GOP Healthcare, Dopamine, Dads Need Training Too

Guest: Mark Showalter, PhD, Chair of the Department of Economics, BYU The Republican health care proposal is called the American Health Care Act – or AHCA – and it narrowly cleared a key House committee. Republicans are under the gun to get the replacement in place quickly so they can deliver on years of campaign promises to repeal Obamacare.  But there are significant hurdles ahead. Republicans do not unanimously approve of the proposal as it stands. Health insurance companies, the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association are also opposed to it.

Guest: Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University, author of “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” When a mother and her baby are really bonded, they do this thing called “synchrony” where they mirror each other’s facial expressions and sounds back and forth in sync. Well our next guest wanted to know if that bond was playing out on a neurochemical level in the mom’s brain, too. The results of that research recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science and provide the first evidence that dopamine – the neurotransmitter involved in the brain’s reward center – is also central to human bonding.

Guest: Holly Schindler, PhD, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood and Family Studies, University of Washington Parenting experts talk about the importance of noticing when a child does something right and praising the child for it. Well, that strategy doesn’t just work with kids. Researchers at the University of Washington are using it to great effect with parents, too. In particular, they’re focused on helping fathers be better parents – more engaged, more confident. And get this – eighty percent of dads who participated in the program said that it worked for them.

Guest: Laura Grant, PhD, Assistant Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College You may still be recuperating after losing that one hour Sunday morning. Jumping ahead does mean it will be lighter outside when you get home from work tonight thanks to that quirky clock-changing thing we do twice a year. (Well, every state except Arizona and Hawaii does, anyway.) What’s the point of Daylight Saving Time? Every year state legislatures try – and fail – to opt out of it, so clearly the value is in question.

Guest: Liz Gershoff, PhD, Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas, Austin In some US states, teachers can discipline their students with a paddle across the backside – even if the paddling causes injuries that parents would be prosecuted for inflicting. You heard me right: corporal punishment is still in use in US schools, and teachers can be immune from prosecution for injuries caused by it. Now there’s evidence that corporal punishment is more often used on boys, Black students and those with disabilities. The discrimination is detailed in a Social Policy Report from the Society for Research in Child Development.

Guest: Heather Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anatomy, Midwestern University The appendix at the end of a book is extra material that you can easily skip and still get the gist of things. It may be helpful, but it’s not critical. And for a long time, that pretty much summed up our understanding of the human appendix, too. If you’ve had yours out, no big deal because it basically has no purpose anyway.  But new research confirms what’s been a growing suspicion lately among researchers: the appendix evolved for a specific function, and research at Midwestern University in Arizona suggests that function in immunity.