An Ethics Feature in the May-June issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine describes the lessons learned as the Madras Medical Group transformed itself into a pharma-free clinic.  The small, private clinic of five physicians no longer has contact with detailers – representatives from the pharmaceutical industry who visit physicians to educate them about medications. The clinic also refuses drug samples, gifts and lunches from pharmaceutical companies.

Alice C. Gray

Pharma-free medical practices refuse gifts, lunches, educational programs and samples from pharmaceutical industries.

The corresponding author of the paper, David V. Evans, practiced at the clinic and is now an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Washington. He and his colleagues at the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy and at University of Oregon Health & Sciences University  examined the clinic’s successful methods to change a culture ingrained in medicine.

“Detailing – selling drugs by educating physicians –  was first reported as a problem in the late 1950’s,” Evans said.  Since then, extensive research indicates that detailing can encourage physicians to prescribe medicines that may not be appropriate, necessary or cost-effective for patients, and that may pose safety concerns.

Academic medical centers, such as medical schools and teaching hospitals,  Evans noted, have critically looked at detailing,  have advocated against it nationally, and have set institutional policies prohibiting or limiting student, resident and faculty contact with detailers .

However, he added, three-fourths of the country’s physicians practice in the community, where interactions between physicians and pharmaceutical representatives are still commonplace.  Although some states have curbed contact between drug reps and physicians, most physicians in small, independent practices have little guidance on how to become pharma-free, the authors of the paper observed.

“Changing this situation is not easy, but with a deliberate and thoughtful approach it can occur,” Evans said.  Although his clinic’s personnel were not unanimous in wanting to go pharma-free, approaching it in smaller steps helped to decrease dissent.

First, those championing a pharma-free clinic quantified the presence of detailers and their marketing strategies.  This data helped convince the physicians and staff that a problem existed.  The staff and physicians then voiced their concerns. These included doing without prescription samples for patients.

The clinic then scheduled sessions for their health professionals to keep current about medications by reviewing rigorous scientific studies. To replace the pharma-sponsored lunches, the clinic held its own regular lunches for their clinicians and staff.  Clinic staff told patients about the change, and news media in the local area informed the nearby public.  The clinic also created a chart comparing average monthly costs of many heavily marketed drugs with first-line, less-expensive or generic drugs, if such alternatives were available.

“Becoming pharma-free at our clinic was not an overnight thing,” said Evans. “Cultural change takes time.  Eventually even the initial dissenters in the clinic came to feel good about the change, and it became a point of pride.”

Now, as a UW medical school faculty member who teaches medical students and residents, Evans, along with colleague Pam Pentin, educate future physicians on effectively managing drug detailers, including how to turn all of them away.

“One of the concerns,” Evans said, “is that medical students and residents may come up through their education without ever having interacted with a drug representative.  It’s important to teach medical students and residents how detailers operate in the real world. At the UW, family medicine residents learn about detailer strategies during their third-year practice management curriculum.  This year’s graduating residents will be the first to have taken the training.”

As of 2009, there was one drug sales representative for every eight physicians.  Despite increased scrutiny and regulation, Evans and his colleagues noted that the percentage of primary care physicians with industrial relationships remains high at 84 percent.  Evans explained that most drug reps are well trained and personable. They use marketing strategies time-tested in the social sciences.

“It’s a sophisticated operation. For example, before they go in to see physicians,” he said, “detailers sit in their cars data-mining on their electronic devices. They find out the physicians’ prescribing patterns from databases in which the patients’ names and other identifying information have been removed. They know how much a doctor has prescribed of drug A, and will either thank the doctor or encourage him or her to prescribe drug B instead.”

Beginning in August 2013, as part of the Affordable Care Act of 2013, a national web site will contain information for patients on the monetary value of what individual physicians accept from pharmaceutical firms.  The Physician Payment Sunshine Act will require manufacturers of drugs, devices and biologics to report all payments to physicians and teaching hospitals to a public web database.

What else can patients do to mitigate undesirable effects of drug marketing?  Evans advises asking their physicians about the issue. He suggests refusing drug samples if they are offered. Patients can also become aware of the effects of drug advertising on their own treatment choices.

The authors of the paper, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Lessons Learned from a Pharma-Free Practice Transformation,” wrote that they hope their description of how a clinic changed its practice “contributes to the ongoing discussion of the potential clinical influences and the ethics of the relationship between practicing physicians and pharmaceutical marketing.”

The other authors were Daniel M. Hartung and Denise Beasley of the Department of Pharmacy Practice, Oregon State University College of Pharmacy in Portland. The senior author was Lyle J. Fagnan, a physician in the Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network in the Department of Family Practice, Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine.

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The externally peer-reviewed analysis of the clinic transformation received no funding and the researchers declared no conflicts of interest.

But new research by University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker argues that the tea party ideology owes more to the paranoid politics associated with the John Birch Society — and even the infamous Ku Klux Klan — than to traditional American conservatism.

Parker is the author, with fellow UW political scientist Matt Barreto, of a new book titled “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America,” published this spring by Princeton University Press.

At the heart of their book is a nationwide telephone survey overseen by Parker in early 2011 of 1,500 adults — equal numbers of men and women — across 13 geographically diverse states. The results starkly illustrate where tea partyers and true conservatives part ideological ways.

Responses place tea party members far to the right of the mainstream Republican conservatism of Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and even George W. Bush — viewing President Obama as a faux citizen, a Muslim and socialist agitator, bent on America’s demise.

“Tea party conservatives believe in some conservative principles, to be sure, but they are different from more mainstream conservatives in at least one important respect,” Parker said. “True conservatives aren’t paranoid; tea party conservatives are.”

Asked flat-out if they think President Obama is “destroying the country,” only 6 percent of non-tea party conservatives agreed, a number that rose to 36 percent among all conservatives regardless of tea party affiliations. By contrast, 71 percent of self-identified tea party supporters thought this extreme statement true.

“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Parker, a UW associate professor of political science. “It’s no secret that tea party conservatives view President Obama with such contempt, but I am the first to document it empirically.”

Other survey results include:

• Three-quarters of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama’s policies are politically socialist while only 40 percent of non-tea party conservatives held that view.

• Twenty-seven percent of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama is a practicing Muslim, while 18 percent of non-tea party conservatives took that view.

• Similarly, 46 percent of non-tea party conservatives allowed that President Obama is a practicing Christian, while only 27 percent of tea party conservatives believed it so.
• Was President Obama born in the United States? A majority — 55 percent — of conservatives allowed that this was true, but of tea party conservatives, only 40 percent agreed.

And perhaps not surprisingly, fully three-quarters — 75 percent — of tea partyers said they wish President Obama’s policies to fail, compared with 32 percent of conservatives.

Parker called the tea party a continuation of what political scientist Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.

Parker said, “Consider me a skeptic when tea party supporters call upon a conservative tradition to which they have but a slight claim.”

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For information or interviews, contact Parker at 510-285-7770 or csparker@uw.edu, or Barreto at 206-569-4259 or mbarreto@uw.edu.

Flickr user Eddie~S

Anti-bullying poster on the front door of a Berea, Ohio, school.

The research team analyzed responses collected in a 2010 Washington state survey of more than 24,000 public school students in grades eight through 12. The study found that 14 percent, 11 percent and 9 percent of male students in grades 8, 10, and 12 respectively reported being bullied because of perceived sexual orientation. For female students in those grades, the numbers were 11 percent, 10 percent and 6 percent respectively.

“These findings underscore the need for early prevention efforts before 10^th grade,” wrote the authors.

Being bullied because of perceived sexual orientation was linked to lower quality of life scores and increased the odds of depressed mood or consideration of suicide. Moreover, the size of these associations was greater than being bullied for other reasons

”Youth at this age group are extremely vulnerable to the effects of bullying when they are perceived rightly or wrongly to be gay, lesbian or bisexual. The effects are profound for many youth struggling with issues of identity and self-esteem,” said Patrick, principal investigator of the study.

“Bully-prevention or harm-reduction programs must address bullying because of perceived sexual orientation. All youths are entitled to safe school environments and support is essential for those who are most vulnerable to being bullied because of perceived sexual orientation,” the study concluded.

Read the article in the American Journal of Public Health.

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Getty Images

Illustration of the Bull-leaping Fresco from the Great Palace at Knossos, Crete

DNA analysis is unearthing the origins of the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established the first advanced Bronze Age civilization in present-day Crete. The findings suggest they arose from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier.

The British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans in the early 1900’s named the Minoans after a legendary Greek king, Minos. Based on similarities between Minoan artifacts and those from Egypt and Libya, Evans proposed that the Minoan civilization founders migrated into the area from North Africa. Since then, other archaeologists have suggested that the Minoans may have come from other regions, possibly Turkey, the Balkans, or the Middle East.

Now, a team of researchers in the United States and Greece has used mitochondrial DNA analysis of Minoan skeletal remains to determine the likely ancestors of these ancient people.

Mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of cells, contain their own DNA, or genetic code. Because mitochondrial DNA is passed down from mothers to their children via the human egg, it contains information about maternal ancestry.

Getty Images

One of the buildings in Knossos restored by British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans. Knossos was the major civil center of the Minoans.

Results published May 14 in Nature Communications suggest that the Minoan civilization arose from the population already living in Bronze Age Crete. The findings indicate that these people probably were descendents of the first humans to reach Crete about 9,000 years ago, and that they have the greatest genetic similarity with modern European populations.

Read the scientific paper.

Dr. George Stamatoyannopoulos, University of Washington professor of medicine and genome sciences, is the paper’s senior author. He believes that the data highlight the importance of DNA analysis as a tool for understanding human history.

“About 9,000 years ago,” he noted, “there was an extensive migration of Neolithic humans from the regions of Anatolia that today comprise parts of Turkey and the Middle East. At the same time, the first Neolithic inhabitants reached Crete.”

“Our mitochondrial DNA analysis shows that the Minoan’s strongest genetic relationships are with these Neolithic humans, as well as with ancient and modern Europeans,” he explained.

“These results suggest the Minoan civilization arose 5,000 years ago in Crete from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier,” he said. “Our data suggest that the Neolithic population that gave rise to the Minoans also migrated into Europe and gave rise to modern European peoples.”

Stamatoyannopoulos, who directs the UW Markey Molecular Medicine Center and who formerly headed the UW Division of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine, added, “Genetic analyses are playing in increasingly important role and predicting and protecting human health. Our study underscores the importance of DNA not only in helping us to have healthier futures, but also to understand our past.”

Stamatoyannopoulos and his research team analyzed samples from 37 skeletons found in a cave in Crete’s Lassithi plateau and compared them with mitochondrial DNA sequences from 135 modern and ancient human populations. The Minoan samples revealed 21 distinct mitochondrial DNA variations, of which six were unique to the Minoans and 15 were shared with modern and ancient populations. None of the Minoans carried mitochondrial DNA variations characteristic of African populations.

Further analysis showed that the Minoans were only distantly related to Egyptian, Libyan, and other North African populations. The Minoan shared the greatest percentage of their mitochondrial DNA variation with European populations, especially those in Northern and Western Europe.

When plotted geographically, shared Minoan mitochondrial DNA variation was lowest in North Africa and increased progressively across the Middle East, Caucasus, Mediterranean islands, Southern Europe, and mainland Europe. The highest percentage of shared Minoan mitochondrial DNA variation was found with Neolithic populations from Southern Europe.

The analysis also showed a high degree of sharing with the current population of the Lassithi plateau and Greece. In fact, the maternal genetic information passed down through many generations of mitochondria is still present in modern-day residents of the Lassithi plateau.

Co-authors of the study are Jeffery R. Hughey of Hartnell College; Peristera Paschou of Democritus University of Thrace; Petros Drineas of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Manolis Michalodimitrakis of the University of Crete; and Donald Mastropaolo, Dimitra M. Lotakis, Patrick A. Navas, and John A. Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington. The study was partially supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (5T32 GM007454), as well as from private funding.

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The study also revealed that participants, all of whom were white, were less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously against companies who had diversity programs.

Workplace diversity programs are usually developed by human resource departments to foster a more inclusive environment for employees, but aren’t typically tested for their effectiveness. Nonetheless, their existence has been used in courtrooms as evidence that companies treat employees fairly.

“Our fear is that companies may prematurely stop thinking about diversity among their workers because they’ve credentialed themselves with these programs,” said Cheryl Kaiser, lead author and a UW associate professor of psychology. “Our findings suggest that diversity programs can be window dressing – even those that do very little to increase diversity may still be perceived as effective.”

Many diversity programs seem rational, she said. “By their design and goals, we’re inclined to assume they would be successful. The catch is that since very few are tested for efficacy, these rational assumptions may not actually map onto the reality.”

In their study, published in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kaiser and her coauthors point to a report that examined 1,000 federal civil rights legal decisions and found that “judges increasingly showed deference to organizations’ diversity management structures” as “evidence of an organization’s compliance with civil rights law.”

“Some judges assume that diversity programs effectively address employees’ complaints, without questioning whether those programs work,” Kaiser said.

She and Brenda Major, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and their coauthors studied whether diversity programs can simply serve as a cosmetic short-cut that convinces others that companies value diversity and treat employees equally. The researchers used surveys to measure participants’ perceptions of companies’ fairness toward their minority employees.

The researchers found that a hypothetical company that had a “diversity statement” rather than a “mission statement” led participants to believe the company had treated women and minorities fairly, even when they saw evidence that the company’s actual hiring, promotion and salary practices disadvantaged these groups.

For instance, after seeing that women who were identically qualified as men were disproportionately passed over for interviews at a company, participants were less willing to support litigation against the company when they saw that it offered diversity training.

In another part of the study, researchers told participants with corporate management experience to list what their companies do to increase either diversity or environmental sustainability. Participants who thought about their companies’ diversity practices took minorities’ racism allegations against the company less seriously than did managers who thought about the environment.

“Diversity structures often increase minorities’ and women’s sense of belonging within organizations,” Major said. “Nonetheless, we think that diversity structures also can create an illusion of fairness in that they impede the ability to detect discrimination and generate a harsher response against members of minority groups who claim to experience discrimination.”

The researchers recommend that companies look at their records to see if diversity and mentoring programs have led to changes in the hiring, promotion and retention of women and minorities.

“They can learn more by mining their own data rather than assuming that because a program is there that it works,” Kaiser said. “If companies examine diversity-related outcomes, they will be in a better position to recognize diversity approaches that are successful and those that are not.”

The research was funded with a National Science Foundation grant to Kaiser and Major. Additional funding came from a UW Mary Gates Research Scholarship to coauthor Ines Jurcevic, now at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Other coauthors are Tessa Dover, at UCSB; Jenessa Shapiro, at UCLA; and Laura Brady, a graduate student at UW.

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For more information, contact Kaiser at ckaiser@uw.edu.

UW

Amanda Lock Swarr, UW associate professor in gender, women and sexuality studies

Amanda Lock Swarr will deliver the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity’s ninth annual Samuel E. Kelly Distinguished Faculty Lecture on Thurs., April 18. A reception will be held at 5 p.m. at the Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center followed by the lecture at 6:30 p.m. in the Alder Hall Commons Auditorium.

Swarr, a UW associate professor in gender, women and sexuality studies, will discuss the intersections among gender, sexuality and race in her talk, “Racing the Boundaries of Gender and Sexuality: Rethinking Apartheid and Transitional South Africa.”

Drawing on 15 years of research in South Africa, Swarr will ask why some South Africans who define themselves as transsexual, gay and lesbian have been subjected to forced and botched sex reassignment procedures, legalized discrimination and community ostracism, while others have received state-funded medical treatment and legal support.

The topic is an extension from her 2012 book, “Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa.” Her current book project is titled “Forcing Sex: Violent Contestations over South African Masculinities.”

Learn more about Swarr on the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity’s website.

The Kelly lecture is free and open to the public. To register, contact cpromad@uw.edu or call 206-685-9594.

Built “ecologies,” resource integration subject of lecture April 4

The lecture from 6 to 7 p.m., Thursday, April 4, in Kane 210 is free and open to the public, but advanced registration is requested.

Speaking on the subject of “Built Ecologies: Regionalism and Resource Integration in the Built World” will be Thomas Knittel, vice president and project designer with HOK, a design, architecture, engineering and planning firm with offices in Seattle and 23 other cities.

Drawing on research and project examples from Brazil and Haiti to China, he will discuss how new design strategies and solutions, to be more resilient, must be integrated with sustainably produced regional resources—and how design informed by nature provides insights, from the nano to the macro, toward building a sustainable future locally and globally.

UW wins sixth consecutive regional cybersecurity competition
The University of Washington has won the 2013 Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, extending its undefeated streak to all six years of the competition.

In competition March 23-24 at Highline Community College, teams of students defended a fictional computer network against attacks conducted by security industry professionals. The event helps students develop teamwork and project management skills and is part of the curriculum for the UW’s Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity.

A dozen teams competed this year, including one from UW Bothell, which finished in fourth place. Students on the UW Seattle team were from the Informatics Program at the UW Information School and the Computer Science and Engineering Department. The national competition will be April 19-21 in San Antonio, Texas.

2013 Autism Awareness Month: Public events in Seattle and Tacoma
The UW Autism Center will host a series of public lectures throughout April, which is Autism Awareness Month. The free lectures, to be held in Seattle and Tacoma, include:

• “Making Friends: Supporting Peer Interactions for Students with ASD,” April 3 in Tacoma
• “Ask the Experts: A Multidisciplinary Panel Discussion,” April 4 in Seattle
• “Off to College? The Needs of Students with ASD after High School,” April 16 in Tacoma
• “All I Really Need is an iPad, Right? Myths and Realities of iPads for Families of Individuals with ASD,” April 18 in Seattle and April 30 in Tacoma
• “Get your Zzzzzz’s! Strategies for Addressing Sleep Problems in Children and Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum,” April 25 in Seattle

More lectures are on the full schedule, along with the times and locations. To register, call 1-877-408-UWAC or email uwautism@uw.edu.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests a suspect.

Jail stays and costs increase dramatically when federal immigration authorities request that inmates be held under what are called “detainer requests,” according to research by University of Washington sociologist Katherine Beckett.

A detainer request is how Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security, informs local law enforcement authorities of its intention to assume custody of an individual when he or she is released from jail. The requests are meant to lengthen an inmate’s stay by no longer than 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays.

But in a research study commissioned by the Northwest Defenders Association, Beckett, a UW professor of sociology and law, and graduate student Heather Evans, studied records of about 33,000 King County jail bookings associated with releases in 2011.

Using a statistical regression method, they found that detainer requests had the effect of extending jail stays by an average of 161 percent and cost the county about $3 million each year in additional jail costs.

They also found that nearly two-thirds of the people flagged in this manner by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were not charged with a felony offense related to their booking, and about one in eight were charged with no crime at all. Beckett said this casts doubt on the government contention that detainer requests mainly target people with serious criminal offenses and histories.

Beckett, who is with the UW’s Law, Societies and Justice program, said King County jails are not holding otherwise releasable inmates for longer than 48 hours, but that detainers affect the decisions made by people under arrest. People aware that immigration enforcement is pursuing them might plead guilty to buy time to make family and housing arrangements, she said, and may not post bail, fearing they’d never get the money back.

“So it’s not that people are being held longer than the rules allow, but rather that their decisions about the criminal matter are affected by the presence of a detainer,” Beckett said, adding that court decisions regarding pre-trial release may also be affected by the presence of detainer requests.

The researchers also determined that federal detainer requests have a powerful impact on the Hispanic community, with more than one-fourth of all King County jail inmates identified as Hispanic being transferred to federal custody upon release.

The research proves timely, Beckett said, because the King County Council is preparing to revisit and possibly amend its ordinance dictating how the county will respond to such requests.

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For more information, contact Beckett at 206-543-4461 or kbeckett@uw.edu. A copy of the research is available online.

“The Afterlife of Empire” was published in November 2012 by the University of California Press.

Jordanna Bailkin is a University of Washington professor of history and author of the new book “The Afterlife of Empire.” She answered a few questions about the book for UW Today.

Q: What is the central concept behind this book?

A: I wanted to understand how Britain and Britons were affected by losing their empire, and how they were changed — often in deeply personal ways — by this process of decolonization.

Q: Why do you use what you describe as the “spectral” term “afterlife”?

A: One of the arguments of the book is that the relationships that were forged in imperial days were not necessary brought to an end when formal imperialism declined. Instead, they could be galvanized and even intensified. Ironically, decolonization often brought Britons into even closer contact with their former colonial subjects.

Q: You discuss the relationship between empire’s end and the beginnings of social welfare, stating parenthetically, “Indeed, empire’s final gasp could be said to take place in the domain of welfare.” Would you explain?

A: The rise of the welfare state and the decline of the empire are two of the stock themes of 20th-century British history. But they have always been treated as separate chapters, as if they were unrelated.

I wanted to write this book partly as a way to explore how decolonization and welfare were actually intertwined. Some of the final projects of the empire took place in the realm of development, which we might see as a distinctive form of welfare. But more specifically, I wanted to understand how some of the key domains of welfare — mental health, education, child care — were shaped by British perceptions of the demands of decolonization.

Q: You state that decolonization changed the lives of Brits whether they knew it or not at the time. How does the post-imperial Britain of the 21st century differ from the Britain that held an empire?

Jordanna Bailkin

A: The history of decolonization is usually told through its diplomatic and military details, as a matter of state. But I think it’s important to remember that ordinary individuals, too, were transformed through this process. Their everyday routines, social interactions and family structures were changed by decolonization as well.Just to take one example, as Ghana and Nigeria became independent, tens of thousands of West Africans traveled to Britain for higher education. Frequently, they placed their children in private foster care arrangements with white, working-class women. There were numerous long-term effects of these deep — and deeply complicated — relationships, including different types of child care resources that were provided by the state for African and British children. This is just one of the ways in which the afterlife of empire persisted for decades, and into the present day itself.

Q: Finally, what do you hope readers will take away from this book?

A: I hope to encourage readers to think about this charged term of “decolonization,” and what it actually meant. I suggest that decolonization was taking place not only in the former colonies but also in Britain itself, where it reshaped the structures of the welfare state.

Thus, it was a process that bore intimately on the social lives and experiences of ordinary Britons and migrants. But, ultimately, rather than fixing a single definition of decolonization as a diplomatic, military, cultural or social phenomenon, my work aims to recapture the cacophony about what decolonization meant for different historical actors.

• “The Afterlife of Empire” was published in November 2012 by the University of California Press, part of its Berkeley Series in British Studies.

Soulumination

Remembrance photographers use a documentary style to capture timeless images.

Six days before her due date, a pregnant Seattle woman learned during a routine doctor’s appointment that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. She had lost her son to a virus that can be deadly to fetuses.

The mother decided to deliver him naturally, rather than via caesarean section. Then she faced another decision: Would she like a professional photographer to capture the few moments she would have with her stillborn son?

A photo shoot with a dead baby may sound morbid, especially in a culture that tends to be uncomfortable with death. But remembrance photography provides grieving parents with lasting memories of their children who lived so briefly that little else exists to remember them by. Parents say that the professional images are easier to look at than the ones they took themselves.

“The photos validate the experience of the parents, and prove the baby existed when oftentimes there are so few memories and things to show,” said Faustine Dufka, a University of Washington anthropology student, whose undergraduate honors thesis explored the role of remembrance photography in parental grief.

People will tell mothers: “It’s OK, you’ll be a mom again one day,” Dufka said. “But no, they are still a parent, even if their baby has died, and the photographs help to confirm that parental identity. And to validate that their baby’s life, no matter how brief, was a life.”

Dufka investigated remembrance photography as a way to reveal how contemporary families cope with infant death. She interviewed parents, photographers and health care workers and volunteered at the Seattle-based nonprofit Soulumination, which provides free photography services to families with children 18 years old and younger facing life-threatening illnesses.

“Faustine’s thesis is medical anthropology at its best,” said Daniel Hoffman, a UW associate professor of anthropology and faculty adviser to Dufka’s project. “She used careful observation to explore a real problem: How people experience and make sense of a personal tragedy within a larger social and medical context that doesn’t generally honor or assist them in grief.”

A couple of months after her son was born, the Seattle mother told Dufka that she agreed right away to a photo shoot with the nonprofit Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, which is a nationwide network of photographers  providing free remembrance photography services. When she got the CD of photos, the mother was surprised by their beauty – she told Dufka that she didn’t think it was possible for the photos to turn out so well since they were taken in a hospital.

For the mother “the photos were something to look forward to after leaving the hospital empty-handed,” Dufka said. The mother also kept a few objects her son had touched, such as a blanket he was wrapped in immediately after his birth.

The other five parents Dufka interviewed recalled similar attachments to the photos. Their babies lived from 10 minutes to 7 months after birth, dying from lethal genetic variations, trauma during birth and other reasons. In some cases their photos portray the few moments they had as a family, with the newborn surrounded by loved ones, including parents, siblings and grandparents.

The parents display the photos at home and used them at memorial services. One father even had an image of his baby tattooed on his arm.

“It’s easier to talk about something if you have a photo to share,” Dufka said. Photos “are a gateway to bringing up memories of the deceased. For siblings who weren’t there or were too young to remember, photos can help parents talk about and explain what happened.”

Photos the parents took themselves on phones or personal cameras depicted the reality almost too vividly, the parents told Dufka.

“We do have pictures of when he died that [my husband] took … before the hospice nurse came,” one mother told Dufka. “I can’t look at those … He’s blue, you know, he’s lifeless and he’s blue.”

Remembrance photographers use black-and-white and sepia tones to disguise how sick the babies can look. They use certain angles or – usually at the parents’ request – airbrush out hospital equipment. For babies who have died, photographers use poses to make it look like the baby is simply sleeping.

“I’m always looking for those sort of moments that just shine, whether the child’s alone or close with the parent,” Lynette Johnson, founder of Soulumination, told Dufka. “I’m looking for something timeless and beautiful, just something you will always treasure.”

The accompanying photo gallery includes comments from photographers interviewed by Dufka about the techniques they use in remembrance photography.

Mourning and post-mortem photography used to have a more visible presence in American culture, Dufka points out in her thesis. In the 1800s, it was socially acceptable to display photos of deceased individuals, including images of the body posed to look asleep on a sofa or a close-up portrait.

Professional post-mortem photography went out of fashion in the 20^th century, possibly because medical advances encouraged prolonging life and denying death. Public pain and mourning became taboo, according to research Dufka references in her thesis, and families moved toward taking their own photos of deceased loved ones and keeping the images private.

Could this be changing now that technology makes taking and sharing photos so easy, and that photography has become one way to legitimize an experience and create a memory? The resurgence of photography in the context of loss, Dufka believes, could signal a change in the way death and dying are talked about and dealt with in our society.

“I think it’s really happening, I think there’s a real change,” Johnson told Dufka. “People are not stepping back from loss like they used to.”

It’s possible, though, that Dufka’s interviews don’t reflect all parents’ responses to remembrance photos. Since she interviewed parents who were willing to speak about their experiences, her sample of parents could sway more toward those who have experienced benefits of the photos and who have reached a stage of grieving where they can talk about their child’s death.

“Every individual moves through their process of grieving very differently,” Dufka said. “The main purpose of this research is not to prove whether or not remembrance photography is actually beneficial to all parents, but rather to understand the different ways in which these types of photographs are used by bereaved parents in the process of mourning.”

Dufka said that walking through that pain with parents who have lost a baby has helped her understand grief from their point of view. She plans to go to medical school, and believes her project will help her talk about death with her patients and their families.

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For more information, contact Dufka at fdufka@uw.edu or Hoffman at djh13@uw.edu. For more information about Soulumination, visit www.soulumination.org.

University of Washington students have been testing low-cost materials capable of harvesting water from fog in a temporary “hoop house” next to the Botany Greenhouse. They create the fog with a specially adapted power washer and record how much water condenses and drips off various panels of low-cost materials, such as shade cloth.

P Cromwell/U of Washington

In tests on campus this month, faculty member Ben Spencer checks the water condensing and dripping down matting material used in landscapes to control soil erosion. The group is evaluating inexpensive, readily available materials for fog harvesting.

They specifically want to find a way to help residents on the northern edge of Lima, Peru, where less than half an inch of rain falls, but heavy fogs occur consistently for six to nine months a year. The faculty and students are seeking a way to condense enough water to irrigate new plantings that would, in turn, harvest fog on their own, naturally bringing water into the landscape, said Susan Bolton, a professor of environmental and forest sciences and one of the group’s instructors.

To that end, they are also testing various plants as fog collectors: Vines, for example, because winemaking is a growing industry in Peru and residents might plant vineyards. Or perhaps a city park with trees could be created.

The landscape once had trees that collected fog, but 500 years ago Spanish colonizers denuded Lima’s fog-fed dry forests.

The UW group and 43 other university teams last year competed and each received a $15,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency’s P3: People, Prosperity and the Planet program. Teams are developing ideas to make such things as water, energy and agriculture more sustainable in developed or developing countries. In April the groups will send representatives to Washington, D.C., trying to win one of the grants worth up to $90,000 to implement their ideas.

Doug Ewing, who runs the botany greenhouse, heard about the project and helped the group adapt some of equipment used in the greenhouse. He and his crew, for example, use a power washer set-up, but with a different nozzle, in the greenhouse to cool plants when it gets hot.

Humans have long fashioned structures meant to cause dew or fog to condense. Today, for example, the Canadian non-profit FogQuest tries to help communities, particularly in Chile, harvest drinking water. FogQuest says a 48-square-yard fog collector can produce an average of more than 50 gallons per day.

“We hope we improve upon standard fog collection models by finding ways to increase collection rates while decreasing the amount of material used and energy needed by communities to construct and maintain the collectors,” said Peter Cromwell, a graduate student in landscape architecture.

“The UW project wants to take that a step farther by thinking about it as part of larger social, environmental and economic systems,” said Ben Spencer, assistant professor of landscape architecture. “Our focus on fog collection as a source of water for households and irrigation of green space responds directly to priorities expressed by the community. Low-cost systems of fog collection would empower the community to take charge of their own water resources and improve their environment and living conditions.”

Speaking at a national meeting on a panel of academic leaders who focus on natural resource sustainability, College of the Environment Dean Lisa Graumlich said the college’s successful sustainability initiatives are grounded in long-standing relationships among scientists, local communities and decision-makers as well as widely accessible research data and results.

She was among the directors, deans and department heads exploring the challenges academic institutions face in undertaking sustainability science as part of a panel at the annual conference of the American Association for Advancement of Science.

Ben Lucas

Lisa Graumlich, dean of the UW College of the Environment

Sustainability science is about taking what’s being learned about ocean acidification, climate change and other phenomena and helping policy makers and citizens develop strategies to deal with challenges that may arise. It’s scientific knowledge linked with societal action.

Graumlich said the UW’s Climate Impacts Group and the Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems, for example, have critical ties with user communities, providing them with tailored information, teaching resources and apps to help people make decisions about issues from daily fishing conditions to climate change adaptation.

She also pointed to the importance of long-running relationships that college researchers, like forest ecologist Jerry Franklin, have with the various communities that bring multiple perspectives to the table when dealing with natural resource issues. “Franklin is known as the father of modern forestry precisely because he continually brings people together, so that they can identify logging practices that will work for them in the long-term,” Graumlich said.

These relationships require both social and financial investment, a critical issue that Graumlich said is often overlooked.

“New institutional arrangements are necessary if we are going to reconcile our development goals with the planet’s environmental limits,” said panelist James Buizer, one of the developers of Arizona State University’s institution-wide effort to increase sustainability science and practice. Because research to address environmental problems is inherently complex, researchers require skills, like mediation and facilitation, for which they are often undertrained.

That message was echoed in the “Careers” section of Nature the week following the AAAS meeting that said, “Sustainability training is on the rise, and institutions are working out how to best translate it into marketable skills.”

The article quotes Julia Parrish, associate dean in the UW College of the Environment, who said, “When we talked to employers, whether they’re top-tier universities, federal labs or large environmental non-government organizations, they said ‘we want disciplinary experts with cross-cutting skills in communication, problem-solving and leadership.”

An example is James Thorson, now with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Services. While earning his doctorate in aquatic and fishery sciences at the UW, he also worked on a team advising the Washington Restaurant Association on sustainability guidelines. But his contributions didn’t concern fisheries, they concerned such things as energy-efficient lighting.

That “pushed him out of his area of expertise and into one with varied stakeholders,” the Nature article said. “He learned about everything from environmental auditing to certification programmes to project management.”

“It’s an example of how universities are seeking new institutional models to effectively engage with the grand challenges of sustainability,” Graumlich said.

UW global health expert Dr. Christopher Murray at an informal meeting in Tanzania.

These are some of the findings from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study, a collaborative project led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the UW. Country-specific findings, including those  for the United States, will be announced March 5 at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle by Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Director Dr. Christopher Murray and Gates Foundation Co-chair and Trustee Bill Gates.

The findings detail the causes of death and disability – across age groups and sexes – for 187 countries around the world. The Global Burden of Diseases 2010 study encompasses researchers from 303 institutions and 50 countries, and the work, which generated 1 billion estimates for health challenges large and small, was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

A full range of dynamic visualizations of the findings for the United States and other countries can be found at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation website.These tools allow people everywhere to see the progress being made in health and the challenges that remain.

A global health researcher conducts an interview in Bangladesh.

“We know that the world’s health can only improve if we are measuring the right problems and evaluating the right solutions,” Murray said. “That’s why we are working hard to gather more and better data constantly and are challenging ourselves to improve our analytical methods. We also are expanding our network of collaborators. This extended network will improve the quality of the assessment but also provide a forum for ongoing reflection, learning, interpretation, and action based on the Globan Burden of Diseae results and future revisions.”

An image of a child jumping rope used in an NIH campaign to encourage American children and families to be more active.

Much of the illness and death in the United States is caused by a short list of ailments. The researchers found that just 17 distinct causes account for more than half of the American disease burden, measured as the number of years lost to disability and premature death. The top cause is ischemic heart disease, followed by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, low back pain, lung cancer, and major depressive disorders.

In critical ways, the United States is lagging behind many wealthy and middle-income countries in terms of health. Americans live shorter lives, and shorter healthy lives, than do many other people. For example, men in 39 other countries – including Greece, Lebanon, and South Korea – live longer, and men in 30 other countries – such as Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Portugal – enjoy more years of good health.

Health is being largely eroded because Americans make poor lifestyle choices that cause lung ailments, musculoskeletal stress, and obesity-related illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes. Obesity’s impact is especially troubling. High body mass index as a risk factor rose by 45 percent between 1990 and 2010, and is now the third largest risk factor in the United States. Obesity accounts for more than one-tenth of total disease burden in 2010.

NIH

Obesity is a major contributor to the global burden of disease.

Like many countries in the world, the United States is struggling with a growing burden of disability. Almost all of the top causes of disability – back and neck pains, depression, anxiety, migraine headaches – grew as health threats from 1990 to 2010. These causes of disability are often not causes of death but their toll on health is dramatic.

The Washington Post wrote of the study, “The health of most of the planet’s population is rapidly coming to resemble that of the United States, where death in childhood is rare, too much food is a bigger problem than too little, and life is long and often darkened by disability.”

“We are in transition to a world where disability is the dominant concern as opposed to premature death,” Murray told the Post.

A public symposium on the study will be held on campus at 4 p.m., Monday,  March 11 to discuss the major findings and how the study provides a platform for collaboration across research centers on campus and worldwide. Murray will give a lecture “Findings of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors 2010” in Hogness Auditorium at the UW Health Sciences Center. UW President Young, UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce, UW Medicine CEO Paul G. Ramsey, and UW School of Public Health Dean Howard Frumkin will discuss the implications of the study.

A Q&A session will follow and a reception will be held in the Health Sciences lobby. To register for the event, please go to  https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/alex27/192452.

The three-part series, which runs Wednesday evenings from Feb. 20 until March 6, pairs University of Washington psychologists with experts from outside the university.

The public lectures begin at 7 p.m. in Kane Hall 130. Free registration online (www.uwalum.com/psychology) or call 206-543-0540. The talks will be broadcast at a later date on UWTV. See previous years’ lectures on UWTV.

The lecture series is funded by a bequest from Allen L. Edwards, a UW psychology professor from 1944 to his death in 1994. Edwards is credited with introducing modern statistical techniques into psychological science.

Descriptions of the 2013 lectures are below, or read more about them online:

Ecopsychology: Reinventing the Human-Nature Relationship in the Digital Age
Feb. 20
The growing field of ecopsychology explores how we can embrace both technology and the natural world. Peter Kahn, a UW psychology professor, and Scott Sampson, a research curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, will discuss a future where people optimize their well-being and flourish in relationship with nature.

The New Science of Adolescence: Understanding Risky Behavior
Feb. 27
Attempts to educate teenagers of the consequences of their risk-taking have not led to less sex, drug use, speeding or other dangerous behaviors. Kevin King, a UW assistant psychology professor, and Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University, will explain why asking adolescents to think more carefully about their actions does not dampen their risk-taking, and describe what else can be done to promote positive behaviors.

Human Memory and the Law
March 6
For the past four decades, experimental psychologists have been testifying in court about how the human mind works. Two such experts – Geoffrey Loftus, a UW psychology professor, and Elizabeth Loftus, a former UW psychology professor now at the University of California, Irvine – describe their participation in homicide cases that involved various aspects of human perception, attention and memory.

That’s the opinion of a consortium of political science and law scholars from the University of Washington and several other institutions who have filed an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” brief in the Supreme Court case about voting rights out of Shelby County, Ala. The UW faculty are political science professors Matt Barreto and Luis Fraga. The Supreme Court is expected to review the case on Feb. 27.

At issue is Section 5 of the act, which forbids any change in voting law in the selected areas unless the federal government agrees the change “does not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.” The rule pertains to the states Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, and certain jurisdictions in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, Michigan and New Hampshire.

Shelby County, Ala., is suing the government saying that Section 5 is outdated, too restrictive and should be declared unconstitutional. Edward Blum of the Project on Fair Representation, which brought the challenge, told the Washington Post in November that the America that elected Barack Obama has progressed substantially since 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed. He said, “Congress unwisely reauthorized a bill that is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp.”

After studying census records from 2000 and 2010, voting records from 2000 and 2008, public opinion data, lawsuits about the Voting Rights Act and all relevant state legislation in recent years, Fraga, Barreto and the other scholars strongly disagree.

They found “clear and statistically significant evidence” that discrimination is still widespread today, though often in different forms, and remains more widespread in Section 5-covered jurisdictions than elsewhere.

The scholars found that minorities in Section 5-covered jurisdictions continue to suffer from socioeconomic disparity that hinders their ability to participate in the political process. Those jurisdictions, they found, are also twice as likely as non-covered areas to adopt policies that make voting more difficult for African-Americans and language minorities.

Finally, their research found an extensive pattern of racially polarized voting — where whites vote as a bloc against minority candidates — and racial prejudice against minorities that was statistically distinct and more negative in Section 5-covered jurisdictions than in the country overall.

Fraga, who is also the UW’s associate vice provost for faculty advancement, said: “We all look forward to the day when such legislation will not be necessary. Our current reality, however, makes very clear that there is a continued role for the Justice Department and federal courts to guarantee that African-Americans and language minorities do not have their right to vote limited by states and local jurisdictions.”

Barreto, who holds an adjunct appointment in the UW School of Law, said the brief compiles objective empirical data to conclude that minority voters in Section 5-covered jurisdictions face more discrimination and racial prejudice, and have systematically less access to resources than white voters.

“These facts directly dispute the Shelby petitioners’ claims and demonstrate the continuing need for the Voting Rights Act,” Barreto said.

Other team members are professors Kareem Crayton of the University of North Carolina, Terry Smith of DePaul University, Jane Junn of the University of Southern California and Janelle Wong of the University of Maryland.

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For more information or interviews, contact Barreto at 909-489-2955 or mbarreto@uw.edu; or Fraga at 206-685-4831 or lrfraga@uw.edu.

A PDF of the brief is available by request.        

A. “Transcending Blackness” is about mixed-race African-American representations in the 10 years leading up to Obama’s election in 2008.

Q. You review representations of multiracial figures in popular culture. Who did you research and what came from this?

A. I’ve collected popular — and not so popular — representations of multiracial black folks for most of my life. Like many teenagers I was addicted to fashion magazines and by the time I left for college I had a 3-foot stack amassed in the back of my closet.  I loved the images of “racially ambiguous” models and actresses, and I would study their images and the occasional stories about them for hours.

Duke University Press

“Transcending Blackness,” by Ralina L. Joseph.

I was lucky to begin college at the same moment that mixed-race became a topic of interest for scholars and the mass media. The ever-growing representations (and embodiment) of multiraciality — in popular culture, academia, and my dormitory  enabled me to not just worship the images of mixed-race, but also think critically about them.

Q. What were your conclusions?

A. In this book my critical thinking led me to the conclusion that popular representations of mixed-race African-Americans in the late 20^th/early 21^st century are nowhere near as complex as the real, live mixed-race African-Americans in my life.

In real life multiracial black folks identify in all sorts of ways — as sometimes black, sometimes mixed, sometimes as no race at all — and this might be the same person’s choices all in different moments in the same day!

Ralina Joseph

But in representations, I found that the old stereotypes of the tragic mulatto (the figure who is forever damned because of her drop of blackness) and the sell-out multiracial (the figure who is only successful because she does everything in her power to dismiss her blackness) are alive and well.

I tweaked my terminology and definitions to fit our contemporary moment, and so my tragic mulatto becomes the “new millennium mulatta” and my sell-out multiracial becomes the “exceptional multiracial.” I see both of these representations as far from neutral, but instead mired in anti-black racism.

Other studies have found that husbands got more sex if they did more housework, implying that sex was in exchange for housework. But those studies did not factor in what types of chores the husbands were doing.

The new study, published in the February issue of the journal American Sociological Review, shows that sex isn’t a bargaining chip.  Instead, sex is linked to what types of chores each spouse completes.

Couples who follow traditional gender roles around the house – wives doing the cooking, cleaning and shopping; men doing yard work, paying bills and auto maintenance – reported greater sexual frequency.

“The results show that gender still organizes quite a bit of everyday life in marriage,” said co-author Julie Brines, a UW associate professor of sociology. “In particular, it seems that the gender identities husbands and wives express through the chores they do also help structure sexual behavior.”

Husbands shouldn’t take these findings as justification for not cooking, cleaning, shopping or performing other traditionally female household tasks, warned lead author Sabino Kornrich, a former UW graduate student who is now a researcher at the Juan March Institute in Madrid. “Men who refuse to help around the house could increase conflict in their marriage and lower their wives’ marital satisfaction.”

The findings come from a national survey of about 4,500 heterosexual married U.S. couples participating in the National Survey of Families and Households. The data were collected from 1992 to 1994, the most recent large-scale survey available that measured sexual frequency in married couples. Brines says that it is unlikely that the division of housework – which did not include child care in this study – and sex have changed much since then.

The researchers found that husbands, average age 46, and wives, average age 44, spent a combined 34 hours a week on traditionally female chores. Couples spent an additional 17 hours a week on chores usually thought of as men’s work.

Husbands performed about one-fifth of traditionally female tasks and a little more than half of the male-type work. This suggests that wives help out with men’s chores more often than husbands help with female tasks.

Men and women reported having sex about five times, on average, in the month prior to the survey. But marriages in which the wife does all the traditionally female tasks  reported having had sex about 1.6 times more per month than those where the husband does all the traditionally female chores.

Brines, an expert in family and household dynamics, said that it wasn’t surprising that sexual activity was tied to the division of household chores. “If anything surprised us, it was how robust the connection was between a traditional division of housework and sexual frequency.”

The researchers ruled out other possible explanations for their findings:

• Husbands being sexually coercive did not have a role, because wives reported similar levels of satisfaction in their sex lives whether they were in households with traditional or nontraditional divisions of labor.
• Two-income households had comparable patterns of sexual frequency and division of household chores relative to households where a spouse did not work outside the home. Similarly, wives’ income was unrelated to how often the couple had sex.
• Other variables such as happiness in marriage, religion and gender ideology did not have a role.

“Marriage today isn’t what it was 30 or 40 years ago, but there are some things that remain important,” Brines said. “Sex and housework are still key aspects of sharing a life, and both are related to marital satisfaction and how spouses express their gender identity.”

Katrina Leupp, a UW doctoral student in sociology, is the other co-author of the study.

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For more information, contact Brines at 206-685-9067 (office) or brines@uw.edu. To reach Kornich, contact Dan Fowler, at American Sociological Association’s news office: 202-527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.

Randall Kyes, UW

Juvenile Sulawesi black macaques (Macaca nigra) foraging in the Tangkoko Nature Reserve.

Since at least the 1970s, the population of critically endangered Sulawesi black macaques living in an Indonesian nature reserve has been dropping. But a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and in Indonesia shows that the population has stabilized over the past decade.

The findings, published in the January issue of the American Journal of Primatology, are from the longest ongoing survey of Macaca nigra and are among the first evidence that the monkeys may be in better shape.

“Fifteen years ago it looked like this macaque population would continue its decline and eventually disappear,” said Randall Kyes, lead author and UW research professor of psychology. This study “doesn’t mean that everything is fine now and that we no longer need to worry about the fate of these animals, but it is good news compared with what we’ve seen over the past 30-plus years in this reserve.”

Since 1997, Kyes and his Indonesian colleagues have conducted conservation-related studies of the black macaques at the Tangkoko Nature Reserve in North Sulawesi, Indonesia – an area known for its biodiversity, which attracts flocks of tourists each year. He and his team began the newly published population survey in 1999 and collected data through 2011.

Searching a specified section of the forest, the researchers took two daily counts during a two- to three-week survey period each year of the study. They only recorded numbers of black macaques they saw, though they would often hear many others.

The number of groups of macaques per square kilometer (0.40 of a square mile) increased from 3.6 in 1999 to 3.9 in 2005 and to 4.3 in 2011, the research team found. They observed a similar gradual climb in numbers of individuals per square kilometer: 32.4 in 1999, 53.8 in 2005 and 61.5 in 2011.

By these counts, the population size has returned to the level of nearly 20 years ago: a 1994 study reported 3.9 groups and 68.7 individuals per square kilometer. In contrast, a study in 1978, when scientists first began documenting the population’s status, showed 10 groups and 300 individuals per square kilometer.

“We’ve found that the progressive decline has slowed,” Kyes said. “Somewhere over the last 10 years the trend has started to turn. We’re seeing the population in the balance now, but without the sustained efforts by local and international groups working in the reserve and the support and involvement of the local people, the macaques will likely face further decline.”

Hunting and habitat loss are the chief culprits in the black macaque population’s waning in recent decades. In North Sulawesi culture, black macaques are considered a food for special occasions, similar to a Thanksgiving turkey for people in the United States and Canada.

Randally Kyes, UW

Randall Kyes (left, in black shirt) and local university students observing Sulawesi black macaques during an annual field training program in Tangkoko Nature Reserve.

Though they did not examine this in their new study, the researchers’ outreach education efforts for children who live near the Tangkoko Nature Reserve may be helping to decrease illegal hunting and trapping of the animals. The researchers also hold an annual field course in conservation biology and global health for local university students and the community.

“We focus on the importance of the human-environment interface and the close relationship between environmental health and human health,” Kyes said. “We also emphasize how the black macaques support the local economy, by way of all the tourists who come to the nature reserve to see them.”

He said that outreach to children is particularly helpful. “We don’t chastise them for eating monkeys, but we do explain that there might not be many left in the future. We encourage them to ask their parents if there’s something else they can eat.”

Co-authors in Indonesia are Entang Iskandar of Bogor Agricultural University’s Primate Research Center; and Jane Onibala, Umar Paputungan and Sylvia Laatung of Sam Ratulangi University. Co-author Falk Huettmann is from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

The study was funded by the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, One Earth Institute in Seattle, the International Primatological Society and the National Institutes of Health.

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For more information, contact Kyes at 206-619-5765, 206-685-7159 or rkyes@uw.edu.

UW

A 1 year old baby participates in a language test at UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas – the hippocampus and cerebellum – can predict children’s language abilities at 1 year of age.

The University of Washington study is the first to associate these brain structures with future language skills. The results are published in the January issue of the journal Brain and Language.

“The brain of the baby holds an infinite number of secrets just waiting to be uncovered, and these discoveries will show us why infants learn languages like sponges, far surpassing our skills as adults,” said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

Children’s language skills soar after they reach their first birthdays, but little is known about how infants’ early brain development seeds that path. Identifying which brain areas are related to early language learning could provide a first glimpse of development going awry, allowing for treatments to begin earlier.

“Infancy may be the most important phase of postnatal brain development in humans,” said Dilara Deniz Can, lead author and a UW postdoctoral researcher. “Our results showing brain structures linked to later language ability in typically developing infants is a first step toward examining links to brain and behavior in young children with linguistic, psychological and social delays.”

In the study, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain structure of a mix of 19 boys and girls at 7 months of age. The researchers used a measurement called voxel-based morphometry to determine the concentration of gray matter, consisting of nerve cells, and of white matter, which make up the network of connections throughout the brain.

The study is the first to relate the outcomes of this whole-brain imaging technique to predict future ability in infants. The whole-brain approach freed the researchers from having to select a few brain regions for study ahead of time, ones scientists might have expected to be involved based on adult data.

Five months later, when the children were about 1 year old they returned to the lab for a language test. This test included measures of the children’s babbling, recognition of familiar names and words, and their ability to produce different types of sounds.

“At this age, children typically don’t say many words,” Deniz Can said. “So we rely on babbling and the ability to comprehend language as a sign of early language mastery.”

Infants with a greater concentration of gray and white matter in the cerebellum and the hippocampus showed greater language ability at age 1. This is the first study to identify a relationship between language and the cerebellum and hippocampus in infants. Neither brain area is well-known for its role in language: the cerebellum is typically linked to motor learning, while the hippocampus is commonly recognized as a memory processor.

“Looking at the whole brain produced a surprising result and scientists live for surprises. It wasn’t the language areas of the infant brain that predicted their future linguistic skills, but instead brain areas linked to motor abilities and memory processing,” Kuhl said. “Infants have to listen and memorize the sound patterns used by the people in their culture, and then coax their own mouths and tongues to make these sounds in order join the social conversation and get a response from their parents.”

The findings could reflect infants’ abilities to master the motor planning for speech and to develop the memory requirements for keeping the sound patterns in mind.

“The brain uses many general skills to learn language,” Kuhl said. “Knowing which brain regions are linked to this early learning could help identify children with developmental disabilities and provide them with early interventions that will steer them back toward a typical developmental path.”

Todd Richards, a UW professor of radiology, was another co-author. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Santa Fe Institute Consortium.

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For more information, contact Kuhl at 206-685-1921 or pkkuhl@uw.edu or Deniz Can at 206-221-6415 or dilara@uw.edu.

Lone, an affiliate faculty member and director of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, says she wrote her new book, “The Philosophical Child,” to help parents, teachers and other adults conduct conversations with children about life’s mysteries.

The center was founded in 1996 and became affiliated with the UW in 1999. In 2008, Lone started writing a blog titled “Wondering Aloud: Philosophy with Young People,” that she still maintains, often analyzing children’s books for their philosophical content.

The blog attracted emails from parents asking how to engage their children in such conversations. “Often, parents try to lecture their children about the subject or they ask a question that seems to the child to come out of nowhere and doesn’t really go anywhere,” Lone said.

The book is, in a sense, a reply to those questions. Lone said she strove to write it in a readable, nonacademic style, and along the way relates some conversations she had with her own three boys over the years.

Jana Mohr Lone

“The point I try to make is that we should be following the child’s lead. Let their ideas influence your thinking as much as your ideas might influence their thinking,” Lone said. “It’s really being sensitive to the child’s questions and to have the philosophical inquiry come out of those questions, and not some pre-packaged plan.”

Such an approach, Lone said, nurtures the child’s “philosophical self,” described in the book as “the part of us that understands that many aspects of our existence are profoundly mysterious.” Cultivating that self, she said, is important to “the kind of people we might become.”

Children’s literature is often deeply philosophical and a good resource for starting such conversations, she said. It can draw out the sorts of questions young thinkers might already quietly have: What makes us love? Are thoughts real? Why am I here? (Lone has lately been posting philosophical quotes and questions from children on the philosophy center’s Facebook page.)

Lone thinks of the book as part of the overall outreach efforts of the center, which is co-administered with philosophy department colleague Sara Goering and David Shapiro of Cascadia Community College. The center offers a “Philosophers in the Schools” program, where UW undergraduate and graduate students go to public schools to engage students in philosophical discussions — they visited a dozen schools in autumn quarter alone.

The students at both levels benefit, Lone said. “In some ways it really is about being ambassadors for the humanities in general.” She added, “There’s some real worry about students graduating without basic skills — but there’s also a worry that some of them are not getting the real, deep, important learning that makes people lifelong learners.”

Lone’s work and that of the center draws praise from Michael Rosenthal, professor of philosophy and chairman of the UW department.

“It really would be wonderful if philosophical conversations began before a student enters college,” Rosenthal wrote in an email. “We now have faculty and graduate students making connections to local primary and secondary schools to make this happen. Jana’s work really adds a new and exciting dimension to the Department of Philosophy. We want to support the center and expand its activities.”

Such conversations, are empowering and can build the child’s self-esteem as well as the bond with her parent, Lone said, adding, “I don’t think parents need Ph.D.s or even undergraduate degrees in philosophy in order to do this.”

Of course, part of being sensitive to your child’s questions — being the “co-inquirer,” so to speak — does not mean ceding the role of parent. Lone smiled remembering a philosophical talk with her sons, deeply exploring the nature and meaning of childhood.

“But then I would still be able to say, no — you’re not staying out until 2 o’clock in the morning!”

Human trafficking is the second most profitable underground industry – after drugs – in the world. Around the globe, its yearly earnings are $35 billion to $37 billion and it’s estimated that at least 1 million people are trafficked each year.

“When you talk about human trafficking, right away people assume it’s about sex. But the experience we’re having in other communities of color is that it’s not only about sex but about labor,” said Velma Veloria, who leads the anti-human trafficking task force at the University of Washington’s Women’s Center along with the center’s executive director, Sutapa Basu.

The center will host a public conference Jan. 11-12 to take a fresh look at human trafficking and its root causes. The other organizers hope the event will lead to some solutions, such as legislation aimed at eliminating human trafficking. They point to poverty and international trade policies as starting points to eradicating the trade.

“In our state, we continue to lead in progress and awareness,” Veloria said. “The issue now is prevention, which we can begin to address if we look at some of the root causes.”

The conference – co-sponsored by the UW School of Law and Seattle University School of Law – comes a decade after the Washington Legislature passed House Bill 1175, making the state the first to criminalize human trafficking. Since then 47 other states have instituted similar legislation.

Veloria is a former state representative and author of HB 1175, which was drafted in 2001 during the last anti-trafficking conference convened by the UW Women’s Center. At that time, human trafficking concerns focused on the mail-order bride business in the wake of reports in the 1990s of brides living in the Seattle area being exploited and murdered.

These days, human trafficking touches more trades and is no longer “just about women being prostituted,” Veloria said. Most trafficked laborers become domestic servants. Construction, agriculture and hospitality businesses like nail salons and restaurants are other magnets for human trafficking.

Victims, usually women and children, typically don’t know what they’re getting into. They may enter the trade willingly or are sold into it by their families. Female victims tend to be desperate for employment and come from an economically troubled country where women hold lower social status.

Rarely are they aware of the nature of the work. For instance, an individual might bring a niece to help take care of an aunt, but then the niece becomes an unpaid domestic servant.

Or traffickers, calling themselves employment brokers, tell the victim that they have legitimate work for her abroad as a waitress, dancer or secretary. But the worker ends up as domestic servant, in a sweatshop or in the sex trade. She’s then indebted to the traffickers to pay back their fees for smuggling her into the country. The fees are often in the tens of thousands of dollars.

“It’s not a choice,” Basu said. “It’s forced migration when lack of economic opportunities leave individuals faced with starving and are forced to leave home to survive. No one wants to leave their home and family.”

Traffickers take away workers’ passports and identification, leaving victims afraid to go to the authorities and vulnerable in a country where they rarely can speak the native language.

“The only person the victim knows is the trafficker and they know they’re here illegally – they fear deportation and feel threatened, they fear their family at home will be killed if they leave,” Basu said.

The problem is particularly difficult in Washington, a state in which one in five jobs is a trade and where entering the state is made easier with an international airport, ports and a border with Canada.

“Globalization has made international borders increasingly porous, and the scale of human trafficking has proliferated,” Basu said. “And even though trafficking is now recognized as a human rights issue, other dimensions of the trade – such as public health, labor rights, immigration law and criminal justice – are still not given enough attention.”

These issues will be addressed at the Jan. 11-12 public conference; “Human Trafficking in the Era of Globalization: Forced Labor, Involuntary Servitude and Corporate & Civic Responsibility.” Researchers, lawmakers, human rights advocates, experts in international corporate policies, law enforcement officials and others will participate. The agenda and registration are online.

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For more information, contact Basu at 206-685-1090 or sbasu@uw.edu or Veloria at 206-685-1090 or rosete80@gmail.com.

Pacific Lutheran University

A new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard.

Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.

Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard.

“The mother has first dibs on influencing the child’s brain,” said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. “The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them.”

Previously, researchers had shown that newborns are born ready to learn and begin to discriminate between language sounds within the first months of life, but there was no evidence that language learning had occurred in utero.

“This is the first study that shows fetuses learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother’s language,” said Christine Moon, lead author and a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. “This study moves the measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth.”

The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Acta Paediatrica.

Forty infants, about 30 hours old and an even mix of girls and boys, were studied in Tacoma and Stockholm, Sweden. While still in the nursery, the babies listened to vowel sounds in their native tongue and in foreign languages.

Their interest in the sounds was captured by how long they sucked on a pacifier that was wired into a computer measuring the babies’ reaction to the sounds. Longer or shorter sucking for unfamiliar or familiar sounds is evidence for learning, because it indicates that infants can differentiate between the sounds heard in utero.

In both countries, the babies at birth sucked longer for the foreign language than they did for their native tongue.

The researchers say that infants are the best learners, and discovering how they soak up information could give insights on lifelong learning. “We want to know what magic they put to work in early childhood that adults cannot,” Kuhl said. “We can’t waste that early curiosity.”

Hugo Lagercrantz, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, was another co-author. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and Pacific Lutheran University’s S. Erving Severtson Forest Foundation Undergraduate Research Program.

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For more information, Kuhl at 206-685-1921 or pkkuhl@uw.edu, Moon at 253-535-7471 or mooncm@plu.edu, or Lagercrantz at hugo.lagercrantz@ki.se or +46-8-517 747 00. This news release was adapted from a story provided by Pacific Lutheran University.

Naloxone bottles with a syringe. Naloxone reverses the deadly, respiration-stopping effects of heroin overdose.

Giving heroin users kits with the overdose antidote naloxone is a cost-effective way to prevent overdose deaths and save lives, according to a study released this week in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Phillip Coffin, director of Substance Use Research at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and assistant clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and Sean Sullivan, professor and director of the Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, co-authored the study

Drug overdose is now the leading cause of injury death in the United States.  Opioids, such as heroin, account for about 80 percent of those deaths. Naloxone is a safe and effective antidote that works by temporarily blocking opioid receptors. As of 2010, 183 public health programs around the country, including those supported by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, had trained more than 53,000 individuals in how to use naloxone. These programs had documented more than 10,000 cases of successful overdose reversals.

The authors of this study developed a mathematical model to estimate the impact of distributing naloxone in this way. Their model was based on conservative estimates of the number of overdoses that occur each year. It accounted for people who overdose repeatedly. It also acknowledged that most people who overdose will survive whether or not they get naloxone.

In their basic model, Coffin and Sullivan estimated that reaching 20 percent of a million heroin users with naloxone would prevent about 9,000 overdose deaths over their lifetime. One life would be saved for every 164 naloxone kits given out. Based on more optimistic assumptions, naloxone could prevent as many as 43,000 deaths – one life for every 36 kits given out.

A naloxone kit distributed in Toronto, Canada. The kit contains directions for recognizing and responding to an opioid overdose and injections to counteract fatal effects of opioids.

Naloxone distribution would cost about $400 for every quality-adjusted year of life gained. This value is well below the customary $50,000 cutoff for medical interventions. It is also cheaper than most well-accepted prevention programs in medicine and is most similar to the cost-effectiveness of smoking cessation or checking blood pressure. All reasonable assumptions produced costs that were well within traditional guidelines for cost-effectiveness.

“Naloxone is a highly cost-effective way to prevent overdose deaths,” said Coffin. “And, as a researcher at the Department of Public Health, my priority is maximizing our resources to help improve the health of the community.”

Naloxone has been distributed in San Francisco since the late 1990s and with San Francisco Department of Public Health support since 2004. During that time, heroin overdose fatalities slowly decreased from a peak of 155 in 1995 to 10 in 2010. Opioid analgesic deaths (such as those from the prescription pain medications oxycodone, methadone, or hydrocodone) remain elevated, with 121 deaths in 2010. Efforts are under way to expand access to naloxone for patients receiving prescription opioids as well.

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Eileen Shields, San Francisco Department of Public Health, contributed to this report.

It’s gonna happen!

But according to at least one study, a third of us can’t keep these resolutions through the end of January, never mind an entire year, and four out of five of us will break them eventually.

Dennis Donovan is the director of the UW Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute.

“I don’t make them,” Dennis Donovan said of New Year’s resolutions. He’s the director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute at the University of Washington and has spent decades helping people, usually those in recovery for alcohol and substance use problems, stick to their resolutions.

“New Year’s is a time to reflect, see things differently or for the first time. People have the best of intentions around the holidays, but it often dissipates quickly,” he said. “The lastingness of a resolution depends on the initial level of commitment and degree to which it’s made public and implemented rapidly.”

Donovan suggests some steps to help overcome the holiday afterglow and make headway on life improvements long after you finish muddling through “Auld Lang Syne.”

Are you really ready to change? According to behavioral models of change, often people start in a “pre-contemplation” stage during which they don’t see or aren’t aware of a problem. It’s also called denial. “If you don’t consider a behavior as problematic, then you won’t see a need to change,” Donovan said. So be honest and realistic with yourself: If you don’t think you’re that overweight or out of shape, a gym membership probably won’t help you get fit. But if you begin contemplating the potential need to change and the pros and cons involved, that could be a signal that you’re ready.

Weigh the pros and cons. To drink less or to not to drink less, that is the question. Donovan said that you have to think through the good and the bad consequences of change, a strategy known as decisional balance. For instance, cutting back on your drinking will improve your health, but what will you do if it damages your relationship with your drinking buddies? If your drinking helps with your depression, how else can you cope that doesn’t involve alcohol? The point is to “become aware of the benefits of changing but also know the cons because those could be the barriers to following through,” Donovan said.

Spread the word. You’re more likely to stick to a resolution if you let people know your intentions. Then you’ll have witnesses to support you and remind you not to drink, smoke or whatever else you resolve to do.

Don’t dawdle. The longer you delay in making the resolution and then acting on it, the more likely you’ll let it fall by the wayside. “Many of us are procrastinators and we’re good at talking ourselves out of things,” Donovan said. So buy that exercise bike during New Year’s Day sales.

Change could take a while. There’s no magical answer to how long it will take for a new behavior to become permanent, but there are some predicting factors. “How firmly committed the person is and how well he or she has prepared to implement change probably contributes to the length and success of change,” Donovan said. In the meantime, it’s important to stay away from “slippery places” – or high-risk relapse situations – and have emotional and behavioral copings skills and social support. People often relapse, or break their resolutions and commitment to change. Likelihood of relapse among alcohol-dependent individuals who stop drinking through treatment or on their own is greatest in the first 90 days, Donovan said.

If you plan ahead, it’s just possible the old acquaintance of some bad habits will be, if not forgotten completely, perhaps at least greatly diminished.

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For more information, contact Donovan at 206-543-0937 or ddonovan@uw.edu.

Alex Credgington, UW

Students in Jack Johnson’s archaeology class at UW sort trash, compostables and recyclables.

“Food waste is the single most significant contaminant in trash bins,” said Jack Johnson, a UW archaeology graduate student who leads the UW Garbology Project. “It is clear that most contamination stems from people throwing the contents of their on-campus meals, including foods and compostable/recyclable packaging, into trash bins,” he wrote in a report (pdf) posted this week summarizing the project’s findings.

Finding ways to improve composting would cut the university’s waste expenses. It costs $145 per ton to dispose of trash compared with $55 per ton for compost, which ends up turned into nutrient-rich soil by Cedar Grove. There is no fee for recycling.

Johnson and his students in an archaeology class spent five afternoons this fall sorting and weighing campus waste collected from two of the seven BigBelly Solar kiosks on Red Square. The kiosks include bins for trash, recyclables and compost. Clad in white, water-resistant jumpsuits, blue specialized gloves and breathing masks, the group wanted to see how effectively campus users were categorizing their waste.

Based on trash from the two kiosks in Johnson’s study, 67 percent of waste was diverted from landfills by people putting it in compost or recycling. Looking at campus recycling programs as a whole, UW Recycling finds that the diversion rate is 57 percent, though they are working to increase that to 70 percent by 2020.

“It’s definitely achievable,” Emily Newcomer, UW Recycling manager, said of the goal. “UW is a city within a city, with people from all over the world. The challenge is helping everyone understand recycling and composting, and educating them on what goes where.”

The diversion rate in Johnson’s study fell to 54 percent when his group factored in whether campus users were correctly sorting their waste.

Trash bins showed the most miscategorizing, usually with items that should have been composted. Recycling bins revealed confusion too, where a quarter of the mass accumulated was compostable food waste – mostly liquids that should have been poured into the compost bin and then the bottle recycled. Contamination was only 7 percent in compost bins, suggesting that those who use the compost bins are accurate in identifying compostable materials.

Johnson and his research team estimate that only about 5 percent of what is thrown out on campus is actually trash – everything else could be recycled or composted. They suggest these ways to improve:

• Pouring out liquids. Most contamination in recycling bins was from food, usually liquids. Johnson estimates that at least 60 percent of recycling contamination would be eliminated if people simply poured out liquids before recycling.
• More education on what is compostable. Most carry-out containers of food purchased on campus are compostable, yet many campus users treat them as trash. Better labeling of containers might help with this, Johnson’s group points out.
• Increasing the number of campus compost bins. The researchers found that the kiosks accumulate 14 times more compost than trash, yet they point out that campus-wide there are more trash bins than compost bins.
• Increased promotion of incentives for reusable cups. Several hundred cups for coffee, soda and soup – about 7 percent of the waste examined by the team – were recyclable or compostable. The amount seems like “wanton wastefulness,” Johnson wrote, and it might be reduced if more people participated in programs like UW’s Housing & Food Services’ discounts for bringing their own cups.

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For more information, contact Johnson at anamgorm@uw.edu, or Newcomer at 206-685-8928 or emilyn2@uw.edu.

Wendy Lustbader, an affiliate associate professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington

Wendy Lustbader, an affiliate associate professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington and an expert on how to cope with aging, disability and end-of-life issues, has advice on how to deal with these issues through the holidays.

Lustbader writes occasionally on aging issues at the Huffington Post. In an entry she posted last week, she described talking to a group of elders at Market Heritage House in downtown Seattle about what they missed most during the holiday season. Many of the residents were nearing their mid-80s, and they shared yearnings for their parents, nostalgia for homes where they used to gather, and other kinds of sadness that creep in this time of year.

“The mood of the group became warm and convivial as each person thrust aside the curtain of aloneness and took comfort from each other,” Lustbader wrote.

Lustbader prompted the conversation during one of her weekly group discussions she leads with the elders, because commiseration can relieve pain. Grief over death or estrangement of loved ones, homesickness, money woes and other sorrows can make it hard to muster holiday cheer.

“If you are having a rough time during the holidays and you’re forced to be cheerful, it creates loneliness,” she said. “But if you can say who you are missing or what you’re going through, then you aren’t so alone and you might be able to enjoy yourself a bit.”

Lustbader offers some advice below for coping with bereavement, illness, homesickness and other issues during the holiday season.

For those mourning a death in the past year, what might make things easier as they go through the holidays for the first time without their loved one?

It’s important for people to realize that the first holiday season without a loved one is the hardest. Accordingly, many people choose to break with their longstanding traditions and do something totally different, like take a trip out of town or spend the holiday volunteering at a soup kitchen. For those who choose to go forward with enacting holiday traditions the way they always have, building in some kind of acknowledgment of the loss is essential. For instance, setting aside time during the holiday dinner for each person to speak about their memories of the person can be enormously comforting.

Injuries, illnesses and grief can make preparations for the holidays too exhausting. Any suggestions on how people should modify their plans?

Here again, the key is not to pretend that everything is fine. Those who don’t have the energy or spirit to meet traditional expectations – like baking a certain kind of pie or putting up the decorations everyone expects – should tell the truth of their feelings. It’s better to say, “I just don’t have it in me this year” than to force oneself to put on a performance. In fact, altering the tradition calls attention to the loss or the difficulty, and this allows others to be respectful toward those who are having a hard time in the midst of the festivities.

Some people can’t make it home for the holidays. What can they do to not feel homesick?

Homesickness is like any other grief – we feel better when we talk about it. Getting together with other people who are far from home is especially helpful, because of the shared understanding. Those who can’t go home again, due to parents going through a divorce or the family home finally being sold, also need to give voice to the loss. It doesn’t matter how old we are. These feelings are universal and can run deep in us.

How can holiday festivities be made more enjoyable for aging family members who face physical and cognitive challenges?

It is helpful beforehand to try to put yourself in the shoes of your older relative. For example, at gatherings a hearing aid often doesn’t function well with so many conversations going on at once. Planning to take turns sitting off in a corner with someone where there is less commotion may provide much welcome relief, as well as the pleasure of individual attention. Similarly, bringing someone to the gathering who resides in a care facility may require advance planning about strategies for handling the front stairs, preparing the right food items, and being sensitive to the rush of emotion that may arise as the person is flooded with memories. For those with cognitive challenges, having someone posted by this person’s side at all times during the gathering can keep anxiety to a minimum for everyone. Thoughtfulness pays off in creating an experience that will be cherished.

How can families deal with difficult decisions that are looming, such as whether it is time to urge an older relative to move to a supported living residence or care facility?

Sometimes families do take advantage of being together over the holidays to broach complicated subjects about an elder’s care situation. Recognizing that there may be several perspectives on what is best is a useful first step. Agreeing to disagree and putting the emphasis on hearing each other out, rather than competing for control, is an approach that tends to reduce conflict. The holidays can be better spent scouting out possibilities and exchanging ideas, rather than allowing old issues and past tensions to get in the way of hashing out the options.

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For more information, on Lustbader’s work: www.lustbader.com.

Oh, the slippery slope. And it’s not just when snow is falling.

The omnipresence of alcohol at holiday gatherings and the social ease that a little buzz provides make it hard to limit ourselves. Risk of relapse among alcoholics is greater this time of year, when stress and negative emotions may mix at gatherings where alcohol has a central role.

Dennis Donovan is the director of the UW Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute.

Dennis Donovan, director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute at the University of Washington, says that alcohol is a major issue around the holidays for both social drinkers and those recovering from alcoholism. He’s spent more than three decades treating people with alcohol and other addictions. He has advice for how to drink moderately, and treatment approaches he’s used with people recovering from alcohol problems.

So perhaps we can strive to be home, but not hammered, for the holidays.

For social drinkers and people hoping to curb their alcohol consumption, Donovan suggests following these guidelines.

• Count your drinks. In many cases, people lose track of how much they’ve had. This is especially true when they’re sharing a pitcher of beer and someone refills their glass – it’s easy for drinkers to not notice or say “yes” to more than they want to drink.
• Know a standard serving size. Large wine glasses, higher alcohol content in some beers and generous liquor pours in mixed drinks make the “I only had one!” claim questionable. There are guides online showing standard serving sizes for alcohol.
• One drink, one hour. Most people’s bodies can process about one drink per hour. “It’s like a funnel, you might take in lots of alcohol but the body cannot process it any faster,” Donovan said. Pace yourself to one drink an hour or so, and every hour or two you might take a drink “off” and have water or another non-alcoholic beverage instead. Also, make sure to have eaten something.
• Ginger ale looks like a cocktail. Teetotalers not wanting to attract attention or questions can stick to ginger ale or other non-alcoholic drinks that look like cocktails.
• Get support. Moderation Management is a support group that helps social drinkers who are not alcohol dependent achieve and maintain a goal of staying within safe drinking limits.

For people struggling with alcohol use or in recovery, Donovan advises:

• Say no. Firmly, confidently turn down drinks and become resistant to social pressure and arm-twisting. It’s a learned skill that takes practice. “It’s like a play. You need to rehearse your lines and convince the audience,” Donovan said. Some lines to try: “No, I’ve reached my limit” or “I’m not drinking tonight”. Donovan added that the drink refusal approach requires a commitment to yourself to abstain or have a drink limit. “If you’re not committed, it won’t help,” he said.
•  Ride out cravings. Using a treatment strategy known as mindfulness, let yourself be aware of a desire, impulse or craving, then wait it out. Distract yourself – take a walk, strike up a conversation, move away from the liquor cabinet. Think of it as “urge surfing,” Donovan said, where you imagine your craving as a wave. The wave increases in intensity, heightens and then crests. As a surfer, you ride it out. Once the wave is gone, the power behind it dissipates.
•  Look out for stinking thinking. In 12-step programs, stinking thinking is when you notice you’re beginning to think in a way that leads to drinking. It usually starts with a seemingly small decision, like running an errand that brings you close to a favorite bar or stopping by a holiday party. “It seemed to come out of nowhere” is how many people in treatment describe their relapses to Donovan. Think through the consequences of small decisions – “If I go to the party, what will I say if someone offers me a drink?”
•  Support groups. Like Pavlov’s dogs salivating to the sound of a bell, people with alcohol problems are conditioned to crave alcohol in response to social and emotional cues. These cues, such as family conflicts, become more prominent around the holidays, Donovan said. Support and camaraderie of other people trying to stay sober and clean can help you get through this high-stress time. He suggests 12-step or mutual support programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Women for Sobriety or Secular Organization for Sobriety, and notes that people don’t have to be sober to join – they just have to have a desire to stop drinking.

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For more information, contact Donovan at 206-543-0937 or ddonovan@uw.edu.

Victoria Lawson, a UW geography professor, will kick off the 2012-2013 Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities series with a talk titled “A Crisis of Care and a Crisis of Borders: Towards Caring Citizenship” to take place in Kane Hall, room 110 at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 7.

An internationally-respected feminist geographer, Lawson’s research focuses on how human relations have been altered by new modes of mobility, technology and inequality.

In her talk, Lawson will discuss the ethics and practices of care in the global era and how the demand for care in the U.S. is rapidly increasing while public support for it falls. According to Lawson, this “crisis of care” is often borne by low-income care providers, many of whom are racial-ethnic women who may be immigrants and who are often assumed to be undocumented.

She will also explore how the crisis of care meets a border crisis, and how efforts to control the movement and work of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers have unleashed new spatial strategies of border enforcement that have shifted where borders are located.

Read more about Lawson’s lecture and the rest of the 2012-2013 Katz lectures.

Katz Lectures, which are free and open to the public, are organized by UW’s Simpson Center for the Humanities.

“So much of a toddler’s learning involves social interaction, and early intervention that promotes attention to people and social cues may pay dividends in promoting the normal development of the brain and behavior,” said Geraldine Dawson, lead author and chief science officer for the advocacy group Autism Speaks.

UW

A child wearing EEG electrodes looks at a photo of a face, which was used to trigger brain responses to social stimuli.

“For the first time, parents and practitioners have evidence that early intervention can result in an improved course of both brain and behavioral development in young children,” she said.

Dawson began the study while she was the director of the UW Autism Center. The study was published online Oct. 26 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Forty-eight children, aged 18 to 30 months and diagnosed with autism, either participated in routine community-based interventions or the Early Start Denver Model, which emphasizes interpersonal exchanges and shared participation in activities. The model was developed by Dawson and co-author Sally Rogers, a professor at the UC Davis MIND Institute.

Participants received one of the interventions for about 20 hours each week over a period of two years. For the children randomly assigned to the ESDM group, treatment took place two hours, twice a day, five days a week, by trained interventionists who came to the child’s home. The children got an extra boost from their parents, who were trained to use ESDM strategies during routine exchanges with their child.

A previous study found that the ESDM intervention improved IQ, language, and adaptive skills and the researchers wanted to know if the approach also led to brain changes.

After two years of treatment, the brain function of the participants – now about four to five years old – was measured with electroencephalography while the youngsters viewed social stimuli, such as faces, and nonsocial stimuli, such as toys.

“Humans are experts at processing faces, but the brains of children with autism have delays in the ability respond to faces,” said co-author Sara Webb, a UW research associate professor. If the brain can quickly identify a face, she said, then it can build on this to also quickly decide whether the face is of a man or a woman, happy or sad, and familiar or not.

Children in both intervention groups showed similar brain responses to faces as did children in a control group who did not have autism, suggesting that “the high level of intervention in both groups allowed the children with autism to catch up to the children in the control group,” Webb said. “That’s fantastic news.”

Looking at a higher level of brain processing, the researchers studied whether the treatments changed brain measures of attention and cognitive engagement when seeing faces compared with a nonsocial stimulus. Eleven of 15 – or 73 percent – of children in the ESDM group showed greater attention to faces than to toys. In contrast, the EEGs of only five of the 14 recipients of the community intervention, or 36 percent, showed similar activation.

“The ESDM intervention resulted in greater attention and cognition brain activity to social stimuli, and these brain function patterns are more similar to the typical developing group of children,” Webb said.

She stressed not only the importance of receiving intensive early intervention for autism, but that the intervention should focus on enhancing social attention, reciprocal interactions and engagement with a social partner.

Other study authors at UW are Emily Jones, Kaitlin Venema, Rachel Lowy, Susan Faja, Dana Kamara, Michale Murias, Jessica Greenson, Jamie Winter and Milani Smith, as well as Kristen Merkle of Vanderbilt University.

The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and an Autism Speaks postdoctoral fellowship awarded to Jones.

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For more information, contact Webb at 206-221-6461 or sjwebb@uw.edu. Media inquiries for Dawson can be sent to Jane Rubinstein at 212-843-8287, 516-993-0708 (cell) or jrubinstein@rubenstein.com.

A new study from the University of Washington shows that digital media helps teens reach developmental milestones, such as fostering a sense of belonging and sharing personal problems. But the study also raised questions about whether digital connectedness might hinder the development of an autonomous sense of self.

Katie Davis, an assistant professor in the Information School and an expert on digital media use during adolescence, calls it “Friendship 2.0.”

“What they’re doing is different from generations of teenagers from before the digital era, but it comes from the same place of basic developmental needs. It’s just that they’re using different tools to satisfy these needs,” said Davis.

She is the author of a study on the role of digital media in adolescent friendships and sense of identity, an important factor in psychological well-being. The study will be published in the November issue of the Journal of Adolescence.

Davis interviewed 32 adolescents, aged 13 to 18 and about an even mix of boys and girls, living on the island of Bermuda where teens have similar digital media habits as teenagers in the United States. She asked them about how they use media to communicate with friends, and came up with an inventory of their media use:

• 94 percent have cell phones.
• 53 percent have Internet-enabled cell phones.
• 91 percent have Facebook profiles.
• 78 percent use online instant messaging, such as MSN, AOL or Skype.
• 94 percent use YouTube.
• 9 percent use Twitter.

These percentages are similar to what Davis found when she surveyed 2,079 youths living in Bermuda, an affluent British-dependent territory located about 640 miles off the coast of South Carolina. Though more Bermudian teens use social networking sites and own cell phones than American teens, Davis says that her findings from the island where she grew up and worked as a school teacher can provide insights on U.S. teens because the two countries share cultural ties and the role of digital media in teens’ lives is similar in both places.

Davis asked about the content of their digital conversations and analyzed 200 examples shared by the teens. Casual chatter about homework or what they did that day occurred three times more than intimate conversations about feelings or problems.

Looking more closely at the casual exchanges, Davis found that friends stay connected through frequent check-ins, sharing something funny that happened or asking what they’re up to or how they’re doing. These off-the-cuff conversations can last throughout the day, with breaks for going to class or having dinner.

Most – 68 percent – of check-ins occur on Facebook, and include groups of friends commenting on photos or YouTube videos. Nearly half of the participants in the survey talked about posting photos of themselves with their friends and then tagging their friends, allowing them to discuss a shared experience and promote a sense of belonging to a circle of friends.

Intimate exchanges, discussed by 69 percent of participants – usually girls – included how they were feeling, whether they were having a bad day or other problems that they hoped to get their friends’ help with. Youths, especially those describing themselves as shy or quiet, said that it was easier to share these personal thoughts digitally than in person. Some felt typing rather than speaking their feelings gave them more control.

Some participants considered the ability to connect anytime and anywhere with their friends to be not just convenient, but necessary to stay up-to-date and to avoid feeling isolated or being left out of group activities.

“Adolescents are interacting with their peers constantly, and the question arises as to whether they can still develop an autonomous sense of self,” Davis said. This isn’t known yet, but she suspects that this constant connectivity may support the development of an outward-looking self, one that looks to others for affirmation rather relying on an internal sense of worth and efficacy.

“Relying on others for self-affirmation suggests a relatively fragile sense of self, but our study doesn’t say for sure that that is what is going on,” Davis said. “What we can say is that adolescents are using digital media to promote their sense of belonging and self-disclosure of personal problems, two important peer processes that support identity development.”

The study was funded in part by The Bank of Bermuda Foundation.

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For more information, contact Davis at kdavis78@uw.edu or 206-221-7741.