Anak SUlung..First Born...Abang Long..Along..Pak Long..Tok Long..Abe Long..

From www.yahoo.com
2320 hours
22 June 2007

Busu : I was surfing and stumbled upon
this report..Anak Sulung...The Older..the Wiser (Kira aku nih bijak jugak laa..aku anak sulung dari 5 adik bradik)

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
Thu Jun 21, 5:54 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Boys at the top of the
pecking order — either by birth or
because their older siblings died —
score higher on IQ tests than their
younger brothers. The question of
whether firstborn and only children are
really smarter than those who come along
later has been hotly debated for more
than a century.

Norwegian researchers now report that it
isn't a matter of being born first, but
growing up the senior child, that seems
to result in the higher IQ scores.

Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal
report their findings in Friday's issue
of the journal Science.

It's a matter of what they call social
rank in the family — the highest scores
were racked up by the senior boy — the
first born or, if the firstborn had died
in infancy, the next oldest.

Kristensen, of Norway's National
Institute of Occupational Health, and
Bjerkedal, of the Norwegian Armed Forces
Medical Services, studied the IQ test
results of 241,310 Norwegian men drafted
into the armed forces between 1967 and
1976. All were aged 18 or 19 at the time.

The average IQ of first-born men was
103.2, they found.

Second-born men averaged 101.2, but
second-born men whose older sibling died
in infancy scored 102.9.

And for third-borns, the average was
100.0. But if both older siblings died
young, the third-born score rose to 102.6.

The findings provide "evidence that the
relation between birth order and IQ
score is dependent on the social rank in
the family and not birth order as such,"
they concluded.

It's an issue that has perplexed people
since at least 1874, when Sir Francis
Galton reported that men in prominent
positions tend to be firstborns more
often than would have been statistically
expected.

Since then, several studies have
reported higher intelligence scores for
firstborns, while other analyses have
questioned those findings and the
methodology of the reports.

While the Norwegian analysis focused on
men, other studies have included women,
some indicating a birth-order effect and
some not.

Frank J. Sulloway of the Institute for
Personality and Social Research at the
University of California, Berkeley,
welcomed what he called the Norwegians'
"elegantly designed" analysis.

"These two researchers demonstrate that
how study participants were raised, not
how they were born, is what actually
influences their IQs," said Sulloway,
who was not part of the research team.

The elder child pulls ahead, he said,
perhaps as a result of learning gained
through the process of tutoring younger
brothers and sisters.

The older child benefits by having to
organize and express its thoughts to
tutor youngsters, he said, while the
later children may have no one to tutor.

___

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Science: http://www.sciencemag.org