Growing up in a poor neighborhood significantly reduces the chances that a child will graduate from high school, according to a study published in the October issue of theAmerican Sociological Review. And, the longer a child lives in that kind of neighborhood, the more harmful the impact.

The study, by University of Michigan sociologists Geoffrey Wodtke and David Harding and University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Felix Elwert, is the first to capture the cumulative impact of growing up in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods on a key educational outcome—high school graduation.

“Compared to growing up in affluent neighborhoods, growing up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment reduces the chances of high school graduation from 96 percent to 76 percent for black children,” says Wodtke, a Ph.D. student who works with Harding at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “The impact on white children is also harmful, but not as large, reducing their chances of graduating from 95 percent to 87 percent.”

In contrast to earlier research that examined neighborhood effects on children at a single point in time, the new study uses data from the ISR Panel Study of Income Dynamics to follow 2,093 children from age one through age 17, assessing the neighborhoods in which they lived every year. [continue reading…]

Adolescents become smarter because they become mentally quicker. That is the conclusion of a new study by a group of psychologists at University of Texas at San Antonio. “Our findings make intuitive sense,” says lead author Thomas Coyle, who conducted the study with David Pillow, Anissa Snyder, and Peter Kochunov. But this is the first time psychologists have been able to confirm this important connection. The study appears in the forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

“Our research was based on two well-known findings, Coyle continues. “The first is that performance on intelligence tests increases during adolescence. The second is that processing speed”—the brain taking in and using new stimuli or information—“as measured by tests of mental speed also increases during adolescence.”

To find the relationship between these two phenomena, the UTSA psychologists analyzed the results of 12 diverse intelligence and mental speed tests administered to 6,969 adolescents (ages 13 to 17) in the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Intelligence was measured by performance on cognitive tests of diverse abilities, such as vocabulary knowledge, math facts, and mechanical comprehension. Mental speed showed up in timed tests of computing and coding—matching digits and words and other arithmetic tasks.

In both of these categories, the researchers could see that the older teenagers did better and worked faster than the younger ones. Then, running the data in numerous ways, they discovered that the measured increase of intelligence could be accounted for almost entirely by the increase in mental speed.

This is what they expected to find, says Coyle. After all, “performance on intelligence tests reflects, in part, the speed of acquiring knowledge, learning things, and solving problems.” Those cognitive processes, he says, are related to how fast the brain is working—and all that improves during the teenage years.

The work reinforces earlier theories about the relationship between increasing processing speed in the maturing brain and the cognitive development of children.
Source: Association for Psychological Science

Deakin University health researchers have found that poor diet may be a risk factor for mental health problems during adolescence.

In a study of 3000 Australian adolescents, published in the journal PLoS One, the Deakin researchers revealed that diet quality predicted mental health in adolescents over time, suggesting that it might be possible to use diet to prevent mental health problems developing in the first place.

“We found that diet quality and mental health were linked, with healthier diets associated with better mental health in 2005 and also predicting better mental health in 2007. This relationship even persisted when mental health at the starting point was taken into account,” said Dr Felice Jacka from Deakin University’s Barwon Psychiatric Research Unit based at Barwon Health, who led the study.

“Three quarters of psychiatric illnesses begin before the age of 25 and the average age that depressive illnesses start is only 13 years old. Once an individual experiences depression, they are more likely to experience it again. We believe that diet may be an important environmental factor influencing the development of mental health problems during adolescence, when rapid growth makes good nutrition particularly important.

“This new evidence suggests that it might be possible to prevent some cases of depression developing in the first place by ensuring that the diets of adolescents are sufficiently nutritious.” [continue reading…]