Category: Behavior

— It's one of the biggest moneymakers for Hollywood and its media empire: reruns. Reruns of television shows and movies allow for people to watch their favorite moments over and over again. But why do people do it? What drives so much consumer motivation to enjoy the same activity repeatedly? American University Professor of Marketing Cristel Russell has determined that the "re-consumption" as she calls it, is due to the guaranteed outcome, the enhanced viewing that results from the repeated action, or the rediscovery of subtle details. Professor Russell's research is due to be published by the Journal of Consumer Research in August 2012.

Russell and co-author Sidney Levy have looked carefully at the motivations behind why people re-read the same book over and over again, re-watch their favorite TV shows and movies and why people go on vacation to the same place year after year. From a business standpoint, the importance of this re-consumption is considerable. For a film or television show to be successful financially, it has to be syndicated throughout the world so that viewers can re-watch it. Tourist locales are dependent on repeat visitors. Re-consumption plays a crucial role in the world economy. But what's in it for people?

"Understanding re-consumption and the motivations behind it is incredibly important," said Russell. "If we can look at the underlying drivers of re-consumption, we can help businesses to better understand their customers and help them create products that consumers will use again and again."

The psychological and experiential aspects of re-consumption are important as well. Russell and Levy's study shows that the motivations behind people's re-consumption behavior were often complex and nuanced.

"We interviewed people in New Zealand and America to determine why they chose to repeat their behavior," adds Russell. "We determined that re-consumption behaviors serve five main purposes: regressive, progressive, reconstructive, relational, and reflective. The reasoning that people had for their repeat behaviors was far more complex than simply nostalgia. For people to take time out of their busy lives to do something over and over again, the motivations required were usually deep-seated and poignant."

NewsPsychology (May 16, 2012) — Children in the United States and Great Britain share a number of common risk factors that increase the likelihood that they will have behavioral problems — and Britain’s broader social welfare programs don’t appear to mitigate those risks, according to a new study in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (JHSB).

The researchers — from North Carolina State University, California State University-Northridge, and the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign — evaluated data from a 1994 study of children between the ages of five and 13 in the U.S. and a 1991 study of children in the same age range from England, Scotland, and Wales.

In both the U.S. and Great Britain, the JHSB study found that male children, children with health problems, and children with divorced mothers were more likely to have behavioral problems.

“We also found that stronger home environments — those that are intellectually stimulating, nurturing, and physically safe — decrease the likelihood of behavior problems in both the U.S. and Great Britain,” said Dr. Toby Parcel, a professor of sociology at NC State and lead author of the JHSB study.

“We wanted to see whether the role of parents was equally important in both societies because the argument has been made that more developed welfare states — such as Great Britain — can make the role of parents less important, by providing additional supports that can help compensate for situations where households have more limited resources. This study tells us that parents are important in households, regardless of the strength of the welfare state.”

While there were common risk factors for children in the U.S. and Great Britain, there were also some differences between these groups. For example, “family structure” effects were more pronounced in Great Britain. Family structure, in this context, refers to marital status and family size. In Great Britain, a child from a family with a single mother or multiple children was at a higher risk of having behavioral problems. Additionally, the more children in a British family, the greater the likelihood a child from that family had behavioral problems. These effects were absent in the U.S.

Titled, “Children’s Behavior Problems in the United States and Great Britain,” the study was co-authored by Dr. Lori Ann Campbell, of Cal State-Northridge, and Dr. Wenxuan Zhong, of University of Illinois, and was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

The researchers are now looking to see how shared risk factors may influence child cognition and academic achievement across these two societies. Parcel and Campbell have previously shown that parents are critical to the creation of strong home environments in both the U.S. and Great Britain.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Sociological Association (ASA), via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. T. Parcel, L. A. Campbell, W. Zhong. Children’s Behavior Problems in the United States and Great Britain. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 2012; DOI: 10.1177/0022146512436742

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues at the University of South Florida and University of Kentucky have found that breast cancer survivors who have had chemotherapy, radiation or both do not perform as well on some cognitive tests as women who have not had cancer.

They published their study in the April 1 issue of Cancer.

"Survivors of breast cancer are living longer, so there is a need to better understand the long-term effects of cancer therapies, such as chemotherapy and radiation," said study lead author Paul B. Jacobsen, Ph.D., associate center director for Population Sciences.

To carry out their study, the researchers recruited 313 women being treated by either chemotherapy or radiotherapy for early stage breast cancer at Moffitt Cancer Center and the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center. Those who had undergone treatment for cancer were tested six months after treatment and then tested again 36 months after having completed treatment.

They also recruited a control group of women who did not have cancer. These participants were also tested at six months and 36 months.

Participants in all groups were within five years of age, and breast cancer patients were matched with non-cancer patients who lived in their same ZIP codes. Participants were tested cognitively with respect to processing speed (quick task completion under pressure), executive functioning (ability to shift cognitive sets and solve novel problems), the two domains expected to be most affected by chemotherapy. They were also tested with regard to verbal abilities.

"Our findings were partially consistent with prior research," explained Jacobsen. "We found that chemotherapy-treated patients performed worse than non-cancer controls in processing speed, executive functioning and verbal ability. These domains may be the domains most affected by chemotherapy."

The also found test results for the radiotherapy group to be similar to the results of those in the chemotherapy group. Additionally, they discovered that the non-cancer group improved in these cognitive abilities over time while the chemotherapy and radiotherapy groups did not. There were no differences in performance between the radiotherapy and chemotherapy groups, noted the researchers.

The researchers commented that they were fortunate for having included the radiotherapy groups because their results were so similar to the chemotherapy group. Had that group not been included, conclusions could have been drawn to suggest that the cognitive differences between the non-cancer group and the chemotherapy group were specific to chemotherapy.

"Since patients report cognitive problems that interfere with their daily activities, early workups should include tests to determine cognitive functioning prior to treatment," concluded Jacobsen. "Future research also needs to investigate factors that may affect both chemotherapy patients and those receiving radiotherapy. Providers may wish to communicate that such effects can accompany chemotherapy and radiation therapy."

 When parents of middle school students participate in school-based, family interventions, it can reduce problem behavior, according to new research released online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The transition to adolescence can be particularly challenging, as during this period, children are more likely to engage in potentially harmful behavior with their peers while having less monitoring from and communication with their parents. The researchers were interested in whether an intervention called the Family Check-Up (FCU)—a short program that provides feedback and skill training for parents—could mitigate some of the troubles many parents and teens face. “We hypothesized that we would find significant intervention effects on all four outcomes—family conflict, parental monitoring, antisocial behavior and alcohol use,” said Mark J. Van Ryzin, Ph.D., of the University of Oregon and lead author of the study. “We were pleased that these hypotheses were confirmed.”

Van Ryzin and his colleagues followed 593 seventh and eighth graders and their families in a randomized controlled trial, with families assigned either to participate in the FCU program or to a control group of “school as usual” students at three public schools in the Pacific Northwest. The researchers gathered data primarily from students' self-reports to provide a broad assessment of family interaction. Researchers also videotaped parents interacting with their teens at home and school. Both parents and teens received comprehensive feedback about their interaction with each other.

One of the program’s strengths is its short duration. “The average participating family only received about 4 and half hours of intervention time,” said Van Ryzin.

“Most adolescents with behavioral problems see professionals after they are in trouble instead of beforehand, which is why this program is unique; there are few preventive programs like it,” said Garry Sigman, M.D., director of adolescent medicine at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. “It requires either a school district willing to incur the time and financial costs of trained professionals or collaboration between schools and mental health professionals. In either case, most districts do not have funds or interest in this type of endeavor.”

While no simple answer exists for decreasing teenagers’ behavioral problems, Sigman said, “I only wish more young adolescents would have the opportunity for their parents to get the type of education offered by the Family Check-Up. To be sure, it doesn’t happen very often in primary care offices.”

Sigman said he helps parents understand that adolescence is not a time to pull back on involvement in their children’s lives. “I suggest parents know where their teens are, have curfew rules, and make their values and wishes explicit regarding teen drinking, substance use and sex.”

“If support and services like the Family Check-Up are available, it can help implement reasonable strategies for change,” said Van Ryzin. “The key is to involve the whole family in the process, not just the adolescent.”

TERMS OF USE: This story is protected by copyright. When reproducing any material, including interview excerpts, attribution to the Health Behavior News Service, part of the Center for Advancing Health, is required. While the information provided in this news story is from the latest peer-reviewed research, it is not intended to provide medical advice or treatment recommendations. For medical questions or concerns, please consult a health care provider.

Programs that support parents during their child's early years hold promise for obesity prevention, according to a new study in the online February 6 issue of Pediatrics.

Today, one out of five American children is obese. Young children who are overweight are five times more likely than their peers of normal weight to be obese by adolescence. Obese children and adolescents, especially low-income and minority youth, are at increased risk for a range of medical, social and academic problems.

The new study led by Laurie Miller Brotman, PhD, professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Early Childhood Health and Development at the NYU Child Study Center investigated whether early family intervention that was effective for parents of children with behavior problems, resulted in lower rates of obesity. This innovative study took advantage of two long-term follow up studies of high-risk children who had participated in evaluations of either ParentCorps or another effective parenting intervention, the "Incredible Years," during early childhood. The study involved 186 children from low-income, minority families at high risk for obesity who were randomly assigned to family intervention or a control group when the children were approximately four years old. Behavioral family intervention in early childhood included a series of weekly 2-hour parent and child groups over a 6-month period. The interventions did not address nutrition, activity, or weight.

"Children who enter school with behavior problems are at very high risk for academic underachievement and school dropout, antisocial behavior, delinquency, obesity and other health problems. ParentCorps engages parents of high-risk children, reduces harsh and ineffective parenting and prevents early behavior problems from escalating into more serious and intractable problems," said Dr. Brotman.

For more than a decade, Dr. Brotman and her colleagues have developed and evaluated programs for parents and young children living in urban poverty. ParentCorps, a culturally-informed family program for young children, helps parents to be more responsive and nurturing as well as more effective in their approach to discipline. ParentCorps graduates are more attentive and attuned to their children, spend more time playing and reading with their children and praise positive behaviors such as sharing with peers. After participating in ParentCorps groups, parents replace physical punishment with more effective strategies such as time out. ParentCorps has benefits for ethnically and socioeconomically diverse families, and is especially helpful for parents of children with behavior problems.

In both follow-up studies, children who were assigned to the intervention and children in the control condition were evaluated from three to five years later. The evaluation of children as they approached adolescence included examination of body mass index, sedentary activity and physical activity. In one of the studies, blood pressure and nutritional intake were also measured.

Children who received family intervention during early childhood had significantly lower rates of obesity compared to children in the control group. In the larger study, without intervention, more than half of the children with early behavior problems were obese by second grade. In contrast, among children with behavior problems who received ParentCorps in early childhood, only 24% were obese. Similarly positive effects were found across the two studies on sedentary behavior and physical activity. The one study that examined blood pressure and diet showed lower rates of blood pressure and relatively lower consumption of carbohydrates in adolescents who received early childhood intervention.

ParentCorps and other programs that promote effective parenting and prevent behavior problems at a young age may contribute to a reduction of obesity among low-income, minority youth.

Dr. Brotman's co-authors include Spring Dawson-McClure, PhD, Keng-Yen Huang, PhD, Rachelle Theise, PsyD, Dimitra Kamboukos, PhD, Jing Wang, MA, Eva Petkova, PhD, of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Gbenga Ogedegbe, MD, of the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, NYU School of Medicine.

This study of health outcomes was supported by the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Foundation. The original randomized controlled trials were supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Institute for Education Sciences to Dr. Brotman.

A Wayne State University researcher believes studying people's ability to find their way around may help explain why loss of mental capacity occurs with age.

Scott Moffat, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology and gerontology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Institute of Gerontology at WSU, said studies have demonstrated reliable differences in navigation and spatial learning tasks based on age. Younger adults tend to outperform their elders in spatial navigation, Moffat said, and people seem to start switching navigational strategies with age.

Generally speaking, he said, younger subjects tend to use an allocentric, or map-based, strategy, in which they conceive what an entire environment looks like and where they are in it. Older ones prefer an egocentric, or route-based, strategy, using a series of steps to be taken to reach a destination.

Researchers believe the reason for the strategy shift may lie in the part of the brain called the hippocampus, where neuroimaging studies have shown reduced or absent activation in older adults performing navigation tasks.

Moffat's study, recently published in Neurobiology of Aging, was an effort to identify which strategy people use to navigate and to measure differences between age groups.

"People have speculated that changing strategies is part of the reason older people have trouble navigating, but no one had come out and done a direct demonstration that it actually is the case," Moffat said. "Navigation is an important cognitive skill that older people may be losing, and in severe cases it might be an early indicator of Alzheimer's disease."

Researchers assigned virtual tasks to 99 older (ages 55 to 85) metropolitan Detroit-area adults and 54 younger (ages 18 to 45) ones. Subjects were given a training task that revealed which strategy they were using in a simple maze. They then were asked to navigate in a large, nonsymmetrical virtual room to find a hidden location.

Older adults were much more likely to choose an egocentric strategy, while younger adults were more equally distributed between egocentric and allocentric strategies.

"This finding is the clearest demonstration to date that older adults have different strategy preferences or biases in approaching spatial navigational tasks," he said.

Older adults also took longer to solve the maze than younger ones, Moffat said, demonstrating that strategy may predict performance on that task. Younger adults who preferred allocentric strategy performed better on the second maze and showed more accurate cognitive mapping.

"We already knew before this study that older people have deficits in navigating," Moffat said. "We learned that it seems like one of the reasons behind this is that they start using a different, perhaps more inefficient strategy."

He said he is somewhat surprised at the degree to which older adults preferred an egocentric strategy; just 18 percent preferred an allocentric strategy. Moffat cautioned, however, that while the tendency appears strong, there are a lot of individual differences. For example, while some older adults show decline in navigational ability, in others it is markedly preserved.

Moffat's team now will turn its attention to magnetic resonance imaging studies to note physical differences in brain regions of people using allocentric strategies and those using egocentric strategies.

"Using more controlled laboratory testing, we can measure navigation skills better than just asking someone's opinion about whether or not they get lost while they're driving," he said.

Moffat said his team's work ultimately could lead to studies of possible behavioral interventions — as opposed to treatment with drugs — in which people could improve allocentric strategy use even as they age. Effects of that training could generalize to some other cognitive areas, he said, noting that the brain's navigational areas are also important for memory, such as word recall.

"Eventually we could learn how to improve quality of life for older people by preserving their cognitive and mental functions," Moffat said.

For some older adults, the online video game World of Warcraft (WoW) may provide more than just an opportunity for escapist adventure. Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that playing WoW actually boosted cognitive functioning for older adults – particularly those adults who had scored poorly on cognitive ability tests before playing the game.

"We chose World of Warcraft because it has attributes we felt may produce benefits – it is a cognitively challenging game in a socially interactive environment that presents users with novel situations," says Dr. Anne McLaughlin, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the study. "We found there were improvements, but it depended on each participant's baseline cognitive functioning level."

Researchers from NC State's Gains Through Gaming laboratory first tested the cognitive functioning of study participants, aged 60 to 77, to set a baseline. The researchers looked at cognitive abilities including spatial ability, memory and how well participants could focus their attention.

An "experimental" group of study participants then played WoW on their home computers for approximately 14 hours over the course of two weeks, before being re-tested. A "control" group of study participants did not play WoW, but were also re-tested after two weeks.

Comparing the cognitive functioning test scores of participants in the experimental and control groups, the researchers found the group that played WoW saw a much greater increase in cognitive functioning, though the effect varied according to each participant's baseline score.

"Among participants who scored well on baseline cognitive functioning tests, there was no significant improvement after playing WoW – they were already doing great," McLaughlin says. "But we saw significant improvement in both spatial ability and focus for participants who scored low on the initial baseline tests." Pre- and post-game testing showed no change for participants on memory.

"The people who needed it most – those who performed the worst on the initial testing – saw the most improvement," says Dr. Jason Allaire, an associate professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the study.

The paper, "Individual differences in response to cognitive training: Using a multi-modal, attentionally demanding game-based intervention for older adults," is published online in Computers in Human Behavior. Lead author of the paper is Laura Whitlock, an NC State Ph.D. student. The research was supported by NC State's College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

 A new study suggests that age-associated improvements in the ability to consider the preferences of others are linked with maturation of a brain region involved in self control. The findings, published by Cell Press in the March 8 issue of the journal Neuron, may help to explain why young children often struggle to control selfish impulses, even when they know better, and could impact educational strategies designed to promote successful social behavior.

Human social interactions often involve two parties who want to maximize their own outcomes while reaching a mutually satisfactory result. It is generally accepted that over the course of childhood behavior shifts from a more selfish focus to an increased tendency to consider the benefits to others. However, little is known about age-related changes in this type of "strategic social behavior" or the underlying neuronal mechanisms.

Researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig conducted behavioral and brain-imaging studies comparing children of different ages as they engaged in two carefully constructed games called "The Dictator Game" and "The Ultimatum Game." In the Dictator Game, children were asked to share a reward with another child who could only passively accept what was offered. In the Ultimatum Game, the recipient had to accept the offer or neither child received a reward. Therefore, the games differed in the demand for strategic behavior for the child making the offer.

"We were interested in whether children would share more fairly if their counterparts could reject their offers, and to what extent strategic behavior was dependent on age and brain development," explains lead study author, Dr. Nikolaus Steinbeis. "We observed an age-related increase in strategic decision making between ages 6 to 13 years and showed that changes in bargaining behavior were best accounted for by age-related differences in impulse-control abilities and underlying functional activity of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a late-maturing brain region linked with self control," explains Dr. Steinbeis.

The results suggest that egocentric behavior in children may not be a function of an inability to know "fair" from "unfair," but is instead due to an immature prefrontal cortex that does not support altruistic behavior when faced with a situation that has a strong self-serving incentive. "Our findings represent a critical advance in our understanding of the development of social behavior with far-reaching implications for educational policy and highlight the importance of helping children act on what they already know," concludes Dr. Steinbeis. "Such interventions could set the foundation for increased altruism in the future."

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have shown — by each of a range of measures, in men and women of all ages, in Caucasians and minorities — that consumption of dietary trans fatty acids (dTFAs) is associated with irritability and aggression.

The study of nearly 1,000 men and women provides the first evidence linking dTFAs with adverse behaviors that impacted others, ranging from impatience to overt aggression. The research, led by Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, associate professor in the UC San Diego Department of Medicine, has been published online by PLoS ONE.

Dietary trans fatty acids are primarily products of hydrogenation, which makes unsaturated oils solid at room temperature. They are present at high levels in margarines, shortenings and prepared foods. Adverse health effects of dTFAs have been identified in lipid levels, metabolic function, insulin resistance, oxidation, inflammation, and cardiac health.

The UC San Diego team used baseline dietary information and behavioral assessments of 945 adult men and women to analyze the relationship between dTFAs and aggression or irritability. The survey measured such factors as a life history of aggression, conflict tactics and self-rated impatience and irritability, as well as an "overt aggression" scale that tallies recent aggressive behaviors. Analyses were adjusted for sex, age, education, and use of alcohol or tobacco products.

"We found that greater trans fatty acids were significantly associated with greater aggression, and were more consistently predictive of aggression and irritability, across the measures tested, than the other known aggression predictors that were assessed," said Golomb. "If the association between trans fats and aggressive behavior proves to be causal, this adds further rationale to recommendations to avoid eating trans fats, or including them in foods provided at institutions like schools and prisons, since the detrimental effects of trans fats may extend beyond the person who consumes them to affect others."

Those motivated to actively change bad habits may be setting themselves up for failure, a new study suggests. The study, described in an article in the journal Motivation and Emotion, found that people primed with words suggesting action were more likely than others to make impulsive decisions that undermined their long-term goals. In contrast, those primed to "rest," to "stop" or to be inactive found it easier to avoid impulsive decisions.

"Popular views of self-control maintain that individuals should 'exert' willpower, 'fight' temptations, 'overcome' desires and 'control' impulses when they want to successfully control their own behavior," said University of Illinois graduate student Justin Hepler, who led the study with psychology professor Dolores Albarracín.

"Ironically, in these situations people are often 'fighting' to do nothing — for example, they want to not eat a piece of cake."

"Those who try to be active may make wild, risky investments, for example, and persist in behaviors that clearly make them unsuccessful," Albarracín said.

Hepler, Albarracín and colleagues at Idaho State University and the University of Southern Mississippi wanted to determine whether successful self-control involves the active, effortful pursuit of one's goals, as some researchers have proposed, or whether one is more likely to succeed by "delay(ing) behavior until sufficient pre-action information processing has occurred," as others suggest, the researchers wrote.

In a first experiment, the researchers exposed volunteer participants to words suggesting action ("start," "active," etc.) or inaction ("stop," "pause," etc.) and then tested their self-control by measuring their willingness to forego an immediate monetary reward in exchange for a larger, later one.

A second experiment also primed participants with action and inaction words and then tested their impulse control on a simple computer game.

In both experiments, volunteers who were motivated to be active were more likely to select immediate rewards and had poorer impulse control than those who had been primed with words suggesting inaction, the researchers found.

"Overall, these experiments demonstrate that attempting to motivate oneself to be active in the face of temptations may actually lead to impulsive behaviors," Hepler said. "On the other hand, becoming motivated for inaction or calming oneself down may be the best way to avoid impulsive decisions."

"Of course, inaction words like 'stop' may induce effort directed at decreasing undesirable behavior," Albarracín said. "But these inaction words have been shown to relax individuals, and our research suggests that the relaxed state is better at inhibiting the pull of temptations.