Tag Archives: study

New Research Finds Interesting Correlations Between Lifelong Weight Gain and Mortality Rates

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According to new research, people who start adulthood with a body mass index (BMI) in the “normal” range and move later in life to being “overweight” but not “obese” to tend live the longest.

Those who stayed in the “normal” BMI range throughout life didn’t live as long as the latter category and those who started adulthood as “obese” and continued to add weight had the highest rate of death.

Researchers stated that the impact of weight gain on mortality is complex and depends on lots of factors like the amount of weight gain and where the subjects BMI started.

The primary message is that you want to start in a “normal” weight range and gain only a modest amount throughout life while avoiding “obesity.”

Results like these were also found in two generations of participants in a Framingham Heart Study, though the participants were mostly white. The review followed the medical histories of residents in one city and that of their children for several decades.

The study revealed troublesome trends for the younger generation who became overweight or obese sooner in life than their parents and are more likely to have an obesity-linked death.

 

Adults and Children Focus on Different Things in Photos

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As an adult if you were asked to look at a picture with a cat in the foreground and a wide mountain range in the background and remember the mountains later on if you saw them in a subsequent picture that would be no hard task for an adult.

However, in a new study by the Ohio State University when preschool kids were asked to perform the same visual-memory task it was found that they focus so much on the cat they won’t later be able to recognize the mountain range.

These results from the study suggest that young children’s attention is biased toward focusing on objects rather than scenes even when asked to focus on the scene rather than an object.

Researchers found that almost exclusively young children couldn’t ignore objects in photos irrelevant to the tasks they were asked to complete by looking at the photos.

The study was recently printed in the journal called “Child Development.”

 

People Prefer Seeing Individuals Excel Over Teams, New Study Finds

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A new study by researchers at OSU found that people like to see talented people excel, whether in sports or business. They like an individual’s winning streak. But don’t care to see that happen with teams or groups.

People would love to see Usain Bolt win another gold medal but far fewer are interested in seeing the New England Patriots win another Super Bowl, researchers said.

Researchers stated the reason for the phenomenon is that people are inspired by extraordinary individual success in a way team success doesn’t. If Usain Bolt wins another gold medal (and another in a row) it expands what we considered to be the limit of human ability. We do not see team success in the same light. The study found people are simply more moved by individual success.

In one part of the study many more people were excited bout Bolt’s winning a third in a row gold medal in the 100-meter dash than they were by his shared gold medal on the 4×100-meter relay team. Result also showed people would rather see him win a forth gold medal on his own rather than as part of a team.

In one study, they examined people’s views on the success of Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who won the 100-meter dash in the last three Olympics. Bolt was also a member of a team that won the gold medal in the 4×100-meter relay at those same Olympic games.

The study was published in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.”

 

Baby Boomers’ Cognitive Functions Lower Than Previous Generations New Study Finds

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In a nationwide study authored by OSU faculty researchers found that American baby boomers scored lower on a test for cognitive functioning than previous generations had.

Specifically, findings discovered that average cognition scores of adults at age 50 increased from one generation to the next. The data starting with the greatest generation (birth years 1890-1923) and peaking with war babies (1942-1947).

Cognitive scores declined starting with early boomers (1948-1953) and decreased even further with mid boomers (1954-1959).

Even though a prevalence of dementia has declined recently in the U.S. the new study results suggest this trend could reverse in the coming years.

Researchers pointed out that while this “sudden” reversal is shocking, the most shocking fact is that the data of decline holds true over many groups—in both men and women, across all races, across education levels and across income levels.

The data demonstrated that less wealth in addition to higher levels of loneliness, depression, inactivity and obesity along with less likelihood of being married all could play a role in this cognitive decline.

 

The Science Behind a Bad Yelp Review

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Researchers found that just a couple of negative online reviews for a restaurant could determine early on how many it receives long term.

Researchers stated that online rating platforms claim to be unbiased but that their research found this wasn’t true either. With the way the platforms work the research demonstrated that popular restaurants tend to get more popular while a few initial low reviews will cause one to stagnate.

The study also found that the median income of the neighborhood where the restaurant is located could affect whether or not they get rated at all. In the poorest neighborhoods many restaurants tended not to get rated at all. The study used only economic data to determine this.

The study evaluated Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews for about 3,000 restaurants per website in Franklin County, Ohio. Franklin county is where Columbus and Ohio State are located in addition it is the home of over 20 restaurant chains.

Previous research had found that the food industry considers consumer preferences in this area to be representative of the larger, country-wide market.

The research was published in Papers in Applied Geography