Tuesday, April 15, 2014

April 28: Jane Hu, "Learning from others using social and statistical cues"

Learning from others using social and statistical cues

How do children come to possess the knowledge necessary to progress into adulthood? With relatively few life experiences, children must look to other people for information about the world. In this talk, I'll discuss several studies that demonstrate children's rich ability to learn from and about others by observing their actions and paying attention to contextual cues surrounding new information. Specifically, I'll show that children can infer others' preferences from watching their choices, and consider consensus opinions and informants’ knowledge when learning new information from others.

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

April 14: Audun Dahl, "Early Moral Development in Social Interactions"

Early Moral Development in Social Interactions

Morality is about how we treat other people, and it develops, to a large extent, through social interactions. In its fully developed form, morality involves a concern for the well-being of others and an ability to coordinate moral and non-moral concerns. Although infants appear sensitive to some moral norms by their first birthday, they do not reliably act out of concern for the well-being of others. For instance, they harm others without provocation and they help others at substantially lower rates than older children, if at all. Over the course of the second year of life, this changes dramatically. In this talk, Audun will discuss evidence for how distinct forms of social interactions in the second year contribute to two fundamental aspects of moral development: the aversion to interpersonal harm and the tendency to help others. His research combines naturalistic and experimental methods to show that (1) caregivers are generally more insistent and more angry when intervening on infants' moral (harmful) transgressions than on other transgressions, (2) caregivers facilitate infants' helping behavior at ages earlier than often assumed, and (3) infants make use of these social signals in deciding what to do (help) and not to do (harm).

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

April 7: Douglas Jutte, "Exploring the Intersection of Community Development and Healthy (Child) Development"

Exploring the Intersection of Community Development and Healthy (Child) Development

There is growing interest in the social determinants of healthy child development, and more specifically, in understanding the ways that low-income social environments can have a negative impact on child development. This presentation by Douglas Jutte will describe an exciting research initiative to examine efforts to improve low-income neighborhoods and their effects on the health and well being of children and families. Douglas Jutte is a developmental pediatrician who has recently received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to add health and development measures to a large community development project. He will describe the history and function of the national non-profit community development sector and discuss how the $150 Billion (yes, Billion) invested annually into low-income neighborhoods has the potential to have a positive impact on understanding--and improving--important social determinants of child and family health and well-being. Achieving these goals will require partnering between the national non-profit community and researchers with expertise in child development and public health to more effectively understand how improvements in low-income neighborhoods can have a positive effect on the social determinants of healthy development.

Douglas Jutte, MD, MPH is a professor and population health researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. He teaches in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and serves as associate director of the master’s degree in Health & Medical Sciences. He has been a leader in the Federal Reserve & Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Communities Initiative that aims to increase the positive impact of community development and public health by better integrating the work of these two sectors, and he will soon be Executive Director of the newly formed National Partnership for Community Development & Health. His research focuses on the impact of social determinants of health on children’s wellbeing over the life course as well as the policy levers and financial tools that can intervene to protect children and families. He has published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Epidemiology, Academic Pediatrics, the American Journal of Public Health and Health Affairs. Dr. Jutte graduated from Cornell University and received his MD from Harvard Medical School and a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. His post-doctoral research training in population health was through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health & Society Scholars program based at UCSF. He completed his pediatric training at Stanford University and continues to care for at-risk newborns as a neonatal hospitalist.

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm.