studies & articles

The Blog

One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.

I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.

-Dr. Karen Nelson

Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

Poverty and children’s brain development

The Harvard Gazette (May 2, 2023) published “Poverty Hurts Children’s Brain Development but Social Safety Net May Help” Here’s the article with some information in bold:

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Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

Patterns of coparenting and young children

Schoppe-Sullivan, Wang, Yang, Kim, Zhang, & Yoon (2023) published “Patterns of Coparenting and Young Children's Social–Emotional Adjustment in Low-income Families” in Child Development. I am providing a long summary here, first from the abstract and research summary, with some points in bold:

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