The Mental Wealth of Nations

Beddington, J. R.; Cooper, Cary L.; Field, John; Goswami, Usha; Huppert, Felicia A.; Jenkins, Rachel; Jones, H.; Kirkwood, Tom; Sahakian, Barbara J.; Thomas, Sandy M

doi:10.1057/9781137309341_16

Cited by 78 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The rapid advancement of technology has considerably improved people's lives worldwide. The present results suggest that more research is needed on the impact of these new technologies on child development (32).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

China’s language input system in the digital age affects children’s reading development

Tan

Chang

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Written Chinese as a logographic system was developed over 3,000 y ago. Historically, Chinese children have learned to read by learning to associate the visuo-graphic properties of Chinese characters with lexical meaning, typically through handwriting. In recent years, however, many Chinese children have learned to use electronic communication devices based on the pinyin input method, which associates phonemes and English letters with characters. When children use pinyin to key in letters, their spelling no longer depends on reproducing the visuo-graphic properties of characters that are indispensable to Chinese reading, and, thus, typing in pinyin may conflict with the traditional learning processes for written Chinese. We therefore tested character reading ability and pinyin use by primary school children in three Chinese cites: Beijing (n = 466), Guangzhou (n = 477), and Jining (n = 4,908). Children with severe reading difficulty are defined as those who were normal in nonverbal IQ but two grades (i.e., 2 y) behind in character-reading achievement. We found that the overall incidence rate of severe reading difficulty appears to be much higher than ever reported on Chinese reading. Crucially, we found that children's reading scores were significantly negatively correlated with their use of the pinyin input method, suggesting that pinyin typing on e-devices hinders Chinese reading development. The Chinese language has survived the technological challenges of the digital era, but the benefits of communicating digitally may come with a cost in proficient learning of written Chinese.child development | developmental dyslexia | language learning R eading is a crucial skill for children to master. It is not only necessary for success in school, but also important for maintaining a decent quality of life in our increasingly literate society. Cognitive scientists and psycholinguists have maintained that learning to read requires skills in orthographic (i.e., the appearance of a word), phonological, and semantic facets of printed words (1). This basic, lexical-level knowledge highly correlates with text comprehension and thus constitutes a major behavioral marker of reading ability (1).Although formation of a coherent and integrated reading circuit is universally critical for successful reading development (2), strategies toward helping children develop and retain such a reading network vary with the nature of writing systems. For example, children's awareness of the phonological structure of speech sounds and their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences play a pivotal role in reading development in English and other alphabetic languages, and reading instruction and remediation programs have therefore centered on phonological training (1-16). For Chinese readers, children's reading acquisition begins with a demanding visuospatial analysis of characters' graphic forms composed of strokes and subcharacter components that are packed into a square (2, 17, 18), followed by rote memory of arduous lexical mappings of ortho...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

China’s language input system in the digital age affects children’s reading development

Tan

Chang

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…The present findings thus set the stage for future research recruiting more complex tasks and models as well as psychiatric populations to more precisely delineate the impact of stress upon aversive and appetitive conditioning. Given the enormous and growing psychological, social, and economic impact of stress-related disorders (27), such an understanding is of clear value.…”

Section: Fig 1 (A)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Stress increases aversive prediction error signal in the ventral striatum

Robinson

Overstreet

Charney

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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From job interviews to the heat of battle, it is evident that people think and learn differently when stressed. In fact, learning under stress may have long-term consequences; stress facilitates aversive conditioning and associations learned during extreme stress may result in debilitating emotional responses in posttraumatic stress disorder. The mechanisms underpinning such stress-related associations, however, are unknown. Computational neuroscience has successfully characterized several mechanisms critical for associative learning under normative conditions. One such mechanism, the detection of a mismatch between expected and observed outcomes within the ventral striatum (i.e., "prediction errors"), is thought to be a critical precursor to the formation of new stimulusoutcome associations. An untested possibility, therefore, is that stress may affect learning via modulation of this mechanism. Here we combine a translational model of stress with a cognitive neuroimaging paradigm to demonstrate that stress significantly increases ventral striatum aversive (but not appetitive) prediction error signal. This provides a unique account of the propensity to form threat-related associations under stress with direct implications for our understanding of both normal stress and stress-related disorders.threat of shock | punishment | anxiety | face perception L earning to associate cues with threat is adaptive because it allows future threat to be predicted and avoided (1). However, such associative learning also may lead to haunting and debilitating memories; the smell of stir-fry may evoke painful intrusive memories in Vietnam veterans. How aversive information is integrated to guide adaptive or maladaptive behavior, however, is not well understood. Here, we report that stress increases a key learning mechanism: the neural detection of a mismatch between an expected and observed aversive outcome within the ventral striatum, commonly referred to as the aversive prediction error (PE) signal (1, 2).Neurocomputational and neuroeconomic accounts of cognition posit that stimulus-outcome associations during conditioning are formed via temporal difference learning (1, 3, 4), in which learning depends upon comparing expectation to what is currently happening. New associations, it is argued, are driven by a difference between predicted and actual outcomes (i.e., "prediction errors"), with greater mismatch between expected and actual outcomes evoking greater PE, resulting in greater predictive learning. This mismatch gives rise to phasic dopamine release in the ventral striatum (1, 3-5) for both appetitive and aversive stimuli (1, 2, 6, 7). Little is known, however, about how PE processing might be affected by an organism's emotional state. Stress, for instance, is well known to facilitate aversive conditioning in both humans and animals (8, 9), raising the possibility that aversive PEs also might be increased by stress. This hypothesis, however, is untested. Therefore, here we used a translational stress induction method in healt...

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“…INFANTIL Y ADOLESCENTE Beddington et al (2008) señalan en su estudio que, para alcanzar el progreso económico y social, se tiene que tener en cuenta la riqueza mental de las naciones, es decir , potenciar la salud mental de los ciudadanos. Según la Organización Mundial de la Salud la depresión se convertirá en 2020 en la se gunda causa de incapacidad en el mundo, sólo por detrás de las enfermedades isquémicas, mientras que en 2000 ocupaba el cuar to lugar (véase http:// www.who.int/topics/depression/en/).…”

Section: Prevención De La Depresiónunclassified

Prevención de la depresión en niños y adolescentes: Revisión y reflexión [Prevention of depression in children and adolescents: Review and reflection]

Hernández

Méndez

Garber

2014

RPPC

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Resumen: En este artículo se describen los principales pro gramas de prevención de la depresión en niños y adolescentes, analizando las conclusiones deri vadas de las más recientes re visiones cualitativas y cuantitativas. Se detallan las características de las intervenciones que han conseguido mayores efectos, así como algunas limitaciones de los estudios. Por último se realizan algunas reflexiones y sugerencias de cara a futuras in vestigaciones, remarcando la necesidad de realizar mayores inversiones en intervenciones preventivas por sus beneficios en el bienestar de la población y como medida de ahorro económico.Palabras clave: Prevención; depresión; revisión; niños; adolescentes. Prevention of depression in children and adolescents: Review and reflectionAbstract: This article describes the principal programs aimed at preventing depression in children and adolescents, and discusses f indings from the latest quantitati ve and qualitative reviews. Characteristics of interventions with the largest effect sizes are outlined and some limitations of these studies are noted. Finally, directions for future research are suggested, particularly the need for more investment in preventive interventions, in view of their benef its for the well-being of the general population and as a measure of economic savings.

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The Mental Wealth of Nations

Cited by 78 publications

References 12 publications

China’s language input system in the digital age affects children’s reading development

China’s language input system in the digital age affects children’s reading development

Stress increases aversive prediction error signal in the ventral striatum

Prevención de la depresión en niños y adolescentes: Revisión y reflexión [Prevention of depression in children and adolescents: Review and reflection]

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