Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences最新文献

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) pose a massive public health challenge, affecting over 6.7 million Americans aged 65 and older-a number projected to double by 2050. Despite advances in pharmacological treatments, there remains no cure or method to reverse the disease. This paper highlights the role of psychological stress as a critical yet underappreciated risk factor for cognitive decline and reviews its complex interplay with behavioral, social, and biological mechanisms. Chronic psychological stress drives physiological and behavioral changes that are linked to accelerated cognitive deterioration, particularly in older adults. Early interventions can target stress management and behavioral prevention strategies, which include physical activity, healthy diet, and social engagement. Further, key barriers to meaningful policy change to prevent and slow ADRD include lack of public awareness, stigma around mental health and aging, and misaligned funding incentives. Policy initiatives can improve brain health literacy, increase equitable access to services, and enhance community-level and environmental factors to promote healthy aging. Prioritizing stress reduction and promoting early detection and prevention can meaningfully reduce ADRD risk and progression, improving public health broadly.

Romantic relationships impact individuals' mental and physical health across the lifespan. The link between relationships and health may be especially intertwined during transitions. Examining three seasons of romantic relationships-dating, the transition to parenthood, and bereavement-links each season with health. To best support the health of relationships and the individuals in them, domain-specific policy recommendations address experiences of dating, pregnancy/parenting, and grieving. Broad-scale recommendations cover education, placemaking, research and funding, and community efforts to support individual health across various relational seasons.

A large body of research shows connections between infants' and toddlers' home language input and a wide range of receptive and expressive early language skills. Some facets of caretaker input and early language skills are associated with socioeconomic status (SES), though not all. Given the complexity of language learning, language use, and its many pathways of connection to SES, testing causal links between these dimensions is difficult at best. Interventions aimed at changing parent language use have seen mixed success, in part because "language infusions" generally fail to target underlying challenges facing underresourced families, and perhaps because parent language is the wrong target. System-level interventions such as paid parental leave and expansion and enrichment of childcare and early education options hold greater promise for improving families' lives, with positive repercussions for a broad range of family and child outcomes, including linguistic ones.

Collaboration is key to STEM, where multidisciplinary team research can solve complex problems. However, inequality in STEM fields hinders their full potential, due to persistent psychological barriers in underrepresented students' experience. This paper documents teamwork in STEM and explores the transformative potential of computational modeling and generative AI in promoting STEM-team diversity and inclusion. Leveraging generative AI, this paper outlines two primary areas for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. First, formalizing collaboration assessment with inclusive analytics can capture fine-grained learner behavior. Second, adaptive, personalized AI systems can support diversity and inclusion in STEM teams. Four policy recommendations highlight AI's capacity: formalized collaborative skill assessment, inclusive analytics, funding for socio-cognitive research, human-AI teaming for inclusion training. Researchers, educators, and policymakers can build an equitable STEM ecosystem. This roadmap advances AI-enhanced collaboration, offering a vision for the future of STEM where diverse voices are actively encouraged and heard within collaborative scientific endeavors.