Heard at Convention

'You may be wondering what happened to the personality you developed at home. The answer is it?s waiting for you right there where you left it. Why do you think people hate to go home for the holidays? They may act tough in the boardroom or in the courtroom, but put them at the table with their parents and their siblings, and pretty soon they?re whining and bickering again, just like the good old days.'
?Judith Harris, Middletown, N.J., author of the new book, 'The Nurture Assumption' (Free Press, 1998), on her contention that people adopt different personalities outside the home than the personalities they display in the home.

'We inherit a taste system...that is given to us by ancestors who selected wisely from their chemical environment.'
?Thomas R. Scott, University of Delaware, speaking at a symposium on 'Ingestive behaviors.'

'That?s what slowed HIV prevention. For the first 10 years [of the epidemic], we used a cookie-cutter cultural approach. Then we found out not everybody uses the same dough.'
?Psychologist Gail Wyatt of the University of California?Los Angeles on the fact that scientists based too much of their HIV/AIDS research on data collected from white, gay, educated men rather than other racial and ethnic groups.

'The professionals didn?t know how to deal with child abuse. They hadn?t known much about it because information on it was suppressed under Communism.'
?Barbara Bonner, University of Oklahoma, on her work training East European mental health professionals to provide better services to abused children.

'I find it so ironic that this generation that fought labels through all of its youth is now ?glombing? onto such terms.
?Susan Krauss Whitbourne, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, on the use of the term 'baby-boomer.'

'White Americans and black Americans have a different worldview. But where in our curriculum is that reflected?'
?Leroy Reese, Chicago State University, on training in culturally competent counseling.

'I have five children, and I read children?s books at night. Thirty years ago the emblematic children?s book was ?The Little Engine That Could.? It was about doing well in the world and, by that achievement, feeling good. Now children?s books are about footless, unwarranted self-esteem.'
?APA President Martin E.P. Seligman, on the prevention of depression in children.