A window of opportunity? Motor skills and perceptions of competence of children in kindergarten.

BACKGROUND: Our aim was to examine the relationship between motor skill proficiency and perceptions of competence of children in their first year of school. We also explored gender-based differences. FINDINGS: Participants were 260 kindergarten children (mean age = 5y 9 m; boys = 52%) from eight schools; representing 78% of eligible children in those schools. Motor skills were measured using the Test of Gross Motor Development-2 and perceptions of physical competence were assessed using the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance for Young Children. Motor skill scores were generally low (percentile ranks ranged from 16 - 24) but perceptions of physical competence were positive (boys = 18.1/24.0, girls = 19.5/24.0). A MANOVA showed a significant overall effect for gender (Wilk's lambda = .84 with F (3, 254) = 15.84, p < 0.001) and univariate F tests were significant for all outcome variables. The relationship between object control skills and perceptions of physical competence among girls was not significant; however all other correlations were modest but significant. CONCLUSIONS: Although motor skill levels were quite low, the children generally held positive perceptions of their physical competence. These positive perceptions provide a window of opportunity for fostering skillfulness. The modest relationships between perceptions of competence and motor skill proficiency suggest that the children are beginning to make self-judgments at a young age. Accordingly, opportunities for children to become and feel physically competent need to occur early in their school or preschool life.

Assessing the use of school public address systems to deliver nutrition messages to children: Shape up Somerville--audio adventures.

Given the current childhood obesity epidemic, it is especially important to find effective ways to promote healthful foods to children. School public address (PA) systems represent an inexpensive and a replicable way of reaching children with health messages. To test the effectiveness of this channel, messages were created to promote 2 dried bean (legume) dishes that had been added to the school lunch menu. Six elementary schools were pair matched, and 1 school from each pair was randomly chosen to play the messages. The impact of the intervention on choice of the 2 new entrees was assessed. Results indicate that for all schools combined, choice was not significantly affected. However, compared to their matched control schools, choice was significantly higher in the school that received the highest dose of the intervention and was significantly lower in the school that received the lowest dose. Choice was not changed in the school that received an intermediate dose. These results suggest that PA systems show promise as an effective and appropriate communications channel but only in schools that are able to play messages frequently.

Psychosocial factors associated with young elementary school children's intentions to consume legumes: a test of the theory of reasoned action.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to test the utility of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in explaining young elementary school children's intention to consume legumes. METHODS: A survey was conducted with children in an urban, multicultural community in Massachusetts. A total of 336 children participated. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess the strength of the relationship between attitude and subjective norm and intention. RESULTS: Although attitude was significantly associated with intention, the pseudo-R2 for the regression model that included only the TRA constructs was extremely low (.01). Adding demographic factors and preference improved the model's predictive ability, but attitude was no longer significant. CONCLUSION: The results of this study do not provide support for the predictive utility of the TRA with young elementary school children for this behavior, when demographic factors are accounted for. Hedonic factors, rather than reasoned judgments, may help drive children's intentions.

Food advertising targeted at school-age children: a content analysis.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether the contents of food and beverage advertisements are associated with physical activity and athletic ability more often than those for toys and games, and to describe persuasive techniques used in advertising food and beverages to children. DESIGN: A content analysis of advertisements during 31 hours of school-age children's television programming. ANALYSIS: Chi-square tests were used to examine differences in depictions of physical activity. Types of persuasive techniques were tabulated and, within each advertisement, categorized as implicit or explicit. RESULTS: Food and beverage ads depicted children engaged in physical activity and associated the advertised product with athletic ability significantly more than toy and game ads. Food was most often associated with fun and good times (75%), pleasant taste (54.1%), being hip or cool (43.2%), and feelings of happiness (43.2%). IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND PRACTICE: These findings raise concern that greater levels of physical activity and athletic ability in food advertising, in which the product is frequently associated with fun, may promote overconsumption, especially of calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods. Further research would elucidate whether this concern is warranted. On the other hand, since food advertisements are presumably effective, health educators can use these techniques to formulate messages for nutritious foods. This concept should be tested with well-designed interventions.

Meal duration mediates the effect of "social facilitation" on eating in humans.

This experiment examined the 'time extension' explanation for the social facilitation effect, which is that people eat more as the number of co-eaters increases. Seventy male and 62 female participants ate a lunch consisting of pizza, cookies, and bottled water, alone or in (same-gender) groups of two or four and were given either 12 or 36 min in which to do so. The independent variables were gender, group size, and meal duration. The main dependent variable was amount consumed in the meal. The results showed that male participants ate more than did females, and participants eating the longer meal ate more than did those eating the shorter meal. However, the effect of group size was not significant. It was also the case that the amounts consumed by participants eating in two-person groups resembled one another to a greater extent than did of pairs of participants who ate alone or by participants in four-person groups. It was concluded that the results of the present paper provide strong support for the idea that the effect of group size on intake seen in previous studies is mediated by meal duration.

Relations among comfort of fabrics, ratings of comfort, and visual vigilance.

Little is known about the relationship between perceptions of comfort and cognitive performance. In the present study, 40 subjects (20 men and 20 women) participated in a computerized cognitive task of visual vigilance. The computer task was completed under three conditions of clothing and tactile comfort: one condition was that of extreme discomfort, effected by the wearing of wool clothing material on the arms and neck in addition to each subject's normal clothing, including a short sleeve shirt; a second condition was that of minimal discomfort, effected by the wearing of cotton clothing material on the arms and neck, in addition to each subject's normal clothing, including a short sleeve shirt; and a third condition was a control, wherein no experimental material was added to each subject's normal clothing, including a short sleeve shirt. Comfort was assessed prior to, during, and after testing. Reaction time and accuracy of 400 trials of a visual vigilance task were assessed under each of these three conditions. Analysis indicated a significant difference in perceived comfort between the wool and each of the other conditions. In addition, both reaction time and accuracy declined in the wool condition. This study is among the first to identify a direct significant relationship between perceptions of clothing comfort and cognitive performance.

Time to eat: the relationship between the number of people eating and meal duration in three lunch settings.

We conducted an observational study of customers in three different types of lunch settings: a worksite cafeteria, a fast-food restaurant, and a moderately priced restaurant, and assessed the relationship between meal duration and the number of people eating at each table (group size). Results suggest a significant positive correlation between group size and meal duration, collapsing over eating settings. Analysis of variance yielded significant main effects of both eating setting and of group size, indicating that meal durations were longest in the moderately priced restaurant and shortest in the fast-food restaurant. An interaction between group size and eating setting indicates that the magnitude of the group size effect on meal duration differed in the different situations, with the effect of group size on duration being smallest, but still significant, in the fast-food setting compared with the other two settings.

The construct of food involvement in behavioral research: scale development and validation.

The construct of involvement has been found to influence brand loyalty, product information search processing, responses to advertising communications, diffusion of innovations, and ultimately, product choice decisions. Traditionally, involvement has been defined as being a characteristic of either a product or of an individual. In the present research, we make an assumption that an individual's 'food involvement' is a somewhat stable characteristic and we hypothesized that involvement with foods would vary between individuals, that individuals who are more highly involved with food would be better able to discriminate between a set of food samples than would less food involved individuals, and that this discrimination would operate both in affective and perceptive relative judgments. Using standard scale construction techniques, we developed a measure of the characteristic of food involvement, based on activities relating to food acquisition, preparation, cooking, eating and disposal. After several iterations, a final 12-item measure was found to have good test-retest reliability and internal consistency within two subscales. A behavioral validation study demonstrated that measures of food involvement were associated with discrimination and hedonic ratings for a range of foods in a laboratory setting. These findings suggest that food involvement, as measured by the Food Involvement Scale, may be an important mediator to consider when undertaking research with food and food habits.