Leisure time physical activity in Australian women: relationship with well being and symptoms

This paper explores the association between moderate levels of physical activity (PA) and health benefits in well being and symptoms such as tiredness, back pain, and constipation. Participants in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health, 14,502 young women (ages 18-23 years), 13,609 middle-age women (45-50 years), and 11,421 older women (ages 70-75 years), answered questions about vigorous and less vigorous exercise (used to determine a physical activity score), well being (SF-36), symptoms, and medical conditions. There were significant associations between the PA score and SF-36 in each cohort. Odds ratios (OR) for a range of symptoms and conditions were lower for women who reported low to moderate activity than for sedentary women, for example, for young women or for constipation = 0.76 (CI, 0.65-0.89), for middle-age women or for tiredness = 0.70 (0.63-0.78). There was no threshold of PA at which health benefits increased significantly. Although cross-sectional, the findings suggest that low-to-moderate levels of exercise are associated with a range of health benefits for women of all ages. These preliminary findings will be followed up during the longitudinal study.     

General and Specific Factors in Reading Comprehension

One explanation for why many students routinely choose to do their homework with a radio or TV operating is that this distraction facilitates studying. To investigate the validity of this explanation, the authors carried out two experiments with sixth-grade students who worked on two difficulty levels of individualized mathematics assignments (N = 12) and reading assignments (N = 9) under three distraction conditions: quiet; self-selected, self-regulated radio; and self-selected, self-regulated TV. The data yielded no evidence of sizable distractor effects on students' time spent studying, computational accuracy, reading comprehension, or reading rate. These results generally are consistent with the theoretical conceptualization of attention as flexible and adaptable.