This is a set of web collections curated by Mark Graham using the Archive-IT service of the Internet Archive. They include web captures of the ISKME.org website as well as captures from sites hosted by IGC.org.These web captures are available to the general public.For more information about this collection please feel free to contact Mark via Send Mail ||||| New research from Emory University scientists finds that fathers may play favorites when it comes to their children. 
 
 The study, published in the American Psychological Association’s journal “Behavioral Neuroscience” last week, examined the influence of fathers’ brain responses to male or female children. 
 
 Researchers from Emory University and the University of Arizona gathered data from 52 fathers of toddlers (30 daughters, 22 sons) in the Atlanta area for the study. 
 
 The fathers wore small computers on their belts for one weekday and one day on the weekend. The gadget recorded any sounds in 50-second intervals every nine minutes during the 48-hour period as well as nighttime interactions in the child’s room, where the device was left charging. 
 
 
 
 The men also underwent MRI brain scans as they viewed photos of unknown adults, unknown children and their own child with neutral, happy and sad facial expressions. 
 
 A father and daughter walk in the city center on July 17, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Sean Gallup/Getty Images 
 
 Dads with daughters had greater responses to daughters’ happy facial expressions. 
 
 Dads with sons had greater responses to sons’ neutral facial expressions. 
 
 Dads with daughters spent about 60 percent more time responding to their children than dads with sons. 
 
 Dads with sons spent three times as long playing with their children. 
 
 Dads with daughters used more language referencing the child’s body, such as “belly,” “foot” and “tummy.” 
 
 Dads with sons were more likely to use words such as “win,” “proud,” and “best.” 
 
 “The fact that fathers may actually be less attentive to the emotional needs of boys, perhaps despite their best intentions, is important to recognize,” lead researcher Jennifer Mascaro said. 
 
 In addition, regarding the finding that dads with daughters tend to use more body-related words, researchers noted that previous research has shown pre-adolescent girls are more likely than boys to report low self-esteem and body image issues. 
 
 But some scientists, including Alan Kazdin, child psychiatry professor and director of Yale Parenting Center, warned against jumping to any conclusions in the small sample study. 
 
 “Daughters and sons are very different even in utero and then when they're infants they start behaving very differently,” Kazdin told CBS News. “Interactions between parents and children drive and influence each other's brains. So what we don't know here is whether the fathers drive the behaviors of their daughters and the sons or if the daughters and the sons drive the behavior of the fathers.” 
 
 In addition, because the research was conducted in the U.S., cultures with varying societal norms are not as well represented. ||||| Dads with toddler-age daughters interact differently with their kids than fathers with toddler-age sons, a new study suggests. 
 
 Researchers found that fathers with daughters use different language and show different levels of attentiveness to their daughters' needs, compared to fathers with sons. In addition, their brains' responses to their tots' pictures differed from those of dads with sons, according to the findings, which were published May 22 in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience. 
 
 The findings indicate that gender-based differences in fathers' behaviors appear to show up while children are very young, said lead study author Jennifer Mascaro, an assistant professor of family and preventive medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. The fathers in the study had kids between ages 1 and 3. 
 
 Previous research has shown that when parents complete questionnaires, they rarely report treating their sons and daughters differently. And psychology studies that observe how a parent and child interact in a laboratory setting may not always be representative of typical caregiving behavior. [8 Tried-and-True Tips for Talking to Preschoolers] 
 
 To observe real-world interactions between fathers and toddlers, the researchers recruited 52 men ages 21 to 55 who lived in Atlanta and had a 1- or 2-year-old son or daughter. Thirty of the dads had young daughters, and the rest had sons. 
 
 Each father was given a recording device that he wore on his belt during one typical weekday and one typical day over the weekend. The device was programmed to record 50-second snippets of sound every 9 minutes, but neither the father nor the child could tell when the device was actually recording. 
 
 "People behave incredibly natural" when wearing the recording device, since they never know when it's on or off, Mascaro said. 
 
 The researchers ended up with a total of 2 hours of sound from each father. They transcribed the recordings, and evaluated the fathers' attentiveness, behaviors and language used while interacting with their sons or daughters. 
 
 The study found that the fathers with daughters sang more to their little girls than the fathers with sons sang to the boys. When talking to their children, fathers of toddler daughters used more language related to sadness, using words such as "cry," "sad," "tears" and "lonely," as well as more language referencing the body, such as "belly," "foot" and "tummy," compared with fathers who had toddler sons. [25 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids] 
 
 In addition, dads used more analytic words, such as "more" and "better," with their daughters than dads with sons did. Such words can facilitate more complex language development, Mascaro said. 
 
 On the other hand, fathers with sons used more achievement-oriented words — such as "win," "proud" and "top" — and they engaged in more rough-and-tumble play, such as tickling or tossing around their sons, the findings revealed. 
 
 When it came to being attentive, the fathers with daughters were more responsive to their children's needs than fathers with sons, according to the findings. 
 
 And when the fathers were shown pictures of their children with different facial expressions, brain scans showed that the fathers had a stronger neural response in areas of the brain important for reward and emotional regulation to happy faces on their daughters than they did when the girls made other expressions. The brains of dads of sons, by contrast, had a more robust response to the boys' neutral expressions than to other expressions. 
 
 It was surprising that the fathers responded more to a neutral expression on their sons, Mascaro said. Fathers may be more attentive to their sons' neutral expressions because it is less clear what the son is feeling, and so they may need to read between the lines more to understand it, Mascaro told Live Science. [9 Weird Ways Kids Can Get Hurt] 
 
 One possible explanation for why fathers had different emotional and behavioral responses to their young children is biologically based, meaning that men could be hardwired to respond differently to sons and daughters, Mascaro said. 
 
 But another possibility is that there are societal, cultural and gender norms about how dads should interact with girls and boys, she said. The study looked at fathers from just one area. 
 
 It could also be that the differences in behavior stem from both biological and cultural explanations. In other words, there could be small differences in the way young boys and girls actually behave, which then cause fathers to encourage more of this behavior in their children, thus enhancing these behaviors in kids, Mascaro suggested. 
 
 The researchers said they could not tie the findings to any long-term outcomes in children, such as youngsters' social, emotional or intellectual development. However, the fact that these differences in fathers' behavior toward their sons and daughters show up so early is important in helping researchers understand how gender roles are developed and reinforced, Mascaro said. 
 
 Originally published on Live Science. ||||| The question of whether parents treat sons and daughters differently and how that may or may not affect the children later in life has been the subject of a number of scientific studies — and endless family debates. 
 
 New research now adds to the conversation, not only shedding light on certain behavioral differences fathers show toward sons and daughters but also revealing clues to what's happening in their brains. 
 
 The study, published in the American Psychological Association's journal Behavioral Neuroscience, focused specifically on fathers' interactions with their toddlers. 
 
 "In most fields of research there's so much more research on men than on women, but this is one of the rare situations in which there's a lot more research on moms than on dads," lead researcher Jennifer Mascaro, PhD, an assistant professor in Family and Preventative Medicine at the Emory School of Medicine, told CBS News. 
 
 The findings showed that fathers of little girls tended to be more responsive to their daughters' needs than fathers with toddler sons, and they spoke more openly to daughters about emotions, including sadness. 
 
 Fathers of little boys, on the other hand, engaged in more rough-and-tumble play and used more achievement-related language, including words like "proud," "win," and "top." 
 
 Dads with daughters also used more language referencing the child's body, including "belly," "foot," and "tummy." 
 
 For the study, Mascaro and her team analyzed data on 52 fathers of toddlers (30 girls, 22 boys) in the Atlanta area who wore a small handheld computer device onto their belts for two days. Every nine minutes, the device randomly turned on for 50 seconds and recorded sound. 
 
 "People act shockingly normal when they are wearing it," Mascaro noted in a press release on the findings. "They kind of forget they are wearing it or they say to themselves, what are the odds it's on right now." 
 
 The dads were also told to charge the device in their child's bedroom at night so any nighttime interactions with their kids could be recorded. 
 
 In addition, fathers underwent MRI brain scans while viewing photos of their child with happy, sad or neutral facial expressions. Participants with daughters had greater responses to their daughters' happy facial expressions in areas of the brain important for visual processing, reward, emotion regulation, and face processing than fathers of sons, the researchers found. 
 
 Conversely, the brains of dads with boys responded more robustly to their sons' neutral facial expressions. 
 
 While the authors emphasize that no definitive long-term conclusions could be made from the research, the findings mirror previous studies. 
 
 "A huge caveat is that we did not longitudinally study the toddlers whose dads were in the study so we can't tie any of these differences to outcomes," Mascaro said, "but there is a lot of research indicating that the quality and quantity of language that people use with children is important for cognitive outcomes." 
 
 For example, when taken together she says both the behavioral and brain imaging findings suggest that parents tend to respond more to the emotions of girls. 
 
 "This is consistent with studies that show that moms tend to use more emotion language and validate emotions in girls than in boys," Mascaro said. 
 
 Additionally, the findings that the fathers tended to use more language referencing the child's body with girls than with boys could be relevant to prior research that has shown pre-adolescent girls are more likely than boys to report body dissatisfaction and lower self-esteem relating to body image, the authors note. 
 
 But Alan Kazdin, PhD, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry and director of Yale Parenting Center, cautions against jumping to conclusions about cause and effect. 
 
 "Daughters and sons are very different even in utero and then when they're infants they start behaving very differently," he told CBS News. "Interactions between parents and children drive and influence each other's brains. So what we don't know here is whether the fathers drive the behaviors of their daughters and the sons or if the daughters and the sons drive the behavior of the fathers." 
 
 The study has several other limitations, including its small sample size and that it was conducted in one area of the U.S., so conclusions about fathers in other cultures with different societal norms could not be drawn. 
 
 And while the authors noted a number of factors, including parental age, number of children, ethnicity, income, and hours fathers worked per week, were similar for all dads in the study regardless of their child's gender, they did not look at other important factors such as the fathers' education level, Kazdin points out. 
 
 "The study raises interesting questions that would be wonderful to have answers to," Kazdin said. "Now, we know what the big questions are to be answered next." 
 
 Mascaro also calls for more research, saying the study could not determine if different brain responses meant fathers are somehow biologically hard-wired through genetics or evolution to treat sons differently than daughters, or if the dads were conforming to societal norms relating to gender. 
 
 Still, she said parents may want to take a minute and consider the many ways they are interacting with their sons and daughters. 
 
 "These differences are showing up really early in children that are 1 and 2 years old," she said. "The idea that we could have unintentional or maybe even in some cases intentional biases in the way we interact with our kids and how we prepare them for the world, I think that is a good realization. There's a ton of research indicating that it's really good for children to talk about their emotions and so if we're doing that less with out boys, that's a good thing to realize."
– Dads play more with sons but are more open about emotions with daughters, according to a new parenting study published last month in Behavioral Neuroscience. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports researchers looked at 52 fathers of toddlers in the Atlanta area, recording their interactions with their children for random 50-second increments over two days. The results showed a bunch of differences in how dads interact with sons versus daughters. Dads sang more to daughters and talked more about sadness with them, according to Live Science. Dads spent three times longer playing with sons than daughters. And dads of daughters talked more about their child's body, whereas dads of sons used more words like "win" and "best." Researchers also gave the dads MRI brain scans while they looked at photos of their children. Dads of daughters had bigger reactions to their child looking happy; dads of sons had bigger responses to their child looking neutral. Researchers say it shows dads may pay less attention to their sons' emotional needs. But Alan Kazdin tells CBS News we shouldn't draw conclusions from the small study. For one thing, the professor of child psychiatry says it's unclear whether dads treat sons and daughters differently for societal reasons or if they're responding to differences in behavior between boys and girls. (An earlier study found gender stereotypes set in surprisingly early.)