Human Development

Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making: Implications for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy

Valerie Reyna discusses teen risk taking, developmental differences in judgment and decision making, and the implications of her research for programs and policies to prevent or change risky behaviors. [Video, slides & article]

Law, Psychology, and Human Development

Charles Brainerd highlights the pervasive use of memory reports as legal evidence in our courts, common assumptions juries make about eye-witness reports, and research findings showing many of these assumptions to be false or seriously limited. [Video, slides & article]

The Positive Side of Aging: Changes in Emotion-Cognition Interactions across the Life Span

Joseph Mikels discusses age-related changes in cognitive function and emotional regulation, findings related to emotion-cognition interactions, and implications for how the decision quality of older adults could be improved. [Video & article]

From Theory to Practice and Back: Finding New Ways to Integrate Research and Practice

Jennifer Brown discusses logic modeling, linking research to program theory and evaluation, and the Netway - a new Internet-based database tool for monitoring and tracking program activities to create evaluation plans. [Video & slides]

Human, but More So: What the Autistic Brain Tells Us about the Process of Narrative

Matthew Belmonte discusses his research on the brain physiology of people with autism spectrum conditions and how the deficits they experience relate to the process of narrative which has its basis in neural connectivity. He posits that autistic repetitive behaviors may be seen as an exaggerated form of normal development in which the person is trying to learn from and make sense of experience through the process of narrative. [Video, slides & article coming soon]