News

Effects of School Closures on Children: The pandemic profoundly affected American children with disruptions to their schooling and daily care. A new study by Anna Gassman-Pines, Elizabeth Ananat, John Fitz-Henley II, and Jane Leer found that service sector workers who had a young child reported disruption on 24 percent of days in fall 2020. The disruptions were more common in remote learning and had a negative impact on children’s behavior and on parenting mood and behavior.

A team of researchers found that a poverty reduction intervention had a direct impact on children’s brain development. Co-author of the study, Lisa Gennetian, is co-PI of the Baby’s First Years, a randomized control trial of a direct cash intervention and the source of the data for this new study. Findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show that after one year of predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families, 1-year-olds exhibited brain activity patterns associated with the development of thinking and learning.

A new study published in Science on Dec. 24 shows that early human foragers and farmers adopted an inefficient high-risk, high-reward strategy to find food. They spent more energy in pursuit of food than their great ape cousins, but brought home much more calorie-rich meals that could be shared with the rest of their group. This strategy allowed some to rest or tackle other tasks while food was being acquired.

DUPRI’s Giovanna Merli, UNC’s Ted Mouw and co-authors have a new paper in Demography which evaluates a novel network sampling approach for hidden and rare populations ("Network Sampling with Memory" [NSM]). They show the feasibility of using this approach to efficiently and cost-effectively recruit a sample of Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area, the accuracy with which the sample represents this population of immigrants and the benefits of multiple forms of network ties collected as part of the survey for the study of immigrant social incorporation.

Kenneth Dodge, William McDougall distinguished professor of public policy studies, has received a 2021 Outstanding Achievement Prize in Mental Health from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF). Dodge is the BBRF Ruane Prizewinner for Outstanding Achievement in Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Research. He is the founding and past director of the Center for Child and Family Policy, the founder of Family Connects International and a leading scholar in the development and prevention of aggressive and violent behaviors.

The NextGenPop team is excited to share the website and application for this summer’s inaugural program hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Please help spread the word, particularly to students from underrepresented groups. Application deadline February 15. This program uses the pressing growth of inequality as a lens for studying population composition and change, with the goal of increasing the pipeline of undergraduates from underrepresented backgrounds into the population sciences.  It has three specific aims: 1) to introduce advanced undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to foundational demographic concepts and tools; 2) to integrate students’ training in research and professional development; 3) to foster ongoing engagement of program participants in population research and allied fields.

The NIA supported Research Network on Animal Models to Understand Social Dimensions of Aging , under the leadership of  Jenny Tung, Duke University, Alessandro Bartolomucci,  University of Minnesota, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, UNC, recently awarded its 2021-2022 pilot Project Awards.  The goal of the Pilot Program is to support projects  focused on animal models or comparative studies relevant for understanding the social determinants of health and aging, and to generate key preliminary data for future NIH grant applications, publications, and other scientific products.

We've all had to deal with breakups — with close friends or romantic partners. But breakups aren't a uniquely human phenomenon. Our primate cousins do it too. Robert Seyfarth, a primatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says there are a number of ways a breakup can go down in a group of primates. "We have known for years that primate groups, like baboons and other African monkeys and chimpanzees and gorillas, that they grow in size. And at a certain point, they may split apart," Seyfarth said. "The question was, how do they decide who goes with whom? Are they banding together with a tight little group of kin and splitting off in that group? Or is there some despot that is determining what they're doing?" Now a group of scientists has come up with an answer. Groups of baboons seem to split into two smaller groups in a cooperative way, rather than at the whims of a tyrannical baboon. And as in the human world, these breakups can take months or years.

Psychologist Terrie Moffitt has won the 2022 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for shedding new light on the nature of juvenile crime. Moffitt, a Duke University psychologist and King’s College, London, social development professor, discovered two types of antisocial behavior in juveniles. One persists from early childhood to adulthood, is relatively rare and seen mostly in males, while the other occurs only in adolescence and is seen in both males and females. Although both types appear to be the same on psychological tests and in illegal behaviors, Moffitt found they are distinctly different, an insight that has changed the way the courts prosecute juveniles.

Lisa Gennetian  and Marta Tienda, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University, co-edited a recent volume of The Annals  of the American Academy of Political and Social Science titled Investing in Latino Children and Youth. Their introduction summarizes the volume’s contributions and policy implications across its broad coverage of topics in housing, education, health, and social policy, considering geographic variation and diversity of Latinx children and youth.