Health

Working memory, the ability to hold information in your mind and use it to guide behavior, develops through childhood and adolescence and is key for successful performance at school and work. A new study has found that parents’ education is related to children’s performance on tasks of working memory and that neighborhood characteristics are not.

A national study of teenagers suggests that school drug testing did not deter them from starting to smoke tobacco or marijuana or drink alcohol. But in high schools that had a “positive school climate,” teens were less likely to start smoke cigarettes or marijuana, according to the study, in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The study compared the effectiveness over one year of school policies of student drug testing with a positive school climate.

Nearly three-quarters of the newspaper stories mentioning suicide and the holidays over the 2012-2013 holiday period perpetuated the myth that more people commit suicide during that season, according to an analysis by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Nearly 90 percent of the top-grossing movies over a 25-year period show main characters acting violently, and in 77 percent of the movies those characters also engage in sex-, alcohol- or tobacco-related behavior, a new study has shown. The study published in Pediatrics, by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that more than half of the biggest PG-13 movies featured a main character acting violently and involved in either drinking, sexual behavior or smoking within a five-minute segment.

Having trained nurses follow up on medication use with mentally ill patients who are HIV positive was effective both at improving the patients’ quality of life and biological markers for the human immunodeficiency virus, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The study is thought to be the first to

Dan Romer, director of APPC’s Adolescent Health and Communication Institutes, reviews the evidence on ways to prevent drug abuse in middle and high school youth, focusing on mandatory random drug testing. Since the 1990s, interest has been growing in the use of such tests to deter drug use among teenagers. The review finds that mandatory

Research conducted at APPC by Michael Hennessy, Ph.D., and Daniel Romer, Ph.D., among other project sites, was released in the January 2013 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. “Safer Sex Media Messages and Adolescent Sexual Behavior: 3-Year Follow-Up Results From Project iMPPACS” abstract: Objectives. We estimated the long-term (36-month) effects of Project iMPPACS, a

A common misperception about the end of year holidays is that more people commit suicide during this period than at other times in the year. Since 2000, the Annenberg Public Policy Center has been tracking press reporting about this widespread belief. In the millennium year of 1999, APPC identified over 60 stories that ran during

Research points to the potential for prevention   Weakness in a cognitive skill called "working memory" predicts both the initiation and the escalation of alcohol use in adolescents ages 10 to 15, according to a longitudinal study by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of