Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Every Baby’s a Critic: Tots Drawn to Complex Art

February 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
pollockesque

Can you tell a real Jackson Pollock painting from a watered-down replica? If so, don’t feel too superior: So can your eight-month-old baby. That’s one finding of a new study that compares the ways infants and adults look at abstract art. The research's intent is to discover whether responses to such works are innate or learned. The tentative answer: a bit of each. In a set of experiments, the eyes of both babies and adults were drawn to images featuring greater contrast and complexity. To the researchers, this suggests that while some aesthetic preferences are shaped by cultural ... Read More

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What A Healthy, Happy, Wailing Baby You Have!

January 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Researchers at Philadelphia's Temple University claim to have conclusively proven that tough love advocates are right, and the best way to get a reluctant baby to sleep is to let it scream like Janet Leigh until it passes out. The study just published in Developmental Psychology gathered data on the sleep habits of more than 1,200 babies, checking with new parents at six, 12, 24 and 36 months. It found that two-thirds of kids slept through the night by six months, or woke up long enough to need attention only once or twice a week. The remaining third of the kids woke up and fussed, ... Read More

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Everyone’s a Critic: Babies Prefer Picasso

June 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Taste in art is, of course, highly subjective. Personality, education and the norms of one's culture all influence why one person craves Kandinsky while another has a crush on Kinkade. But what about babies, whose minds have yet to be shaped by any sort of cultural indoctrination? Newly published research finds they prefer the imagery of Pablo Picasso to the impressionism of Claude Monet. For babies, "a painted canvas is simply a visual pattern," writes a University of Zurich research team led by psychologist Trix Cacchione, "and some patterns appeal to them more than others." Their ... Read More

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Family Planning Subsidies Save Taxpayer Money

April 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

After Congress finally settled on a budget at the 11th hour two weeks ago, it turned out much of the drama had come down to a fine point absurd even by Washington standards: The fate of the entire government, apparently, turned on a dispute over Planned Parenthood. This odd quid pro quo pairing — of national budgets and family planning policy — seems destined to infect much of Congress’ squabbles to come. But what, it seems worth asking, does the one have anything to do with the other? Much, in fact — but not quite in the way Planned Parenthood foes have been ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Breastfeeding Women Viewed as Less Competent

March 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A study emerged out of Oxford University last week suggesting babies who are breastfed end up doing better in school. Yet despite such well-documented benefits for both mother and child, the percentage of American breastfeeding women remains "stagnant and low," according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why are only one-third of American mothers exclusively breastfeeding at three months, and only 43 percent breastfeeding at all at six months? Perhaps because they’ve gotten a sense of how harshly they are being judged. Research just published in the journal ... Read More

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The Bad Daddy Factor

December 10, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
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The fathers weren't supposed to matter. But in the mid-1960s, pharmacologist Gladys Friedler was making all sorts of strange findings. She discovered that when she gave morphine to female rats, it altered the development of their future offspring — rat pups that hadn't even been conceived yet. What's more, even these rats' grandchildren seemed to have problems. In an effort to understand the unexpected result, she made a fateful decision: She would see what happened when she put male rodents on the opiate. So she shot up the rat daddies with morphine, waited a few days, and then mated them ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Health, January-February 2011
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Just a Memory Before You Sleep Forever

July 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Jill and Mike MacGregor like to smile. The Ohio couple smile as they slide the vase of yellow silk flowers to the far side of their dining room table and wait for me to set up my laptop. They smile as they begin their story — about the perfect early days of Jill's second pregnancy, then the complications beginning in her fifth month: the emergency surgery after her appendix burst, the bleeding and contractions a few days later, the weeks of bed rest, and finally, the difficult cesarean section birth of their son, Collin. Then came even harder weeks as the baby suffered one ... Read More

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The New York Times and a Mistaken Infant Mortality Trend

February 18, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
State Comparison

Anecdotes and stories have long been a dominant means of conveying information and establishing principles, especially moral and religious ones. In a science-oriented society that has entered the information age, the public appetite for empirical data about every aspect of life has emerged as a complementary and sometimes competing way of understanding the world and, particularly, governmental decisions. But if policy-relevant data are often widely available, the capacity to effectively analyze and fully comprehend that data is more limited. As presented in the news media, anecdotes and ... Read More

More like this: Health, March-April 2010, Miller-McCune Research Essay
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Visual Cues Make Children More Helpful

August 13, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Do your children behave selfishly? If so, they may be picking up cues from their environment. That's the implication of a startling new study by a British psychologist, which found 18-month-old children were far more likely to help someone in need after they were subtly introduced to the concept of togetherness. The study, just published in the journal Psychological Science, was conducted by psychologist Harriet Over, who is affiliated with both Cardiff University in Wales and the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. She and her co-author, Malinda ... Read More

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Hotter Planet Means More Underweight Babies

June 9, 2009 • By • 4 Comments

To the dismay of environmentalists, climate change remains far down the list of public concerns. The longer heat waves, more intense storms and new habitats for disease-carrying insects will all impact human health, but the warnings haven't registered in the public imagination. Arguably, what's needed is a sympathetic set of victims — utterly innocent creatures, preferably adorable, whose suffering can be directly linked to our actions, or inactions. Well, a research team led by economist Olivier Deschenes has identified just such a population. Babies. If current projections of a warming ... Read More

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