--Original published at Manami PSY105blog

Summary

A journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by the University of Michigan suggests that 5 to 10-year-old children have the same habits of saving/spending money called “tightwads” and “spendthrifts” as well as the adults do. Firstly, they predicted that children’s tendency of consuming can be measured based on their feeling whether they like to spend money or not. In addition, it was expected that children’s skill of decision making to shop can be educated and improved by understanding when and how children have stable consuming reactions.

In the study if children’s consuming behavior, 225 children at age of 5 through 10-year-old were assigned with almost equal number of boys and girls. Children under age 5 were assumed to lack the ability to explain their feelings accurately. One of participants’ parents also took a questionnaire about the spending/saving tendencies of their children.

There were five tasks for each child participant who assigned randomly. The first task called “ST-TW scales” showed a child two toy characters that said things “I feel mostly good when I spend money” and “I feel mostly bad when I spend money” twelve times. The child was told to choose the one that is more like his/her feelings. In addition, the researchers conducted two tasks to measure inhibitory control and financial understanding using their prior understanding of math. In “Sensitive to opportunity costs”, they asked children to pick from two options: did they want to save money for a new toy as the birthday gift or buy a candy? These four tasks were given participants in random order. Final tasks called “Observed money saving/spending behavior” was conducted to observe whether the child spent a given dollar for the bag of toys or take it home or not.

In the results, researchers found only 5-year-old children have tendencies of money-related behaviors based on their feelings as well as adults do. It was also clear that parents spending/saving habits relate to children’s habits according to ST-TW scales. Besides this, 51 percent of children who decided to spend a dollar for their toy bags had high score of ST-TW scale, which shows they are likely to be spendthrifts from their desire. The researchers also indicate that some children spend money without feeling of pain beyond desire what they want in their journal.

In addition, there were several limitations. For example, although first task’s pictures had emotional words such as happy and boring regarding spending habits, they should have focused on impulsive or careless consuming. Moreover, the research cannot be generalized because they have only 200 results whose participants were mostly white due to the location where the research conducted from the limitations in the journal.

In conclusion, people have spending/saving habits since they were only 5-year-olds. The result may help to design the financial education to children by focusing on how emotions influence on their consuming behaviors.

Citations:

Lisa, W. (2018, September 3). A Spendthrift 5-Year-Old? Researchers Say Yes. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-spendthrift-5-year-old-researchers-say-yes- 1536026460?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=9

Craig, E.S. Susan, A. G. Scotto, I. R. (2017, December 28). Spendthrifts and Tightwads in Childhood: Feelings about Spending Predict Children’s Financial Decision Making. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bdm.2071?mod=article_inline

Reflection

In this media production assignment, I focused on five critical questions to choose what is important contents. It was not difficult to figure out whether original research journal tells readers answers of questions accurately thanks to the previous assignment: scholar research critique. I suggested what the study found and how it is measured at first because the result that little kids have similar consuming responses to adults especially their parents have is beneficial to improve financial education. I empathized the associations between “ST-TW scale” and “Observation money spending/saving behavior” because it was the most useful result to support researcher’s prediction as well as the news article, “A Spendthrift 5-Year-Old? Researchers Say Yes,” by Lisa Ward.

I also did not include the detail information of other tasks because they did not have beneficial results and the correlation with the children spending/saving tendencies based on their emotions directly. I added information about participants and limitations of the experiment which news article does not mention by following to some critical questions: how do they selected and assigned participants and are the conclusions generalized to the right populations. It is important to explain why under 5-year-old children were not be assigned and there was no diversity of participants to be generalized. I learned people cannot know what research found in detail sometimes by just reading news articles, although they can catch the brief concept of the research and what was the result. In addition, it was not easy to answer all critical questions clearly and catch attention of readers. It was good to know that even original research journal has a lack of information to answer questions.

--Original published at jennacampanellipsych

Summary

Therapy has been the go-to solution for people with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, but if is as effective as you might think? In media, therapy can be seen as helpful toward people who are struggling, but researchers Ellen Driessen, Steven Hollon, Claudi Bockting, Pim Cuijpers, and Erick Turner looked more into how therapy is reflected in the media vs actual results and the answers were surprising. They studied past trials and found out that the effect of treatments such as therapy were 37% less effective then the media portrayed. Since they were studying past trials only, they cannot confirm that these trials were using the correct methods. Yet they are confirming that there are indications of publication bias in the media regarding therapy’s for effective for depression. All in all, they are saying they believe that therapy is not as effective as media may lead you to believe, but they are not stating these are facts. It is up to you to decide whether you believe it or not.

Reflection

While writing my summary, I found it difficult to put myself in someone’s shoes that has never been exposed to this information. From all the research I have done on this topic, it was tough for me to write about it brand newly for someone who has never researched these studies before. It must be hard for journalists to step out of their own minds and beliefs to write about topics for anyone to read and then make their own assumption unbiasedly.  I chose to include the basic top finding of the scholarly article, because it was what made the most sense to me and was clearest on the answer to my main question. My summary had more data than the pop-culture article, and I tried to not state that these findings were the 100% facts, because the researchers themselves said that these findings were just indicators. I felt that the author of the pop-culture article stated the findings as if they were the truth and you had to start believing that, but it is up to your own interpretation of the results. I learned from the pop-culture article journalists can really twist the information to sound however they want it to. Most likely, the regular person reading Cosmo would read this article and just believe it without extra research. This article just turns out to be true, but if it was false, false information could start spreading around. The journalists from the scholarly article have a hard job, having to go through every detail and explain it. They had to account and describe every mistake they could of made on the findings, and that cannot be easy. For me, the scholarly article was very, very hard to read and understand but I trust that it was well done.

Sources Cited

Narins, Elizabeth. “Therapy Probably Isn’t the Best Way to Treat Depression.”    Cosmopolitan, Cosmopolitan, 5 Oct. 2017, www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/ a47087/the-best-way-to-treat-depression-isnt-therapy/.

Driessen, Ellen, et al. “Does Publication Bias Inflate the Apparent Efficacy of Psychological Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of US National Institutes of Health-Funded Trials.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, 30 Sept. 2015, journals.plos.org/plosone/ article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0137864.

--Original published at RachelsCollegeBlog

Project

Diffuse intrinsic pontin glioma (DIPG), spreads through and around the brainstem. It is also the leading cause of cancer death for children. The reason it is so deadly is because of the difficulty of getting the needed medicine through the blood brain barrier, while not causing the medicine to go through the entire body causing toxicity in the body. A new technique, however, is being developed. This technique is a focused ultrasound combined with microbubble-mediated intranasal delivery (FUSIN). This technique utilizes nerve pathways in the nose, olfactory and trigeminal nerve, which allows for medicine to pass through the blood brain barrier as it also uses a focused ultrasound to better localize the medicine.

The technique is still in the testing stages as they are experimenting the technique on mice. The mice are distributed into five groups, each testing a different technique, and also looking at the consequences of each. The sample groups are researching the distribution of the solution after the administration of the medicines, comparing the localization abilities of intravenous, which is the techniques being used today which give the medicine through a vein in the arm, and intranasal techniques which is being utilized in FUSIN. They are also looking at the short-term effects of the techniques and how feasible it is to utilize the techniques.

The results of the experiments expressed that FUSIN did a better job with localizing the medicine than either intranasally by itself and intravenously. They also found that when using the technique of intranasally injecting medicine, that there was no vascular or tissue damage. This means that FUSIN did not cause any short-term consequences or safety concerns. They were able to determine the localization ability by measuring the radioactivity of the body using folds. They also injected fluorescence into the brain stem and nasal nerve pathways, this showed the effect that the medicine may have had on the brain and nerve pathways. The researchers measured the intensity of the fluorescence using arbitrary unit.

There are however, some limitations of this study. The study has not looked at the long-term effects of the research as they only have tested for the impacts just one hour after the study was conducted. The parameters that were used when testing FUSIN were from a previous experiment, so they could be a little off. They also have a lack of data evaluating the level of toxicity of the injection of the solutions. They are also, right now, only able to make these conclusions for mice because that is their sample population.

References

Washington University in St. Louis. (2018, September 4). Focused delivery for brain cancers:Imaging, aerosols and pediatric neuro oncology come together to fight tumors. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 25, 2018 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180904164645.htm

Dezhuang Ye, Xiaohui Zhang, Yimei Yue, Ramesh Raliya, Pratim Biswas, Sara Taylor,     Yuan-chuan,Tai, Joshua B. Rubin, Yongjian Liu, Hong Chen., (2018). Focused Ultrasound Combined with Microbubble-mediated Intranasal Delivery of Gold Nanoclusters to the Brain. Journal of Controlled Release, 286: 145

Links

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180904164645.htm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168365918304140

Reflection of Project

It was not very difficult to write my summary, and I did not have to leave out any information because my original article was long. I was able to answer some of the five critical questions, including the how they operationalized their variables, radioactivity and fluorescence. There population was randomly selected because they are mice from a breeder and they are randomly sent from a group of other mice. I also talked about the population generalization. Though, the scholarly article did not talk about random assignment, and there was not enough information because there is a lack of information on the method of assignment to groups.

Some similarities that are occurring between my article and the original article was summarizing the experiment as well as give a small background of the experiment. Both my article and the original article talks about the main reason for the experiment, cure DIPG. My article states, the limitations of the study while the original article did not. The pop culture article only answered one of the five critical questions and that was random selection. In my article, however, I included three of the critical questions. The original article included so quotes from the primary researcher and mine did not.

I learned that through this process that writing about psychology research can be a very difficult task. The pop culture article can depend on the scholarly article, when it comes to the amount of information used. My scholarly article was not written the best as it did not include all five of the critical questions, but it gave specific information. The pop culture article was given at least three of the critical questions, but the writer did not use them. Every piece of writing will include all of the scientific information but doesn’t not describe the experiment. My article was fairly easy to write because of all of the background information and the other two articles. This tells me that every piece of writing has its own difficultly and you may not be able to include all of the needed information.