Category: Past News

 

The University of Georgia has named nine faculty and academic leaders to the 2022-2023 class of the university’s Women’s Leadership Fellows Program.

“Through the Women’s Leadership Fellows program, the university is making a significant commitment to building leadership capacity across our campus,” said UGA President Jere W. Morehead. “We congratulate the members of this new class, who will gain skills and experiences that will benefit their careers and our institution.”

Two of the Women’s Leadership Fellows are also Distinguished Scholars at the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research.

Paula Lemons, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and associate dean of social and behavioral sciences in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on how students develop conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills in college science courses and how to facilitate improvements in STEM education at the course, department and university levels. Lemons is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Her other honors include the University System of Georgia Board of Regents’ Excellence in Teaching Award.

Anne Shaffer, professor in the department of psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and associate dean of the UGA Graduate School. A clinical and developmental psychologist, her research focuses on risk, resilience and development in the family context, with an emphasis on emotion regulation and parent-child emotion communication. Shaffer’s honors include being named to the American Psychological Association’s 2021 Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology. In addition, she received the Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity Leadership from the Franklin College.

UGA established the program in 2015 as part of its Women’s Leadership Initiative to provide a select group of current faculty and administrators with an opportunity to develop leadership skills while gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities confronting higher education. The program specifically focuses on issues women face in academic administration.

“The talented faculty and administrators selected for the 2022-2023 class of the Women’s Leadership Fellows Program are leaders in their respective fields and on our campus,” said S. Jack Hu, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “They have made significant contributions to UGA, and their experiences in this valuable program will provide a foundation for them to make an even greater impact in the future.”

Throughout the yearlong program, the participants will attend monthly sessions to learn from senior administrators on campus as well as from visiting speakers from higher education, business and other fields.

How a company manages a new mother’s return to work could have a big impact on her emotional health.

Mental health problems such as postpartum depression or generalized anxiety disorder could affect up to one in five women during the postpartum period. According to recent University of Georgia research, the way a company treats a mother’s return to work can have major implications on her mental health.

The bulk of workplace variables that indicate positive outcomes for mental health is under the control of organizations. It can include having access to paid maternity leave, having a flexible schedule and a total workload.

However, according to lead author Rachel McCardel, a doctorate student in the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia, past studies that looked at how maternal mental health related to work had included returning to work with maternity leave.

“But return to work is more than that because, while maternity leave is an important resource, it doesn’t necessarily capture the actual process of when the leave ends and when you start resuming work, and when you start combining your roles as an employee and a mother,” she said.
Finding solutions may be made easier by comprehending the impact returning to work has on the mental health of working mothers. It will highlight potential areas for support or treatments to prevent or decrease the impact of disorders like depression or anxiety.

How Workplaces Influence the Mental health of Working Mothers

The authors conducted a systematic analysis of the peer-reviewed papers over the previous 20 years that investigated working mothers’ mental health in the United States. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on whether returning to work benefited or harmed mental health were included in the investigations.

“But when synthesizing all the studies together, we saw a type of conflict emerge between balancing responsibilities and demands associated with being an employee, as well as the responsibilities associated with being a parent, and wanting to meet the needs of both roles,” said McCardel.

They discovered that lower mental health outcomes were associated with increased conflict between the two roles.

Return to Work Programs

According to co-author and OIBR Affiliate, Heather Padilla, University of Georgia Assistant Professor of Health Promotion and Behavior at the College of Public Health, the term ‘return to work’ in workplace research refers to individuals who have been ill or injured and are returning to their jobs after a prolonged absence.

“There are return to work programs and, in some cases, a very systematic process to assess an employee’s capability and adjust their job responsibilities to help their transition back because the research shows that there are positive benefits to coming back to the workplace after an injury or an illness, but there’s a balance,” said Padilla. “I don’t know that we have those same conversations about the return to work after you’ve had a baby even though we treat pregnancy very much as a disability and illness in the U.S. workplace.”

The findings of this study suggest some methods that people might use to support their mental health as they resume their jobs. One resource mentioned as being crucial for parents returning to the workforce is coworker support. However, the decisions made by the organization will ultimately have the biggest impact.

According to McCardel, this review highlights the need to intentionally address mothers’ mental health in the workplace.

“It’s about creating that structure to say you are not alone. To show that as an organization, you care about your employees and value them. Let’s have a structure in place where we can have those conversations and meet those needs,” said McCardel.

 

Written by: Lauren Baggett

Correcting peers is key in small-group learning

Telling fellow students they are wrong can help everyone in the group learn

Collaborative group work is increasingly prioritized across higher education, particularly in the life sciences and STEM-related fields. But how students communicate within these smaller groups is key to their success.

New research from the University of Georgia suggests that students who understand what they do and do not know, and who are willing to ask for clarification and correct misinformation in the group, are more successful in small-group problem-solving.

The study, “Oh, that makes sense”: Social Metacognition in Small-Group Problem Solving, was published in the current issue of Life Science Education.

The new research advances the understanding of how students succeed in innovative instruction environments such as SCALE-UP classrooms and active learning courses.

“The move toward more collaborative learning is really big in life science education,” said Julie Dangremond Stanton, OIBR Distinguished Scholar and associate professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of cellular biology and corresponding author on the study. “If we’re going to ask students to work in small groups, then we have to provide them with some guidance on how to collaborate effectively while problem solving because they are still learning how to do this. Guidance on collaboration may be particularly important when we ask students to use scientific reasoning with their peers.”

Using discourse analysis to examine transcripts from two groups of three students during breakout sessions in an upper-division biology classroom, researchers identified statements and questions that work best in small-group settings. By analyzing the conversation for metacognition (the awareness and regulation of thought processes), the team – led by postdoctoral researcher Stephanie Halmo – identified seven types of metacognitive statements or questions.

By coding for reasoning, they uncovered four categories of metacognitive statements or questions associated with higher-quality reasoning. For example, when students identified a point of confusion and asked for clarification (e.g., “I don’t understand. Can you explain that?”) the group’s responses helped move their problem solving forward. As another example, when students asked questions that evaluated their group’s answers (e.g., “Does our answer address the question?”), the group’s responses helped them reason at a higher level.

Correcting a peer can be daunting, but it’s beneficial

“It’s fascinating to see. If you and I were working with one other person and you said something to me about how cell division works, and I thought I understood how that worked, but as you’re explaining it, I realize I don’t actually understand how cells divide,” Stanton said. “I might try to clarify my understanding by explaining it back, but maybe the third person we’re talking with realizes, oh no, Julie is still confused, let me correct this part and help her try to understand it.”

That ability, according to Stanton, can be important even though students may be otherwise socialized not to directly correct someone, because it could be considered confrontational. It’s a skill that also combines with an ability to listen and think about the discussion in the group.

“We created timelines of what students did during breakout sessions, and we see times when students are not speaking to each other, and I really appreciated this idea that maybe some silence can be very beneficial to group work, when you take a moment to think about what you’re going to say before you say it, or think about the problem before you jump in to solve it,” she said.

Periods of silence denoted better group problem solving

The researchers were initially excited by another group in the study who spoke continually, even finishing each other’s sentences. But the audio recordings and transcript revealed that, while the group had some success in problem solving, they would never directly correct each other. Even when one student said something that another knew was wrong, the second did not acknowledge the wrong answer by offering a correction or asking a question, and instead gently moved to something else.

According to Stanton the silence is an interesting indicator for both students and faculty, who may be more inclined to correlate noisy classroom discussions with better active learning as well as become concerned with periods of silence while students are working in groups.

Overlapping utterances that don’t include students being direct with one another can lead a group discussion in circles and may exhaust the participants. Instead, the new research suggests providing students more coaching around the metacognitive statements and questions that can promote problem solving. For instance, while it is normally not seen as socially acceptable to correct someone, not stopping to ask questions or make a point could lead down a road that’s not productive for the work or the learning situation as designed.

“We often think about metacognition as realizing what you do and don’t know,” Stanton said. “And a lot of times it’s really beneficial to work with other people because when you hear them talk – or when you explain something to them – you start to realize, OK wait I don’t actually know what I thought I knew.”

Writer: Alan Flurry, aflurry@uga.edu
For more information about this research, contact: Julie Dangremond Stanton, stantonj@uga.edu

 

There’s a slight gap in Dee Warmath’s academic resume.

A 19-year gap, in fact, between the time Warmath finished her master’s program and earned her doctorate.

“I thought I’d go out and see the world maybe for a couple of years and then I’ll come back and finish the Ph.D. and teach,” she said. “A couple of years turned into decades, and those years were wonderful.”

Warmath, an Affiliate with OIBR and an assistant professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, received her master’s degree in sociology from Vanderbilt University in 1991. She then took a job building retail sales forecasting models for Service Merchandise.

That entry into the corporate world led to a variety of high-profile data analysis and market research positions with several companies, including J.C. Penney, Kohl’s and the NPD Group.

Warmath’s background in sociology and psychology gave her a unique insight into consumer behavior that proved valuable in her career in industry, she said.

“I traveled a ton, worked with some very interesting people, met with some really cool companies and people doing very innovative things who were just trying to figure out their business in a better way,” she said.

Despite the success she enjoyed in her career, Warmath also felt a tug back to academia.

“I knew if I didn’t go do what I always wanted to do, I would probably never have that chance,” she said.

While working at NPD, she went back to school, earning her Ph.D. in consumer behavior and family studies with a minor in marketing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I finished my Ph.D. in three years while working 80 hours a week and taking about 120 airline flights a year,” she said. “I wrote my entire dissertation on airplanes. I still do my best work on airplanes—it’s the perfect environment to work in.”

Warmath came to UGA in 2018, where she teaches consumer analytics and social entrepreneurship for consumer well-being in the FACS department of financial planning, housing and consumer economics.

Her research focuses on how consumer decision-making, self-efficacy and motivation affect well-being.

“I was always asked why I didn’t go to a business school or marketing or something like that,” she said. “But my entire career was about making sure the consumer was represented in the meetings and discussions. I worked for years to try to find this mutually beneficial space, and that’s where I wanted my research to be.”

Warmath has a passion for the practical application of research. “I love research and doing things that have an impact and aren’t just purely theoretical,” she said. “Here, it all kind of fits together because it has this sense of promoting well-being at the center of it, trying to make people’s lives better. I love that.”

More information about Dr. Warmath and her research here.

 

Owens Institute for Behavioral Research appoints Dawn T. Robinson as the new Director of Faculty Development.

Dr. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, is an OIBR distinguished scholar and has been a vital member of the institute since 2004. She founded and co-directs the Laboratory for the Study of Social Interaction and the Computational Social Science Work Group. She has been actively involved at the Institute for many years and was recently honored with the “OIBR Service Legacy Award”.

The faculty development director leads the 2-year Grant Development Program within the institute preparing UGA faculty participants to compete successfully for extramural funding.

Dawn has tremendous expertise to bring to the GDP, including a longstanding history of funding from NSF, US Department of the Interior, Office of Naval Research, and Army Research Office.

Dr. Robinson will be replacing Steven M. Kogan, Athletic Association Professor of Human Development, who has held the position for the last eleven years.

Read more about the OIBR Grant Development Program.

For more info. about Dr. Robinson, go here.

It may feel like an anvil hanging over your head, but that looming deadline stressing you out at work may actually be beneficial for your brain, according to new research from the Youth Development Institute at the University of Georgia.

Published in Psychiatry Research, the study found that low to moderate levels of stress can help individuals develop resilience and reduce their risk of developing mental health disorders, like depression and antisocial behaviors. Low to moderate stress can also help individuals to cope with future stressful encounters.

“If you’re in an environment where you have some level of stress, you may develop coping mechanisms that will allow you to become a more efficient and effective worker and organize yourself in a way that will help you perform,” said Assaf Oshri, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

The stress that comes from studying for an exam, preparing for a big meeting at work or pulling longer hours to close the deal can all potentially lead to personal growth. Being rejected by a publisher, for example, may lead a writer to rethink their style. And being fired could prompt someone to reconsider their strengths and whether they should stay in their field or branch out to something new.

But the line between the right amount of stress and too much stress is a thin one.

Oshri, who also directs the UGA Youth Development Institute, compared the phenomenon to developing a callous on your hands or feet from physical activity. “You trigger your skin to adapt to this pressure you are applying to it. But if you do too much, you’re going to cut your skin.”

The researchers relied on data from the Human Connectome Project, a national project funded by the National Institutes of Health that aims to provide insight into how the human brain functions. For the present study, the researchers analyzed the project’s data from more than 1,200 young adults who reported their perceived stress levels using a questionnaire commonly used in research to measure how uncontrollable and stressful people find their lives.

Participants answered questions about how frequently they experienced certain thoughts or feelings, such as “in the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?” and “in the last month, how often have you found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do?”

Their neurocognitive abilities were then assessed using tests that measured attention and ability to suppress automatic responses to visual stimuli; cognitive flexibility, or ability to switch between tasks; picture sequence memory, which involves remembering an increasingly long series of objects; working memory and processing speed.

The researchers compared those findings with the participants’ answers from multiple measures of anxious feelings, attention problems and aggression, among other behavioral and emotional problems.

The analysis found that low to moderate levels of stress were psychologically beneficial, potentially acting as a kind of inoculation against developing mental health symptoms.

“Most of us have some adverse experiences that actually make us stronger,” Oshri said. “There are specific experiences that can help you evolve or develop skills that will prepare you for the future.”

But the ability to tolerate stress and adversity varies greatly according to the individual.

Things like age, genetic predispositions and having a supportive community to fall back on in times of need all play a part in how well individuals handle challenges. While a little stress can be good for cognition, Oshri warns that continued levels of high stress can be incredibly damaging, both physically and mentally.

“At a certain point, stress becomes toxic,” he said. “Chronic stress, like the stress that comes from living in abject poverty or being abused, can have very bad health and psychological consequences. It affects everything from your immune system, to emotional regulation, to brain functioning. Not all stress is good stress.”

The study was co-authored by Zehua Cui and Cory Carvalho, of the University of Georgia’s Department of Human Development and Family Science, and Sihong Liu, of Stanford University.

For more information about this research: Youth Development Institute
Written by: Leigh Beeson

 

 

If you were a 10-year-old living in Georgia in 1997, here’s what might have been on your mind. The world probably felt bigger after Atlanta hosted the Centennial Olympic Games the year before. The Spice Girls ruled radio, and you might spend Friday night watching “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” Beanie Babies might have been on your Christmas wish list. And in December “Titanic” would break box office records (though just this summer, those records were toppled by “Top Gun: Maverick”).

And if you were a 10-year-old living in Georgia in 1997, you and your parent might have met with someone from the University of Georgia—someone who asked questions about your lives and your family relationships. These visits, subsequently repeated every two to three years, were the beginning of the Family and Community Health Study, which began collecting data 25 years ago. For the last two and a half decades, FACHS has collected data on health and well-being among African American families, focusing on how stress affects mental and physical health and identifying the factors that provide protection from such stressors.

The project’s legacy is vast, including more than 200 published papers plus the creation of research-informed, community-based programs that help families strengthen their relationships, parenting processes and youth competencies. But it started with members of Georgia communities who 25 years ago began sharing their lives with UGA.

“I tell every person how special they are, and I tell them that they’re heroes,” said Valeria Jones, the scheduler/recruiter for FACHS.

“I want them to know that they have made a big difference in the world.”

What keeps people healthy?

In the early 90s, OIBR Distinguished Scholar Ron Simons started the Iowa Youth and Families Project while working at Iowa State University. It included 452 families with a seventh grader and examined how a number of factors—family processes, economic hardship, etc.—affected the kids as they grew up.

But Simons was concerned about the lack of diversity, both with regard to race and family structure (all of the families included two parents). He also wanted to start working with the kids when they were younger. So he and colleagues at the Center for Family Research collaborated with African American scholars, sociologists and psychologists to design a new project that would target 10-year-olds from African American families in both Iowa and Georgia.

Then they set out to recruit participants, starting with more than 800 families that included a fifth grader. Initial data collection involved surveys with the children and their primary and secondary caregivers, assessing traits like discipline and affection as well as examining neighborhood data like the number of playgrounds and churches. They also interviewed the children’s best friends, and as they got older, they interviewed their romantic partners as well. Over time they began collecting data not just from the primary caregivers, but about the primary caregivers.

“We tried to look at the major dimensions of life, like education, neighborhood conditions, parent-child interaction, marital interaction, income and economic hardship,” said Simons, now a Regents’ Professor of Sociology in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

The researchers were also interested in issues unique to the African American experience—both positive and negative. They explored structural racism, examining the caregivers’ occupations and the schools the kids attended, noting whether college prep courses were offered in schools that predominantly served Black communities. They documented incidents of discrimination or harassment by police, as well as things like racial socialization—the ways parents guide their children in how to deal with issues related to race, counter negative messages they are likely to encounter, and develop pride in being Black.

“We’re especially interested in the way that things like racial socialization can overcome exposure to ugly incidents,” Simons said.

Former OIBR director and Distinguished Scholar Steve Beach joined the project nearly a decade after it started.

“It was really an important study in that initial phase,” said Beach, Regents’ Professor of Psychology in the Franklin College. “It gave rise to some observations about what families do to help raise strong youth who are able to deal with the various kinds of challenges that confront them.”

That idea led the team to start looking at more health-related characteristics and collecting more biological measures like height, weight, BMI and blood pressure. These days, they’re also collecting saliva and blood samples.

“That really characterizes the next phase of FACHS—that shift toward trying to understand what keeps people healthy,” Beach said. “What kinds of romantic partner relationship processes? What kinds of family processes? What kinds of broader community processes or internal psychological processes contribute to people being able to stay healthy?”

The researchers were also providing health-related data to any participants whose results—high blood sugar, or high blood pressure, for example—indicated that they might need to see a doctor.

In addition, findings from the FACHS project have informed and given rise to community-based prevention programs like the Strong African American Families Program, designed to support parents and youth during the transition from early adolescence to the teenage years. The Strong African American Families Teen Program is designed for older teens, with a focus on reducing risks such as substance abuse and sexual risk taking. These programs have been implemented in 52 cities and 65 organizations, and 792 facilitators have been trained to lead them. A more recent development has been the Promoting Strong African American Families Program, designed to support two-parent families of youth in early adolescence.

This focus on putting research-based programming back into the community has its roots in the creation of the Center for Family Research. Gene Brody, Regents’ Professor in the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, organized the center around three facets: conducting research with projects like FACHS; evaluating if results can be shaped in a way that can make people’s lives better; and getting the information into the hands of people in the community.

“There are groups at CFR that are dedicated to each of those three different components,” Beach said. “That’s because of the leadership that Gene Brody provided.”

Is your clock fast or slow?

From the start, FACHS has involved faculty collaborators at numerous institutions, including Rob Philibert at the University of Iowa, Carolyn Cutrona at Iowa State University, and Rick Gibbons and Meg Gerrard at the University of Connecticut. At UGA, the team includes Leslie Simons and Man Kit “Karlo” Lei, both in sociology, in addition to Simons and Beach.

Having a large team allows them to tackle multiple topics. Gibbons focuses on substance abuse and risky sex, for example. Leslie Simons studies family processes, adolescent outcomes, dating behavior and intimate partner violence. Ron Simons, Beach and Lei focus on health issues.

The many publications resulting from this project explore a variety of topics. One recent study revealed that when family stress is high, teen depression can follow. Another explored the health consequences faced by Black young adults who were successful, finding that the economic hardship and exposure to racial discrimination they faced in earlier years can get “under the skin,” leading to physical deterioration that persisted through adolescence and well into adulthood.

“FACHS has influenced a lot of different lines of research. The value of affirming black identity for kids was an early and important finding,” Beach said. “For parents, the findings about community-level influences on health and the importance of inflammation as a mediator of stressor effects on health really stand out. Recently we’ve been working on tracing the influence of childhood adversity on adult health.”

One innovation that has expanded the FACHS project has been a focus on the epigenome. As people age, their epigenome—how various genes are turned on or off—also ages. Tools called biological epigenetic clocks evaluate this activity and are strong predictors of factors like blood pressure, blood sugar, kidney function and inflammation, as well as chronic illnesses like coronary vascular disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer. One such tool, the GrimAge clock, provides a score in years, revealing if aging is accelerated or decelerated.

“You add up your score on this index, and it tells you how old you are in terms of biology,” Simons said. “It might say you are 38, and if you’re actually 43, that’s good news. It means you’re experiencing decelerated aging.”

A number of factors appear to impact a person’s biological age, according to Simons. Education, income and marriage appear to decelerate GrimAge, and discrimination and financial hardship increase it. Smoking is associated with a higher GrimAge, and so is an unhealthy diet. Simply living in an impoverished area has an impact, increasing aging by several years.

“Our question was how is epigenetic age affected by what happens to you as a little kid? And the answer is a lot,” he said. “If you grew up in poverty, if your parents got divorced, if you changed schools several times, if you had a parent die—if you experienced two or more of those things as a child, then you are typically 4.6 years older than your chronological age when you hit your mid 50s. That’s pretty amazing.”

There’s a lot of loyalty to them. They go to a lot of trouble to participate,” Simons said. “But they believe that there’s value. They take us at our word that this is going to be helpful to African Americans. And we believe that it has been helpful, and will continue to be.”

After 25 years, there’s no end in sight for FACHS, according to Beach.

“There’s a lot left to learn from the participants. They have been wonderful in their dedication to the project and in their willingness to work with us over the years,” he said. “It seems likely that we’ll find ways to expand the sample and continue asking more detailed questions about health mechanisms, integrating new technologies as they become available. There’s no shortage of new ideas floating around.”

Written by: Allyson Mann

UGA’s Office of Research named Jody Clay-Warner the new director of the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, effective Aug. 1.

“I am honored to be named the director of the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research. OIBR has been an integral part of my experience as a UGA faculty member, and I am deeply committed to its mission,” said Clay-Warner. “I look forward to using my administrative skills to ensure not only that OIBR continues to be a model for grants administration customer service, but also that it responds effectively to new challenges in the increasingly complex world of social and behavioral science research.”

Established in 1970, OIBR is a service unit within the Office of Research. OIBR’s mission is to support innovative social and behavioral sciences research at UGA, with a particular eye toward fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. To fulfill this mission, the Owens Institute offers a variety of grant administration services, including pre- and post-award support. Faculty mentoring is also important to OIBR’s mission. The Grant Development Program fosters faculty career development and supports the UGA pipeline for future excellence by preparing social and behavioral science faculty to compete successfully for extramural funding. In addition, OIBR offers many multidisciplinary, collaborative events and networking. Currently, 171 faculty members are affiliated with the Institute, representing 45 academic units.

“Dr. Clay-Warner brings a wealth of experience and expertise to this position, and we look forward to working with her to amplify OIBR’s impact,” said Karen Burg, UGA vice president for research. “OIBR helps prepare our faculty to thrive and succeed in a competitive funding environment. Their research, in turn, has potential for tremendous societal benefit.”

Clay-Warner, Meigs Professor of Sociology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, received a Ph.D. in sociology from Emory University and has been at UGA since 1998, where she previously served as director of the Criminal Justice Studies Program and as head of the Department of Sociology. She has been involved with OIBR since 2000, when as an assistant professor she participated in the grant mentoring program. In 2019, Clay-Warner was appointed associate director of the Institute.

In addition to her service on many UGA and professional committees, she is currently co-editor-in-chief of Social Psychology Quarterly and chair-elect of the American Sociological Association’s Social Psychology section.

Clay-Warner has been the recipient of many distinguished awards, including the Owens Creative Research Award, the Outstanding Recent Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Emotion section, the Southern Sociological Society’s Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Award, and the American Society of Criminology’s Outstanding Teaching Award. She is a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

Clay-Warner’s research focuses on understanding responses to injustice. She uses laboratory experiments to understand the underlying processes that shape these responses, and she uses survey techniques to study the implications of these basic processes for reactions to real-world experiences of injustice, such as labor exploitation and criminal victimization. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of State.

New research from OIBR Affiliate and Grant Development Program participant, Analisa Arroyo, Associate Professor, Communication Studies, shows a connection between being a feminist and having a better body image.

Published in Body Image, the study found that feminist mothers and their daughters felt more positively about their bodies and less shame about how their bodies look than those who don’t ascribe to feminist ideals. Additionally, the paper showed that how mothers view and speak about their bodies can affect how their daughters view their own and vice versa.

The researchers focused on feminist embodiment, which they define as women rejecting societal norms and expectations about what they should look like while also feeling empowered and embracing their own bodies for their strengths and uniqueness.

Led by Arroyo, lead author of the study, the researchers surveyed 169 mother-daughter pairs for the study, but they specifically didn’t ask participants whether they self-identified as feminists. Instead, they analyzed participants’ feelings about their own power as a woman, how connected they feel to their bodies and how in control they feel of their own lives, in addition to other measures of feminist values.

Previous research linked negative comments about one’s own body to negative outcomes such as depression, disordered eating, body dissatisfaction and more. The present study showed that when daughters hear their mothers talk negatively about themselves, the daughters’ own body image takes a hit.

Daughters who embraced their bodies and spoke positively about themselves, though, served as a positive influence for their mothers. Moms with more body-positive daughters were more likely to have a better body image of themselves.

“I think one of the key takeaways of this study is the importance of focusing on moms as the agent of change,” Arroyo said. “One way we can break the intergenerational cycle of negative body image is by empowering mothers to accept themselves and love their bodies, and that’s what we can teach our daughters.”

But Arroyo said that’s much easier said than done.

“There’s a whole group of people who’ve never been taught to think positively about their bodies,” said Arroyo. “In fact, they’re ashamed of their bodies, whether it’s because of body size, gender identity, race ethnicity or something else. And their negative talk about their bodies is hurtful.”

Negative “body talk” is common, particularly among women. And Arroyo said it sometimes operates like a feedback loop.

A woman tells her friend that she thinks she needs to lose weight. The friend rushes to reassure her that she looks great. “When people compliment us, that reinforces that behavior, but you can’t not say anything different, right? You can’t be like, ‘Yeah, maybe you could go on a diet.’”

But it’s not as simple as telling moms to fake confidence until they make it.

The moms in the study grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, a time period where body positivity wasn’t a concept, let alone the movement it’s grown into over the past decade.

“They grew up at a time when thin was the ideal, and there was no embracement of the body,” Arroyo said. They were also likely hyperaware of the obesity epidemic, which placed value judgments on bodies and condoned discrimination against people in larger bodies.

“The mothers in our sample were likely taught that their bodies, which naturally could never meet those beauty ideals, are deficient and should be subjected to ongoing improvements,” the authors wrote.

So, is the answer to the body image crisis for mothers to talk more positively about themselves in the presence of their daughters? Not exactly, Arroyo said.

“We can say, ‘Say this when your daughter says this. Act this way when she is watching,’” Arroyo said. “But if they don’t experience this embodiment and don’t really accept their body, that’s just acting, right? That’s faking it. That’s not what we want. We want them to truly accept the body that is carrying them through their lives.”

Moms can be honest and open with their daughters about their struggles with body image, but they should also strive toward being more accepting of themselves and encouraging their daughters to follow suit.

“What we think is that the mother-daughter relationship is one of the few times that this kind of body talk is OK because they have a history of sharing and caring that might be different from two strangers who typically engage in body talk to fit in,” Arroyo said. “Mothers and daughters are very important for one another.”

More Information: Analisa Arroyo

 

 

According to new research findings recently published online in the International Journal of Strategic Communication, your age may play a huge role in whether you’ll decide to get a COVID vaccine.

Though vaccine hesitancy due to personal politics has drawn a lot of media attention, a University of Georgia study reveals it’s not the only consideration.

The link between vaccines and politics is “not so much true as people get older,” noted study author OIBR Affiliate, Glen Nowak. He co-directs the Center for Health and Risk Communication at the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, in Athens, Ga.

In fact, “people who are 65 and older are almost universally vaccinated, particularly as you start getting to 75 and older,” Nowak said.

For the study, his team surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 1,000 Americans. The researchers wanted to learn whether respondents’ political party, preferred news source and factors like age, gender, race/ethnicity and education would affect vaccine acceptance.

The investigators found that respondents 50 and older tended to consider themselves at greater risk while worrying that getting COVID-19 would have a negative impact on their daily lives.

The youngest respondents, however, were less likely to worry about getting the virus or to consider themselves at risk of severe illness.

“Looking at 18- to 29-year-olds, it’s not surprising that they are the group with the lowest overall COVID vaccination rates because they’re not a group that is suffering serious illness and death from COVID,” Nowak said in a university news release. “Are there instances of that? Absolutely. But it’s relatively rare. I think many people in that age group understand that.”

Still, even with differences in age, political affiliation and where participants got their news were the most consistent predictors of how they felt about their COVID risk and their vaccine intent, according to the study.

Liberals were more likely than conservatives to consider the virus a bigger threat to their daily lives, worry about becoming ill and think symptoms could be severe. They also were more concerned they could pass the disease to others, more likely to accept the vaccine and to trust public health officials.

Compared with conservatives, liberals and moderates believed medical care and treatment would be more difficult to access.

And, in a finding that surprised the researchers, the survey showed that respondents who received their news from a mix of conservative and liberal sources were more likely to be vaccine hesitant than those who only consumed partisan news.

“If you had asked us before this study, we would have said pretty confidently that people who were looking at a wide array of information would be much more likely to be vaccinated and have much more confidence in the vaccine,” Nowak said. “What this suggested was the opposite in many instances. Many people who tried or said that they looked at a broad spectrum of information sources came away less confident and more uncertain about the vaccine and its value.”

The authors suggested that public health messages should be tailored to specific audiences, in part because those who aren’t at high risk tune those messages out.

“This data shows you can’t assume interest and attention from younger people and those who are less affected by COVID-19,” Nowak said. “It’s a good reminder that we can’t just blast, ‘Everybody should be afraid of getting severe COVID.’ That’s not an effective communication strategy.”