The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General led by University of Pennsylvania researchers Danielle Cosme and Emily Falk. The researchers analysed the behavior of more than 3,000 individuals to understand why people share information on social media.

Cosme and her team tested what contributes to “value-based virality.” In other words, information on the internet often goes viral because people find it inherently valuable, either to themselves or to society.

Crafting effective messaging for social cause

This finding could help craft effective messaging for social causes, says Cosme, a research director at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Communication Neuroscience Lab. Knowing the psychological ingredients that make a person share a post on social media can help scientists share facts about climate change or public health officials dispel myths about vaccines.

Cosme’s research shows that people pay more attention to information they perceive to be related to themselves.

Similarly, humans are social beings and love to connect with each other. Sharing information activates reward centers in our brain. And when we communicate with others, we consider what the other person is thinking or wants to hear—a quality known as social relevance.

The methodology and findings

The participants were exposed to articles and social media posts about health, climate change, voting, and COVID-19. Some participants read headlines and summaries of news articles, others looked at social media posts. All of the participants rated how likely they were to share each message and how relevant they found each one to themselves and to people they know.

The researchers found that no matter the topic covered or the medium of the message, people were most likely to say they’d share messages that they perceived as self- or socially relevant. Further, they found that when participants were asked to explicitly write out why a message was relevant to themselves or people they know, they were even more likely to share it than when they just reflected on the topic.

Influencing behaviour and shifting perceptions

“Sharing information is a critical component of individual and collective action,” Cosme says. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we needed to quickly spread accurate information about what was going on, how to protect ourselves, how to protect each other. Information spreading within social networks can be really impactful for changing our individual behavior, and also changing our collective behavior through shifting our perceptions of what’s normative.”

With data on tens of thousands of messages, Cosme and her colleagues at the Communication Neuroscience Lab believe this finding can help shape effective public messaging on social media. “We’re interested in understanding how we can translate psychological theory into real-world interventions to try to promote behavior change,” Cosme says.

One way to improve content sharing is to recruit people who find the content self- or socially relevant to share messages online. Another is to frame messages to be seen as more self- or socially relevant by audiences without tailoring the messages themselves. 

“We developed message frames that could be paired with existing news and social media posts,” says Falk, the study’s senior author. “This means that the same prompts that worked in this study could be tested easily in other contexts as well.”

Further research on sharing information online

The Communication Neuroscience Lab is continuing this research by looking at brain activity in relation to social media sharing. For these studies, the researchers are using fMRI scanners to understand how specific regions of the brain shape perceptions of self and social relevance.

Overall, the team hopes that the results of the study will give those wanting to create social change the tools to do so effectively. “Big issues require collective action,” Cosme says. And spreading accurate information empowers individuals to join together and act.

“This study highlights key psychological ingredients that motivate people to share information about topics that impact our well-being,” Falk says. “Sharing is one key lever for shifting cultural norms and motivating larger scale action, so it’s really important to understand what makes it happen.”

Source: University of Pennsylvania. Original written by Hailey Reissman

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“It is well known that smoking causes blocked arteries, leading to coronary heart disease and stroke,” said study author Dr. Eva Holt of Herlev and Gentofte Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark. “Our study shows that smoking also leads to thicker, weaker hearts. It means that smokers have a smaller volume of blood in the left heart chamber and less power to pump it out to the rest of the body. The more you smoke, the worse your heart function becomes. The heart can recuperate to some degree with smoking cessation, so it is never too late to quit.”

This study explored whether smoking was related to changes in the structure and function of the heart in people without cardiovascular disease, and the effect of changing smoking habits.

More about the study

The study used data from the 5^th Copenhagen City Heart Study which investigated cardiovascular risk factors and diseases in the general population. A total of 3,874 participants aged 20 to 99 years without heart disease were enrolled. A self-administered questionnaire was used to obtain information on smoking history and to estimate pack-years, which is the number of cigarettes smoked through life. One pack-year is defined as 20 cigarettes smoked every day for one year.

Participants had an ultrasound of the heart, called echocardiography, which provides information about its structure and how well it is working. The researchers compared the echocardiography measures of current smokers versus never smokers after adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes and lung function.

The average age of participants was 56 years and 43% were women. Nearly one in five participants were current smokers (18.6%), while 40.9% were former smokers and 40.5% had never smoked.

The findings

Compared to never smokers, current smokers had thicker, weaker and heavier hearts. Increasing pack-years were associated with pumping less blood.

Dr. Holt explained: “We found that current smoking and accumulated pack-years were associated with worsening of the structure and function of the left heart chamber – the most important part of the heart. Furthermore, we found that over a 10-year period, those who continued smoking developed thicker, heavier and weaker hearts that were less able to pump blood compared to never smokers and those who quit during that time.”

She concluded: “Our study indicates that smoking not only damages the blood vessels but also directly harms the heart. The good news is that some of the damage is reversible by giving up.”

Previous studies on smoking and heart health

Previous studies on the effect of smoking on heart health have also shown that smoking is associated with a higher risk of heart failure, where the heart muscle does not pump blood around the body as well as it should, usually because it is too weak or stiff. This means that the body does not receive the oxygen and nutrients it needs to work normally.

The link between smoking and heart structure and function has not been fully examined.

Source: Eurekalert!

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Undertaken by Washington State University and University of Washington scientists and published in the journal Pediatrics, the review highlights the important role that exposure to nature plays in children’s health. Importantly, some of the data examined the effects for kids from historically marginalised communities and showed that the benefits of nature exposure may be even more pronounced for them.

Exposure to nature necessary for children’s wellbeing

“By looking at the full scope of existing quantitative evidence, we were able to see the importance of ready access to nature for both physical and mental health outcomes in childhood,” said Amber Fyfe-Johnson, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor with WSU’s Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH) and the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. She added, “Access to nature – and the benefits that come with it – are a necessity, not a nicety. Unfortunately, not all kids are able to have regular nature contact. This is due partly to urbanisation, increased screen time and more sedentary indoor lifestyles.”

Lack of exposure to nature disproportionately impacts historically marginalised communities that typically have fewer nearby residential parks and access to outdoor spaces, Fyfe-Johnson added. Families with limited resources and transportation options also face barriers to accessing parks and natural areas outside the city.

Important to define what outdoor time means

Although these findings may seem self-evident to some, and the American Academy of Pediatrics routinely recommends outdoor play time, convincing data on the health benefits associated with nature exposure have been lacking, due partly to inconsistencies in study methodologies and definitions of outdoor time.

The authors of the study point out that not all time spent outside is equal: a parking lot is not a park, and an urban playground without natural elements is not a garden. And without strong evidence to support the benefits to kids of spending time outside, in nature, there has been little political will to enact or enforce policies that ensure equitable nature contact, said Fyfe-Johnson.

She points to prior evidence suggesting that contact with nature and greenspace may offer even greater health benefits to disadvantaged populations by counteracting some of the toxic effects of poverty. “We sincerely hope our work will help lead to improved access to nature and health outcomes for kids, in addition to reducing health disparities in childhood,” she said.

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The results were published today in Review of Educational Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

The authors of the study, Natalia Kucirkova, May Irene Furenes and Adriana G. Bus, analysed the results of 39 studies that included a total 1,812 children between the ages of 1 and 8. For their analysis, the authors compared children’s story comprehension and vocabulary learning when they read a book on paper versus on screen, and assessed the effects of story-related enhancements in digital books, the presence of a dictionary, and the role of adult support. The bulk of the studies were carried out between 2010 and 2019, and for the greater part, in the last four years of that time span.

“The wide availability of digital reading options and the rich tradition of children’s print books beg the question of which reading format is better suited for young readers’ learning,” said Natalia Kucirkova, who is a professor of early childhood development at the University of Stavanger and The Open University and also one of the authors. “We found that when the print and digital versions of a book are practically the same and differ only in the voice-over or highlighted print as additional features in the digital book, then print outperforms digital.”

The authors found that the digital device itself and sometimes digital enhancements that are not aligned with the story content—such as a dictionary—interfere with children’s story comprehension.

When digital enhancements are designed to increase children’s ability to make sense of the narrative—for instance, by prompting children’s background knowledge to understand the story or providing additional explanations of story events—digital picture books not only outweigh the negative effects of the digital device but also outperform print books on children’s story comprehension.

Digitised versions are often inferior

“Our overall findings may reflect the rather low quality of enhancements in the digital books available for young children,” said Kucirkova. “Many digitised versions of picture books are inferior to the print version, yet young children widely use them.”

With a few exceptions, the commercially published digital books in the studies did not include storytelling techniques that adults provide during book sharing, for example attracting children’s attention to the main story elements and focusing their attention on the chain of story events.

“If we want to support all children, we need to understand the impact of digital books and make them of higher quality,” said Kucirkova. “Digital books are low-cost to access and thus more readily available to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Furthermore, we can customise digital books to a child’s level of learning by including interactive features responsive to the child.”

Production of digitised version needs more attention

“For reasons that need to be clarified by additional research, our meta-analysis shows that children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be distracted from story content on digital books by their interactive features and by the reading devices themselves,” said Adriana G. Bus, a professor at the University of Stavanger. “As a result, these children are experiencing the most difficulty comprehending digital picture books.”

“Makers of children’s digital books need to be careful about the enhancements they make, and educators and parents need to choose carefully which digital books young children read,” said Kucirkova. “Internationally, it is important to promote the production of exemplary prototypes including text in a range of languages and provide incentives to publishers, authors, designers, and illustrators to change the status quo.”

The authors found that digitised versions may be more effective than print books for enhancing children’s vocabulary if the digital books use a dictionary that defines infrequently used words and expressions. However, digital dictionary features hinder children’s ability to understand the story they are reading, indicating that focussing attention on word meanings distracts children’s attention from the story content.

“This is further evidence that digital book designers need to exercise caution with seemingly small and popular additions that may be helpful for isolated outcomes such as vocabulary learning but hinder the reading session overall,” Kucirkova said.

■ This study was supported by a grant from the Research Council of Norway.

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In more dire circumstances, however, the brain’s fear response can be critical for survival. “Being able to fear is the ability to sense the danger and is the driving force to figure out a way to escape or fight back,” said Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Bo Li.

VIDEO: Watching a mouse think about fear and pleasure

Li’s team is probing the brain circuits that underlie fear, using sophisticated neuroscience tools to map their connections and tease out how specific components contribute to learning fear. A deeper understanding of these circuits could lead to better ways to control the overactive or inappropriate fear responses experienced by people with anxiety disorders.

Many of their studies begin with the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that is considered the hub for fear processing in the brain. While the amygdala was once thought to be devoted exclusively to processing fear, researchers are now broadening their understanding of its role.

Amygdala: beyond fear response

Li’s team has found that the amygdala is also important for reward-based learning, and as they trace its connections to other parts of the brain, they are uncovering additional complexity. Li said: “It is important for formation of fearful memory, but it’s also important for interacting with other brain systems in a different behavior context. We think that this circuit that we discovered that plays a role in regulating fearful memory is only a tip of the iceberg. It is indeed important for regulating fearful memory, but probably is also involved in more complex behavior.”

Li and his colleagues were surprised recently to find that the amygdala communicates with a part of the brain best known for its role in controlling movement. The structure, called the globus pallidus, was not known to be involved in fear processing or memory formation. But when the researchers interfered with signaling between the amygdala and the globus pallidus in the brains of mice, they found that the animals failed to learn that a particular sound cue signaled an unpleasant sensation. Based on their experiments, this component of the fear-processing circuitry might be important for alerting the brain “which situations are worth learning from,” Li said.

Li’s team and collaborators at Stanford University reported recent findings in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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On the other hand, inspirational coaches will find that their athletes will become less reliant on them over time.

“Being increasingly needed by your athletes as time goes on is not a good sign,” says Chou-Yu Tsai, assistant professor of management in Binghamton University’s School of Management adding, “if your athletes no longer need your leadership and guidance as time goes on, that should be seen as a positive sign that you’ve helped them in their development.”

Tsai, who studies leadership in a number of contexts, including athletics, worked with a research team consisting of San-Fu Kao of National Tsing Hua University and Robert Schinke of Laurentian University. They set out to discover how a coach’s leadership style affected athlete evaluations of their competency over time.

Insights gained from basketball players

The researchers evaluated how nearly 250 Division I collegiate basketball players felt about their coaches at different points over the course of a season. They focused on a coach’s ability to enact transformational leadership, or the ability to develop athletes to their full potential.

“Transformational coaches empower their players in ways beyond just playing a sport. They help players develop meaning and instill pride, and encourage them to go above and beyond for the good of the team,” said Tsai.

They found that coaches who enacted high transformational leadership had a decrease in perceived coaching competency by their athletes over time. In other words, the more a coach inspired a player to achieve their full potential, the less the athlete relied on their coaching.

In contrast, they found that coaches with low transformational leadership skills had an increase in perceived coaching competency by their athletes over the course of the season. This means that players may rely more on their uninspiring coaches over time.

“If you’re not gaining some sort of independence from your coach, you may feel like you need that coach even more,” said Tsai. “This probably isn’t a good sign.”

Perception is key

Tsai said it’s important for coaches to understand how their leadership style interacts with player perceptions of them.

“Coaches may incorrectly think they did something wrong if their athletes aren’t as reliant on them anymore,” said Tsai. “On the contrary, our research indicates that this kind of independence is a sign that you demonstrated good leadership behaviors.”

As for how to become a transformational leader, Tsai recommends that coaches focus on the personal development of their athletes.

“Transformational coaches don’t want athletes to only become better players. They mentor their athletes and help them become better people as well,” said Tsai.

♦♦♦

The study, “Investigation of the interaction between coach transformational leadership and coaching competency change over time,” has been published in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching.

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“Although scientists are still learning how the SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to invade the brain and central nervous system, the fact that it’s getting in there is clear. Our best understanding is that the virus can cause insult to brain cells, with potential for neurodegeneration to follow on from there,” said Professor Kevin Barnham from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience & Mental Health.

The silent wave

In a review paper published on 22^nd September 2020, researchers put spotlight on the potential long-term neurological consequences of COVID-19, dubbing it the ‘silent wave’. They are calling for urgent action to be taken to have available more accurate diagnostic tools to identify neuro-degeneration early on and a long-term monitoring approach for people who have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The researchers report that neurological symptoms in people infected with the virus have ranged from severe, such as brain hypoxia (lack of oxygen), to more common symptoms such as loss of smell.

“We found that loss of smell or reduced smell was on average reported in three out of four people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. While on the surface this symptom can appear as little cause for concern, it actually tells us a lot about what’s happening on the inside and that is that there’s acute inflammation in the olfactory system responsible for smell,” explained Florey researcher Leah Beauchamp.

Early diagnosis is key

Inflammation is understood to play a major role in the pathogenesis of neurogenerative disease and has been particularly well studied in Parkinson’s. Further research into these illnesses may prove critical for future impacts of SARS-CoV-2.

“We believe that loss of smell presents a new way forward in detecting someone’s risk of developing Parkinson’s disease early. Armed with the knowledge that loss of smell presents in around 90% of people in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease and a decade ahead of motor symptoms, we feel we are on the right track,” added Ms Beauchamp.

Clinical diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease currently relies on presentation of motor dysfunction, but research shows that by this time 50-70% of dopamine cell loss in the brain has already occurred.

“By waiting until this stage of Parkinson’s disease to diagnose and treat, you’ve already missed the window for neuroprotective therapies to have their intended effect. We are talking about an insidious disease affecting 80,000 people in Australia, which is set to double by 2040 before even considering the potential consequences of COVID, and we currently have no available disease-modifying therapies,” said Professor Barnham.

Aiming for cost-effective screening protocol

The researchers hope to establish a simple, cost-effective screening protocol aiming to identify people in the community at risk of developing Parkinson’s, or who are in early stages of the disease, at a time when therapies have the greatest potential to prevent onset of motor dysfunction. They plan to put the proposal forward for funding from the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Funding scheme.

Additionally, the team have developed two neuroprotective therapies currently under investigation and have identified a cohort of subjects who are ideally suited to study the treatments. Through their research they gained new evidence that people with REM sleep behaviour disorder have a higher predisposition to go on to develop Parkinson’s disease.

“We have to shift community thinking that Parkinson’s not a disease of old age. As we’ve been hearing time and time again, the coronavirus does not discriminate—and neither does Parkinson’s,” said Professor Barnham.

“We can take insight from the neurological consequences that followed the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 where the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease increased two to three-fold. Given that the world’s population has been hit again by a viral pandemic, it is very worrying indeed to consider the potential global increase of neurological diseases that could unfold down track.”

He added, “The world was caught off guard the first-time, but it doesn’t need to be again. We now know what needs to be done. Alongside a strategized public health approach, tools for early diagnosis and better treatments are going to be key.”

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Researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine have found a link between high body mass index (BMI) and changes in two brain areas, the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula. These regions play a key role in decision-making and behavior. Disruptions in these areas of the brain have earlier been linked to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and overeating.

Link between obesity and brain of fetus

The investigators examined 197 groups of metabolically active nerve cells in the fetal brain. Using millions of computations, the study authors divided the groups into 16 meaningful subgroups based on over 19,000 possible connections between the groups of neurons. They found only two areas of the brain where their connections to each other were statistically strongly linked to the mother’s BMI.

“Our findings affirm that a mother’s obesity may play a role in fetal brain development, which might explain some of the cognitive and metabolic health concerns seen in children born to mothers with higher BMI,” says Moriah Thomason, PhD, the Barakett Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health.

Previous studies showing an association between obesity and brain development had mostly looked at cognitive function in children after birth. The new investigation is believed to be the first to measure changes in fetal brain activity in the womb, and as early as six months into pregnancy.

According to Thomason, this approach was designed to eliminate the potential influence of breast feeding and other environmental factors occurring after birth and to examine the earliest origins of negative effects of maternal BMI on the developing child’s brain.

Thomason believes that understanding how the condition may impact early brain development is more important than ever especially in the wake of increasing rates of obesity.

The investigation process

For the investigation, the research team recruited 109 women who were all between six and nine months’ pregnant and their BMIs were between 25 and 47. According to the National Institutes of Health, women are considered “overweight” if they have a BMI of 25 or higher and are “obese” if their BMI is 30 and higher.

The research team used MRI imaging to measure fetal brain activity and map patterns of communication between large numbers of brain cells clustered together in different regions of the brain. Then, they compared the study participants to identify differences in how groups of neurons communicate with each other based on BMI.

The investigators caution that their study was not designed to draw a direct line between the differences they found and ultimate cognitive or behavioral problems in children. The study only looked at fetal brain activity. But, Thomason says, they now plan to follow the participants’ children over time to determine whether the brain activity changes lead to ADHD, behavioural issues, and other health risks.

The study was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

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“There is strong evidence that children are happier, healthier, function better, know more about the environment, and are more likely to take action to protect the natural world when they spend time in nature.” said Dr Chawla.

These findings support the idea that young people should have easy access to wild areas, parks, gardens, green neighborhoods, and naturalised grounds at schools.

Connection not necessarily positive

However, the review also found that a connection with nature is not necessarily always positive.

“My review shows that connecting with nature is a complex experience that can generate troubling emotions as well as happiness.” said Dr Chawla. “We need to keep in mind that children are inheriting an unravelling biosphere, and many of them know it. Research shows that when adolescents react with despair, they are unlikely to take action to address challenges.”

The good news is that there is overlap in the strategies used to increase children’s feelings of connection with nature and supporting them with difficult dimensions of this connection. These strategies include helping young people learn what they can do to protect the natural world, as individuals and working collectively with others, and sharing examples of people who care for nature.

Children need to be heard

Research covered in the review found that young people are more likely to believe a better world is possible when friends, family and teachers listen sympathetically to their fears and give them a safe space to share their emotions.

One of the most surprising findings from the review was the complete disconnect between researchers studying the benefits of childhood connection to nature and those studying responses to environmental threats. “People who study children’s connection with nature and those who study their coping with environmental risk and loss have been pursuing separate directions without referencing or engaging with each other.” said Dr Chawla. “I am arguing that researchers on both sides need to be paying attention to each other’s work and learning from each other”.

Read the full review

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