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Elika Bergelson on three key predictors of language development

January 23, 2024
Elika Bergelson standing in front of a chalkboard with letter magnets
Elika Bergelson, Associate Professor of Psychology; Photo by Dylan Goodman

Growing up amid a swirl of Russian, Hebrew, and English fed Elika Bergelson’s passion for language development.

Her parents had emigrated in the 1970s from the Soviet Union to Israel, where they began their family. Bergelson and her youngest sibling were born in the 1980s after the family settled in Columbus, Ohio. Even back then, she noticed generational differences around grammar, accents, and vocabularies that left her asking how the kids had outpaced the adults.

“What is it about language acquisition that makes younger minds — which are usually less good at everything — actually better at this particular process?” she remembered wondering.

Read the full article in the Harvard Gazette.

PhD Student Wendy Sun (Buckner Lab) on mapping the mind in the Harvard Gazette

November 27, 2023
A young Asian woman wearing glasses and a white lab coat

"Sun and her colleagues leverage a method developed at the lab of Harvard Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Randy Buckner to identify and target these networks in individual subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood oxygen levels. 'At Buckner lab, we recruit human subjects and put them in an MRI scanner,” Sun explains. “We ask them to do various tasks like remembering the past or imagining the future, and we scan the subjects very intensively over a course of several months using fMRI imaging to get a proxy of brain activity, measure, and characterize their neural networks.'"

Read more in the Harvard Gazette.

Fiery Cushman named Harvard College Professor

May 4, 2023
Cushman

Congratulations to our very our Fiery Cushman for being named as one of 5 Harvard College Professors out of more than 700 faculty in the FAS!

Harvard College Professors receive five-year appointments to acknowledge significant contributions to undergraduate teaching, research, and learning.

Read more in The Harvard Gazette.

Mina Cikara, Katie A. McLaughlin, and Mark Hatzenbuehler in The Harvard Gazette

May 3, 2023
Photo of Cikara, McLaughlin, and Hatzenbuehler

Time and again, science finds that poverty is hard on developing brains.

“Higher levels of anxiety and depression are well-established among kids growing up in families with lower income,” said Harvard psychology Professor Katie A. McLaughlin. “Over the past decade or so, we’ve learned there are also well-replicated differences in brain development as a function of a family’s socioeconomic status.”

But a robust social safety net may buffer young minds from these effects, according to a new paper in Nature Communications by McLaughlin and her colleagues. Benefits like cash assistance and access to Medicaid seem to be especially beneficial for children in states with a high cost of living.

Read the full article in The Harvard Gazette.

Harvard Psychology mourns the passing of Herbert C. Kelman, 94

March 5, 2022
Photo of Herb Kelman
Herb Kelman. Harvard Gazette file photo.

Herbert C. Kelman, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics emeritus at Harvard and the director of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (1993-2003), died March 1 in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. He was 94.

Read more in the Gazette.

Matthew Nock appointed to NIMH Advisory Council

February 18, 2022
Matthew K. Nock

Psychologists Named to NIMH Advisory Council
NIMH has appointed three new psychologists to the National Advisory Mental Health Council. Congratulations to Marguerita Lightfoot, PhD, Oregon Health & Science University – Portland State University School of Public Health; Joel T. Nigg, PhD,Oregon Health &P Science University; and Matthew Nock, PhD, Harvard University. Read more.

Professor Steven Pinker tries Wordle

January 25, 2022
Steven Pinker

It’s simple, it’s free, it’s addictive, it’s Wordle. But what makes the online daily puzzle so appealing? And what parts of the brain are being activated when players try to guess a five-letter word in six tries? The Gazette turned to Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist and Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, for answers.

Read the full article in the Harvard Gazette

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