NEW APPROACH FINDS SUCCESS IN TEACHING YOUTH WITH AUTISM

As the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders continues to increase, the one thing that won't change is the need for those children to develop social skills. Statistics show that if these students are able to communicate effectively, they can achieve success in the classroom, and later, in the workplace. In addition to the challenges facing each individual student, educators find themselves facing dwindling resources.

Now, researchers at the University of Missouri are developing an effective social competence curriculum, with a virtual classroom component, that could help educators meet the demand of this growing population.

Janine Stichter, a professor of special education at the MU College of Education, and her team have developed a curriculum that has shown success in an after-school format and is now being tested during daily school activities,

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DEPRESSION AND TEENAGE PREGNANCY

Research suggests that childbearing does not necessarily cause psychological distress among teenagers. Dr. Stefanie Mollborn of the University of Colorado and her team investigated stress and depression using a large group of teenage girls and adult women.

In the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, they explain that teenage mothers’ high depression rates have received “considerable research attention” in small studies, but a larger study of adolescent childbearing and depression was needed.

So they used figures from two large long-term surveys, the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort. The participants completed questionnaires to measure depression, although the term “depression” was avoided.

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LANGUAGE MAY HELP CREATE, NOT JUST CONVEY, THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS

The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That's the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.

The paper appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul," says co-author OludaminiOgunnaike, a graduate student at Harvard. "This study suggests that language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well."

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SIDE IN PERIODIZATION OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Psychiatric education is very important for forming the soul of balance in the child's personality. Psychiatric education means educating the children so they can be brave, open, independent, helpful, able to control anger, and love against all forms of moral virtue dam soul absolutely. In order to achieve optimal educational purposes, so parents should pay attention to mental growth of children in the educational process.

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