Quantum Units Education

High school students who acknowledge texting while driving are more likely to engage in other risky behaviors, such as riding with a driver who has been drinking alcohol; not wearing a seat belt; or drinking and driving themselves, according to a new study.

“This suggests there is a subgroup of students who may place themselves, their passengers and others on the road at elevated risk for a crash-related injury or fatality by engaging in multiple risky MV (motor vehicle) behaviors,” wrote the authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

The study

Researchers analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2011 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which asked high school students whether they had texted while driving in the 30 days previous. Nearly half of the 8,505 students aged 16 or older who answered that question reported doing so. The survey also queried participants on behaviors such as wearing a seat belt or riding in a car with a driver who had been drinking.

Full story of teens taking risks at CNN Health

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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

Scientists from Royal Holloway University have found that when white Caucasians are under the illusion that they have a dark skin, their racial bias changes in a positive way.

In the study that was funded by the European Research Council and published today in Cognition, the team used the tried and tested Rubber Hand Illusion, where participants are asked to look at a fake hand being touched, while at the same time, the experimenter touches the participants’ own hand which is hidden out of view.

The combination of seeing the touch on the rubber hand and feeing touch on your hand, creates the illusion that the fake hand is now part of your body and has replaced your own hand.

The team was keen to take this method one step further by testing whether people can experience a hand of a different skin colour and whether this would change possible racial biases.

Using Caucasian participants, the scientists tested their implicit attitudes towards people with dark skin before using a dark-skinned rubber hand to make them feel as if this was their own hand. They then tested their racial attitudes again after the experiment.

Full story of skin color and racial bias at Science Daily

Photos courtesy of and copyright PhotoPin, http://photopin.com/

Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

People who are unhappy in their romantic relationship spend more time during a disagreement thinking about how angry and frustrated they are, but happy couples coordinate their thoughts so that when one partner has many emotional thoughts, the other has few, according to a new study recently published online in the National Communication Association’s journal, Communication Monographs.

“Among happy couples, when one partner is thinking a lot about disagreement or anger, the other instead may be thinking about how to understand his or her partner or how to resolve the conflict,” said lead investigator Anita Vangelisti, Ph.D., professor of communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

The findings, Vangelisti said, show that people’s thoughts during a conflict situation reflect and shape their own relationship satisfaction and can even affect how happy their partner is.

Vangelisti and her colleagues studied 71 young unmarried heterosexual couples in Texas, who had been together an average of three years. Each person was encouraged to privately express his or her thoughts aloud to a researcher while in a separate room from the other partner and while communicating about a topic of conflict with the partner via a computer chat program. The chat program showed the person’s typed messages in one section and the partner’s replies and messages in another section, but did not display the person’s vocalized thoughts, which were tape recorded.

Full story of couples disagreements at Science Daily

Photos courtesy of and copyright PhotoPin, http://photopin.com/

Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) second annual National Prevention Week begins on Sunday, May 12. This national health observance, which continues through May 18, aims to increase public awareness of, and action around, substance abuse and mental health issues. This year’s theme – Your voice. Your choice. Make a difference. – emphasizes that the choices we make each day are important and have a real effect on our health and the well-being of our families and communities. Each day of National Prevention Week 2013 has a unique focus to recognize states’ and communities’ prevention efforts and highlight multiple facets of behavioral health:

May 12: Prevention and Cessation of Tobacco Use
May 13: Prevention of Underage Drinking
May 14: Prevention of Prescription Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Use
May 15: Prevention of Alcohol Abuse
May 16: Suicide Prevention
May 17: Promotion of Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Well-being
May 18: (Communities identify an issue of their choice)

Our nation’s states and communities provide many evidence-based programs and strategies promoting mental and emotional well-being and preventing substance abuse. SAMHSA applauds their excellent work in showing that prevention works. As a result of states’ and communities’ concerted prevention efforts, important progress has been made in many areas, such as in the decline of underage binge and heavy drinking rates between 2002 and  2011¹.  However, much work remains to be done.

Full story on national prevention week at DrugFree.org

Photos courtesy of and copyright PhotoPin, http://photopin.com/

Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

Kids don’t all learn at the same pace, or in the same way. Extra tutoring doesn’t always help either, but for some it helps a lot. Why?

Researchers, publishing this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, believe the answer is in the brain. By looking at the structures and wiring of children’s brains, they’ve developed a method of predicting who will benefit most from tutoring.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you will be seeing brain scans in every school.

“What we’ve done is much more modest, in terms of trying to understand what are the systems that underlie individual differences in response to math tutoring,” said Vinod Menon, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and senior author of the study.
Methods

The study looked at 24 children in third grade, ages 8 to 9, which is a critical period for gaining basic math skills. Menon’s previous research, published in 2011, found that third-graders demonstrate superior problem-solving abilities compared to second-graders, and that this is also associated with brain changes.

Full story of children’s brains predictions at CNN Health

Photos courtesy of and copyright PhotoPin, http://photopin.com/

Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education