The Power of the Past

If you grow up in the working class, neither love nor money can trump your blue-collar roots, a Duke sociologist has found.

Her study of couples from different social classes suggests that those who “marry up” still make life decisions based on their upbringing.

                             Cover of Streib book by Eric Ferreri, Duke News & Communications
                          Sociologist Jessi Streib’s book “The Past” is about class structure in marriages.

“Your social class never goes away,” says Jessi Streib, an assistant professor of sociology whose findings are revealed in her new book: The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages. “It stays with you in terms of how you live your life. The class you’re born into sticks with you and shapes you, even when you marry into more money and a far more financially secure life.”

Streib’s findings derive from interviews she conducted with white, heterosexual Midwestern couples. She interviewed 32 couples in which one spouse came from a working class background, the other from the middle class. For comparison, she also interviewed 10 couples in which both spouses grew up in the middle class.

Streib defines working class as people raised by parents with high school educations; the middle class subjects were raised by college-educated parents.

Her findings run contrary to the notion held by many scholars that strivers can outrun a difficult childhood by getting a college degree and good-paying middle-class job.

While the findings suggest that a middle class upbringing isn’t required to excel in the American workplace, those upwardly mobile people from working class roots may still miss out on opportunities if they can’t or don’t subscribe to the unspoken norms of middle class culture, Streib notes.

Streib found that couples from different classes held onto their own, firmly-rooted beliefs regarding money and parenting, often negotiating fervently with each other over the proper amount of career planning and nurturing of children. Should children be left to grow and discover on their own, or should goals and schedules be set for them?

“Those are the sorts of tiny battles cross-class couples have all the time,” Streib said. “These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are certainly common and consistent.”

Source: Duke Univesity

ADHD: Brains not recognizing angry expressions

These two faces were presented to children. Credit: © National Institutes of Natural Sciences

Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior in children with ADHD can result in social problems and they tend to be excluded from peer activities. They have been found to have impaired recognition of emotional expression from other faces.

The research group of Professor Ryusuke Kakigi of the National Institute for Physiological Sciences, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Masami K. 

Yamaguchi and Assistant Professor Hiroko Ichikawa of Chuo University first identified the characteristics of facial expression recognition of children with ADHD by measuring hemodynamic response in the brain and showed the possibility that the neural basis for the recognition of facial expression is different from that of typically developing children.

The findings are discussed in Neuropsychologia.

The research group showed images of a happy expression or an angry expression to 13 children with ADHD and 13 typically developing children and identified the location of the brain activated at that time. They used non-invasive near-infrared spectroscopy to measure brain activity. Near-infrared light, which is likely to go through the body, was projected through the skull and the absorbed or scattered light was measured. The strength of the light depends on the concentration in "oxyhemoglobin" which gives the oxygen to the nerve cells working actively. The result was that typically developing children showed significant hemodynamic response to both the happy expression and angry expression in the right hemisphere of the brain.

On the other hand, children with ADHD showed significant hemodynamic response only to the happy expression but brain activity specific for the angry expression was not observed. 

This difference in the neural basis for the recognition of facial expression might be responsible for impairment in social recognition and the establishment of peer-relationships.

Source: National Institutes of Natural Sciences

The biology of fun and playfulness

Dog and child (stock image). Credit: © Irina84 / Fotolia

Current Biology celebrates its 25th birthday with a special issue on January 5, 2015 on the biology of fun (and the fun of biology). In a collection of essays and review articles, the journal presents what we know about playfulness in dogs, dolphins, frogs, and octopuses. It provides insights on whether birds can have fun and how experiences in infancy affect a person's unique sense of humor.

"Fun is obviously--almost by definition--pleasurable, rewarding, but in a way that is distinct from the pleasures of satisfying basic needs, such as the drives to reduce thirst or hunger or to reproduce," says Current Biology Editor Geoffrey North. "The articles in this special issue consider examples of what appear to be fun and play in a broad range of animal species and the insights that can be gained into how the behaviors might contribute to evolutionary fitness."

How do we get our sense of humor?

Psychologists Vasu Reddy and Gina Mireault, of the University of Portsmouth and Johnson State College respectively, offer a comprehensive overview of how, in infancy, reactions to absurd behavior like pulling hair or blowing raspberries, as well as teasing others, offer a window into how aware young children are of others' intentions. "As [infants] discover others' reactions and, indeed, others' minds, they also discover the meaning of 'funny', a construct that varies across and within cultures, regions, families, and even dyads," write the authors. "Infants become attuned to the nuances in humour through their social relationships, which create the practice of contexts of humorous exchange." The scientists note that children with atypical patterns of development may exhibit different senses of humor compared to their peers.

Why do adult apes play?

Based on her observations of a wild bonobo community, primatologist Isabel Behncke of the University of Oxford makes the case that play in bonobo adults could be a key adaptation that underlies social bonding and intelligence. She describes how bonobos in the Wamba community of Central Africa naturally engage in chasing, hanging, and water games despite differences in age and sex. "Play makes individuals more adaptable because it makes them more social; and more successful in their sociality as a result of being more adaptable," Dr. Behncke writes. "Life-long play is a bridge between sociality and adaptability."

Does playfulness spur creativity?

Ethologist Sir Patrick Bateson of the University of Cambridge wants to know why playfulness is so connected to creativity in the realms of science, music, and business. Working with behavioral biologist Daniel Nettle, he asked over 1,500 people to rank their creativity and then provide up to ten potential uses for a jam jar or paperclip. Those who considered themselves the most playful were most likely to provide many uses for the items. 

"Play is an effective mechanism for encouraging creativity since creativity also involves breaking away from established patterns of thought and behavior," Dr. Bateson writes.

Source: Cell Press

Why 'I'm so happy I could cry' makes sense

Individuals who express negative reactions to positive news were able to moderate intense emotions more quickly, scientists found. They also found people who are most likely to cry at their child's graduation are most likely to want to pinch a cute baby's cheeks. Credit: © michaeljung / Fotolia

The phrase "tears of joy" never made much sense to Yale psychologist Oriana Aragon. But after conducting a series of studies of such seemingly incongruous expressions, she now understands better why people cry when they are happy.

"People may be restoring emotional equilibrium with these expressions," said Aragon, lead author of work to be published in the journal Psychological Science. "They seem to take place when people are overwhelmed with strong positive emotions, and people who do this seem to recover better from those strong emotions."

There are many examples of responding to a positive experience with a negative emotion. A crying spouse is reunited with a soldier returning from war. Teen girls scream at a Justin Bieber concert and so do soccer players as they score a winning goal. The baseball player who hits a winning home run is pounded at home plate by teammates. And when introduced to babies "too cute for words," some can't resist pinching their cheeks.

"I was surprised no one ever asked why that is," she said.

Aragon and her colleagues at Yale ran subjects through some of these scenarios and measured their responses to cute babies or happy reunions. They found that individuals who express negative reactions to positive news were able to moderate intense emotions more quickly. They also found people who are most likely to cry at their child's graduation are most likely to want to pinch a cute baby's cheeks.

There is also some evidence that strong negative feelings may provoke positive expressions; for example nervous laughter appears when people are confronted with a difficult or frightening situations, and smiles have been found by other psychologists to occur during extreme sadness.

These new discoveries begin to explain common things that many people do but don't even understand themselves, Aragon said.

"These insights advance our understanding of how people express and control their emotions, which is importantly related to mental and physical health, the quality of relationships with others, and even how well people work together," she said.

Source: Yale University