“If you look at other cultural industries, they don’t have nearly the growth curve that games have had in the past few years,” says , professor of pedagogy & technology at 91��ɫ [Faculty of Education] and president of the Canadian Game Studies Association. “When almost 75 per cent of women work, to not have them somehow represented in this workforce is excluding them from something that has had massive investment from all these different countries.”

Jenson, who spent more than 10 years studying gender and gaming, found one of the reasons a girl might not break into gaming is access. “Girls don’t often have the context for play that necessarily includes other girls. They may play with their brothers, cousins or fathers.”

“Girls and boys – once they level up – [are] exactly the same,” says Jenson. “Because the game demands that you play a certain way in order to be successful. Once you get rid of the confounding variable of being novice in these environments, girls play very much like the boys.”

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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One of them was an article co-authored by members of 91��ɫ’s LaMarsh Centre for Child & Youth Research, psychology Professor Jennifer Connolly and Distinguished Research Professor Debra Pepler in the Faculty of Health, along with Professor Wendy Craig (MA ’89, PhD ’93) of Queen’s University and Adele Goldberg (MA ’91, PhD ’10).

Left: Debra Pepler

The article, “”, is available in a virtual Special Issue: Decade in Review published this month and representing the best of the Journal of Research on Adolescence in celebration of its 20th anniversary.

The Society for Research on Adolescence and the journal's editorial team say the 10 articles embody “the exemplary quality of scholarship upon which the journal has solidified its reputation as a leading publication in the field of adolescent research.”

“Mixed-Gender Groups, Dating, and Romantic Relationships in Early Adolescence”, first published in the journal’s May 2004 issue, details a study on the dating-stage and developmental-contextual models of romantic relationships during early adolescence.

Right: Jennifer Connolly

The study looked at same-gender friendships, affiliation with mixed-gender groups, dating and romantic relationships in a sample of 1,284 young adolescents of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds. Data was collected cross-sectionally in Grades 5 through 8, as well as longitudinally in the fall and spring of an academic year.

For more information, visit the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The study, published today in the journal , follows up on a 2007 study led by 91��ɫ, which found that lifelong use of two or more languages keeps symptoms of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia at bay (see YFile, Jan. 15, 2007).

Led by the , the current study examined the clinical records of more than 200 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s disease in the Sam & Ida Ross Memory Clinic at Toronto’s Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain.

"All the patients in the study had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, so clearly bilingualism does not prevent the onset of dementia," says study co-author Ellen Bialystok (right), Distinguished Research Professor of psychology in 91��ɫ’s and associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, which is part of Baycrest.

"Instead, our results show that people who have been lifelong bilinguals have built up a cognitive reserve that allows them to cope with the disease for a longer period of time before showing symptoms," she says.

While the brains of bilingual patients did show deterioration, researchers believe that the use of more than one language equips them with compensatory skills that keep symptoms like memory loss and confusion in check.

The research team included Fergus Craik, senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, and Dr. Morris Freedman, professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine (Neurology), and scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. They found that bilingual patients were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 4.3 years later and had reported the onset of symptoms five years later than those who spoke only one language. The groups were equivalent on measures of cognitive and occupational level; there was no apparent effect of immigration status, and there were no differences between genders.

The Neurology paper replicates findings from the team’s 2007 study led by Bialystok and published in Neuropsychologia. That study examined the clinical records of 184 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. It found that bilingual patients delayed the onset of their symptoms by four years compared to monolingual patients.

"Overall, bilingualism should be seen as an important tool for healthy aging, along with exercise, diet, and other lifestyle choices," Bialystok says. "It’s also another reason to encourage people in multicultural societies like ours to keep speaking their native tongue and pass it along to their children," she says.

The study was funded in part by grants from the (CIHR) and the to 91��ɫ and the Rotman Research Institute.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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Here's an on June 24. The story's had 86 tweets and 335 Diggs:

It's long been an accepted truth among married couples that it's the wife who must usually steer the pair through social gatherings, reminding her husband if he's meeting someone for the first, second or 15th time – and science backs up that observation.

In lab settings, women routinely outperform men in facial recognition skills, both in terms of speed and reliability. Now, research from 91��ɫ in Toronto has added a wrinkle to the existing wisdom. It's not just women whose brains are so nimble, the investigators have determined, it's gay men, too.

In the Canadian study, Jennifer Steeves, a psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, recruited a sample group composed of homosexual men, heterosexual men and heterosexual women. Significantly, she also took care to include both left- and right-handed people among the subjects. All of the volunteers were shown pictures of 10 faces and given time to try to memorize them. Those 10 faces were mixed with similarly edited images of 50 other people, and flashed on a screen for just milliseconds apiece. The subjects' job was to press a key when they saw a face they'd seen before.

The results confirmed what the investigators suspected they'd find: the gay men and the straight women scored about equally well in the test, and both did better than the straight men. What's more, within the straight male group, lefties outperformed righties. The explanation is rooted mostly in the genes.

All people are born with genetic coding that regulates body symmetry and asymmetry. This includes not just handedness, but which way the whorl in the hair at the crown of the head grows, or which hemisphere of the brain will be dominant for processing language. "Characteristics like this are determined very, very early on," says Steeves. "A baby's handedness can sometimes even be observed in utero."

If sex and symmetry get mixed up this way, there's no reason the phenomenon should sidestep the brain, and Steeves does not think it does. Gay men, she believes, probably do so well at recognizing faces because, like women, they're putting both hemispheres to work at once. Greater crosstalk between the two halves via the corpus callosum – the cable of nerve fibres that serves as sort of a superhighway between left and right – probably contributes to this as well. That, however, is not something Steeves and her colleagues have been able to demonstrate conclusively yet, since they have not had the chance to rerun their study while simultaneously scanning the brains of their subjects with a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI). "The University just doesn't have one," she says. "But we're getting one soon and we'll be able to take that next step then."

None of this means that it will ever be possible simply to take an fMRI of a brain and tell from that alone if it belongs to a homosexual or heterosexual – and given privacy concerns and the risk of bias, Steeves wouldn't even want to try. "I would hesitate to do post-hoc analysis," she says. "There are scary things that could happen with that." What it does mean, however, is that science's understanding of the roots of sexuality, so long shrouded in misinformation, is steadily edging into the light – and there's nothing scary about that.

The Times of India Online and DailyIndia.com covered the research June 23:

A new study by 91��ɫ researchers has shown that gay men can recall familiar faces faster and more accurately than their heterosexual counterparts because, like women, they use both sides of their brains.

The study examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right- or  left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

Jennifer Steeves, psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals. “Our findings are consistent with what we know about the organization and laterality of how we process faces depending on our gender, sexual orientation and handedness,” Steeves says.

The study was also covered in :

Gay men are on a par with women when it comes to never forgetting a face, according to a study. Homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – using both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women.

"Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information," said study lead author Jennifer Steeves, at Toronto’s 91��ɫ.

Stories on the research also appeared in Sun Media newspapers and June 22.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The study, published in the journal, , examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right-or-left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

“Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information,” says study lead author Jennifer Steeves, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, .

Study participants were asked to memorize photographs of ten faces, and differentiate them from 50 others, shown to them for only milliseconds each. The images were rendered in black and white and edited to remove ears, hair and blemishes, which can serve as obvious identifying cues. Participants then had to relay which faces were new, as quickly and accurately as possible.

Steeves and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals.

Hand dominance is thought to be linked with both hemispheric functioning and sexual orientation; previous studies have shown that homosexual individuals are 39 per cent more likely to be left-handed.

“Our findings are consistent with what we know about the organization and laterality of how we process faces depending on our gender, sexual orientation and handedness,” Steeves says.

Anatomical studies of the corpus callosum, which facilitates communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, also indicate differences in handedness: women and left-handed men have been shown to possess larger corpus callosum and more symmetrical cortices than right-handed men.

“These anatomical differences likely contribute to the more lateralized performance results seen among right-handed and heterosexual men,” says Steeves.

The study, “Sex differences in face processing are mediated by handedness and sexual orientation,” was co-authored by 91��ɫ psychology graduate student Caitlin R. Mullin, and 91��ɫ undergraduate psychology students Paul W. H. Brewster, and Roxana A. Dobrin.

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer.

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Now there’s another kind of prowess achieved by women in their 40s that men peak at earlier in life, wrote the Toronto Star March 10.

Math.

Not only do female math students outperform men at Ontario’s community colleges, but it’s the 40-something female multi-taskers juggling jobs, families and mortgages who edge out their classmates of either sex at any age, new research shows.

Their secret? They simply might have mastered the time-management skills younger students lack, notes Graham Orpwood, professor emeritus in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Education. He is co-author of the College Mathematics Project, released Tuesday, which examined 31,000 first-year math students across the province’s 24 community colleges.

“Women in their 30s and 40s who go back to school have had to juggle so many roles that they can organize their time and study independently – life skills many young students haven’t mastered,” says Orpwood, who coordinated the joint tracking project by the 91��ɫ/Seneca Institute for Mathematics, Science & Technology Education.

While mature men do better than their younger male classmates – males scored the highest percentage of good grades in their 30s – at any age, they lagged behind women of the same age by 4 to 14 percentage points, wrote the Star.

Despite the old misconception that women don’t have “a head for figures”, nearly 72 per cent of females scored grades of A, B or C in first-year math compared with 64 per cent of males – with a whopping 86.9 per cent of women in their 40s landing the highest percentage of these good grades.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin, with files from the Toronto Star.

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