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Bababababa, dadadadada, ahgagaga. Got that? Babies are speaking to us all the time, but most of us have no clue what they're saying. To us non-babies, it all sounds like charming, mysterious, gobbleydegook. To researchers, though, babbling is knowable, predictable, and best of all, teachable. This week, we'll find out how to decipher the vocabulary, and the behavior, of the newest members of the human family. First, we explore the wordless conversation of synchronous movement, and the...

Thirteen minutes into Taylor Sheridan’s feature film Wind River, the body of a young Native woman from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming is discovered by the protagonist, a white hunter who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That spurs a multi-agency investigation, and within days, officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local and tribal law enforcement face off in a bloody, Tarantino-style shootout with the bad guys: oil workers living in the company-owned...

Trauma-informed care should be like universal precautions – in the same way you wouldn’t clean up a blood spill without wearing gloves, you should always assume that someone has experienced trauma and treat them accordingly. Only it doesn’t happen that way. Once our indignation or any other parts of our wounded selves come into play, that usually goes out of the window unless you have been conditioned to wear a trauma-informed lens. And even then, there will be times we fail. Let me give you...

Understanding trauma and its impact on the developing brain and body is one thing. Reshaping public serving systems to mitigate the impact of trauma is quite another. Many trauma-informed change agents find themselves overwhelmed with the daunting task of infusing trauma-informed knowledge into every facet (policy, procedures, practice, culture) of their public serving system. In this “one of a kind” two-day offering, participants will begin to view trauma-informed change through the lens of...

A teenage brain is a fascinating, still-changing place. There's a lot going on: social awareness, risk-taking, peer pressure; all are heightened during this period. Until relatively recently, it was thought that the brain was only actively developing during childhood, but in the last two decades, researchers have confirmed that the brain continues to develop during adolescence — a period of time that can stretch from the middle school years into early adulthood. "We were always under the...

There is a haunting sense of calm at the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Better known as the National Lynching memorial, the space opened on April 26 as a project of the Equal Justice Initiative , a nonprofit that provides legal support to those unjustly persecuted in the criminal justice system. EJI spent just over 3 years and $15 million dollars to create the 8,400-square-foot museum and memorial, which is dedicated to the more than 4,400 victims of racial violence...

STOP SNAP FRAUD! Bright red signs, with instructions like the one above, are hard to miss. But chances are, if you commute regularly into Washington, D.C., you might've seen this exact message plastered throughout D.C. Metro stations and on buses in recent weeks. The posters , sponsored by the D.C. Department of Human Services, broadcast a clear message about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamp, recipients: "To purchase items other than food or qualified products is a...

Denise Fitzgerald’s property abuts the string of quiet, empty lots that line Ewing Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Recently she was leaf-blowing detritus shed by the enormous sycamore tree dominating the yard of her tidy Habitat for Humanity home. She says she’d cut the tree down herself but knows it’s big enough to take out both her house and the house beside her if she dare try it. Fitzgerald is familiar with the empty lots of Ewing Street, just a few blocks from Jackson State University.

New research from York University suggests that minority children as young as six years old show an implicit pro-White racial bias when exposed to images of both White and Black children. But how ingrained these biases become and whether they persist into late childhood and adulthood might depend on their social environment. Faculty of Health Professor Jennifer Steele conducted two studies with graduate student Meghan George and her former PhD student Amanda Williams, now at the School of...

For more than a decade, the nation’s juvenile justice systems have steadily cut back on unnecessary use of incarceration for young people. The reduction in the use of youth lock-ups have been good for kids and for public safety. Reforms that resulted in incarcerating fewer kids, statistically improve the chances of success for youth when they become adults, while also corresponding with the steady decline in juvenile crime during the same period. Yet, according to an important new report...

Affordable housing is already a hot button political issue. Housing advocates have long pointed out the lack of affordable options in big cities with booming tech sectors, like San Francisco , but where does that leave the rest of the country ? We wanted to find out, so we created a new map that illustrates how much an average worker would need to earn to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment in each state. We found the data for our map through the National Low Income Housing Coalition...

On an ACEs Connection webinar on Monday, Dr. Andrew Seaman, an assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University, showed how he navigates his students through the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). And, in an unusual twist for a webinar, Seaman and O’Nesha Cochran, a peer mentor with the Mental Health Association of Oregon, role-played doctor-patient interactions to show how to develop the skills to communicate with patients with high ACE scores. About 90 people...