Children Who Are Spanked Have Lower IQs
Children who are spanked have lower IQs worldwide, including in the United States, according to new groundbreaking research by University of New Hampshire professor Murray Straus

"All parents want smart children. This research shows that avoiding spanking and correcting misbehavior in other ways can help that happen," Straus says. "The results of this research have major implications for the well being of children across the globe."

"It is time for psychologists to recognize the need to help parents end the use of corporal punishment and incorporate that objective into their teaching and clinical practice. It also is time for the United States to begin making the advantages of not spanking a public health and child welfare focus, and eventually enact federal no-spanking legislation," he says.

Straus and Mallie Paschall, senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, studied nationally representative samples of 806 children ages 2 to 4, and 704 ages 5 to 9. Both groups were retested four years later.

IQs of children ages 2 to 4 who were not spanked were 5 points higher four years later than the IQs of those who were spanked. The IQs of children ages 5 to 9 years old who were not spanked were 2.8 points higher four years later than the IQs of children the same age who were spanked.

"How often parents spanked made a difference. The more spanking the, the slower the development of the child's mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference," Straus says.

Straus also found a lower national average IQ in nations in which spanking was more prevalent. His analysis indicates the strongest link between corporal punishment and IQ was for those whose parents continued to use corporal punishment even when they were teenagers.

Straus and colleagues in 32 nations used data on corporal punishment experienced by 17,404 university students when they were children.

According to Straus, there are two explanations for the relation of corporal punishment to lower IQ.

First, corporal punishment is extremely stressful and can become a chronic stressor for young children, who typically experience corporal punishment three or more times a week. For many it continues for years. The research found that the stress of corporal punishment shows up as an increase in post-traumatic stress symptoms such as being fearful that terrible things are about to happen and being easily startled. These symptoms are associated with lower IQ.

Second, a higher national level of economic development underlies both fewer parents using corporal punishment and a higher national IQ.

The good news is that the use of corporal punishment has been decreasing worldwide, which may signal future gains in IQ across the globe.

"The worldwide trend away from corporal punishment is most clearly reflected in the 24 nations that legally banned corporal punishment by 2009. Both the European Union and the United Nations have called on all member nations to prohibit corporal punishment by parents. Some of the 24 nations that prohibit corporal punishment by parents have made vigorous efforts to inform the public and assist parents in managing their children. In others little has been done to implement the prohibition," Straus says.

"Nevertheless, there is evidence that attitudes favoring corporal punishment and actual use of corporal punishment have been declining even in nations that have done little to implement the law and in nations which have not prohibited corporal punishment," he says.

Widely considered the foremost researcher in his field, Straus is the co-director of the Family Research Laboratory and professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. He has studied spanking by large and representative samples of American parents since 1969. He is the author of "Beating The Devil Out Of Them: Corporal Punishment In American Families And Its Effects On Children."

He has been president of three scientific societies including the National Council on Family Relations, and has been an advisor to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Much of his research on spanking can be downloaded from http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2.

Straus's research was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Social Cues Confuse Babies/Dogs In a Classic Hiding Game
Are babies and dogs equally intelligent, not as intelligent as thought, or hiding something?

A study by developmental scientists at the University of Iowa and Indiana University challenges the conclusions of two recent studies on how babies and dogs respond to certain social cues. The new findings, published in this Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicate that babies and dogs may not be as clever as the other studies suggest.

Last year, a surprising study led by József Topál of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences showed cues from adults - like nodding, speaking and pointing - cause babies to perform worse in a classic toy-hiding game. The September 2008 report in Science suggested that babies have a unique ability to "read" social cues in a way that misled them in this particular task. Then, in a follow-up paper published earlier this month, the same research team reported that dogs, like babies, are confused by social cues - but wolves aren't. The authors concluded that dogs have become sensitive to social cues from humans due to our shared evolutionary past.

Today's UI and Indiana study used a 10-year-old theory based on how the brain works to provide another explanation for these hiding-and-finding mistakes. Led by John Spencer, professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the UI Delta Center, the work indicates that babies age 10 months or younger are distracted by social cues - they focus on adults' faces and gestures rather than paying attention to where the object is hidden and do not have a unique ability, as the earlier study suggested.

Because dogs show a similar pattern of behavior with social cues present, the computer model used by Spencer's team can explain their behavior, too. Spencer and his colleagues suspect that wolves succeed in this task for the same reasons older babies do - they can form a robust memory for the hiding location. They say this makes particular sense given that the experimenters hid bits of food in the study with wolves.

"You don't often see cases in which the same data are interpreted in such fundamentally different ways," he said. "We say the infants and the dogs are easily distracted by social cues and the wolves are the clever ones; they say the infants and the dogs have a special ability to process social cues, and the wolves are inferior. It's exactly the opposite. It will be interesting to see where that tension takes us."

The studies in question examine a classic error made by babies up to 10 months old. When they repeatedly see an object hidden in one spot, they look for it there. Even when they witness it being hidden somewhere else, they continue to search in the original hiding location. By age 1, babies figure it out. This odd "A-not-B" error is the subject of five decades of research. Discovered by child psychologist Jean Piaget, it's a staple topic in developmental psychology courses and covered in parenting books.

Topál and his team are among the first to investigate how social cues influence babies' and other animals' performance on the task. Spencer considers the studies provocative but has concerns.

"It's against our intuition that social cues seem to hurt the infants' performance - you'd think encouragement from adults would be helpful. And it shows that social cues make a difference," he said. "But we disagree with the explanations put forth that are not grounded in what we know about infants' perceptual and cognitive abilities. This is, after all, a hiding and finding game - attention and memory should matter."

To show how attention and memory matter in this task, Spencer and colleagues ran computer simulations of a theory that was originally published in 1999 by co-author Linda Smith and her colleagues from Indiana University. This theory has explained infants' performance in many different versions of the A-not-B task. In the paper published this Friday in Science, Spencer and colleagues show that when the computer model fails to focus on the hiding event because distracting social cues are present, it shows the same behavior as infants.

"Research indicating that infants or dogs are extraordinary in some way tends to make a splash. We like to think our kids and pets are special, and in many ways they are," he said. "But in our view, there is no special ability at play here. Using neural network models, we demonstrated that other mundane things underlie infants' behavior. Infants and dogs are simply being distracted by social cues in this hiding game."

Spencer and his co-authors, UI postdoctoral researcher Evelina Dineva and Linda B. Smith, a chancellor's professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, propose a particular lesson from the debate. They want to see a move away from explanations that only explain a specific result - how infants interpret social cues in a hide-and-seek game - toward more comprehensive explanations that bring a host of findings together.

"This has been one of the really powerful aspects of our theory - it has unified a diverse array of findings with infants in this task and with older children in related memory tasks. Our paper nicely illustrates a new extension into the social domain," Spencer said. "In our view, this is something to celebrate - that we can bring social cognition together with basic cognitive processes. The downside, of course, is that infants, and by analogy dogs, don't have a special mind-reading ability. For some people, that's an unpleasant pill to swallow."

The Secrets of Cilia
Cilia have become unlikely stars in an unfolding scientific drama that promises new treatments for kidney disease, birth defects, blindness, and neurological and cardiac disorders. They may even be involved in the control of cell division and cancer

At Yale and labs across the country, scientists are proving that cilia, which exist on almost every mammalian cell, are not just tiny oars that move sperm or keep fluids moving over the surface of tissues in the oviduct or the throat and lungs.

These tiny structures play a profound role in sensing the environment outside the cell in many biological processes. Malfunctions of the cilia have now been associated with so many maladies — infertility, obesity, mental deficits, and diseases of the pancreas, liver, heart and kidney — that they have been given their own name: The Ciliopathies.

Joel Rosenbaum's seminal study of cells found in pond scum, have changed our understanding of how biological systems develop from embryos and function in adults. The story illustrates the power of translational research, or how unforeseen insights into our own health can be found within the simplest of organisms.

Rosenbaum wanted to know how proteins in the cytoplasm could travel all the way up to the tip of the cilium, where assembly occurs. "It was a basic biology question involving molecular motors and transport," Rosenbaum says. He and his colleagues came to describe the journey of molecules like riders on a roller coaster, travelling from the interior of the cell up and down the length of flagella. They named this system, which is responsible for flagellar assembly, intraflagellar transport or "IFT." They also found that when genes that code for the IFT transport proteins are mutated, cilia fail to form.

Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD)

And now with easy access to catalogues of genes from a variety of species at their computer, the researchers entered a key gene involved in this intraflagellar transport system in Chlamydomonas into the gene bank and came up with an exact match: a gene found in a mouse model of a disease called polycystic kidney disease (PKD).

"In the lab, we just stared at each other and said, ‘What the hell is going on here?'" Rosenbaum recalls.

Rosenbaum and his colleagues at UMass and Bradley Yoder at the University of Alabama-Birmingham examined the kidneys of mice with PKD by electron microscopy and found their kidney tubules (through which urine flows) lacked cilia — evidence that suggested that this simple appendage might play a role in the disease.

But how, exactly, were the cilia functioning that would cause this devastating disease?A major breakthrough in answering this question was the finding by r

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health then showed that mechanically bending the cilium of the kidney cell would cause calcium to flow into a cell.How did this mechanically-induced calcium flow cause PKD? Somlo and Michael Caplan, Yale professor of cellular and molecular physiology, determined that cilia act like sensors, detecting urine flow through the kidney. When the urine flow decreases, cilia do not bend, calcium does not flow in and a signal is sent to the cell that "not all is right." This in turn signals the formation of more cells. The result is that in mice lacking cilia, excessive cell division causes the cysts in the kidney tubules that are the hallmark of PKD.

Telling the Fetal Heart Right from Left

Dr. Martina Brueckner, associate professor of pediatrics and genetics at Yale and a pediatric cardiologist, found defects in cilia can lead to severe heart defects in children. Brueckner's lab in the late 1990s was investigating why some children are born with hearts on the right side of their chest rather than the correct position on the left. In this condition, the heart and other organs in the developing fetus cannot tell right from left. In severe cases when these organs end up misaligned along the left and right sides of the body, many children die before the age of five.

The culprit for this form of congenital heart disease turned out to be a gene coding for a part of the cilium in embryonic cells. These cilia actually move in an unusual way and direct the flow of fluid from left to right — acting almost like traffic cops by helping direct cells to form organs along a left-right axis. In the case of mice with heart abnormalities closely resembling those found in humans with abnormal left-right development, the cilia were no longer able to direct this left-right flow and the proper body asymmetry was not formed.

"We had no idea when we started where this was going," Brueckner says. She also suspects that cilia found in heart cells may be responsible for orchestrating other important cardiac functions.

Cancer

The insight that malfunctioning cilia might trigger cyst formations has led to some interesting possibilities for research on cancer, which is marked by uncontrollable cell division. Scientists wondered: Was it possible that cancer somehow destroyed cilia to promote proliferation? Several labs are now investigating this possibility. It is based on a 50-year-old observation that cells with cilia do not divide until the cilia are lost.

Mood, Learning, Memory

Now, the profound effects of cilia are being recognized in many other areas of research. For instance, a Yale team led by neuroscientist Pasko Rakic recently described how cilia play a role in creating molecular signals that spur creation of neurons in an area of the brain involved in mood, learning and memory.

Blindness

Ironically, Rosenbaum and his colleagues at UMass are also finding evidence that cilia may indeed be involved in a form of blindness, just as his Ph.D. adviser suggested more than 40 years ago. Rod cells in the retina are crucial to sight. They are formed from cilia, and these cilia play a key role in transporting molecules that repair the rods as they age. If material does not reach these key portions of the rod cells (called "rod outer segments"), they die and blindness can result.

It turns out that the transport mechanism that delivers these key materials to rod cells is the same intraflagellar transport system Rosenbaum studied in the green algae Chlamydomonas. In one form of sight loss, called Joubert's Syndrome, scientists have now identified a genetic defect that causes a blockage at the base of the cilium that prevents transport of these repairing molecules and have identified the particular part of the cilium that is defective. Using gene therapy to correct the defect, scientists have now succeeded in restoring sight in some animals with Joubert's Syndrome.

In 40 years since Rosenbaum began his lonely study of these microscopic marvels, cilia have taken a place among science's most fascinating and rewarding structures