Changing the way people think about health-enhancing physical activity: do mass media campaigns have a role?

Mass media campaigns are conducted to influence community norms around health behaviours, including physical activity. Campaigns can reach large populations at relatively low cost, to influence awareness, knowledge and beliefs through to intention and behaviour change. We reviewed 15 campaigns with an explicit focus on physical activity, and explored impacts upon a range of proximal and distal variables. Campaigns achieved high recall, with a median of 70% of the target group aware of the campaign. Increases in knowledge or attitudes to physical activity were found among half the campaigns that reported this measure. Few campaigns reported other proximal variables, such as saliency, beliefs, self-efficacy or behavioural intention. Increases in physical activity were reported among motivated sub-groups of volunteers, but few campaigns reported population increases in activity. Campaigns increase awareness of the issue of physical activity but may not have a population-level effect on behaviour. Campaigns should focus more on influencing proximal variables, such as social norms, to bring about long-term behaviour change. This should be seen as part of a broader strategy, including policy and environmental change. Evaluation designs that measure the full range of variables are preferred to an over-concentration on behaviour alone.     

Sports nutritionists’ perspectives on enablers and barriers to nutritional adherence in high performance sport: A qualitative analysis informed by the COM-B model and theoretical domains framework

ABSTRACT

Athlete adherence to nutritional guidance is critical for optimal health and performance, yet little is known about the barriers and enablers to athletes’ dietary behaviours within high-performance sport. To advance understanding, we applied a theoretical lens derived from the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation – Behaviour (COM-B) model and the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) to explore the qualitative accounts of sports nutritionists. Five focus groups comprising sports nutritionists working in Olympic and Paralympic sport (n = 14), professional sport (n = 6), or both (n = 6) were undertaken. Thematic analysis was conducted and the interpretations of the findings were guided by COM-B and the TDF. To achieve nutritional adherence, the behavioural analysis identified the need to intervene across all three COM-B components and at least five associated TDF domains (e.g., decision-making processes, reinforcement, social influences, behavioural regulation and environmental context and resource). For the first time, the findings illustrate the complex interplay of the training setting with the capabilities, opportunities, and motivation of the practitioners, athletes and coaches. By applying established behavioural science theories to sports nutrition, the foundations for the development of targeted and multifaceted behavioural interventions addressing athlete dietary adherence in high-performance sport have been laid.     

Self-explanation in the domain of statistics: an expertise reversal effect

This study investigated the effects of four instructional methods on cognitive load, propositional knowledge, and conceptual understanding of statistics, for low prior knowledge students and for high prior knowledge students. The instructional methods were (1) a reading-only control condition, (2) answering open-ended questions, (3) answering open-ended questions and formulating arguments, and (4) studying worked-out examples of the type of arguments students in the third group had to formulate themselves. The results indicate that high prior knowledge students develop more propositional knowledge of statistics than low prior knowledge students. With regard to conceptual understanding, the results indicate an expertise reversal effect: low prior knowledge students learn most from studying worked-out examples, whereas high prior knowledge students profit most from formulating arguments. Thus, novice students should be guided into the subject matter by means of worked-out examples. As soon as students have developed more knowledge of the subject matter, they should be provided with learning tasks that stimulate students to solve problems by formulating arguments.     

Individual Differences in Faculty Research Time Allocations Across 13 Countries

In research universities, research time is often too scarce to satiate the wishes of all faculty and must be allocated according to guidelines and principles. We examine self-reported research hours for full-time faculty at research universities in 13 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Norway, UK, USA, and Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous special administrative region of China). We examine the level of variation in individual faculty research time and the factors associated with individual differences, including differences in: (a) university policy regarding the allocation of working time for research between individual faculty members, (b) individual motivation towards research, and (c) family commitments. Our results suggest that the factors associated with additional research time vary across countries, but individual motivation towards research (relative to teaching) is a significant in all countries. University policies towards research and the research status of individual faculty, are relatively weak predictors of individual research time, though stronger effects are generally found in English-speaking countries. Research hours typically decrease with age, but plateau or increase in the oldest cohorts. Family and gender are weak predictors of research time amongst full-time faculty.     

Facebook网络巡警

一个阳光正午,就快到午饭时间,在位于加州帕洛阿尔托的Facebook公司总部内,西蒙·阿克顿正在寻找色情图片。一对年轻人热恋缠绵的照片映人屏幕。这张图片赋予挑逗性,但是并不违规,阿克顿一边点击键盘,一边评判图片是否合适。下一幅图片：一个只穿着短内裤的年轻女子,用手遮着胸部。     

Social Perception in Infancy: A Near Infrared Spectroscopy Study

The capacity to engage and communicate in a social world is one of the defining characteristics of the human species. While the network of regions that compose the social brain have been the subject of extensive research in adults, there are limited techniques available for monitoring young infants. This study used near infrared spectroscopy to investigate functional activation in the social brain network of 36 five-month-old infants. We measured the hemodynamic responses to visually presented stimuli in the temporal lobes. A significant increase in oxyhemoglobin was localized to 2 posterior temporal sites bilaterally, indicating that these areas are involved in the social brain network in young infants.