Joining Forces Joining Families, January 2008 – Understanding military stress and families

Featured Interview:

"Healthy Families, Healthy Communities"

Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Our featured interview is with Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, a noted neuroscience researcher and child advocate. His work addresses the relationship of childrens' needs to the developing brain, and is relevant to our nation’s military children, families and family prevention and education programs for healthy and high risk families.

We summarize two articles by Dr. Perry that describe basic principles of brain development and their relationship to maltreatment, as well as two articles on gene-environment interaction that shed light on recent neurobiological research on maltreatment. In our regular statistics article, Building Bridges to Research, we provide an overview of logistic regression, a widely used procedure in social science research. Websites of Interest focuses on the Child Trauma Academy and the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies.