Ecology of Adolescence in India

The kaleidoscopic images of Indian adolescents are colored by variations and inequities in region, gender, caste, and social class. The contrast between the privileged and the under privileged makes them appear as belonging to different worlds marked by the “freedoms” of the ‘haves’ and the “unfreedoms” of the have-nots. What offers hope is the significant improvement seen in literacy during the past decade. Although we are far off the mark in universalization of primary education and the enforcement of the right to education, there is reason for optimism due to significant improvements in literacy over the past decade. Adolescent health and nutrition continue to remain grave concerns. Poor reproductive health, especially of young women at risk of early marriage and pregnancy, contributes to the cycle of poor nutrition, health and poor well-being. Enlightened policies offer hope while poor implementations of programs for adolescent welfare cause for despair. The nation stands at the crossroads of economic development with a large expanding pool of adolescent population who can become contributing members of the society in the coming decades. Investment in their education and health can pay rich dividends even as the failure to do so will bring with it a high social cost. The current paper addresses these issues in the light of available empirical data. (An earlier version of the present paper based on data from the Census of India (2001) was published in Saraswathi, T. S. (2012) Ecology of Adolescence (pp188–210) in M. Kapur, H.M. Koot &M. Lamb (Eds.) Developmental Psychology and Education. New Delhi: Manek Publications Pvt. Ltd for ICSSR, NOW and ESRC. The present paper has used updated statistics from the Census of India (2001) and other statistical data wherever possible.).     

Let's Talk: Getting Out of the Counseling Center to Serve Hard‐to‐Reach Students

This article describes Let's Talk, a counseling center outreach program. Counselors hold walk‐in hours across campus to engage students who might not otherwise seek counseling. Locations are chosen to reach underserved communities. Counselors offer informal consultation, a less formal alternative to traditional counseling. Este artículo describe Let's Talk (Hablemos), un programa de acercamiento a los centros de consejería. Los consejeros mantienen horas de puertas abiertas sin cita previa en distintos lugares del campus para atraer a estudiantes que de otra forma no buscarían acceso a la consejería. Las ubicaciones se eligen para alcanzar comunidades con servicios insuficientes. Los consejeros ofrecen consultas informales, una alternativa menos formal a la consejería tradicional.     

Virtual human analogs to rodent spatial pattern separation and completion memory tasks

Spatial pattern separation (SPS) and spatial pattern completion (SPC) have played an increasingly important role in computational and rodent literatures as processes underlying associative memory. SPS and SPC are complementary processes, allowing the formation of unique representations and the reconstruction of complete spatial environments based on partial spatial information. We present two novel computerized navigational tasks as human analogs of well-established rat SPS and SPC tasks. Results from these tasks show that human participants are sensitive to increasing SPS and SPC demands. Specifically, memory accuracy decreased with decreasing separation distance between target and foil locations in the SPS task and with decreasing number of distal spatial cues in the SPC task. These tasks set the stage for valuable future directions, including the use of these tasks with imaging and clinical populations.