“I remember carrying my little sister on my back because she’s too tired and walking through the huge sunflower fields … and me feeling so tired I didn’t think I could walk another step.”
“I remember being in a taxi with my mother, coming back to the man who had been violently abusive to all of us…. Her words to me were, ‘Just trust me, Trish. Just trust me.’ ”
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“I’m waiting at a train station … to meet my mother who I haven’t seen in many years…. Hours pass and eventually I try to call her … and she says to me, ‘I’m sorry, Trish. My neighbor was upset, and I needed to stay back with them.’ And her voice was slurring quite a lot, so I knew she had been drinking.”
Tran, who lives in Perth, Australia, is dispassionate as she describes a difficult childhood. Her account lacks what are generally considered classic signs of trauma: She makes no mention of flashbacks, appears to have a generally positive outlook and speaks with relative ease about distressing events. Yet she narrates her life growing up and living in the Australian Outback as a series of disconnected events; her life story lacks connective glue.
That disjointed style is not how people, at least people in the West, tend to talk about themselves, says psychologist Christin Camia. Autobiographical accounts, like any good narrative, typically contain a curation of key past experiences , transitions linking those experiences and larger arcs about where life is headed. People use these stories to make sense of their lives, says Camia, of Zayed University’s Abu Dhabi campus in the United Arab Emirates.
But a growing body of evidence from fields as wide-ranging as psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy and literary studies suggests that, as with Tran, trauma can shatter the narrative coherence of one’s life. People lose the plot.
Life’s crises can trigger an existential crisis, Camia says. People think: “I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know where I go from here.”
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One therapy now in testing aims to re-tether traumatized individuals to their mental timelines, or their sense of themselves as connected across past, present and future. The therapy focuses on the future, which once rife with possibilities now appears as a void. It asks: What would it take for someone like Tran, or anyone traumatized by war, abuse, mass shootings, the ongoing pandemic and other calamities, to flip their life script, to say that they know who they are and where they go from here?
In a nod to an established research approach, I have asked Tran to tell me her story in two parts. First, she should narrate seven snapshots of key moments in her life. Second, Tran, who is a lecturer on mental health recovery at Curtin University in Perth, should stitch those snapshots together to tell me how she became who she is today.
The first task comes easy. The second task eludes her. She switches to generalities. “I’ve always been a highly reflective person,” she says. “I’ve had to rely on my brains to keep myself and my family alive.”
I try to nudge her toward specifics, but her timeline disintegrates. She repeatedly attempted suicide. Her mother brought home many violent men.
The developer of this two-question approach, psychologist Tilmann Habermas, wasn’t focused on people who had experienced trauma. Habermas, now at Goethe University Frankfurt, wanted to understand how adolescents develop a narrative identity and then sustain that sense of self over time.
In 2003, Habermas launched a study that would follow participants for up to 16 years. Participants came into the lab every four years and dictated their life story in roughly 20-minute increments, using the two-task format I tried with Tran. Habermas analyzed the resulting transcripts line by line, coding them for emotion, tense, transitions and other features.
With few psychologists at the time studying autobiography as a window into the mind, Habermas turned to theorists from other fields for guidance. “After I read psychology, I read narratology, literary theory, linguistics, social linguistics,” he says. “I had to steal … all these concepts from the other areas.”
One of Habermas’ questions was how people retain their sense of self in the face of life’s many disturbances, such as divorce, illness, job loss or moving to a new location.
Philosophers have been puzzling over this question for millennia. “Your body has changed. Your experiences have changed. Your knowledge has changed. And yet, people generally think of themselves as being the same person … in the past and future,” says psychologist Yosef Sokol of Touro University in New York City. “That’s a hard problem.”
This general belief in self-continuity appears universal, even though how it is constructed may differ across cultures.
Autobiographical reasoning is a type of thinking that links the self across space and time. Below are three categories of this reasoning and example arguments for each.
Lessons learned : “After that I told myself, when I fall in love the next time, I must take care that school doesn’t suffer.”
Developmental status : “At the time I wasn’t aware of any that, after all, I was still too young for that.”
Formative experience : “My burnout has led me to no longer attach so much importance to money today.”
In the third wave of Habermas’ long-term study, when 150 participants were ages 16, 20, 28, 44 and 69, Habermas and Camia, who joined Habermas’ lab in 2009, also analyzed the transcripts for a type of thinking called autobiographical reasoning. This reasoning links the self across space and time.
“Autobiographical reasoning is this conscious reflection. How did my past impact me? How did I become the person I am today, and what does it mean for my future?” Camia says. Such reasoning tends to stem from change, she adds. “If there is perfect stability in life, you don’t do a lot of autobiographical reasoning … it’s the changes and the crises that compel meaning-making.”
The researchers divvied such reasoning into eight categories, such as turning points, lessons learned, generalized insights and using an event to explain a change in personality.
Participants also filled out two surveys. One survey summed up the number of big life changes experienced over the previous four years. The other gauged self-continuity, with participants rating the truth of statements such as, “When I look at pictures of myself four years back, it feels a little unfamiliar” and “I have the feeling that at the core I am the same person I was four years ago.”
Researchers then compared the three variables: autobiographical reasoning, levels of life change and sense of self-continuity. As expected, levels of autobiographical reasoning showed no discernible pattern among participants who experienced few changes in life, the team reported in 2015 in Memory .
But when the researchers zoomed in on the quarter of participants reporting the greatest level of change, more autobiographical reasoning came with higher levels of self-continuity . “Constructing continuity in the life story buffers against the effect of change in your life,” Habermas says. Other teams have made similar findings.
As part of a long-term study, participants shared their life stories in roughly 20-minute increments. Researchers analyzed those stories for autobiographical arguments — statements about how the past influences a person today. Among those who experienced the most life changes (quartile 4 in the chart), more autobiographical reasoning correlated with a greater sense of self-continuity.
Most disruptions, however, do not rise to the level of trauma — such as that experienced by Tran. Several years later, Camia would study how traumatic events, notably being forced to flee one’s home and the resulting isolation and bereavement, affect people’s sense of self.
“What does war change first? One’s sense of time , one’s sense of space,” said Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan in an October speech translated to English in the online magazine LitHub.
Zhadan speaks from experience. But the idea that trauma disrupts time perception is also borne out by research. Researchers have found that emotions frequently dictate whether we experience time as passing fast or slow. And traumatic events, which come with intense emotions, can cause people to experience time in slow motion , researchers reported in 2012 in Frontiers in Psychology .
During a car accident, for instance, a person’s whole body is ready to act, says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist with the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. “Your inner workings, your processing, is speeded up. Relative to that, your outside slows down.”
What’s more, says health psychologist Alison Holman of the University of California, Irvine, in that moment or moments of crisis, you do not think about the past or future. All that matters is survival .
Zhadan speaks directly to this idea in his speech: “People in a war-torn space try not to plan for the future or think too much about what the world will be like tomorrow. What’s happening to you here and now is all that matters, just the people and things that will be with you tomorrow morning — tops. That’s if you survive and wake up.”
That narrow focus can wreak havoc on mental health. “[When] that present moment is so intense that it sears into your mind … it may set up the likelihood that you will have a hard time moving past it,” Holman says. “The past never passes.”
Such breakdowns in time can show up in language, particularly among those most severely affected by trauma. For instance, Habermas and his team compared the speech patterns of 14 women diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder following a singular shocking event, such as physical or sexual abuse, and 14 women without such a diagnosis. The women with PTSD used more immersive language . They quoted people directly and spoke of the past as if it was ongoing, says Habermas, who reported the findings in 2014. “Instead of saying, ‘He hit me,’ they would say, ‘He hits me.’ ”
This immersive language dominates Tran’s narration. She is “carrying” her little sister. Her mother is “coming” back to the violent man. She is “walking many kilometers to school in the rain and then opening up my newspaper-wrapped wet and warm tomato sandwiches. They’re so wet, but I’m so hungry that I know I have to eat them otherwise I’ll never make the walk back.”
And always there, her mother’s voice: “Just trust me, Trish. Just trust me.”
“I don’t think I will ever forget those words,” Tran says.
Tran remembers her mother’s words exactly, but other details of the abuse she experienced as a child are fuzzier. That’s common among people who experience trauma. People with trauma “have both an excess and depletion of memory,” says cognitive neuroscientist Elisa Ciaramelli of the University of Bologna in Italy.
How memory changes among trauma survivors remains controversial, write the authors of a 2021 opinion piece in Frontiers in Psychology . But mounting evidence suggests that people tend to remember stressful memories in detail. As the mind fixates on those traumatic memories, memories unrelated to the trauma seem to fade, while new memories fail to register.
For example, when asked to describe memories associated with a specific word, such as “beach,” people who do not have PTSD offer detailed reports, describing what they were wearing, what they said and who they were with, Ciaramelli says. People who have PTSD, on the other hand, typically provide general memories with little color.
Other memories can’t find a foothold. In one study, researchers asked 52 participants — 26 people with PTSD and 26 people who had experienced trauma but not developed PTSD — to keep a diary recording their memories over the course of a week. Participants also responded to questions about the memory, such as whether or not it related to their trauma, how central it was to their current life and how far away in time the memory felt.
Participants without PTSD recorded an average of 21.4 memories across the week while participants with PTSD recorded an average of just 11 memories , the team reported in 2017 in Clinical Psychological Science . The PTSD participants had more trauma-related memories than the non-PTSD group.
Tran recognizes this paucity of detail in her own life story. “My memories are lightbulb memories,” she says. “They are always attached to significant events like trauma or happy times. I may have 57 years of life, but you could truncate them into a chapter.”
Everyone’s memory has imprecision of course. That imprecision allows us to cut extraneous details and make sense of our story. The traumatized person’s relative lack of memories, though, both in clarity and quantity, means they struggle to construct a cohesive narrative of their past and to envision themselves moving forward.
“Ten years ago, people have found that the same brain regions that are activated and are necessary for remembering the past are also necessary to imagine the future,” Ciaramelli says. “We need memories to imagine the future.”
Camia’s work with refugees shows what can happen to the sense of self as people struggle and fail to reconcile a traumatic experience with the larger story of their life. Her central aim, which built on work with Habermas, was to see if the same autobiographical arguments people used to buffer against life’s everyday changes could help those facing traumatic disruptions. She and Rida Zafar, a psychology student at New York University Abu Dhabi, recruited 31 refugees living in Germany and asked them to narrate their life stories, plus fill out the life change and self-continuity surveys used in the 2015 study.
Among the 16 refugees who experienced relatively less change since arriving in Germany, such as fewer upheavals in relationships and fewer moves, more autobiographical reasoning did correlate with higher self-continuity, the team reported in 2021 in Frontiers in Psychology . Refugees who experienced high change also used autobiographical reasoning, but their sense of self-continuity remained low.
These individuals cannot settle their trauma, Camia explains, so their reckoning with the past leads not to resolution but rumination . They are stuck.
For most of her adult life, Tran grappled with that sense of stagnation. “My identity was rooted in the past, and I couldn’t move forward,” she says. “Time was this eternal loop. Every time a problem came up, it felt like a replication of a past problem. I couldn’t see that I could change anything.”
Over and over again, unable to envision a viable escape, Tran tried to kill herself.
Suicide attempts serve as the clearest signal that a person’s future has gone blank, says Sokol, the psychologist at Touro University. The thinking here is intuitive. “If you think you have a meaningful life into the future, you’re not going to kill yourself,” he says.
Conventional therapies for treating people struggling with suicidal thinking often fail to meet their needs because the therapies do not directly address people’s future self , Sokol and his team wrote in 2021 in the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy . For instance, dialectical behavior therapy emphasizes focusing on the present to cope with stress and manage emotions. Narrative therapy likewise aims to help patients incorporate traumatic and other events into a continuous timeline, but focuses on linking past to present, not present to future.
So Sokol developed a therapy that incorporates elements of past- and present-oriented treatments but prioritizes future thinking. It’s known as continuous identity cognitive therapy. His goal is to help military veterans struggling with mental illness re-create the plot in the mental timeline of their lives, to answer those foundational questions: Who am I? Where do I go from here?
Sokol tested an initial version of the therapy in a four-week pilot study with 17 veterans. The program contains many work-arounds for participants struggling to access or make sense of their memories. The specific memory is less important than the larger story, or the broader values contained within that memory, Sokol says. “I have all sorts of techniques to help people tap into something that they find important, meaningful.”
In the first week, participants are asked to define their core values. The hope is that those values, rather than specific past events, will form the core of a person’s life story. To get to that core, participants review negative and positive experiences from their past and identify choices they made.
Many veterans struggle with what are called moral injuries — choices they made that don’t seem to align with who they wish to be, Sokol says. So veterans push those memories away. With the values approach, he hopes participants can start to see that they made the best choices they could under challenging circumstances. One way to access those values is to have participants identify people they admire, and the values those people embody. Participants can then use those people’s experiences to identify their own core values.
The focus of the second week shifts to the future. Participants assemble possible futures by reflecting on how life might play out if they work with, or against, their stated values. Participants also actively construct self-continuity. For instance, they write letters to themselves across different time points, such as from their present self to their future self or vice versa.
In week three, participants learn to differentiate between external life stories, the series of events outside their control, and internal life stories made up of choices in line with their stated values. By week four, participants should be able to visualize their future self overcoming an issue that their present self faces.
In a small pilot study with veterans, a new treatment for mental illness that focuses on future thinking, called continuous identity cognitive therapy, appeared to decrease levels of suicidal ideation and depression.
Tran came across Sokol’s research while embarking on her own journey to healing. That process began when Tran realized how her trauma was hurting the people she loved most. “I’m just causing my children and everybody near and dear trauma. I’m going to take [suicide] off the table,” she eventually realized. “This is not my pathway anymore. If it’s not my pathway, what am I going to do with the next 50 years of my life?”
Tran felt lost. So she dug into research on trauma survivors, eventually stumbling upon Sokol’s project. She was moved by the idea that participants did not have to reconstruct the past to build a new future. “This is true. My soul knows this to be true,” she remembers thinking.
Tran, who is also a trainer with DISCHARGED, a nonprofit organization that provides peer group support for people experiencing suicidal thoughts, and an occasional adviser to researchers writing about suicide, reached out to Sokol and offered to help him make the language used in his program more sensitive to people who have experienced trauma. For instance, she suggested changing references to “you” to “we” to give people a greater sense of belonging and agency. The two still work together.
Research on the therapy remains limited to Sokol’s lab, but initial results are promising. The pilot study showed that the program decreased previously reported levels of suicidal ideation and depression. Those levels stayed low one month after completion. Now Sokol has received a five-year, $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to scale up the program and eventually roll out a randomized controlled trial. In its newer iteration, the program will run for three months instead of one.
With input from Tran and veterans in the program, Sokol made another substantial modification to the pilot program. Participants will now identify how their own story intersects with the stories of other people in their lives. That addition makes sense to Tran, who has become engrossed in research showing the intergenerational nature of trauma. She now sees her life as part of a larger story with many characters, each on their own often troubled journey.
She says her story will always be truncated. But even without a clean narrative arc, she has managed to sever time’s eternal loop. “You can change your relationship with your past experiences in a way that makes living a future possible,” Tran says.
S. Droit-Volet and S. Gil. The time-emotion paradox . Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Vol. 364, July 12, 2009, p.1,943, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0013
Sujata Gupta is the social sciences writer and is based in Burlington, Vt.
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Claude Monet’s 1899 painting “Charing Cross Bridge” has a visibility of less than five kilometers, researchers estimate. That’s similar to the visibility in modern-day megacities such as Delhi and Beijing on smoggy days.
The 19th century landscape paintings hanging in London’s Tate Britain museum looked awfully familiar to climate physicist Anna Lea Albright. Artist Joseph Mallord William Turner’s signature way of shrouding his vistas in fog and smoke reminded Albright of her own research tracking air pollution.
“I started wondering if there was a connection,” says Albright, who had been visiting the museum on a day off from the Laboratory for Dynamical Meteorology in Paris. After all, Turner — a forerunner of the impressionist movement — was painting as Britain’s industrial revolution gathered steam, and a growing number of belching manufacturing plants earned London the nickname “The Big Smoke.”
Turner’s early works, such as his 1814 painting “Apullia in Search of Appullus,” were rendered in sharp details. Later works, like his celebrated 1844 painting “Rain, Steam and Speed — the Great Western Railway,” embraced a dreamier, fuzzier aesthetic.
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Perhaps, Albright thought, this burgeoning painting style wasn’t a purely artistic phenomenon. Perhaps Turner and his successors painted exactly what they saw: their environs becoming more and more obscured by smokestack haze.
To find out how much realism there is in impressionism, Albright teamed up with Harvard University climatologist Peter Huybers, who’s an expert in reconstructing pollution before instruments existed to closely track air quality. Their analysis of nearly 130 paintings by Turner, Paris-based impressionist Claude Monet and several others tells a tale of two modernizing cities.
Low contrast and whiter hues are hallmarks of the impressionist style. They are also hallmarks of air pollution, which can affect how a distant scene looks to the naked eye. Tiny airborne particles, or aerosols, can absorb or scatter light. That makes the bright parts of objects appear dimmer while also shifting the entire scene’s color toward neutral white.
The artworks that Albright and Huybers investigated, which span from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, decrease in contrast as the 19th century progresses. That trend tracks with an increase in air pollution , estimated from historical records of coal sales, Albright and Huybers report in the Feb. 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
“Our results indicate that [19th century] paintings capture changes in the optical environment associated with increasingly polluted atmospheres during the industrial revolution,” the researchers write.
Albright and Huybers distinguished art from aerosol by first using a mathematical model to analyze the contrast and color of 60 paintings that Turner made between 1796 and 1850 as well as 38 Monet works from 1864 to 1901. They then compared the findings to sulfur dioxide emissions over the century, estimated from the trend in the annual amount of coal sold and burned in London and Paris. When sulfur dioxide reacts with molecules in the atmosphere, aerosols form.
As sulfur dioxide emissions increased over time, the amount of contrast in both Turner’s and Monet’s paintings decreased. However, paintings of Paris that Monet made from 1864 to 1872 have much higher contrast than Turner’s last paintings of London made two decades earlier.
The difference, Albright and Huybers say, can be attributed to the much slower start of the industrial revolution in France. Paris’ air pollution level around 1870 was about what London’s was when Turner started painting in the early 1800s. It confirms that the similar progression in their painting styles can’t be chalked up to coincidence, but is guided by air pollution, the pair conclude.
The researchers also analyzed the paintings’ visibility, or the distance at which an object can be clearly seen. Before 1830, the visibility in Turner’s paintings averaged about 25 kilometers, the team found. Paintings made after 1830 had an average visibility of about 10 kilometers. Paintings made by Monet in London around 1900, such as “Charing Cross Bridge,” have a visibility of less than five kilometers. That’s similar to estimates for modern-day megacities such as Delhi and Beijing, Albright and Huybers say.
To strengthen their argument, the researchers also analyzed 18 paintings from four other London- and Paris-based impressionists. Again, as outdoor air pollution increased over time, the contrast and visibility in the paintings decreased, the team found. What’s more, the decrease seen in French paintings lagged behind the decrease seen in British ones.
Overall, air pollution can explain about 61 percent of contrast differences between the paintings, the researchers calculate. In that respect, “different painters will paint in a similar way when the environment is similar,” Albright says. “But I don’t want to overstep and say: Oh, we can explain all of impressionism.”
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Pregnancy shrinks parts of the brain. That sounds bad. Throw in the forgetfulness and fogginess, or “momnesia,” that many moms report, and what’s left is the notion that for the brain, the transition to motherhood is a net loss.
“I see it on social media all the time,” says neuroscientist and therapist Jodi Pawluski of the University of Rennes in France. “Your brain shrunk. This is why [you] forget everything.”
But that’s just not true, Pawluski says. The perception that the maternal brain is dysfunctional has gone on long enough: It’s time to “ start giving the maternal brain the credit it deserves ,” Pawluski and her colleagues write February 6 in in JAMA Neurology.
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Pregnancy does kick-start structural changes in the brain, including a loss of gray matter. But the loss isn’t automatically a bad thing — reductions can reflect a fine-tuning process that makes the brain more efficient ( SN: 3/18/22 ).
During the transition to motherhood, the brain reorganizes its connections, strengthening those that are useful and letting go of those that aren’t, Pawluski says. This reorganization prepares the brain “to learn rapidly to keep a baby alive,” she says.
In a 2016 study, for example, researchers reported brain changes, including reductions, that appear to foster attachment to a new baby ( SN: 12/19/16 ). Other work by this team found pregnancy-triggered decreases in the volume of the ventral striatum, a region involved in motivation and reward. Those reductions in mothers’ brains were associated with a heightened responsiveness toward their babies, the team reported in Psychoneuroendocrinology in 2020.
Still, many pregnant and postpartum women do report memory loss. Studies haven’t found large differences when testing memory for new moms compared with nonmothers, Pawluski says, but more research is needed to understand the mental load of parenthood — the impact of endless tasks and distractions.
A possible explanation for “momnesia” or “mommy brain” is that new mothers turn their attention toward baby and away from other things. Indeed, pregnant women, in contrast to never-pregnant women, demonstrated a boost in learning about baby-related objects as compared with adult-related items, researchers reported in Memory in 2022. Pregnant women also fared better with recalling relationships between objects and locations.
The changes in the maternal brain are akin to those seen during adolescence. A study of first-time mothers and female adolescents found that the reductions in volume in the maternal brain matched those seen in the teens , researchers reported in Human Brain Mapping in 2019. “We accept adolescence as being a time of transition and a lot of neuroplasticity,” or the brain’s ability to change, Pawluski says. The shift to motherhood is just as impactful on the brain, she says.
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Giving the maternal brain its due for its incredible adaptations does not mean that caregiving is a skill exclusive to those who give birth. While hormones trigger brain modifications during pregnancy, nonbirthing parents’ brains change with the experience of having a newborn. After the birth of their first child, new fathers’ brains showed a reduction in gray matter , but childless men’s brains didn’t, researchers reported in Cerebral Cortex in 2022.
Changing misperceptions about the brain during the transition to motherhood “comes back to acknowledging the importance of caregiving,” Pawluski says, by all parents. “The ability for your brain to actually learn to keep a baby alive is a big deal.”
C. McCormack, B.L. Callaghan and J.L. Pawluski. It’s time to rebrand “mommy brain.” JAMA Neurology . Published online February 6, 2023. doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2022.5180.
Aimee Cunningham is the biomedical writer. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
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An eye drop a day could keep myopia at bay — at least temporarily.
Using nightly eye drops with 0.05 percent atropine, a medication that relaxes the eye muscle responsible for focusing vision, may delay myopia onset in children , researchers report February 14 in JAMA .
Myopia, also called nearsightedness, is an irreversible condition in which the eyeball grows too long front to back, causing blurred distant vision. It typically begins in childhood, and the earlier it starts, the worse eye health can become later in life. Elongated eyes increase the risk for ocular complications including cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration.
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The prevalence of myopia has risen rapidly over the last few decades. About one-fourth of the global population currently has the condition. It is expected to affect half of people worldwide by 2050.
But he and other scientists speculate that environmental factors such as less time outdoors and more intensive education are causing the recent boom ( SN: 1/24/13 ). “It’s happening too quickly to be a purely genetic or inherited issue,” says optometrist Kathryn Saunders of Ulster University in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, who was not involved in the new study.
Low-dose atropine eye drops are already used to slow myopia progression in several countries in Asia. Yam and colleagues wanted to see if the medication could also delay myopia onset.
The team recruited nonmyopic children ages 4 through 9 who lived in Hong Kong. Each participant received nightly eye drops but was randomly assigned to receive drops with 0.05 percent atropine, 0.01 percent atropine or a placebo. Families and clinicians didn’t know which treatment group the children were in.
A total of 353 children used their assigned eye drops for two years. Only about 25 percent of children who took 0.05 percent atropine eye drops, roughly 30 kids, developed myopia in at least one eye, compared with about 50 percent of those who used 0.01 percent atropine or placebo eye drops, around 60 kids in each group. The percentages in each group were similar for eye elongation not severe enough to be considered myopia.
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“It’s a great first step to encourage us to explore more,” Saunders says.
Scientists will need to conduct studies in more diverse populations and environments to reach generalizable conclusions since the trial took place in only Hong Kong. Eye color may also influence dosing, as lighter-pigmented eyes might be more susceptible to side effects, including sensitivity to light.
How atropine slows myopia onset and progression remains a mystery. The medication might improve blood circulation in the eye, Yam says, but that’s just one existing hypothesis.
The new study was too short to suggest that atropine eye drops can prevent myopia. But an ongoing follow-up period in which participants continue taking the medication through their teenage years — when eye length stabilizes — will help the team understand if atropine eye drops can ward off the condition altogether.
McKenzie Prillaman is the Spring 2023 science writing intern at Science News . She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience with a minor in bioethics from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Social scientists tend to study individuals to understand health and well-being. But two new studies suggest that researchers should also study families, with the definition of that term left up to survey respondents. That shift in focus could lead to more effective social policies.
A focus on family might be the key to personal well-being.
Surveys in the social sciences, such as those measuring happiness or health, tend to focus on the smallest unit: the individual. But two new studies, each surveying over 10,000 people worldwide, show that primary unit of analysis may need scaling up. One study suggests that people adhere to public health guidelines less to protect themselves than their loved ones. And the other study provides an explanation for why that may be the case: People the world over prioritize family happiness over their own.
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Neither research team defined the term “family,” instead allowing respondents to interpret the term as they saw fit. As such, the results suggest that the exact nature of family, whether nuclear, blood-related or extended, does not matter.
The findings have important implications for society, says Karen Bogenschneider, a family policy expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved with either study. That’s because policy makers occasionally rely on research findings to develop programs such as those aimed at reducing substance abuse or inequality. When researchers frame societal issues in terms of the individual or community, so too do policy makers. And those programs may be less effective as a result.
The idea that policy makers can target family to change behavior comes as no surprise to Martha Newson, an anthropologist at Kent University in England. For years, Newson has studied a concept known as fusion , where an individual becomes so enmeshed in a larger social unit that she or he is willing to sacrifice personal well-being, or even survival, for the group ( SN: 6/23/16 ).
At the onset of the pandemic, Newson and her team began studying how social fusion might be influencing behavior around the world during the pandemic.
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From March to May 2020, over 13,000 participants from 122 countries were shown a sequence of five pictures, each with two circles, one for the self and the other for a given group such as family, country or all of humankind. In the first picture, the circles are far apart, but in subsequent pictures they grow closer and closer together until they fully overlap. Participants had to select one of the five pictures to indicate their level of fusion with the group. A participant had to select the fully overlapping circles to be considered fused to the group.
Participants also filled out scales to indicate how much they had performed a given public health action, such as social distancing or masking, in the previous week.
Participants who were fused to family were overrepresented among those reporting strong adherence to public health guidelines , Newson and colleagues reported January 13 in Science Advances. For instance, despite representing roughly a quarter of the participant pool, participants with strong family bonds constituted three-quarters of those who reported following social distancing guidelines. And almost half of participants with strong family bonds reported frequent handwashing compared with about one-third of participants with weaker family bonds.
Humans evolved in small-scale societies, Newson says. “When we have crises … these smaller units remain very important.”
Meanwhile, another group of researchers had begun to question the widely accepted belief that many happy individuals sum up to a happy society. That idea originated in the West, and has often been treated as universal, says Kuba Krys, a cross-cultural psychologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
But research over the years has indicated that non-Westerners may not value personal happiness as much as people in the West. For instance, outside the West, people tend to see happiness as more interdependent , or grounded in harmony and balance with others, than independent, or grounded in the self .
If happiness exists at least partially outside the individual, then Krys and his team wondered what unit researchers should study. They looked to family.
The team had roughly 13,000 participants from 49 countries indicate how much the perfect or ideal person would agree with statements in two commonly used surveys of well-being. Statements appeared both in the standard “I” framing and in a new family framing. For instance, participants reflected on how the ideal person would respond to both the statements, “In most ways, my life is close to ideal” and “In most ways, the life of my family is close to ideal.”
Nearly half of the participants valued family well-being over personal well-being, while less than a third preferred their own happiness, the team reports in an upcoming paper in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology . Moreover, participants in even the most individualistic countries, including the United States, valued family, on average, more than self.
Cultural psychologists asked roughly 13,000 people from 49 countries to reflect on their ideal happiness. On average, people worldwide idealized family happiness over personal happiness, the team found. This pattern held true even in the individualistic United States, where almost half of the 446 total participants prioritized family over self.
The word “family” has become associated with conservativism, Krys says. But family remains central to people’s lives, regardless of geography or political affiliation. “The shape of family has changed but family as an idea, as a basic unit, has not changed,” he says. “I would advise progressives … not to be afraid of touching on family topics.”
Bogenschneider’s research backs up this point. In a study of more than 200 state legislators, she and colleagues found that while abortion and same-sex marriage remain highly polarized, policy makers tend to view other family issues, such as those involving domestic violence, juvenile crime or teen pregnancy, as largely bipartisan .
This suggests that issues that aren’t typically centered around family, such as climate change or inequality, could be framed in terms of family to garner wider support, Bogenschneider says. Researchers who are seeking to translate their findings into policy and advocates who are advancing particular causes could, she adds, “elevate policy makers’ interest in those issues by focusing on families and family contributions.”
Sujata Gupta is the social sciences writer and is based in Burlington, Vt.
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Many U.S. cities are turning to green infrastructure, such as the rooftop gardens illustrated here, to adapt to climate change. But planning processes often fail to include the people in communities targeted for upgrades, a new study finds, which risks making inequalities worse.
If you’ve noticed more lush medians and plant-covered roofs in cities, it’s not your imagination.
Incorporating more natural elements in urban landscapes is a growing management solution for the planet’s increasing climate hazards ( SN: 3/10/22 ). Rain gardens, green roofs and landscaped drainage ditches are all examples of what’s known as green infrastructure, and are used to manage stormwater and mitigate risks like flooding and extreme heat. These strategies sometimes double as a community resource, such as a recreational space.
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But a major problem with green infrastructure is that the planning processes for the projects often fail to consider equity and inclusion, says Timon McPhearson, an urban ecologist and director of the Urban Systems Lab in New York City, which researches how to build more equitable, resilient and sustainable cities. Without an eye on equity, plans might exclude those most vulnerable to climate disasters, which typically include low-income communities or minority groups ( SN: 2/28/22 ).
There has been talk of fostering equity and inclusion in urban planning for some time, McPhearson says, but he wanted to know if there had been any follow-through. After analyzing 122 formal plans from 20 major U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Detroit and Sacramento, he and colleagues found that most government-affiliated green infrastructure plans are falling short . The researchers focused on plans produced or directly supervised by city governments, as non-profit organizations tend to be more inclusive, the study says.
Over 90 percent of plans didn’t use inclusive processes to design or implement green infrastructure projects, meaning communities targeted for upgrades often didn’t have a chance to weigh in with their needs throughout the process. What’s more, only 10 percent of plans identified causes of inequality and vulnerability in their communities. That matters because without acknowledging the roots of injustices, planners are unable to potentially address them in future projects. And only around 13 percent of plans even defined equity or justice, the researchers report in the January Landscape and Urban Planning .
“We have an opportunity with green infrastructure to invest in a way that can help solve multiple urban problems,” McPhearson says. “But only if we focus it in the places where there is the most need.”
One reason behind poor urban planning practices is a lack of recognition that infrastructure can be harmful, says Yvette Lopez-Ledesma, the senior director for community-led conservation at The Wilderness Society in Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the study. For instance, when cities build stormwater channels but not bridges, locals are left without a way to safely cross. City planners also often lack the training and education to implement more inclusive methods.
But there’s hope. The researchers identified three areas that need more work. First, city planners need to clearly define equity and justice in planning documents to help guide their work. They also need to change planning practices to focus on inclusion by keeping communities informed and supporting their participation throughout the planning, decision-making and implementation processes. And plans need to address current and potential causes of inequality: For example, acknowledging sources of gentrification and identifying how green infrastructure could contribute to gentrification further if officials aren’t careful ( SN: 4/18/19 ).
“If equity isn’t centered in your plans, then inequity is,” Lopez-Ledesma says. “You could be doing more harm.”
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
