Spring 2018

Paige Harden discusses her research on childhood executive functions (EFs) in the Texas Twin Project, an ongoing study of a child and adolescent twins and multiples in central Texas. EFs are supervisory cognitive processes that modulate goal-directed cognitive operations and include inhibition, switching, updating, and working memory abilities. She also looks at her new philosophical work on the ethical and political implications of sociogenomic research linking genetic differences between people to phenotypes, such as EFs, that are relevant for social inequality. In particular, she considers how genotypes and genetically-influenced phenotypes can be understood within the framework of the philosophy of luck, and discusses how the concept of "genetic luck" can be useful for understanding the compatibility of sociogenomic research with a broad spectrum of political values and ideologies.

As the global population ages, older decision makers will be required to take greater responsibility for their own physical, psychological and financial well-being. Duke University's Gregory Samanez-Larkin discusses the effects of ageing on decision making and associated neural circuits. He also examines how “affect-integration-motivation (AIM)” framework helps clarify how motivational circuits support decision making, and reviews recent research that sheds light on whether and how ageing influences these circuits.

Duke University's Emma Zang discusses the effect of intra-household property rights on women's well-being. She examines the gendered consequences of the 2011 Chinese divorce reform, a policy that transferred ownership to the registered buyer—most often the husband—following a divorce. She looks at how the elimination of property rights led to a decrease in the women’s well-being, particularly those with low social status.

Colter Mitchell discusses his recent work on the biosocial correlates of social disadvantage and child development. In particular, Mitchell reviews the effects of cumulative disadvantage as well as how the timing of disadvantage exposure influences child development.

Robert Moffitt discusses how he used data from 1996 through 2008 to analyze the effects of 1990s welfare reforms on family structure categories that incorporate the biological status of the male, finding that most policies did not affect family structure, but that some work-related reforms increased single parenthood and decreased marriage to biological fathers. He posits that these effects of work-related welfare policies on family structure stem from their effects on increased labor force participation and earnings of single mothers combined with factors special to biological fathers, including a decline in their employment and wages.

The University of Michigan's Tyler McCormick discusses his recent methodological work on verbal autopsies. He also reviews his ongoing efforts to integrate verbal autopsies in settings with partial coverage vital registration systems using an open source software platform designed to integrate with existing verbal autopsy & vital registration data infrastructures.

The renewed interest by the economic literature in the effect of birth order on children's outcomes has neglected trust as a long-term output of familial environment. Duke University’s Pierligi Conzo discusses how differences in the order of birth predict heterogeneous self-reported trust levels in Britain. Conzo looks at how psychology, economics and sociology help explain the relationship between birth order and trust.

Maria Glymour discusses the challenges of identifying modifiable causes of dementia because of the ambiguity in the outcome definition and the long and insidious onset of disease. She posits that many of the risk factors identified in observational epidemiology are correlates of childhood development, rather than causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. She discusses the necessity of finding novel study designs that circumvent the measurement and confounding biases intrinsic to research on dementia.

Sex differences in human mortality and health are widely documented in both low and high income countries. In this talk, Michael Gurven assesses sex differences in adult health and physical condition among small-scale, natural fertility populations of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists like the Tisane Amerindians, looking at the effects of reproductive intensity on the female health of this population.

Kevin Lewis discusses how Big data is increasingly used to answer longstanding social scientific questions and how "digital footprints" of human interaction often provide unusually nuanced information on an unprecedented scale that often obscures as much as it illuminates. Lewis draws on the example of online dating to illustrate a few basic fallacies in how big data are often framed for social science research, and suggests some alternative (and potentially more constructive) paths moving forward.