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"This research is a first attempt to shed light on important, but understudied, adverse consequences of gender inequality on women's health in later life," explains researcher Eric Bonsang of University Paris-Dauphine and Columbia University, lead author on the study. "It shows that women living in gender-equal countries have better cognitive test scores later in life than women living in gender-unequal societies. Moreover, in countries that became more gender-equal over time, women's cognitive performance improved relative to men's." Bonsang and colleagues Vegard Skirbekk (Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Columbia University) and Ursula Staudinger (Columbia University) had noticed that the differences in men's and women's scores on cognitive tests varied widely across countries. In countries in Northern Europe, for example, women tend to outperform men on memory tests, while the opposite seems to be true in several Southern European ...

Jonathan Weiss, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health and CIHR Chair in Autism Spectrum Disorders ( ASD ) Treatment and Care Research, discovered that parents who participate in cognitive therapy with their children with autism also experience a real benefit that improves the family experience. Approximately 70 per cent of children with autism struggle with emotional or behavioural problems, and may benefit from cognitive behaviour therapy to improve their ability to manage their emotions. "Most of the time when parents bring in their kids for cognitive behaviour therapy, they are in a separate room learning what their children are doing, and are not being co-therapists," said Weiss. "What's unique about what we studied is what happens when parents are partners in the process from start to finish. Increasingly we know that it's helpful for kids with autism, specifically, and now we have proven that it's helpful for thei...

"We're interested in examining how we take the kind of continuous environment that we all live in and break it into pieces that we can understand and remember," says Chris Baldassano (@ChrisBaldassano), a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the study's first author. "The main finding of this paper is that we can actually observe what's going on in the brain during this chunking behavior and see that it's happening on a lot of different temporal scales, from seconds up to minutes." The study made use of two different fMRI datasets, both of which were collected for other research. In the first experiment, participants watched part of the first episode of the BBC show "Sherlock" while being scanned with fMRI. A second group of participants listened to an audio description of the same episode while being scanned. (The research team, led by Uri Hasson and Kenneth Norman, professors in the Department of...

Results of the research were published online in the  Journal of Alzheimer's Disease . Senior author Dr. Tetyana Zayats is a researcher at the KGJebsen Centre for Neuropsychiatric Disorders at the University of Bergen. The study analyzed genetic markers and IQ collected from 5,165 children in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. The genetic findings were followed up in the genetic data from two adult datasets (1) 17,008 cases with AD and 37,154 controls, and (2) 112,151 individuals assessed for general cognitive functioning. The function of the genetic markers was analysed using reporter assays in cells. Brain cells communicate via synapses containing hundreds of specialized proteins. Mutations in some of these proteins lead to dysfunctional synapses and brain diseases such as epilepsy, intellectual disability, autism or AD. Dr. Zayats and co-workers at the University of Bergen examined a subgroup of these proteins that have been implicated in synaptic plastic...