̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - friends

Support from family and friends important to help prevent depression in teenagers

cjb250 — Fri, 20 May 2016 07:19:46 +0000

Adolescence is a key time in an individual’s development, and is a period where some teenagers begin to show signs of major depression. One of the major risk factors for depression in adolescence is childhood family adversity, such as poor parenting and lack of affection, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, family financial problems or the loss of a family member. Another major risk factor for depression is bullying by peers – and the combined experience of childhood family adversity and peer bullying is associated with increased severity of depression symptoms.

Studies suggest that friendships and supportive family environments may help protect adolescents from depression if they have experienced peer bullying and childhood family adversity. However, no study has simultaneously examined the complex interplay of early life adversity, bullying, family support and friendships on later adolescent depression.

Researchers at the Department of Psychiatry at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge studied almost 800 teenagers (322 boys and 449 girls), and used mathematical modelling to examine the impact of friendships and family support at age 14 on depressive symptoms at age 17 in adolescents who had previously experienced childhood family adversity and primary school bullying.

“Teenage years can be difficult for everyone, but we found that this is particularly the case for those teens who have had a difficult family environment,” explains Dr Anne-Laura van Harmelen, the study’s first author. “Adolescents who had experienced negative family environments are more likely to be bullied at school, and less likely to receive family support in adolescence. We also found that children who were bullied in primary school were less likely to have supportive friendships in adolescence.

“In fact, we found a strong relationship between having a negative family environment and being bullied at primary school. This puts teens at a double disadvantage and means they are more likely to experience more severe symptoms of depression in their late teens.”

Boys who had been bullied were less likely than girls to develop strong friendships in adolescence, which the researchers suggest may be because boys experienced more severe bullying or were more sensitive to bullying.

Crucially, the researchers also found that supportive family or friends in early adolescence could help reduce depressive symptoms in later teenage years. It is not clear from the results how social support influences later life mental health. However, the researchers suggest several possibilities, including that supportive friends and family environments may help enhance children’s ability to cope with adverse situations by improving their self-esteem and offering stress-relief and through helping them develop effective interpersonal skills.

“Our work really shows how important it is that children and teenagers have strong support from their family and friends, particularly if their childhood has been a difficult one,” adds Professor Ian Goodyer, senior author. “It also suggests a role for interventions such as helping parents in at-risk families develop their parenting and support skills or helping bullied teens build their confidence and social skills to help find and maintain friendships.”

̽��ֱ��research was funded primarily by the Wellcome Trust and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Reference
Van Harmelen, AL et al. Friendships and Family Support Reduce Subsequent Depressive Symptoms in At-Risk Adolescents. PLOS ONE; 4 May 2016; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0153715

̽��ֱ��importance of friendships and family support in helping prevent depression among teenagers has been highlighted in research from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��study, published in the open access journal PLOS ONE, also found that teenagers who had grown up in a difficult family environment were more likely than their peers to be bullied at school.

Teenage years can be difficult for everyone, but we found that this is particularly the case for those teens who have had a difficult family environment

Anne-Laura van Harmelen

Michael Coghlan

Zoe and Friend

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Children’s literature an escape from the adult world

sjr81 — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 08:01:12 +0000

Dr Louise Joy is speaking at this year’s Festival of Ideas at Cambridge – the UK’s only festival covering the arts, humanities and social sciences – which runs from October 19-30 and is almost entirely free.

Dr Joy, a Director of Studies at Homerton College, puts forward the notion that reading and writing children’s books is a symbolic retreat from the disappointment of reality for adults.

Literary classics such as Kenneth Grahame’s ̽��ֱ��Wind in the Willows and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have been lovingly cherished and re-published over the centuries. Although shelved as children’s literature, these books have remained immensely popular with adults.

Why do we still find such comfort in re-reading these children’s classics? What is it about these stories which so deeply penetrate our collective psyche? Many literary scholars and commentators have explored how children’s classics interpret childhood, but Dr Joy claims that these books can tell us far more about the adult world than they can about children.

She argues that the characters and stories of children’s classics reflect what we in the adult world lack, desire, and consequently idealises.

She said: “Children’s classics are written by adults, valued by adults, published by adults and celebrated by adults. Instead of telling us about childhood or the child condition, they more obviously tell us something about the adult condition.

“By identifying recurrent motifs and themes in children’s classics, I am attempting to provide a new way of thinking about what we, as adults, desire childhood to be and children to be like. ̽��ֱ��same representations of childhood can be seen again and again in children’s classics, suggesting that we treasure the books that evoke that which the adult world lacks and we wish it contained. We cherish children’s classics precisely because they represent a world that does not resemble the world as we experience it.”

Dr Joy will use the Festival of Ideas to talk about her research on Wednesday, 26 October, 6.30-7.30pm, at the Faculty of English at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. Her lecture is entitled Re-reading Children’s Classics.

Many of the most revered children’s books are those which younger readers find the most impenetrable. Ask a child what he or she thinks of Alice in Wonderland, and many will describe it as a scary, weird and difficult reading experience. Ask the same child ten years later, and they may remember the text with fondness. Many adults and children have never even read these famous texts from cover to cover, but the worlds they depict have rooted themselves in our culture through film, pictorial art, and language itself. So why is it that adults distort their childhood memories and look back on these texts with such nostalgia?

Joy argues that adult writers and readers hold an idealised mythology of childhood, a mythology that is kept alive and re-animated by our culture. Many of these texts depict a form of childhood that is far removed from the kind of life children have ever experienced.

Characters in children’s classics value simplicity, unpretentiousness, compassion, loyalty and tolerance. They are often free spirits, unbothered by peer-pressure or social institutions.

“In the fictional world, humans can get on with events; actions and emotions are un-crippled by the affliction of self-consciousness. This is the key feature of the texts which are celebrated over the centuries; they represent a world which is liberated from self-consciousness, self-doubt, self-scrutiny and self-interest,” said Dr Joy.

One theme which she analyses is friendship. Toad of Toad Hall in ̽��ֱ��Wind in the Willows is kind and generous, but also a blathering crackpot with a criminal fetish for fast cars. Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore is a cynical, nihilistic egotist and Tigger a possible depressive. Yet these fictional chums create and maintain friendship on a transparent level, regarding each other with mutual affection and appreciation. Think of Piglet giving up his house to a homeless Pooh Bear, or Grahame’s Rat taking Mole boating on the river. They view one another’s eccentricities as loveable idiosyncrasies, and not as irritating neuroses or dysfunctions. Children’s literature suggests that being part of a diverse menagerie of personalities is an enriching and ennobling experience.

“A specific kind of friendship is represented and celebrated in children’s classics: it is non-narcissistic. In this idealised form, friends are tolerant of one another’s differences. Friendship is founded on people coming together, sharing experiences and activities. Gone are the complicated, vexed relationships based on need, self-interest and power dynamics, so typical of the adult world,” Dr Joy explains.

In a similar way, conversation in children’s literature is clear and direct. Characters choose their words carefully and precisely. As a result, meaning is nearly always successfully and considerately transacted, and characters rarely misunderstand each other. In contrast, in adult fiction – as in the adult world – conversation is invariably a mine-field of miscommunication, causing confusion, heartbreak, and even death.

Added Dr Joy: “Language is forever inadequate in encapsulating what we wish to say, and we are forever unable to say what we actually mean. Adults use language not merely to communicate, but also to not communicate; we use fillers and meaningless words to express emotion, to conceal meaning, to pass the time or to feign interest.”

She argues that the direct speech typically found in children’s classics therefore has a deep-seated appeal for adults.

She said: “It satisfies adult fantasies for language to be used as a straightforward vehicle for communication. A reason why adults derive such solace from re-reading these books is because it is a pleasure and a relief to witness conversation taking shape in this fulfilling form. ̽��ֱ��pathos, the tragedy and the weight of the failure to communicate, notoriously exemplified in works such as Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a theme which often drives the adult novel. In a children’s book this possibility isn’t really entertained.”

Entitled Literature’s Children, Joy’s upcoming book delves into the symbolic significance of children’s classics, teasing out answers to big philosophical questions such as the adult affliction of self-consciousness and the mythology of childhood. She says children’s literature “refracts adult consciousness, offering and enabling us to pass on to our own children the world as we wish it, and precisely not as we find it.”

A ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge academic is to suggest that grown-ups enjoy children’s classics because they are dissatisfied with life in the adult world.

We cherish children’s classics precisely because they represent a world that does not resemble the world as we experience it.

Louise Joy

David Masters via Flickr

Children's books

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Come here often?

sjr81 — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:30:58 +0000

To date, most social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have relied upon the ‘friend-of-a-friend’ approach to try and determine which people may have connections with one another.

However, Salvatore Scellato, Anastasios Noulas and Cecilia Mascolo, of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, have devised a new approach that not only looks at friends of friends, but also the places people visit – with incremental weightings given to different places such as airports and gymnasiums.

Scellato said: “Essentially this is a way in which we can predict how people will make new friends. We know that we are likely to become friends with ‘friends of friends’, but what we find is there are specific places which foster the creation of new friendships and that they have specific characteristics.”

Historically, the problem facing social networks has been the sheer volume of users. While millions of users may represent good news from a business perspective, it means the task of recommending friends can become an exponentially difficult one, if, as in the case of Facebook, you have 750 million active users.

̽��ֱ��standard two-hop approach – sharing at least a common friend – has, to date, ignored the possibilities of recommending new friends based on the places where users ‘check-in’.

̽��ֱ��trio’s research is an extension of long-standing sociological theory that people who tend to frequent the same places may be similarly-minded individuals likely to form a connection with one another – but applied to social networking sites.

Added Scellato: “For our research we analysed the location-based social network Gowalla to see how users created social connections over a period of four months. We discovered that about 30 per cent of all new social links appear among users that check-in to the same places. Thus, these ‘place friends’ represent disconnected users becoming direct connections.

“By combining place friends with friends-of-friends, we can make the prediction space about 15 times smaller and yet, cover 66 per cent of new social ties.

“It turns out that the properties of the places we interact can determine how likely we are to develop social ties. Offices, gyms and schools are more likely to aid development rather than other places such as football stadiums or airports. In those places, it’s highly unlikely people will develop a social connection.

“Our results show it’s possible to improve the performance of link prediction systems on location-based services that can be employed to keep the users of social networks interested and engaged with that particular website.”

A new way of predicting which people may become friends on social networks - based on the type of places they visit - has been formulated by ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers.

It turns out that the properties of the places we interact can determine how likely we are to develop social ties.

Salvatore Scellato

MIDTN.com AKA Brent via Flickr Creative Commons

Ernest Tubb Record Shop sign

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