Transcendent thinking counteracts longitudinal effects of mid-adolescent exposure to community violence in the anterior cingulate cortex.

Adolescence involves extensive brain maturation, characterized by social sensitivity and emotional lability, that co-occurs with increased independence. Mid-adolescence is also a hallmark developmental stage when youths become motivated to reflect on the broader personal, ethical, and systems-level implications of happenings, a process we term transcendent thinking. Here, we examine the confluence of these developmental processes to ask, from a transdisciplinary perspective, how might community violence exposure (CVE) impact brain development during mid-adolescence, and how might youths' dispositions for transcendent thinking be protective? Fifty-five low-SES urban youth with no history of delinquency (32 female; 27 Latinx, 28 East Asian) reported their CVE and underwent structural MRI first at age 14-18, and again 2 years later.

Diverse adolescents' transcendent thinking predicts young adult psychosocial outcomes via brain network development.

Developmental scientists have long described mid-adolescents' emerging capacities to make deep meaning about the social world and self, here called transcendent thinking, as a hallmark developmental stage. In this 5-years longitudinal study, sixty-five 14-18 years-old youths' proclivities to grapple psychologically with the ethical, systems-level and personal implications of social stories, predicted future increases in the coordination of two key brain networks: the default-mode network, involved in reflective, autobiographical and free-form thinking, and the executive control network, involved in effortful, focused thinking; findings were independent of IQ, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background. This neural development predicted late-adolescent identity development, which predicted young-adult self-liking and relationship satisfaction, in a developmental cascade.

Towards a dynamic, comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia.

Here we build from the central strength of the existing definition of dyslexia-its emphasis on neurobiological origins-and proffer a set of seven core principles for a new, more comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia. These principles derive from two major research directions: (1) the still evolving history of attempts to explain dyslexia, including in varied writing systems; and (2) the study of the reading brain circuit, its development, and its genetic and environmental influences. What emerges from connecting these two directions is a dynamic conceptualization of dyslexia that incorporates the extensive research on the heterogeneity of dyslexia and the interdependent contributions of multiple biological and socio-cultural risk and preventive factors.

Laypeople's (Mis)Understanding of Common Medical Acronyms.

Objectives: Abbreviations are often used in medicine yet may be a source of confusion for patients and their families. We aimed to determine the general public's understanding of commonly used medical acronyms.

Methods: For this cross-sectional study, we surveyed state fair visitors regarding their understanding of 5 common medical acronyms.