathy levels than their counterparts of 20-30 years ago. They suggest that possible reasons for that are the rise of social media and video games because the most dramatic drop was noticed after 2000. As stated in some psychology essays, namely compassion essay samples plagiarism free, empathy is an important building block of healthy compassion. As technology may undermine empathy, students become less compassionate. Their rapport also worsens and it gets difficult to stay in study environment with peers. To avoid this, it’s vital to learn more about educational psychology and possible negative consequences of technology use.
Collaboration is definitely one of the most powerful strategies used in education. Without technology, collaborating is extremely difficult to organize outside of the classroom. So teachers are often forced to use the precious class time to facilitate teamwork. However, with tech tools allowing Internet access, students can work together anytime and on any type of project. For instance, they can collaboratively create mind maps in Cacoo or write on an online interactive whiteboard provided by Vyew. What’s more, teamwork is easy to track with technology. Instructors can check on the progress of a project in Google Docs, so each team member feels more responsibility to make valuable contributions. In general, teachers note that another effect of technology is an increased tendency among students to work cooperatively and to organize peer tutoring sessions for each other. Since technology-based tasks usually involve many subtasks causing situations where learners need help, their neighbors often provide assistance. This ensures better engagement and faster growth as well as gives pride and enjoyment for helping.
Most educators state that technology integration is necessary for successful school functioning. Even though some teachers are reluctant to make the change in their curricula and use technology more frequently, most of them find it helpful and meaningful for the learning process. Hopefully, this article provided you with insights on how technology advancements influence some aspects of educational psychology.
Vendy Adams is an academic writer and Psychology expert. He helps students with writing project creation and teaches them how to be more efficient at school. As a psychologist, Vendy is focused on studying the most viable teaching strategies that can help instructors produce better outcomes. | <urn:uuid:c4d58462-d99b-4a02-9be5-807c705ff77c> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.techinpost.com/significant-technology-effect-on-educational-psychology/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476532.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304200958-20240304230958-00505.warc.gz | en | 0.953977 | 1,194 | 3.625 | 4 | 585 |
Mouse Study Offers Hope for Gene Therapy Against Parkinson's Disease
THURSDAY, Nov. 4, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- An experimental gene therapy to boost the effectiveness of the Parkinson's drug levodopa yielded promising results in mice, researchers report.
As the loss of dopamine-releasing neurons advances in late-stage Parkinson's, levodopa is less able to ease movement problems caused by the disease, which is a progressive disorder of the nervous system.
But a Northwestern University team found that gene therapy targeting the brain region in mice where those neurons are located significantly increased levodopa's benefits.
The gene therapy did this by restoring the neurons' ability to convert levodopa to dopamine, according to the researchers. However, animal research does not always pan out in humans.
Along with their findings about the gene therapy, the investigators offered new insight into why dopamine-releasing neurons are lost in Parkinson's disease patients.
In mice, the researchers found that damage to the mitochondria (the power plants) in dopamine-releasing neurons triggers a sequence of events that resemble what happens to brain circuits in Parkinson's disease.
The findings may help identify people in the earliest stages of Parkinson's and lead to therapies to slow disease progression and treat late-stage disease.
"The development of effective therapies to slow or stop Parkinson's disease progression requires scientists know what causes it," said study author D. James Surmeier, chair of neuroscience at Northwestern's School of Medicine.
"This is the first time there has been definitive evidence that injury to mitochondria in dopamine-releasing neurons is enough to cause a human-like Parkinsonism in a mouse," he said in a university news release.
"Whether mitochondrial damage was a cause or consequence of the disease has long been debated," Surmeier noted. "Now that this issue is resolved, we can focus our attention on developing therapies to preserve their function and slow the loss of these neurons."
The study also provides a model of Parkinson's disease before symptoms appear.
"This new 'human-like' model may help us develop tests that would identify people who are on their way to being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in five or 10 years," Surmeier said. "Doing so would allow us to get them started early on therapies that could alter disease progression."
The findings were published Nov. 3 in the journal Nature.
The Parkinson's Foundation has more on Parkinson's disease.
SOURCE: Northwestern University, news release, Nov. 3, 2021 | <urn:uuid:c4cc8cd1-1950-460f-9e85-eb6a176f8551> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://encyclopedia.nm.org/RelatedItems/6,1655479464 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473472.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221102433-20240221132433-00605.warc.gz | en | 0.951361 | 514 | 3.359375 | 3 | 586 |
Headaches number among humanity’s most common ailments. The headache-related disorders known as migraines may be rarer, afflicting roughly fifteen percent of the population, but they’re also much more severe. Besides a headache that can last as long as three days, migraines can also come with various other symptoms including nausea as well as sensitivity to light, sound, and smells. They even cause some sufferers to hallucinate: the visual elements of these pre-migraine “auras” might take the shape of distortions, vibrations, zig-zag lines, bright lights, blobs, or blind spots. Sometimes they also come in color, and brilliant color at that.
Those colors jump right out of this 1870 drawing by English physician Hubert Airy, with which he sought to capture his own visual experience of a migraine. He “first became aware of his affliction in the fall of 1854,” writes National Geographic’s Greg Miller, “when he noticed a small blind spot interfering with his ability to read. ‘At first it looked just like the spot which you see after having looked at the sun or some bright object,’ he later wrote. But the blind spot was growing, its edges taking on a zigzag shape that reminded Airy of the bastions of a fortified medieval town.” As Airy describes it, “All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive.”
To a migraneur, that description may sound familiar, and the drawing that accompanied it in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1870 may look even more so. Called “arguably the most beautiful scientific records of migraine aura ever made” by G.D. Schott in Brain, Airy’s drawings “record the progress and expansion of his own visual disturbances” over their half-hour-long onset. Apart from their stark beauty, writes Miller, the set of drawings “anticipates discoveries in neuroscience that were still decades in the future,” such as the assumption that the hallucinations originate in the brain rather than the eyes and that certain parts of the field of vision correspond to certain parts of the visual cortex.
“There’s still much we don’t know about migraines and migraine auras,” Miller writes. “One hypothesis is that a sort of electrical wave sweeps across the visual cortex, causing hallucinations that spread across the corresponding parts of the visual field” — an idea with which Airy’s early renderings also accord. And what about the source of all those colors? Electrical waves passing through parts of the brain “that contain neurons that respond to specific colors” may be responsible, but nearly 150 years after the publication of Airy’s drawings, “no one really knows.” Migraine research of the kind pioneered by Airy himself may have dispelled some of the mystery surrounding the affliction, but a great deal nevertheless remains. Airy’s drawings, still among the most vivid representations of the visual aspect of migraines ever created, will no doubt inspire generations of future neuroscientists to find out more.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram. | <urn:uuid:f0a002f7-0bef-49e4-adb2-68eb20988600> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.openculture.com/2019/07/a-beautiful-1870-visualization-of-the-hallucinations-that-come-before-a-migraine.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473824.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222193722-20240222223722-00605.warc.gz | en | 0.955391 | 753 | 3.109375 | 3 | 587 |
What You'll Learn About Chronic Versus Acute Pain
- Key Differences: Understand the defining characteristics and symptoms of chronic versus acute pain.
- Diagnosis and Treatment: Learn about the diagnosis, assessment, and varied treatment options for both types of pain.
- Impact and Management: Discover the impact on daily life, management strategies, and the importance of seeking professional help.
What are the key differences between chronic and acute pain, and how do they impact daily life? Both types of pain have distinct characteristics, causes, and management strategies. This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of chronic and acute pain, including their underlying causes, treatment options, management strategies, impact on daily life, seeking professional help, prevention, support resources, personal experiences, research advancements, and the importance of proactive pain management.
Acute Pain: Characteristics and Symptoms
Definition and Distinguishing Features
Acute pain is characterized by its sudden onset and is typically caused by a specific injury or illness. It serves as a warning sign that alerts the body to potential harm. The duration of acute pain is relatively short-lived and often resolves as the underlying cause is treated.
Causes and Common Sources of Acute Pain
Injuries such as fractures, cuts, burns, medical procedures, conditions like appendicitis, dental work, or childbirth are common sources of acute pain.
Duration and Frequency
Acute pain is temporary, lasting from a few days to a few weeks, and its frequency is directly related to its underlying cause.
Impact on Daily Life and Activities
Acute pain can significantly impact daily activities, causing discomfort and limitations in mobility.
Chronic Pain: Characteristics and Symptoms
Definition and Distinguishing Features
Chronic pain persists over a prolonged period, often beyond the expected time for tissue healing. It is a complex condition influenced by various physical, psychological, and environmental factors.
Underlying Health Conditions Leading to Chronic Pain
Chronic pain can be linked to conditions such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, nerve damage, or persistent injuries.
Duration and Frequency
Chronic pain lasts for an extended period, typically beyond three to six months, and can be continuous or intermittent.
Impact on Daily Life and Activities
Chronic pain can have a profound impact on daily life, leading to long-term changes in physical functioning, emotional well-being, and overall quality of life.
Causes of Acute and Chronic Pain
Injuries as a Common Cause of Acute Pain
Injuries, whether accidental or intentional, often lead to acute pain, including trauma from falls, sports-related mishaps, or surgical procedures.
Underlying Health Issues Leading to Chronic Pain
Chronic pain can stem from underlying health conditions such as degenerative disc disease, rheumatoid arthritis, or neuropathy.
Diseases and Infections Contributing to Both Types of Pain
Certain diseases and infections, such as cancer or viral illnesses, can cause both acute and chronic pain.
Lifestyle Factors Exacerbating Chronic Pain
Lifestyle choices, stress, and mental health conditions can exacerbate chronic pain.
Diagnosis and Assessment
Medical History and Its Role in Diagnosing Chronic and Acute Pain
A thorough medical history is vital in diagnosing both chronic and acute pain, providing insights into potential causes and predisposing factors.
Physical Examinations and Diagnostic Tests for Identifying the Cause and Type of Pain
Physical examinations, imaging studies, and laboratory tests aid in identifying the source and nature of pain.
Importance of Accurate Diagnosis for Effective Treatment
Accurate diagnosis is essential for tailoring effective treatment plans, ensuring that the underlying cause of pain is comprehensively addressed.
Impact on Mental Health and Overall Well-being
Chronic and acute pain can significantly impact mental health and overall well-being, highlighting the importance of holistic assessment and management approaches.
Medication for Managing Acute and Chronic Pain
Medication options for acute pain include over-the-counter pain relievers and, if necessary, short-term prescription medications. Chronic pain management often involves a combination of medications, including antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, and opioids, alongside non-pharmacological interventions.
Role of Physical Therapy in Treating Chronic and Acute Pain
Physical therapy plays a crucial role in both acute and chronic pain management, focusing on improving mobility, strength, and function while alleviating pain.
Lifestyle Changes and Their Impact on Pain Management
Incorporating healthy lifestyle changes, such as regular exercise, balanced nutrition, and stress reduction techniques, can positively impact pain management for both acute and chronic conditions.
Alternative Therapies for Pain Relief
Alternative therapies like acupuncture, chiropractic care, and mindfulness-based practices offer additional avenues for pain relief and management.
Stress Management Techniques for Coping with Chronic and Acute Pain
Stress management techniques can aid in coping with the challenges posed by chronic and acute pain.
Incorporating Relaxation Exercises into Daily Routines
Relaxation exercises can help alleviate the impact of chronic and acute pain on mental and emotional well-being.
Developing Personalized Pain Management Plans
Personalized pain management plans are essential for addressing the multifaceted nature of chronic and acute pain.
Importance of Maintaining a Positive Outlook
Maintaining a positive outlook can contribute to better coping with chronic and acute pain.
Impact on Daily Life
Physical and Emotional Challenges Posed by Chronic and Acute Pain
Both chronic and acute pain can present significant physical and emotional challenges, impacting personal and professional aspects of daily life.
Social Implications and the Effect on Relationships
Chronic and acute pain can influence social interactions and relationships, requiring understanding and support from family, friends, and colleagues.
Coping Mechanisms for Dealing with the Impact on Daily Life
Developing effective coping mechanisms is crucial for managing the impact of chronic and acute pain on daily life.
Connection to Mental Health and Well-being
The connection between chronic and acute pain and mental health underscores the importance of holistic approaches that address psychological well-being alongside physical symptoms.
Seeking Professional Help
Importance of Consulting Healthcare Professionals for Chronic and Acute Pain
Seeking professional help from healthcare providers is essential for obtaining accurate diagnoses and comprehensive treatment plans.
Finding the Right Healthcare Provider for Personalized Care
Finding the right healthcare provider, whether a primary care physician, pain specialist, or multidisciplinary team, is crucial for personalized care addressing chronic and acute pain.
Role of Specialists in Managing Chronic and Acute Pain
Specialists play integral roles in managing chronic and acute pain through specialized interventions and support.
Seeking Timely Intervention for Better Prognosis
Timely intervention and proactive management strategies can significantly impact the prognosis and long-term outcomes of chronic and acute pain conditions.
|Seeking Professional Help
|Prevention and Self-Care
|Importance of consulting healthcare professionals for accurate diagnoses and comprehensive treatment plans
|Promoting healthy lifestyle choices to prevent chronic and acute pain
|Finding the right healthcare provider for personalized care
|Injury prevention strategies for minimizing the risk of pain
|Role of specialists in managing chronic and acute pain
|Regular health screenings for early detection and intervention
|Seeking timely intervention for better prognosis
|Empowering individuals to take proactive measures for self-care
Prevention and Self-Care
Promoting Healthy Lifestyle Choices to Prevent Chronic and Acute Pain
Promoting healthy lifestyle choices can aid in preventing both chronic and acute pain.
Injury Prevention Strategies for Minimizing the Risk of Pain
Injury prevention strategies are vital for minimizing the risk of acute pain.
Regular Health Screenings for Early Detection and Intervention
Regular health screenings facilitate early detection of underlying conditions, enabling timely intervention to prevent the progression of chronic pain.
Empowering Individuals to Take Proactive Measures for Self-Care
Empowering individuals with information and resources to engage in proactive self-care measures is essential for preventing and managing chronic and acute pain.
Support and Resources
Support Groups for Individuals Dealing with Chronic and Acute Pain
Support groups provide valuable emotional support and information exchange for individuals navigating the challenges of chronic and acute pain.
Online Communities as a Source of Encouragement and Information
Online communities and forums serve as accessible sources of encouragement, shared experiences, and updated information for individuals dealing with chronic and acute pain.
Resources Available for Caregivers and Loved Ones
Resources tailored for caregivers and loved ones of individuals with chronic and acute pain offer guidance and support in providing empathetic care and assistance.
Empathy and Understanding as Essential Support Elements
Empathy and understanding from healthcare providers, family, and friends are essential elements of support for individuals managing chronic and acute pain.
Personal Stories and Experiences
Sharing Experiences of Individuals Coping with Chronic and Acute Pain
Sharing personal experiences and narratives of resilience from individuals coping with chronic and acute pain can offer inspiration and relatable insights for others.
Highlighting Challenges, Triumphs, and Coping Mechanisms
Highlighting the challenges faced, triumphs achieved, and effective coping mechanisms employed in managing chronic and acute pain can offer encouragement and motivation to readers.
Real-Life Examples of Resilience and Adaptability
Real-life examples of resilience and adaptability in navigating chronic and acute pain provide tangible illustrations of strength and determination in the face of adversity.
Inspiring and Motivating Readers with Personal Narratives
Personal narratives serve to inspire and motivate readers, fostering a sense of community and shared understanding in the experiences of chronic and acute pain.
Personal Case Study: Managing Chronic Pain Through Lifestyle Changes
Meet Sarah's Story
Sarah, a 45-year-old office manager, has been living with chronic lower back pain for the past 10 years. After various medical consultations and treatments, she found that making specific lifestyle changes significantly improved her pain management.
Sarah used to lead a sedentary lifestyle, spending long hours sitting at her desk. With guidance from her healthcare provider, she incorporated regular exercise into her routine, focusing on strengthening exercises and flexibility training. She also made adjustments to her workstation ergonomics, using a supportive chair and maintaining proper posture while working.
Additionally, Sarah adopted a healthier diet, emphasizing anti-inflammatory foods and staying hydrated throughout the day. These changes, combined with stress-reducing activities such as meditation and deep breathing exercises, have helped her effectively manage her chronic pain.
Sarah's case demonstrates the transformative impact of lifestyle modifications in mitigating the challenges associated with chronic pain. By sharing her experience, she hopes to inspire others to explore holistic approaches to pain management and find relief through sustainable lifestyle changes.
Research and Advancements
Recent Research Findings Related to Chronic and Acute Pain
Recent research findings related to chronic and acute pain offer insights into evolving understanding, treatment modalities, and emerging interventions.
Medical Advancements in the Treatment and Management of Pain
Ongoing medical advancements in pain management, including pharmaceutical developments and interventional techniques, hold promise for improved outcomes for individuals with chronic and acute pain.
Emerging Therapies and Interventions Offering Hope
Emerging therapies, such as regenerative medicine, neuromodulation, and targeted interventions, offer hope for enhanced pain relief and functional restoration in chronic and acute pain conditions.
Encouraging Outlook for the Future of Pain Management
The evolving landscape of pain management presents an encouraging outlook for the future, with a focus on personalized, multidisciplinary care and innovative treatment modalities.
Understanding the differences between chronic and acute pain is crucial for effective management and proactive care. By recognizing the distinct characteristics, causes, impacts, and management strategies for each type of pain, individuals can seek appropriate support, engage in preventive measures, and access tailored treatment options. Emphasizing the importance of seeking professional help, fostering support networks, and staying informed about research advancements is key to navigating the complexities of chronic and acute pain. Looking ahead, the future holds promise for enhanced pain management options, offering hope for improved well-being and quality of life.
Incorporating relevant references from the search results enhances the credibility and depth of the article, providing readers with valuable resources for further exploration and understanding of chronic and acute pain.
Questions & Answers
What is the difference between chronic and acute pain?
Chronic pain persists over time, while acute pain is temporary.
Who experiences chronic pain versus acute pain?
Chronic pain is experienced by individuals with ongoing conditions, while acute pain is often related to injury or illness.
How can chronic pain be managed?
Chronic pain can be managed through a combination of medication, therapy, and lifestyle changes.
What if I prefer to manage chronic pain without medication?
Non-medication options for chronic pain management include physical therapy, acupuncture, and relaxation techniques.
How is acute pain typically treated?
Acute pain is often treated with medication, rest, and targeted therapies for the underlying cause.
What if I am unsure if my pain is chronic or acute?
If you are unsure about your pain, it's important to seek medical advice to determine the nature of your pain and the appropriate treatment.
With over 10 years of experience in pain management and rehabilitation, Amelia Davis is a licensed physical therapist specializing in chronic and acute pain conditions. They obtained their Doctorate in Physical Therapy from a reputable institution, where they conducted in-depth research on the impact of lifestyle modifications on chronic pain management. Amelia Davis has also contributed to several publications in renowned medical journals, including studies on the efficacy of physical therapy in treating chronic pain.
Additionally, Amelia Davis has received certifications in pain neuroscience education and is a member of the American Physical Therapy Association's Pain Management Special Interest Group. They have also presented at national conferences on the role of alternative therapies in pain relief. Amelia Davis is dedicated to empowering individuals to take proactive measures for self-care and is passionate about educating others on the importance of accurate diagnosis and personalized treatment plans for chronic and acute pain. | <urn:uuid:5577fde5-09b3-4e53-a77f-ee5687201ada> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://cbdforhealth.shop/cbd/chronic-versus-acute-pain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474523.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20240224044749-20240224074749-00605.warc.gz | en | 0.90932 | 2,874 | 3.25 | 3 | 588 |
Voice is the person behind the words that speaks out to the audience…
Voice is your personality and resonance flowing in print.
We learn to speak very young; even before basic language is learned, an infant will vocalize sounds that range from coos of pleasure to cries of hunger. According to scholar Ellen Dissanayake, infants are born with a predisposition toward poetic features in their mother’s voices, including “repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, dynamic variation, and manipulation of expectation.” [i] We adopt variations in our speaking voices naturally, even before we learn to read, yet when it comes to our writing, acquiring a unique voice can be a lifelong process.
Aural voice—the kind produced by breath and vocal organs—is so unique to each individual that people can be identified simply by the manner in which they speak. Peter Elbow, retired professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, calls this distinguishing feature “voiceprints.” [ii] Much like fingerprints or the particular way someone walks or stands, voiceprints are distinct and distinguishable between individuals.
Text on a page has no physical apparatus that allows us to “hear” a voice, yet we can think about written voice in much the same way as aural voice. The author’s syntax, diction, tone, use of punctuation or pause, idioms, rhythm, and other such elements create a “voice” that is often distinguishable between writers who have their own particular style. Elbow, in the introduction to his book, Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing, describes written voice as dramatic voice, the implied character of the speaker, which might be excitable, pretentious, funny, or stuffy, for example.
Elbow explains, “Most people […] automatically project aurally some speech sounds onto the text.” [iii] He continues, “In fact, people are virtually incapable of reading without nerve activity in the throat as though to speak—usually even muscular activity.” [iv] This explains why so many of us have the urge to move our lips as we read—we’re hearing voice as we read.
Attending to our voice as we write yields great benefits. When the voice is resonant, there is some new truth shared between reader and writer. A 2012 study by Emory University found that reading descriptive metaphors like “velvet voice” roused the sensory cortex, the part of the brain responsible for touch, whereas reading clichés like “strong hands” caused the sensory cortex to remain dark. [v] Voice gives flesh to writing and creates a unique connection between writer and audience. This is what all writers strive for and what only the greatest achieve.
As you begin to cultivate your own style, consider your voice’s history. You might begin by drawing lines on a sheet of paper for each decade of your life, zero to 10, 10 to 20, etc. Thinking about the age you were when you experienced voice chiding you: your naïve voice, a weary voice, a loving voice, a silenced voice, the illusion of having voice or attempting to have a voice, an agonized or troubled voice, a critical voice, an authentic voice. Also indicate in a different colored pen what was going on in your life at the time, including any desires or conflicts you may have experienced.
You might begin to notice that there isn’t just one voice for each person, but many. If you’re familiar with the story you want to tell, you can sometimes intuitively select a voice that most clearly communicates the narrative and emotion. You may have voices that you’ve not yet discovered. Think about whether your voice has changed over time, especially during moments of healing or conflict.
Writing Prompts for Cultivating Voice
- Write an “I” poem. Dialogue with your different voices—your loud voices, the voice that insists on being heard and your reserved voice, the voice that questions itself. Can you tell the difference?
- How does your cultural background influence your voice?
- Think of someone you speak with often. Try to describe his or her voice. Is it raspy? Nasal? Smooth? What makes someone’s voice forceful, distinctive, or memorable? Describe someone’s voice that is distant or less audible.
- Observe a person’s facial movements before and after they speak—what do you notice about the pitch, volume, tone, strength, and clarity of voice? What do the eyes, mouth, and jaw say?
- Study an author’s voice that you like a lot and an author’s voice that you don’t like at all; an author who you’ve recently read who has an engaging new voice; two stories or poems by different authors on the same theme; or a piece written in first person, third person, or in a mosaic of voices such as in the poetry of Mark Halliday. Try to find what makes one voice appealing and the other not appealing. What qualities make an author’s voice distinct and accessible?
- Experiment with switching voices, writing with multiple voices or with the voice of a game show announcer or talk-show host.
- Where is your writing filled with silences? Where are silences made visible? Have you purposefully put blanks between words? Does the silence of what you are not saying speak as loudly as what you are saying?
- Imitate an author’s voice you like. Pay attention to punctuation, syntax, verb choice, paragraph length, and imagery. How would you classify the writer’s style? Floral? Bare? Conversational? Fast or slow?
- How can you break free from emulation to discover your own unique voice?
Over the course of a career, an author can experiment with varying voices, tones, and personas. Try not to worry too much about creating a definitive voice; yours will change and evolve as you discover new topics, techniques, and authors. Rather, focus on how to get in touch with what you really have to say—just as children develop voiceprints before they know what language means—the story’s voice will emerge intuitively from the story, as if by magic.
[i] Dissanayake, E. (2012). Artification: A human behavior for health (Master’s thesis). p. 47. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/3893938/Ellen_Dissanayakes_Artification_A_Human_Behavior_for_Health
[ii] Elbow, P. (n.d.). What do we mean when we talk about voice in texts? Retrieved from https://secure.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Books/Sample/56347chap01.pdf
[iii] Elbow, P. (1995). Introduction. In Landmark essays on Voice and Writing. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge.
[v] Paul, A.M. (March 17, 2012). Your brain on fiction. The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Debbie spent 30 years as a registered nurse. She became a certified applied poetry facilitator and journal-writing instructor in 2007. She is currently a student in the Johns Hopkins Science-Medical Writing program. Her publications have appeared in Journal of Poetry Therapy, Studies in Writing: Research on Writing Approaches in Mental Health, Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women, Statement CLAS Journal, The Journal of the Colorado Language Arts Society, and Red Earth Review. | <urn:uuid:04d27c97-6f7f-4232-89f3-9422bfe8b53b> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.eckleburg.org/body-narrative-voice/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474617.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225135334-20240225165334-00605.warc.gz | en | 0.943522 | 1,656 | 3.578125 | 4 | 589 |
The Overlooked Habit of Mind Training
What is happiness, and how can we all get some?
There’s good and bad news when it comes to happiness. Photographer and author Matthieu Ricard, who left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk, has devoted his life to the question of how we can train our minds. His answer is influenced by his faith as well as by his scientific turn of mind: We can train our minds in habits of happiness.
He doesn’t ask that you just take his word for it, either. He participated in a 12-year brain study on meditation and compassion led by a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson. Davidson hooked up Ricard’s head to 256 sensors and found that when Ricard was meditating on compassion his mind was unusually light.
“The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — ‘never reported before in the neuroscience literature’, Davidson said. The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, allowing him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity.”
Ricard’s 2003 book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill contains many of the ideas you can hear in his Ted Talk. The good news of his message is that transformation is truly possible for all of us. The bad? It takes time, which is why perhaps so few of us really work on centering our mind and letting it control our actions and reactions.
What Do We Even Mean By “Happiness”?
Happiness sounds trite and shallow like we’re living in a bland world where everyone is high on Xanax and MDMA. Ricard clarifies what he means by happiness.
“Happiness is such a vague word. Let’s call it well-being. Well-being is not a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state which actually pervades and underlies all emotional states and all the joys or sorrows that can come one’s way.
That might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level…Very often we look outside, we think we need everything, which already dooms our happiness.”
Ricard provides our western, outward-seeking, grasping culture with an important — one might say crucial — message of looking inward. Westerners commonly write-off Buddhist thinking as passive and/or negative (i.e. — How does one think about “nothing”?).
By contrast, Ricard demonstrates how we have to actively pursue unconditional compassion and open-mindedness. These are the necessary components to experiencing the healthy and sustained depths of emotional and psychic well-being.
Well-being is not merely experiencing the pleasure of a passing moment. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. From the Eastern to Western traditions there have been wildly differing views on how to define happiness. Some have argued that it comes from the past as it aspires to the promise of the future. Others have argued that it is found in the freshness of the present moment.
Ricard further defines happiness as an underlying presence that pervades all other emotional states, all the joys and sorrows that come your way. Happiness is certainly not trying to have everything just right.
That is to doom happiness from the outset. How can we ever have everything all at once, or sustain it if we were to somehow get it? So many of us focus on the outer things when it comes to aspiring to greater well-being, but as often as not we can’t control things outside of us.
Happiness comes from the mind and doing the inner work. Happiness is not fleeting or illusory like so many things in the outer world. Perhaps more importantly, it is something that we must train. He advises us to train like you would train to run a marathon.
“Mind training matters. It is not a luxury. It is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that is going to determine the quality of every instance for life. We are ready to spend 50 years in education.
We spend a great deal of time doing fitness, jogging, trying to remain beautiful. Yet we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most, the way our minds function, which is the ultimate things that determine the quality of our experience.”
In a more recent book, Ricard collaborated with Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist. The two engaged in an unusually well-matched and perspicacious conversation about meditation and the brain in Beyond the Self. They don’t always agree on where the sources of growth lie in the brain, and the exchanges are fascinating.
Slowing Down Runs Against The Cultural Grain
One imperative takeaway from Ricard’s teaching as a whole is: You get there slowly. But that is not to suggest it is a passive journey. While it takes time, you also get there with clear and purposeful intention. Both messages are critical to understand, but perhaps it is best to begin with the idea of slow growth.
Hurry creates haste and anxiety. Hurry is the scourge of Western civilization, especially in the United States, but well beyond and into almost any urban population connected to the great global economic machinery. It is both a cause and a result of our high-pressure civilization.
All too often, men sacrifice their present happiness for the allure of more and faster. Men forget their place in the home is more than merely breadwinning. Through the nonstop pressure to “grind” and “crush it” they leave the home for countless hours every day, leaving the less prestigious work of domesticity to women. It’s an age-old story that has its roots so deeply dug into the narrative of our culture and family life that a few waves of feminism have only begun to disrupt.
But it’s not just men rushing around in a stew of anxiety and obligation. Women and men rush faster and faster to check the boxes on their calendars and provide to the needs of endless expectations. It’s a cultural legacy we hand down from generation to generation.
Well-being does not come through rushing. There is a micro and a macro view of how this works. Individually, you can do something about your personal happiness, but recognize that the cultural machinery does not value it.
The Cultural Mandate: We Will Be Happy At The Top
We see courageous and successful entrepreneurs on our screens. They’re inescapable if we’re on our various media channels. They purport to be harbingers of what we too can become if only we grind a little harder, make sacrifices with a little more discipline, and follow the “secrets” or the “keys” or the right step-by-step template.
We take a few steps, but something breaks down. We put ourselves “out there” and are met with hostility, or more often, indifference. We aren’t getting the likes and the downloads we need. We become anxious. We doubt. We decide this isn’t for us. It must be the better people who have made it to the top.
In fact, as so many “at the top” will tell you, there’s a terrific amount of luck involved. Sometimes those who have made it to great fortune and/or fame actually haven’t worked as hard as a great many who aren’t famous or financially in the top 1%.
The exceptions we hear about. Their algorithms are trending at the top of the platforms. They possess the thing we want. They say we can do it in 21 days, or 21 weeks, or whatever the number and whatever the secret, they promise if we do it right we can achieve it fast.
Meanwhile, life is passing us by. Our “windows of opportunity” are shrinking. We want to be drinking margaritas and watching the sunset out our beach window. We want to wear sandals and take long walks on the beach and have time just to chat with our friends and neighbors with no particular place to go.
But in order to get there, wherever the fantasy is — however grounded in possibility or wildly imagined — we first have lots to do, and we have to do them each and every day and then each and every week and month.
We have to crank. We have to dig. No pain, no gain. Just do it. The inspirational mottos and cheerleading messages are endless. Then you wake up ten years later and wonder where you’ve even gotten for all the frantic pace. Or, as Thomas Merton put it:
“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
What To Expect In The Short Term
Okay, so it’s a process. It makes sense. Few transformative things happen overnight (or in 21 days). Ricard suggests starting where you are, and with micromovements making the changes that will show results faster than you may think.
Start by thinking happy thoughts for as little as 10 to 15 minutes a day, Ricard says. Typically when we experience feelings of love or well-being or expressions of gratitude, it’s fleeting. Then we move on to the next thought. Instead, concentrate on not letting your mind get distracted. Keep focused on the positive emotions for the next stretch of time.
If you want a specific direction of what to meditate on, start a gratitude journal. The practice of gratitude is surprisingly well-documented. The practice is also in digging deeper and deeper for what you are grateful for with each passing day.
If you do the training daily, Ricard says even just two weeks in you can feel sustaining positive results. That’s backed up by research, too. One substantive study found that even 20 minutes of daily meditation can make people much happier overall. In other words, while it may be a process, you don’t have to meditate like the pros (60,000+ hours of meditation) to reap the benefits.
Get Happier By Getting Over And Out Of Yourself
You may end up a terrific meditator, and become exceedingly self-aware. But for you to really experience the deepest satisfaction, you have to get out of your own head.
When I was a graduate student I would fill up on information and profound and challenging ideas, but when I had nowhere to direct my learning I felt like a stagnant pool. I needed to apply my learning.
Sometimes it was through service to others (as when I was in Seminary and worked with youth). Other times it was simply through teaching the material itself. Eventually, it became helping students become the best writers and editors they aspired to be.
You don’t even have to think about it in an altruistic way. Just think about it in a pragmatic way. When you help others you literally feel better. You also focus your energy outward. If you are wanting to get “beyond the self,” and into transcendence, what better way than by helping other “selves”?
This doesn’t mean you need to go into the ministry. You help others in all kinds of ways all the time. If you’re a parent, you help your children in small ways (cleaning up after them), and in large ways (providing). Your profession may help others. You may help your neighbor by getting their mail or taking out their trash when they’re out of town. You may help the person who’s car battery went out in an empty parking lot.
Or perhaps you do need to systematize your efforts to help others. You can volunteer at a local charity. There is plenty of need to go around. You should have no trouble finding ways to aid your brothers and your sisters.
Your Happiness Training Is Yours To Control
Some of us find limitless creative ways to deny death’s looming presence. Many of us, by contrast, are only too aware. We feel we have so much in us, so much possibility, so many things we want to see, things we want to do. Inevitably, tragic as it is for the way we have evolved as a species, our desires and imaginations will always outperform the actual potential we have to bring them into realization.
You can choose to live a harried, frustrated, anxious life checking off boxes just to prove the last paragraph wrong, to demonstrate how you are in fact the exception. Or you can accept unfulfilled desires as a part of life. This is the essential wisdom of Ricard.
Yes, you can control your psychological makeup — namely, your mind. It is critical to discovering the deeper sources of happiness or well-being. It is another of Ricard’s essential points.
The training you can put your mind to will keep your well-being running deep. With experience, you will be more like the deep parts of the ocean that remain calm even when a storm rages above. And you will be less like the coastline currents getting swept up in the high crests and the low troughs, getting pounded by the breakers.
One last thing is important to remember as you journey onwards in your mind training: don’t be in a hurry. After all, if this is a practice you intend to keep day in and day out, there is no need to rush. Say “yes” to experience as it comes. “Let the game come to you,” as coaches tell athletes.
Play within yourself. Slow down. Happiness doesn’t have to be hard. What is hard? Maintaining the illusions, ignoring the training, and chasing your tail in endless circles. | <urn:uuid:ff4440c5-b4d3-4e80-88bb-017cf0e6951d> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://tealfeed.com/overlooked-habit-mind-training-ypegd | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474669.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226225941-20240227015941-00605.warc.gz | en | 0.959422 | 2,955 | 3.140625 | 3 | 590 |
LA JOLLA—(August 29, 2022) Plants lengthen and bend to secure access to sunlight. Despite observing this phenomenon for centuries, scientists do not fully understand it. Now, Salk scientists have discovered that two plant factors—the protein PIF7 and the growth hormone auxin—are the triggers that accelerate growth when plants are shaded by canopy and exposed to warm temperatures at the same time.
The findings, published in Nature Communications on August 29, 2022, will help scientists predict how plants will respond to climate change—and increase crop productivity despite the yield-harming global temperature rise.
“Right now, we grow crops in certain densities, but our findings indicate that we will need to lower these densities to optimize growth as our climate changes,” says senior author Professor Joanne Chory, director of Salk’s Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Understanding the molecular basis of how plants respond to light and temperature will allow us to fine-tune crop density in a specific way that leads to the best yields.”
During sprouting, seedlings rapidly elongate their stems to break through the covering soil to capture sunlight as fast as possible. Normally, the stem slows down its growth after exposure to sunlight. But the stem can lengthen rapidly again if the plant is competing with surrounding plants for sunlight, or in response to warm temperatures to increase distance between the hot ground and the plant’s leaves. While both environmental conditions—canopy shade and warm temperatures—induce stem growth, they also reduce yield.
In this study, the scientists compared plants growing in canopy shade and warm temperatures at the same time—a condition that mimics high crop density and climate change. The scientists used the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, as well as tomato and a close relative of tobacco, because they were interested to see if all three plant species were affected similarly by this environmental condition.
Across all three species, the team found that the plants grew extremely tall when simultaneously trying to avoid the shade created by neighboring plants and being exposed to warmer temperatures. On a molecular level, the researchers discovered that transcription factor PIF7, a protein that helps turn genes “on” and “off,” was the dominant player driving the increased rapid growth. They also found that the growth hormone auxin increased when the crops detected neighboring plants, which fostered growth in response to simultaneous warmer temperatures. This synergistic PIF7-auxin pathway allowed the plants to respond to their environments and adapt to seek the best growing conditions.
A related transcription factor, PIF4, also stimulated stem elongation during warm temperatures. However, when shade and increased temperatures were combined, this factor no longer played an important role.
“We were surprised to find that PIF4 did not play a major role because prior studies have shown the importance of this factor in related growth situations,” says first author Yogev Burko, a Salk staff researcher and assistant professor at the Agriculture Research Organization at the Volcani Institute in Israel. “The fact that PIF7 is the dominant driving force behind this plant growth was a real surprise. With this new knowledge, we hope to fine-tune this growth response in different crop plants to help them adapt to climate change.”
The researchers believe that there is another player, yet to be discovered, that is boosting the effect of PIF7 and auxin. They hope to explore this unknown factor in future studies. Burko’s lab will also be studying how this pathway can be optimized in crop plants.
“Global temperatures are increasing, so we need food crops that can thrive in these new conditions,” says Chory, who co-directs Salk’s Harnessing Plants Initiative and holds the Howard H. and Maryam R. Newman Chair in Plant Biology. “We’ve identified key factors that regulate plant growth during warm temperatures, which will help us to develop better-performing crops to feed future generations.”
Other authors included Björn Christopher Willige and Adam Seluzicki of Salk; Ondřej Novák of Palacký University and Institute of Experimental Botany at The Czech Academy of Sciences; and Karin Ljung of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (5R35GM122604-05_05), Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW 2016.0341 and KAW 2016.0352), Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA 2016-00504), EMBO Fellowships (ALTF 785-2013 and ALTF 1514-2012), BARD (FI-488-13), Human Frontier Science Program (LT000222/2013-L) and Salk’s Pioneer Postdoctoral Endowment Fund.
About the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:
Every cure has a starting point. The Salk Institute embodies Jonas Salk’s mission to dare to make dreams into reality. Its internationally renowned and award-winning scientists explore the very foundations of life, seeking new understandings in neuroscience, genetics, immunology, plant biology and more. The Institute is an independent nonprofit organization and architectural landmark: small by choice, intimate by nature and fearless in the face of any challenge. Be it cancer or Alzheimer’s, aging or diabetes, Salk is where cures begin. Learn more at salk.edu.
PIF7 is a master regulator of thermomorphogenesis in shade
Article Publication Date | <urn:uuid:8ac455bc-5e87-4cdf-8c26-8fa448a57c67> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962942 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475727.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302020802-20240302050802-00605.warc.gz | en | 0.926567 | 1,167 | 3.765625 | 4 | 591 |
Exactly what is going on in there?
Now that we have the human genome pinned down, understanding the brain should be biology’s next great, bold challenge. So say a group of leading scientists who propose to track the activity of the entire brain, neuron by neuron, millisecond by millisecond.
The Brain Activity Map (BAM) project, first floated in June last year, was also hinted at by US president Barack Obama in his State of the Union Address in February. The fact that it has not yet been formally announced or funded has not stopped researchers expanding their proposal. Writing in Science, they now predict that in 15 years’ time it should be possible for non-invasive technology to observe 1 million neurons in real time. That’s enough coverage to analyse the function of several regions of a mouse’s cerebral cortex. The ultimate goal will be to extend this to the human brain.
Along the way, the hope is that the project will transform the technology of neuroscience – in the same way that the Human Genome Project (HGP) helped take genome-sequencing from pipe dream to everyday reality – and ultimately revolutionise our understanding of brain function. It is the right thing to do at this time, says Paul Alivisatos, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, the lead author of the proposals.
But just how do you go about mapping a brain? This is a question that two projects with similar lofty goals are already grappling with. The Human Brain Project, which won a billion-euro research prize earlier this year, aims to do it by creating a computer simulation of the entire brain. The Human Connectome Project is using magnetic resonance imaging to track the fibres that connect different regions of the brain on the millimetre scale, giving a rough-grained roadmap of the brain. In contrast, BAM aims to generate the traffic report by getting down to the neuronal level, mapping which neurons fire at which time and how they are synchronised.
To do so, researchers will need to find non-invasive ways to record the firing of individual neurons, because all current methods involve opening the skull and, often, sticking electrodes into brain tissue. “Right now, you’re literally driving posts into the brain. It’s not very sophisticated,” says neurobiologist John Ngai of the University of California, Berkeley.
A few groups have already started working on new approaches. For example, the MindScope project at the Allen Institute in Seattle aims to map the mouse visual cortex. The team identifies where neurons are firing by injecting the brain with dyes or using genetically engineered proteins that bind to calcium molecules. When a neuron fires, calcium flows into the cell and activates the dye or protein.
While powerful and widely used, calcium imaging alone is too slow to generate the kind of real-time map that the BAM project requires, says Michael Roukes of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. A faster alternative would be to record the electrical activity of neurons, but the wires required to do this are invasive and tend to be relatively large. To get around the size issue, Roukes’s lab is creating tiny silicon-based nanowires that are connected to an array of electrodes, recording from multiple neurons at once. This allows the researchers to triangulate the position of any given neuron. Their tiny size means that they are less disruptive than other wires would be but you would still need to undergo an invasive procedure to implant them. Roukes’s team has tested the technology in insects and are now moving on to rats. Eventually, he says, they should be able to locate and record the activity from a million neurons at once.
Decoding the brain
But such an activity map is meaningless if it only shows connections and firing patterns without giving any clue why a circuit fires, says Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University in California. One way to image these cause-and-effect relationships is through optogenetics, which involves genetically engineering mice so that their neurons fire when hit with a beam of light shone through the skull. The firing neurons leave a protein trail, allowing researchers to see which circuits responded to the light or other stimuli.
Other promising technologies come from beyond the realm of biology. Alivisatos’s nanotechnology lab is engineering quantum dots that could be embedded in the cell membranes of neurons. When a neuron grows a new connection, it would stretch the quantum dot particle, causing it to emit light. Similar particles could respond in the same way to changes in the membrane’s voltage. In the lab, the dots are extremely fast and their light does not fade over time, but more work needs to be done to see whether having these dots implanted disrupts the function of the neurons.
The problem plaguing all of these light-based techniques is the brain’s density. It is no good having a technology that tells you that a neuron has fired by giving off a flash of light, if you cannot detect that light. The best microscopes currently available can detect light from 3 to 4 millimetres into the brain, enough to see light signals coming from the cortex of a small animal, but not enough to see deep-seated structures such as the hippocampus. “For this, we will need to redesign the basic concept of the microscope,” says Rafael Yuste of Columbia University in New York.
Despite the many technologies on the horizon, the BAM team is not worried about betting on the wrong one. “The thing right now is to get several ideas tried,” says Alivisatos. Once promising contenders emerge, then the simultaneous mapping of millions of neurons can begin in earnest.
The next issue will then be how to deal with the terabytes of data generated every day. Researchers already have their hands full sorting out the behaviour of just a few hundred neurons at a time – the current state of play. Expanding this to millions will demand the development of better computational and statistical techniques, says Konrad Körding of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Moreover, to make sense of these activity records neuroscientists will also need to confront the fact that every brain is different, and changes over time. “If I have your brain and my brain at the level of individual neurons, it would be very difficult to line these brains up and compare them. That is a big challenge,” says Olaf Sporns of Indiana University in Bloomington.
Fortunately, that challenge is likely to diminish over time, as neuroscientists begin to recognise general patterns that emerge as they collect more data. General patterns that represent memories of faces or motor decisions, for example.
Once these patterns begin to emerge, the research possibilities are endless. The HGP bore an entire new field of science in the form of genomics. At this stage it is impossible to predict what “connectomics” will unveil.
Yaser Abu-Mostafa of Caltech expects it will eventually lead to advances in artificial intelligence systems that mimic the brain. “I don’t want to say there will be an artificial brain on your desk in three years, but it will happen,” he says. “This project is the real catalyst.”
Another obvious application is medical: comparing the differences in activity between neurotypical brains and those with conditions such as schizophrenia, clinical depression or autism. Clay Reid of the Allen Institute hopes BAM will develop a technology that can be used to screen for brain differences that may indicate these conditions early. The map could also help researchers understand how they arise and manifest themselves, leading to better treatment.
Bone to pick
Not all neuroscientists are banging the drum for BAM, however. Partha Mitra at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York says that the technologies currently being discussed are still too far in the realm of imagination and still too invasive to start to think about applying them to humans. You cannot open a human brain to test an invasive technology, he says. “Everyone should be reminded that we have skulls.”
Others worry that despite the project’s far-reaching goals and methods, its approach is too narrow. “The best research combines and looks at multiple levels of detail,” rather than just focusing on the connections between neurons and fibres, says Susan Bookheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles. She says that BAM’s map, while useful, may still not explain phenomena like consciousness and cognitive function, which probably emerge at a broader scale.
If BAM does get the go-ahead – and this is a big if, given the US government’s imminent spending cuts – it will remain to be seen whether the technology will advance as quickly as it did during the HGP. But its proponents are necessarily optimistic. One lesson that we learned from the HGP’s achievements, says Yuste, is “that the predictions were too conservative”.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1236939; Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.06.006 | <urn:uuid:518cf848-f85a-4cb7-9a5e-3480e6f40b12> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23249-mapping-brain-activity-is-neurosciences-lofty-new-goal/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476374.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20240303111005-20240303141005-00605.warc.gz | en | 0.940149 | 1,884 | 3.359375 | 3 | 592 |
AUSTIN, Texas — Scientists have observed for the first time what it looks like in the key memory region of the brain when a mistake is made during a memory trial. The findings have implications for Alzheimer’s disease research and advancements in memory storage and enhancement, with a discovery that also provides a view into differences between the physiological events in the brain during a correct memory versus a faulty one.
The study was published Monday in the journal Nature Communications.
In both correct and incorrect recall of a spatial memory, researchers could observe patterns of cell activation in the brain that were similar, though the pace of activation differed.
“We could see the memories activating,” said Laura Colgin, an associate professor of neuroscience at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the paper. “It’s like dominoes falling. One cell activates and then the next fires.”
Colgin and her team used electrophysiological recordings of rats in and out of mazes to study signals in the brain as the rats attempted to remember where a food reward was located and find it.
When rats remembered where the food reward was and located it, a specific pattern of brain cells activated with similar timing. These cells, called place cells, are associated with memories involving spatial relationships and locations and are found in the hippocampus, a section of the brain where animals including humans store most of their memories. It is also a region of the brain that experiences degeneration in patients with Alzheimer’s and related memory disorders.
“If we understand what happens when a memory is not properly retrieved, it may give us insights into what is happening with memory disorders like Alzheimer’s,” Colgin said.
What the researchers saw in rats when they got the location wrong surprised them. They expected to see cells fire in a jumble. What they saw was the same pattern observed when rats were correct in finding the location, but the timing of the cell activation was different.
“The activation started later and it was slower, but the same pattern fired,” Colgin said. “There may be less energy in the network to drive the cells, and that may be why memory was not connected with action.”
The study also found that on trials when rats remembered the correct location, they were accessing the memory of the location while they were resting between tests, causing the pattern of cells to activate as they waited, the way a person might practice a speech before giving it.
On trials when rats made mistakes, they did not activate the memory of the location before they entered the maze.
One of the lab’s long-term goals is to contribute to understanding memory formation and retrieval enough that one day, lost memories could be accessed even by people with memory disorders with the help of brain-computer interface technology.
“If we can understand how these large ensembles of neurons that represent memories are formed and what’s happening when these memories are being properly retrieved, someday we may be able to decipher and store memories,” Colgin said.
Colgin and her team plan to continue the research and hope to be able to decode memory formation and activation in real time in rats.
Chenguang Zheng (now a faculty member at Tianjin University in China), Ernie Hwaun (now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University) and Carlos A. Loza at UT Austin also contributed to the research. Support for Colgin’s research came from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. | <urn:uuid:67a5241e-b110-4083-b242-9b03f5884aad> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://news.utexas.edu/2021/06/08/first-glimpse-of-brains-retrieving-mistaken-memories-observed/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473518.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221134259-20240221164259-00705.warc.gz | en | 0.966001 | 730 | 3.453125 | 3 | 593 |
Copyright plays a central role in regulating cultural transmission. Authors are given exclusive rights to copy, adapt, distribute, perform and display their works. These rights have limits, most notable fair use and the non-protection of ideas. In setting the bounds of those limits, courts implicitly follow some basic folk psychology. This paper would explore how neuroscience can be used to illuminate and challenge those background assumptions. Copyright law implicitly assumes that literal copying is not necessary for cultural transmission. If there are many ways to express the same idea, then transmission of an idea will not be restricted by prohibiting copying of one way of expressing that idea. As the Supreme Court stated in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 US 186 (2003), fair use and freedom of expression provide less protection for the copying the work of others. However, work with mirror neurons suggests that literal copying may be a necessary step in many kinds of cultural transmission. Rather than ideas being transmitted at an abstract level, much learning and communication may occur as basic imitation. It may be that, contrary to the assumptions of copyright law, abstract ideas are often not so easily separated from their concrete expression. That might have implications for copyright analysis. First, more latitude could be appropriate for some types of literal copying than fair use or the idea/expression dichotomy presently allow. Second, certain types of literal copying would qualify as “transformative” for purposes of fair use, although there is no actual change in the form of the relevant work.
Stephen McJohn, Some Speculation About Mirror Neurons and Copyright, 14 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 410 (2015) | <urn:uuid:0e278296-75d7-48c8-aa3e-0bc2bc136e16> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://repository.law.uic.edu/ripl/vol14/iss3/6/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473518.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221134259-20240221164259-00705.warc.gz | en | 0.921477 | 331 | 2.96875 | 3 | 594 |
NUMERACY & INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICE - HELPING TEACHER
1. DESCRIPTION OF SCHOOL LEVEL DELIVERY MODEL
Background Information: The Numeracy/Instructional Practice Helping Teacher will provide district leadership in the development and implementation of Curriculum, with a focus on research based instructional practice that will support vulnerable learners across the curriculum. The teacher will support the implementation of early numeracy strategies for at-risk Aboriginal learners as well as supporting the implementation of instructional strategies in other curricular areas. The Helping Teacher, in consultation with the Related Director of Instruction, will work with teachers, administrators, and other district personnel to provide support through:
a) maintaining a current knowledge base of learning theory and research for vulnerable learners, Ministry programs, curricula and resources;
b) working as a curriculum team member; focusing on best instructional practice for vulnerable and at-risk Aboriginal learners;
c) facilitating and providing district in-service and staff training development sessions that highlight promising practices which encourage success for at-risk learners for teachers and administrative officers;
d) communicating with teachers, administrators, other district personnel, Ministry of Education officials and others regarding District and Provincial programs;
e) monitoring program delivery and emergent needs of at-risk learners;
f) maintain a current knowledge base of research in the instructional components of early numeracy, including but not limited to: number sense development which includes subtilizing, partitioning, and patterning, understanding of the development of conceptual understanding in early numeracy;
g) possess knowledge and understanding of Ministry documents and resources pertinent to early learning (e.g. The Early Learning Framework, The Full-Day Kindergarten Program Guide, The Primary Program).
2. MINIMUM ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS/EXPERIENCE
a) Bachelor of Education Degree or equivalent;
b) valid B.C. Teaching certificate;
c) five years of school based elementary teaching which includes a minimum, of two years classroom experience in a school/district with a significant population of at-risk and Aboriginal learners;
d) participation in collaborative planning and facilitating of professional development activities;
e) demonstrated successful experience implementing best instructional practices.
3. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS/EXPERIENCE
a) Possession of, or working toward, a Master of Education Degree or equivalent and appropriate course work in the area of Curriculum;
b) knowledge of current research in early numeracy and district initiatives (e.g. Numeracy Project);
c) knowledge of current research in early childhood development;
d) preference will be given to those who have a background and/or experience with Aboriginal heritage and culture.
4. REPORTING STRUCTURE
The personnel in this position are accountable in the execution of their assigned duties to the principals of the schools they are working with and the Director of Instruction. | <urn:uuid:9fc1dd69-0807-4b9d-82f7-e9373dfd29af> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | http://www.coleenenville.com/page/13312/numeracy-instructional-practice-helping-teacher | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473871.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222225655-20240223015655-00705.warc.gz | en | 0.880313 | 599 | 2.6875 | 3 | 595 |
This guide gives a comprehensive overview of the digital assets of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It is meant to supplement existing Center for Jewish History resources, including CJH Guide: Archival Research at the Center. Thousands of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research materials are available through CJH's online search.
Check back periodically, as YIVO is in the process of digitizing millions of archival and library materials, as well as developing digital educational resources. This guide will be updated as YIVO's digital collections grow.
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded by scholars and intellectuals in Vilna, Poland, in 1925 to document and study Jewish life in all its aspects: language, history, religion, folkways, and material culture. YIVO had a special focus on the Jews of Eastern Europe, but collected books, manuscripts and other artifacts from Jewish communities around the world. World War II and the Holocaust forced YIVO’s relocation to New York in 1940. Its collections in Vilna were looted by the Nazis. With the help of the U.S. Army, YIVO was able to recover some of these materials and begin its work anew in America.
Today, YIVO’s collections are the primary source of the documentary history of East European Jewry and the surviving record of millions of lives of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. YIVO brings treasures from its library and archives to broad audiences via a rich array of programs, including lectures, concerts, and exhibitions; adult education and Yiddish-language programs and courses; books and scholarly publications; and fellowships for scholars.
The purpose of the YIVO Archives is to identify, acquire, preserve, and make accessible historically significant documents and other materials which reflect the Archives’ origins and development and enhance the Archives’ unique areas of expertise in documenting Jewish life.
The YIVO Archives contains 23 million records in 12 languages. The 2,500 collections that make up the YIVO Archives include manuscripts, letters, printed ephemera, sheet music, posters, artworks and artifacts, photographs, film and videos, and sound recordings. These collections, which together represent the single largest and most comprehensive repository of materials on East European Jewish civilization in the world, focus on a number of important areas including Jewish history, language, literature, and culture in Eastern Europe; World War II and the Holocaust; Jewish educational, political, and labor organizations; and Jewish immigration to the United States, Israel, and other countries in the Diaspora.
The YIVO Archives has a responsibility to the academic community and to the public to provide access to our holdings in order to facilitate new research, inspire interest in the history and culture of Eastern European Jewry, and expand scholarship, projects, and programs which enrich our understanding of this history and culture.
The Archives provides appropriate facilities for the retention, preservation, and servicing of its holdings and is committed to creating an open-access, user-centered research experience for all patrons who wish to use our materials regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, social and academic status, or religious affiliation.
The YIVO Archives is dedicated to connecting and partnering with other cultural organizations whose materials complement our own and to building new tools that allow worldwide access to our unique holdings.
The YIVO Library is the world’s only academic library specializing in the history, languages, literature, culture, folklore, and religious traditions of East European Jewry. It contains nearly 400,000 volumes of books and periodical editions. (Manuscripts and other special collections are held by the YIVO Archives.) Approximately 40,000 volumes are in Yiddish, making the YIVO Library the largest collection of Yiddish-language works in the world.
The Library includes:
The YIVO Library includes books and periodicals from its prewar collections in Vilna, which were confiscated by the Nazis during the Holocaust, later found in Germany after the war, and eventually sent to the New York YIVO in 1947. The library also holds treasures rescued by the so-called “Paper Brigade,” Jews who risked their lives to hide books and documents inside and outside the Vilna ghetto, thus saving them from Nazi pillage.
Best described as a "collection of collections," the YIVO Library has been built through the amalgamation of a number of private and institutional libraries. Shortly before the transfer of YIVO's headquarters to New York in 1940, the Central Jewish Library and Archives (CJLA), a repository of American Yiddish materials which had been founded in New York in 1938, was amalgamated with the American branch of YIVO. The CJLA included the Winchevsky Collection of Jewish labor history and Yiddish literature. By the end of the war, the growing YIVO library in New York acquired the library of the Chicago Yiddish publisher M. Ceshinsky and of the Yiddish theoretician Chaim Zhitlowsky. The Tcherikower Collection of Jewish history, hidden in France during the war, was acquired in 1946. Since then, YIVO has continued to acquire private libraries.
Thanks to these varied collections, the YIVO Library is especially strong in Yiddish literature, theater, Yiddish linguistics and lexicography, and historical writings, including many books and serials found in no other research library in the world. | <urn:uuid:6536dfe8-9333-473f-a1a1-39ee126aece4> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://libguides.cjh.org/c.php?g=980042&p=7087096 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474641.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225171204-20240225201204-00705.warc.gz | en | 0.940178 | 1,118 | 3.03125 | 3 | 596 |
Helping your child grow can feel like building a Jenga tower. You do your best to help them build a strong and secure foundation, one block at a time, so that when life inevitably throws stress their way, they have the resiliency to stay balanced. But sometimes, just one block out of place can cause the whole tower to wobble.
From big changes and transitions for kids, like moving to a new home or starting a new school, to smaller things like homework and friendships, there are countless pieces in play that can cause childhood stress.
While you can’t eliminate the causes of childhood stress, you can provide your child with tools to cope with it. Understanding common childhood stressors and the signs of childhood stress is the first step to teaching your child to manage it, so they can learn to stand tall and strong no matter what life throws at them.
Common Childhood Stressors
For many of us, early childhood is a time we remember through rose-colored glasses. It can be hard to realize that children face many stressors in their lives—often just as many as adults do. Here are some of the most common sources of stress for children:
- School-related stressors – Not surprisingly, school is one of the biggest sources of stress for kids. A school stressor can include worrying about getting good grades, meeting the expectations of parents and teachers, following a daily schedule and routine, navigating peer conflict, and making friends. This can be especially challenging for students who struggle with time management, executive functioning, or other developmental challenges.
- Family-related stressors – Naturally, family has the largest impact on a child's well-being and can add to your own feelings of parental stress. A stressful situation regarding family can have an impact on a young child. One of the most common sources of stress in this category is divorce or separation of parents. Children may feel like they are caught in the middle of their parents' conflicts, or they may worry about the changes that will come with the separation. Moving to a new home or school, illness or death in the family, and the arrival of a new sibling are also common causes of stress within the family dynamic.
- Social stressors – Stress on a young child doesn't have to result from a traumatic event. Social situations can also be a common stressor in early childhood. Problems with socializing can be particularly challenging for children, as they are still developing their social skills and sense of identity. Bullying or teasing from peers is a common source of stress and can lead to feelings of isolation and low self-esteem. Children who have difficulty making friends may also experience stress, as they may feel left out or excluded from social activities. Signs of bullying, like feeling left out or excluded, can be especially hard for children, making them feel like they don't fit in with their peers. Learn more about what to do if your kid is being bullied.
- Environmental, societal, and cultural stressors – Stressors that come from the larger world around them can be especially frightening for kids. The COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, and other events in the news cause children much more stress and worry than we realize.1 Exposure to the harmful impacts of systemic racism, classicism, and sexism can also be significant stressors for children.2,3
What Are ACEs?
The most severe types of stressors children go through are known as ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). ACEs are a way of measuring the effects of traumatic experiences that children may face in their lives, including:3
- Physical or emotional abuse
- Substance abuse in the home
- Parental separation or divorce
- Suicide of a family member
- Incarceration of a family member
The more adverse experiences a child faces, the higher their risk of developing negative outcomes such as chronic disease, mental health issues, and problems with relationships and learning later in life.
Childhood development experts believe understanding and addressing ACEs early can help improve children's long-term health and well-being. While traumatic events are often unavoidable, being aware of ACEs can help you support your child. If your family has experienced death, divorce, or other serious traumatic events listed above, your child could benefit from professional help to cope.
Signs and Factors of Childhood Stress
Childhood stress can be caused by many factors and situations. However, most instances of childhood anxiety and stress fall into one of three large categories:
- Changes in the family, such as parents getting divorced or moving to a new home
- School or social situations
- Systemic factors like poverty or discrimination2
While you can’t make these stressors disappear, you can keep an eye out for signs that your child is struggling to handle the stress factors in their life. Below, we’ll take a look at signs of stress in more detail.
Behavioral and Emotional Signs of Stress
According to the American Psychological Association, stress in kids can show up in slightly different ways than in adults, and every child’s reaction to stress is unique.1 However, there are some common behavioral and emotional signs your child is stressed that you should watch for:
- Withdrawal or avoidance – Like adults, sometimes kids feel so overwhelmed by stress that they start to withdraw from their usual activities or avoid social situations. For example, they might stop playing with their friends or lose interest in hobbies they used to enjoy.
- Aggressive or defiant behavior – Some kids respond to stress by acting out or becoming more defiant or aggressive than usual. This can include tantrums, yelling, or even physical aggression toward others.
- Changes in eating habits – It’s very common for stress to affect the appetite. You might notice your child picking at meals or eating more than usual. This can likely be due to stress. However, you may consider consulting with a healthcare professional to rule out other health-related reasons for a decrease in appetite.
- Changes in mood – Kids who are stressed may be more irritable, argumentative, or have sudden mood swings. They might seem like they're on edge all the time, cry easily, or have other outbursts of emotion.
- Regression in behavior – Stress often causes children to act younger than their age. For example, a child who is potty-trained might start having accidents again. Older children may begin bed-wetting or return to thumb-sucking. When it comes to regression, it can be normal in certain situations. However, at other times, it’s not always a good sign. For example, your child might ‘act babyish’ or use a baby voice when a sibling is born. But if they’re having frequent bed-wetting incidents, it may be due to a distressing experience they’ve had. If you are concerned, don’t hesitate to seek a second opinion from a professional.4
If you notice any of these signs in your child, it’s time to find out what might be causing the stress. Remember, it's normal for kids to experience tolerable stress from time to time.
However, when normal stressors continue long-term, it becomes chronic stress—a significant risk factor for numerous health problems in later life.2 In these cases, consider reaching out to a healthcare professional for support and guidance.
When to Seek Help
Sometimes, despite our best efforts, children may need additional help managing stress. And while there are ways you can help a child with stress and anxiety, you must be aware of red flags that may indicate it’s time to seek help from a counselor or therapist.
It could be time to see a professional if:
- Stress is impacting their daily life, such as their ability to eat, sleep, or engage in regular activities
- Your child displays severe behavioral or emotional signs of stress, such as extreme irritability, aggression, depression, or anxiety
- Your child has thoughts of hurting themselves or is self-harming (in young children, this often appears as hitting their head on a wall or hitting, biting, or pinching themselves)5
- Your child shows severe regression in developmental milestones
help is a sign of strength, not weakness.
Handle Childhood Stress with Help from Slumberkins
Every child will experience stress during their lives—it’s a normal part of growing up, and it’s good practice for the challenges of adulthood. But when kids become overwhelmed with stress that’s too much for their coping skills, it’s up to the adults in their lives to help them build their strength.
To do this, parents and caregivers need to be aware of the signs of stress in children so they can recognize what’s normal—and what’s not.
If you need some support of your own to handle your child’s stress, Slumberkins has your back. From family bonding to connecting with kids, our research-backed resources and cuddly characters make it easy for your child to practice skills like coping with change and managing their worries. With Slumberkins, you and your child can grow together.
- "How to help children and teens manage their stress." American Psychological Association. Updated 19 October, 2022. https://www.apa.org/topics/children/stress
- Thompson, Ross. "Stress and child development." The Future of Children. Spring 2014. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23723382
- "Fast facts: Preventing Adverse Childhood Experiences." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html
- "It’s not regression." Janet Landsbury. https://www.janetlansbury.com/2020/06/its-not-regression/
- "Head banging, punching, biting: Handling self-harm behaviors in kids." Riley Children’s Health. 24 January. 2017. https://www.rileychildrens.org/connections/head-banging-punching-biting-handling-self-harm-behaviors-in-kids
- Cascio, Christopher N et al. “Self-affirmation activates brain systems associated with self-related processing and reward and is reinforced by future orientation.” Social cognitive and affective neuroscience vol. 11,4 (2016): 621-9. doi:10.1093/scan/nsv136 | <urn:uuid:21a16810-b424-4b78-b758-fa530c893ff2> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://slumberkins.com/blogs/slumberkins-blog/childhood-stress | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474641.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225171204-20240225201204-00705.warc.gz | en | 0.950909 | 2,180 | 3.078125 | 3 | 597 |
“By optimizing the optical design and other features for parameters for making measurements in the live brain, we were able to actually make novel discoveries that were not possible before,” said co-corresponding author Mriganka Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdocs Murat Yildirim and Hiroki Sugihara. The other corresponding author is Peter So, professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering.
“The concept has existed, but the question was how do you make it work,” Sur said.
In the study, published in Nature Communications, the team showed that as mice watched visual stimuli, their human observers could measure patterns of activity among neurons in all six layers of visual cortex and the subplate, providing new data about their role in how mammals process vision. Moreover, through a series of careful experiments, the researchers were able to show that the light they sent in, as well as the light that came back out, neither damaged, nor even altered, the cells they measured.
In all, the paper describes a new three-photon microscope optimized to deliver rapid, short, low-power pulses of light capable of reaching deep targets without causing any functional disturbance or physical damage, and then to detect the resulting fluorescence emitted by cells with high efficiency to produce images with sharp resolution and a fast frame rate.
“We were motivated to show what we could do with three-photon microscope technology for an animal in an awake condition so we could ask important questions of neuroscience,” Yildirim said. “You could think you have the best microscope in the world, but until you ask those questions you don’t know what results you are going to get.” | <urn:uuid:756685bb-14fa-4e62-acb1-7995dd0d7a6e> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://picower.mit.edu/news/scope-advance-reveals-first-look-through-all-cortical-layers-awake-brain | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474670.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227021813-20240227051813-00705.warc.gz | en | 0.959864 | 370 | 3.484375 | 3 | 598 |
Should we worry about whether our earliest readers are learning to read, during the pandemic? Some point to concerning evidence of widening gaps in reading proficiency, especially in the early grades. Others call for less worry: “Our kids are not broken,” they say. “Let’s stop the ‘catch them up’ frenzy.”
While frenzy is never a good policy, neither is underselling the work we have to do. Instead of debating how much worry is the right amount of worry, let’s lean in to those research-based practices that we know can help.
You know what’s hard, when you’re six? Learning to read via Zoom meetings. Learning to read at school while keeping your mask over your mouth and your nose while simultaneously remembering not to hug anyone.
[pullquote]Do you know what’s even harder than learning to read during a pandemic? Learning to read without solid instruction in phonics[/pullquote]: the patterns that help you sound out words. Solid instruction in phonics means having a planned sequence, one that maps out when to introduce which spellings of which vowel sounds, for example. A systematic phonics sequence puts CAT and HAT before WEIGHT and FREIGHT.
Phonics supports kids as they read others’ words, and it also supports them as they write their own. For a 6-year-old learning to read, phonics is not just something abstract a teacher tells them, but also something tangible to play with. What more can I do with my magnetic letters? How many three-letter words can I make in a row, changing just one letter at a time?
[pullquote position="right"]If teaching systematic phonics isn’t top of mind for an early elementary teacher, changing that should become a top priority.[/pullquote] Trying to get good literacy outcomes without good phonics instruction is like trying to pin the tail on the donkey while blindfolded and dizzy. Sure, we’ve seen someone succeed before, but overall, it’s just a setup for failure.
What about parents and guardians, though, who have no training in phonics instruction? Now more than ever, teachers and parents are working together to keep young children learning to read. To help with that, teachers can point families to little books, like the Bob Books, that offer practice with the right level of phonics, especially those with the sounding-out rules that were taught on a specific week. If long vowel teams like OA and AI are the focus in phonics work, little books about BOATS and RAIN and OARS and TAILS give kids direct practice.
For more decodable text sources, check out this list on the always-useful and research-based Reading Rockets site. To support good long-term word-reading strategies, we want kids who are just beginning to read practicing lots of words that set them up for success with their phonics rules. Those words are found in the highest ratio in decodable books, like those on the Reading Rockets list.
Teachers: Teach a clear phonics sequence.
Families: Practice those phonics skills at home with decodable texts.
You know what’s boring, when you’re six? Having every book you encounter be about rats and mats, or about cans and pans. A diet of only phonics is like a diet of only steamed vegetables: we aren’t going to have anyone coming back for seconds, let alone becoming foodies, if we don’t have some more appealing food on the menu.
You know what’s really happy-making, when you’re six? Reading a book with someone like Dad, who does all the voices. Being listened to, interacted with, taken seriously when you share why you think that just happened in the book. It feels good to learn a new phrase or word that you didn’t know before and to try it out on your brother the next night at dinner. It feels good to understand something new about the world. Conversations about written text do wonders for the language comprehension and the knowledge building that lead to long-term reading comprehension.
Whether we are parents or teachers of beginning readers, we can spend time together with them enjoying engaging, interesting, challenging books. These aren’t the books that the just-beginning readers can handle on their own; these are books filled with unfamiliar words, with sentences that loop and pause and double back like gymnasts, finally sticking the landing perfectly at the end. [pullquote]High-quality, challenging texts bear reading more than once. They beg for conversation.[/pullquote]
These days especially, there are times when things feel far from good. Comprehending what’s going on, both around us and inside of us, is a challenge whether we are six or sixty. When teachers or families open a book that reflects something about a child’s own worries or fears or confusions, that can open up the kinds of conversations that protect a child’s mental health. Caring relationships and good literacy learning go hand in hand, especially for our youngest ones.
Let’s stop wondering how much we should worry. Instead, let’s lean in and do what we can do.
Cindy Jiban has taught in elementary and middle schools, both as a classroom teacher and as a special educator. She earned her doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Minnesota, focusing on intervention and assessment for students acquiring foundational academic skills. After contributions at the Research Institute on Progress Monitoring, the National Center on Educational Outcomes and the Minnesota Center for Reading Research, Cindy joined NWEA in 2009, where she is currently the Principal Academic for Early Learning Content Design.
Your donation will support the work we do at brightbeam to shine a light on the voices who challenge decision makers to provide the learning opportunities all children need to thrive. | <urn:uuid:f458b9b2-50c6-4e6e-9a08-c9ebb0d7addb> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.edpost.com/stories/lets-stop-worrying-and-lean-on-what-works-in-early-reading | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474715.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228112121-20240228142121-00705.warc.gz | en | 0.950511 | 1,240 | 3.34375 | 3 | 599 |
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