Category: News

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.”

The DeLTA Project (Department and Leadership Teams for Action), is excited to share a research-based resource we created to support STEM departments in advancing teaching evaluation. DeLTA has been funded by a $3 million National Science Foundation grant, teams of faculty members will create, implement and assess active learning materials to help students better develop STEM knowledge and skills. The multi-level project also involves department heads, the Office of Faculty Affairs and Office of Instruction, who will work together to explore ways to better support, incentivize and reward effective, evidence-based STEM instruction. Research findings, at both the disciplinary level and at the department and institutional levels, will be broadly disseminated to improve student learning outcomes at UGA and at research institutions nationwide.

The DeLTA team includes OIBR Distinguished Scholars, Paula Lemons, Professor of Biochemistry and Microbiology and Associate Dean for Social and Behavioral Sciences, Erin Dolan, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Tessa Andrews, Associate Professor of Genetics, and OIBR Affiliate Peggy Brickman, Professor of Plant Biology.

The team recently published an article in Life Sciences Education, “Guides to Advance Teaching Evaluation (GATEs): A Resource for STEM Departments Planning Robust and Equitable Evaluation Practices”, and is a research-based resource to support STEM departments in advancing teaching evaluation.

Most science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments inadequately evaluate teaching, which means they are not equipped to recognize or reward effective teaching. As part of a project at one institution, the team observed that departmental chairs needed help recognizing the decisions they would need to make to improve teaching evaluation practices. To meet this need, they developed the Guides to Advance Teaching Evaluation (GATEs), using an iterative development process. The GATEs are designed to be a planning tool that outlines concrete goals to guide reform in teaching evaluation practices in STEM departments at research-intensive institutions. The GATEs are grounded in the available scholarly literature and guided by existing reform efforts and have been vetted with STEM departmental chairs. The GATEs steer departments to draw on three voices to evaluate teaching: trained peers, students, and the instructor. This research-based resource includes three components for each voice: 1) a list of departmental target practices to serve as goals; 2) a characterization of common starting places to prompt reflection; and 3) ideas for getting started. Anecdotal examples are provided of potential uses of the GATEs for reform efforts in STEM departments and as a research tool to document departmental practices at different time points.

Read more here.

OIBR Distinguished Scholar, Dr. Jiaying Liu, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, has been awarded a Federal R21 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to support a neuroimaging project investigating tobacco use among young adults. The project seeks to identify neurobehavioral markers associated with tobacco use among young adult African American vapers, who are frequently targeted by advertisement from vaping companies.

This targeting, as well as unique vaping-related features like adding characterizing flavors, contribute to the disproportionate vaping use among young adults, minority groups, and those with low socioeconomic status, which is then responsible for higher tobacco-related morbidity and mortality rates among these groups. Findings from this project are expected to provide a greater understanding of the mechanisms that make these young adults more susceptible to tobacco use. This research will be used to inform the development of anti-vaping campaign messages and regulations (e.g., the FDA’s recently proposed rules to ban menthol from tobacco products) with the goal to reduce racial disparities in tobacco harm.

Co-PI is OIBR Distinguished Scholar, Dr. Lawrence Sweet, Gary R. Sperduto Professor in Clinical Psychology. Liu and Sweet teamed up in 2019 tackling youth vaping when the Food and Drug Administration declared that youth vaping had reached epidemic status. At the time there was little scientific data to guide restricting or banning vaping products, but UGA’s Liu and Sweet, both in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, are working to change that.

“E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco product among youths and young adults,” said Liu. “In 2011, the use of e-cigarette products was only 1.5% among youths. In 2018, it was more than 20%. This is very alarming. We know tobacco use has been declining for several years because of very effective tobacco-control efforts. Some people think e-cigarettes are a harm-reduction product because they don’t burn the tobacco, so there’s no tar and, in theory, no carcinogen to lead to cancer.”

“Others think e-cigarette use could be a gateway device that will cause nicotine addiction and dependence that ultimately lead to trying cigarettes and, long term, actually re-normalize smoking in our society,” said Sweet.

Liu added, “We found several studies that confirmed that for every one adult smoker who quits smoking with the use of e-cigarettes, there are 81 never smokers—youths or young adults—who actually initiate smoking after e-cigarette use.”

“When people start with cigarettes, they often stop at the experimentation stage because the nicotine tastes bitter. With e-cigarettes, the flavors can mask the unpleasant nicotine flavor. Until they’re hooked, and they feel like they need more nicotine and can handle the harsher experience of smoking cigarettes.”

“It’s like training wheels for cigarettes,” said Sweet.

This grant includes a budget to support two dedicated Graduate Research Assistants who will work directly with Dr. Liu and Dr. Sweet. The research assistants will be trained in fMRI neuroimaging practices, and will work throughout the project, assisting with participant recruitment and screening, experiment and message design, data collection and analysis and manuscript writing.

Read more about Dr. Liu and Dr. Sweet’s research here.

Interested potential GRA applicants should contact Dr. Liu to learn more about this opportunity.

 

 

New study suggests supportive school environment is linked to higher physical activity levels

Three out of every four teens aren’t getting enough exercise, and this lack is even more pronounced among female students.

But new research from the University of Georgia suggests improving a school’s climate can increase physical activity among adolescents.

School environments play a critical role in helping children develop healthy behaviors, like creating healthy eating habits, said lead study author and OIBR Affiliate,  Janani R. Thapa. And the same goes for physical activity.

“The length of recess, physical facilities and social environments at schools have been found to affect physical activity among students,” said Thapa, an associate professor of health policy and management at UGA’s College of Public Health.

The state of Georgia has implemented policies and programs to boost physical activity in K-12 schools. Thapa has been one of the lead evaluators of these programs.

“Over time, the state has observed declining levels of physical activity among all adolescents, but the rate is higher among female middle and high school students,” she said.

Why are teens not getting enough exercise? Thapa suspected that school climate could play an important role in determining how comfortable students feel participating in school sports or other physical activity. School climate includes factors such as social support, safety and bullying.

“We do not know much about the role of school climate on physical activity,” said Thapa. “There must have been barriers that were faced by certain groups of students. Hence, we wanted to investigate the difference by gender.”

Using data from a statewide survey of over 360,000 Georgia high school students that included questions about physical activity levels and school climate, Thapa and her co-authors were able to test that relationship.

The data included eight characteristics of climate: school connectedness, peer social support, adult social support, cultural acceptance, physical environment, school safety, peer victimization (bullying) and school support environment.

Overall, female students reported less physical activity than their male counterparts, only 35% were active compared to 57% of males. And physical activity declined steadily from ninth grade to 12th grade for both genders.

However, students of both genders were more physically active when school climate was perceived to be positive across most measures.

One thing that stood out was the influence of bullying. Female students who reported being bullied were more likely to be physically active, while male students who reported being bullied were less likely to be physically active.

Bullying was the only measure of school climate that differed for male and female students. This disparity could be explained, said the authors, by the different norms about exercise and masculine versus feminine ideals.

“For example, female students who are active in sports and physically active may not fit the gender norm and hence may face bullying,” said Thapa.

These findings suggest that K-12 schools that want to promote participation in physical activity should consider how to improve students’ sense of safety at school and bolster peer and adult support of exercise.

Co-authors include Justin Ingels, Kiran Thapa and Kathryn Chiang with UGA’s College of Public Health and Isha Metzger with UGA’s Department of Psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

The study, “School climate-related determinants of physical activity among high school girls and boys,” published in the Journal of Adolescence.

More information about Dr. Thapa’s research.

OIBR Affiliate, Anna Abraham, and E. Paul Torrance Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent, spoke on creativity in a recent article from the American Psychological Association’s magazine Monitor on Psychology.

The article, “The science behind creativity,” delves into the field of creativity, including research on how creativity works and how to increase and measure it. Researchers have conducted experiments — like creating paintings based off ideas generated while in hypnagogia, the state between sleep and wakefulness — and evaluated the definition of creativity.

“Across different age groups, the best predictor of creativity is openness to new experiences,” Abraham said. “Creative people have the kind of curiosity that draws them toward learning new things and experiencing the world in new ways.”

Along with openness to new experiences, she found two other factors that predict peak originality in teenagers in her research: intelligence and time spent working on creative hobbies.

For both teenagers and adults, Abraham said creativity requires practice, and that adults need to delegate time in their schedules, find the right conditions for their creativity, and keep trying.

“People want the booster shot for creativity. But creativity isn’t something that comes magically. It’s a skill, and as with any new skill, the more you practice, the better you get,” she said. In a not-yet-published study, she found three factors predicted peak originality in teenagers: openness to experience, intelligence, and, importantly, time spent engaged in creative hobbies. That is, taking the time to work on creative pursuits makes a difference. And the same is true for adults, she said. “Carve out time for yourself, figure out the conditions that are conducive to your creativity, and recognize that you need to keep pushing yourself. You won’t get to where you want to go if you don’t try.”

Read the full story in APA Monitor on Psychology.