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A Virtual Audience 24/7
Peggy Orenstein’s recent NY Times Magazine piece on Twittering brings to the forefront many of the issues that psychologists at the CDMC@LA are concerned about. Due to the myriad of self-presentation tools that digital media such as YouTube, twittering and social networking sites provide, people are often hyper aware of their audience. How will this…
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The Origins of Mental Disorders
The recent article in the New York Times outlining research on the preschool-age depression has raised public interest in the origins of mental disorders. Many non-scholars and even some psychologists are skeptical about the emergence of psychological problems in very young children. The stability of temperament (personalities traits such as extraversion and introversion) is now…
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Impact of Divorce: Children’s reactions
Approximately half of all children experience the divorce of their parents (National Center for Health Statistics, 2008), and the negative impact of divorce has been widely studied and debated. While researchers generally agree that children of divorce are at-risk for negative outcomes, questions persist about study findings given methodological limitations. Parental divorce is associated with…
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Treatments for ADHD – and the forgotten role of motivation
Research on the treatments for ADHD suggest that even the most effective treatments may not be sufficient for improving outcomes for children with ADHD diagnoses. Current treatments have a predominately person-biased approach to conceptualizing and treating the disorder. For example, the largest study conducted to assess the efficacy of ADHD interventions pitted medication and psychosocial…
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Media 24/7 in kid’s lives
A new study came out from Kaiser that talks about the astonishing amount of time that children spend with media today. Media is defined as tv, music, video games, print, computer and movies. Today’s kids 8-18 spend 7 1/2 hours using media, almost as long as an adult work day! Before parents stress too much,…
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Schoolchildren, self-regulation, and addiction
It’s no secret that diagnoses like ADD and ADHD have been seen with much greater frequency in the last decade or so. Slight variations on the same theme, both of these disorders have to do with a person’s (usually a child) inability to appropriately control their impulses and behave appropriately. The debate about the sources…