Monday, Oct. 28: Jenny Saffran, Sounds and meanings working together: Word learning as a collaborative effort

Professor Jenny Saffran, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison will present:

Sounds and meanings working together: Word learning as a collaborative effort

When we think about word learning, we tend to focus on the fundamental act of mapping a word onto the world. However, lexical learning does not occur in a vacuum. At the outset of word learning, infants already have a great deal of experience with the sound patterns that make up their native language, and the objects that clutter their proximal environment. In this talk, I will consider recent data suggesting that knowledge of sounds and knowledge of referents go hand in hand during the language learning process.

Monday, October 28, 12:00-1:30pm in 3105 Tolman Hall

Oct. 21: Dr. Alexandra Minnis, Social environment influences on adolescent reproductive health: Epidemiologic evidence from San Francisco's Mission District and intervention directions

Social environment influences on adolescent reproductive health: Epidemiologic evidence from San Francisco's Mission District and intervention directions.

Dr. Alexandra Minnis, Senior Research Epidemiologist, RTI International and Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health (UCB), will present her research highlighting the role of gang affiliation and migration in reproductive health outcomes in a predominantly Latino community. She will also discuss novel intervention directions and present feasibility results from a randomized study of Yo Puedo, a social networks-based intervention that combines conditional cash transfers and life skills to promote sexual health.

Please join us on Monday, October 21, 12:00-1:30pm in 3105 Tolman Hall.

Institute of Human Development & Change, Plasticity and Development Seminar, Fall 2013

9/16 Linda Wilbrecht
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley

9/23 Emily Ozer
School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

10/21 Alexandra Minnis
Senior Research Epidemiologist, Women's Global Health Imperative, RTI International

10/28 Jenny Saffran
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

11/4 Laurie Paul
Philosophy Department, UNC Chapel Hill

11/18 Mahesh Srinivasan
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley

11/25 Ndola Prata
Associate Professor in Residence, SPH

12/2 Danny Pine
Chief of Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, National Institute of Mental Health

All talks will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm

Sept. 23: Emily Ozer, Promoting Adolescent Health and Beyond: Research on Improving School Settings and Empowerment.

Promoting Adolescent Health and Beyond: Research on Improving School Settings and Empowerment

Abstract:
My scholarship is informed by an ecological perspective that emphasizes the importance of social contexts on human development and the mutual influence of a range of individual and setting-level factors in shaping mental health and disorder. My research entails (a) the systematic examination of interventions designed to promote psychological and economic empowerment among marginalized populations; and (b) investigating and promoting factors that promote positive adaptation and mental health despite the presence of significant stressors. This latter line of research seeks to identify the conditions and resources that help protect individuals from psychopathology and other adverse consequences despite the presence of risk. I have substantially expanded my initial work on stress and child development beyond violence to study more broadly the effects of economic conditions, economic policies, and social class on the mental health of children and adolescents.

In my presentation, I will present findings from two local studies conducted in urban public schools, focusing primarily on a recent longitudinal intervention study of youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) for ethnically-diverse high school students. YPAR is an intervention approach in which young people are trained as researchers to identify and study problems to be addressed in their schools or communities and to conduct actions to advocate for changes based on their research findings. I will also discuss new directions for my intervention research and motivations for promoting interdisciplinary collaborations at the new I4Y Center at the Institute for Human Development.

Please join us on Monday, September 23, 12:00-1:30pm in 3105 Tolman Hall

Sept. 16: Linda Wilbrecht, The brain's topiary art: Development, experience and structural plasticity of synaptic structures in the neocortex

The brain's topiary art: Development, experience and structural plasticity of synaptic structures in the neocortex

Prof. Wilbrecht will discuss the concept of adolescent brain development as a process of synaptic stabilization rather than simple pruning, showing evidence that there is both dendritic spine gain and loss in the frontal cortex across adolescent development in mice. She will then focus on the potential relationship between learning and spine gain and stabilization using her recent study of the impact of cocaine exposure on learning and new spine growth.

3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm

May 13: Jennifer Arter, "You can pick your friends..." An evolutionary framework for human friendship

Jennifer Arter, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Psychology, will present her research: Abstract: Many species employ conditional strategies for reproduction or survival. In other words, each individual “chooses” one of several possible phenotypes in order to maximize survival or reproductive advantage given the specific ecological niche (e.g., Moran, 1992). Can conditional strategies explain individual variation in humans’ selection of their friends? Evidence suggests that individuals are sensitive to characteristics of the self, friend, and environmental conditions when choosing friends (Fehr, 1996; Rose, 1985; Verbrugge, 1977), and that a person’s economic, social, and environmental circumstances influence how they form and organize their friendships (Adams & Allan, 1998; Feld & Carter, 1998). In this dissertation I hypothesized that humans have evolved a definable range of conditional friendship strategies, and that an individual’s strategy will relate to her traits and to features of her social and non-social environment. I also hypothesized that individuals would be able to perceive and detect reliable signals (Cronk, 2005; Searcy & Nowicki, 2005; Smith, 1994) of these strategies in others, enabling them to choose friends whose traits are most desirable to them. Results partly supported these hypotheses; individuals do seem to have a reliable range of friendship preferences which relate to their own traits, and they do seem able to pick up on others’ signals of these strategies, but it is not clear whether preferences for others’ signals are more global or vary more by individual. The studies in this dissertation propose and begin to test a novel theoretical framework for studying human friendship, and they suggest avenues for future work that should capitalize on the framework of evolutionary social psychology described here. 3105 Tolman Hall 12:00-1:30pm

May 6: Development on the Streets: Research with Homeless Children and Youth in San Francisco, CA & Kisumu, Kenya

Colette Auerswald, MD, MS, is an Associate Professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine and the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. She is a pediatrician specialized in adolescent medicine and principal investigator of the Youth in Social Environments Group (Y-SE). She has been engaged in community-based research regarding the health of homeless youth in San Francisco for sixteen years. Her research interests include the study of the contribution of cultural and social factors to HIV and STD-related behaviors in marginalized youth populations (including homeless youth, low-income youth of color, and LGBTQ youth in San Francisco, and street children in East Africa); the sampling of hard-to-reach populations; the role of social networks in adolescent health; and the use of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in adolescent health research. She is currently interested in the role of stigma in the lived of marginalized youth and developing structural interventions to address stigma in their lives.