Mason Media Blog

In 2005, when it became a requirement for female lacrosse players to wear protective eyewear during the game, Mason researcher Shane Caswell set out to determine the effectiveness of the new change.

In his most recent study, Caswell, associate professor of athletic training and director of the Sports Medicine Assessment, Research and Testing (SMART) Laboratory in Mason’s College of Education and Human Development, and his colleagues at MedStar Health Research Institute and the Fairfax County Public Schools found that the new mandate helped to reduce not only the number of eye injuries, but also the number of face and head injuries among players.

Funded by U.S. Lacrosse, the study titled “Effectiveness of the Women’s Lacrosse Protective Eyewear Mandate in the Reduction of Eye Injuries” and published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, also compared concussion rates and overall injury rates among female lacrosse players before and after the rule change.

The researchers worked with approximately 9,430 female scholastic lacrosse players in 25 public high schools in Fairfax County, Va. Data was gathered for each of the high schools over a consecutive 10-year period – four years before the mandate (2000-2003) and six years after the mandate (2004-2009).

The researchers observed that the total number of eye injuries decreased from 22 before the mandate to five after the mandate. In addition, head and face injuries also decreased significantly after the eyewear mandate – from 33 injuries to 21 injuries.

One of their concerns, notes Caswell, is that the change in equipment might result in more aggressiveness on the field. However, the researchers found that the mandate did not have this effect because the overall injury rate stayed the same throughout the course of the study.

Surprisingly, there was a significant increase in the rate of concussions among female lacrosse players – 38 concussions occurred before the mandate compared to 86 concussions after the mandate.

Caswell and his colleagues say they aren’t worried about this finding. In fact, he says, the increase may reflect the increased awareness and diagnosis of concussions across all scholastic sports.

Mason professor finds TV ads target junk food; supports the FTC’s new guidelines

Childhood obesity is an epidemic in the United States, yet Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam still happily hawk their wares to youngsters. To combat this conundrum, a working group of federal agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, issued a voluntary set of guidelines last spring aimed at curbing commercials that market unhealthy foods to children.

But now those voluntary guidelines are facing opposition in Congress. Some Republicans are requesting further research by the FTC into the potential costs and impacts of the guidelines before implementing them, according to an Associated Press story.

Mason associate professor Michael Mink, who has been studying what he calls “nutrition messages on TV,” thinks the FTC guidelines are a good next step. In his research, h­­e is currently analyzing the nutritional value of foods marketed during children’s shows but has also studied the nutritional value of foods marketed during primetime television. He’s found that commercials have a bias toward foods that are high in sugar, fat and sodium.

“Our research found that a 2,000-calorie diet consisting of foods advertised during primetime television would contain 25 times the daily recommended servings of sugar and 20 times the daily servings of fat, less than half a day’s servings of dairy, fruit and vegetables,” says Mink.

“This same diet would oversupply 8 nutrients, including sodium, cholesterol, and saturated fat, while undersupplying 12 other nutrients, including fiber, iron and vitamins A, D and E,” he continues.

This study, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, also found that the diet advertised on television was very similar to the diet of most Americans. “So it is very possible that televised food ads are an important influence in the common American diet,” says Mink. “Since the average American will see about 15,000 food ads every year, any bias toward unhealthy foods in these ads will very likely have an impact on consumer behavior.”

Mink is now evaluating commercials aired during Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons—prime TV viewing time for children—and has found an even greater imbalance.

“Preliminary results show that a 2,000-calorie diet consisting of these foods would provide 100 times the daily recommended servings of sugar and 2.5 times the daily servings of fat, but less than a third of the day’s supply of vegetables, meat, dairy, and fruit,” Mink says.

“In fact, the observed food ads did not contain a single serving of fruit. Likewise, this diet would supply less than half the day’s supply of 11 different nutrients,” he says.

As to the argument that the government is overstepping its boundaries by making these voluntary guidelines, Mink points out, “The role of government is to protect the public from harm. There is plenty of research to show that the foods advertised on television are often nutritionally imbalanced and that televised food ads do influence nutrition behavior. Together, this research suggests a serious public health risk.”

Mink also points out that many other countries—including the United Kingdom, France and parts of Scandinavia—have already restricted food advertising or outlawed marketing junk food to children. “We are just taking a single step in a direction where many countries have taken major strides,” says Mink.

To speak with Mink about his ongoing research about junk food marketing or his comments on the fervor surrounding the voluntary FTC guidelines, contact Media Relations Manager Leah Kerkman Fogarty at lfogart1@gmu.edu or 703-993-8781.

George Mason University professor Eden King has taken her years of research examining workplace dynamics, discrimination and diversity and turned it into a readable, helpful and science-based guide to help women in all stages of their career “survive and thrive” at their jobs.

Her new book, “How Women Can Make It Work: The Science of Success,” co-written with Jennifer Knight, is the first book to use real science to help real women in their careers.

“Many of the books that are out there are based solely on anecdotes or personal experiences, or interviews with a few women. Ours is based on real social science findings that we tried to describe in understandable and engaging ways,” says King.

The book—which covers everything from how to create a resume and nail a job interview to how to balance work/life responsibilities and move up the corporate ladder—is aimed at women who are finishing college and starting  new jobs and careers or making changes in those jobs or careers.

King, who is a professor of psychology at Mason, cites her own research as well as other studies in the field to highlight areas of concern, overcome obstacles and create success for women at work.

In “How Women Can Make It Work,” King and Knight discuss:

• The workplace equivalent of eHarmony—how to find a company that fits just right with your work values.

• The upsides and downsides of your Blackberry—how being “plugged in” might be helpful to your career but affecting your personal relationships.

• Smiley face email correspondence—studies have shown that using emoticons in emails to your new boss just might reduce your starting salary rate.

• You’re good enough; you’re smart enough—how having a positive attitude can lead to more leadership opportunities.

• The “bump” in the road—when to reveal your pregnancy at work and how to avoid negative perceptions of moms in the workplace.

The book also includes special chapters focusing on workplace issues that might arise for women with disabilities, minority women, lesbian and bisexual women and single moms.

“Although women have overcome many barriers at work, research indicates that we still encounter subtle obstacles that can have a huge impact on the careers and lives of the youngest generations of women. We hope to point out some of those potential problems and offer strategies for their resolution,” says King. “As a whole, we hope the book will help serve as a guide to achieving personal and professional success.”

Public health officials say they are eager to communicate the health consequences of climate change but readily admit they need help. To address this issue, the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University has recently unveiled a primer designed to help public health professionals communicate effectively about climate change.

In a survey the center conducted with local public health officials in 2008, more than half of the nation’s public health departments reported they were already experiencing health effects from climate change, yet fewer than 10 percent were taking steps to educate members of their communities about the risks. Furthermore, they found that most survey respondents felt they would need guidance to create effective climate change communication plans.

So with financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the center conducted research on how to effectively communicate the public health implications of climate change over the past two years. The product of that research – a communication primer designed to help public health professionals communicate effectively about climate change – is now available here at no cost.

“Many public health officials are eager to explain the health risks posed by climate change, and the opportunities to reduce those risks, to members of their communities,” says Ed Maibach, director of the project. “But because the issue has become so politicized, they don’t know how to get started.

“We’re pleased because public health officials who had a pre-release copy of our communication primer felt that it was exactly what they needed to get them started.”

For more information on the center’s research and reports, visit the website.

The new telescope was lifted in pieces over Research I by crane and lowered into the observatory tower. Photo by Evan Cantwell, Creative Services.

This past weekend, Optical Guidance Systems helped George Mason University install a Ritchey-Chretien 32″ diameter telescope that will be the largest on-campus telescope in the region. A crane lifted the largest pieces of the telescope as high as nine stories over the building and into the observatory tower in Research I on the Fairfax Campus.

The telescope will be fully functional this fall, and will allow faculty and students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy to conduct research in planetary and atmospheric studies.

In the fall, the community will also be able to take advantage of this technology with night-time observing sessions twice a month, weather permitting. Professor Harold Geller will lead these community sessions, as well as conduct educational observing programs for local K-12 school children.

Educational and Outreach Uses of the Telescope:

• In-service professional development for teachers
• Community groups and organization tours
• School observing sessions
• Public night observing sessions
• Summer science camps

Research Uses of the Observatory and Telescope:

Even within the light-polluted skies of Fairfax, researchers can:

• Search for planets beyond our solar system
• Conduct studies of stellar surfaces and interiors with a high resolution spectrograph
• Search for supernovae
• Study planetary atmospheres

Kristien Zenkov

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This phrase couldn’t ring truer for Mason literacy expert Kristien Zenkov, whose program “Through Students’ Eyes” employs a novel approach to help students develop richer connections to school.

The program uses a “photovoice” method, which combines photographs and written reflections to allow middle and high school students of diverse backgrounds in underserved communities to document what they believe is the purpose of school, what support exists for their academic success and what barriers prevent them from achieving.

Zenkov, an associate professor of literacy and secondary education in Mason’s College of Education and Human Development, launched the first “Through Students’ Eyes” program with 20 students at Lincoln-West High School in Cleveland, Ohio in 2000.

Since then, the program has expanded to other schools throughout Ohio, as well as to schools in Colorado, Massachusetts and Connecticut. In addition, Zenkov has worked with students at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Va. Recently, he began working with students, including those in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program, at Metz Middle School and Osbourn Park High School in Manassas and Smarts Mill Middle School in Leesburg.

The program usually runs at three or four different schools each year and can last from two months to one year. During this time, students are armed with digital cameras and spend several months snapping photographs and writing about school and what it means in their lives.

“In urban cities across the country where dropout rates are consistently high, there is often a disconnect between school curricula and the value it has in students’ lives,” says Zenkov. “This project serves a dual purpose: It engages students in exploring the meaning of school while helping to improve their ability to read and write.”

More information about the program can be found here.

New Research Shows Being Mindful Can Ease Fears of Death and Dying

Death can be terrifying. Recognizing that death is inescapable and unpredictable makes us incredibly vulnerable, and can invoke feelings of anxiety, hatred and fear. But new research by George Mason University psychology professor Todd Kashdan shows that being a mindful person not only makes you generally more tolerant and less defensive, but it can also actually neutralize fears of dying and death.

Photo by Lisa Omarali via Flickr

“Mindfulness is being open, receptive, and attentive to whatever is unfolding in the present moment,” says Kashdan. In his latest research, Kashdan and his colleagues wanted to find out if mindful people had different attitudes about death and dying.

“Generally, when reminded of our mortality, we are extremely defensive. Like little kids who nearly suffocate under blanket protection to fend off the monster in the closet, the first thing we try to do is purge any death-related thoughts or feelings from our mind,” says Kashdan.

“On the fringes of this conscious awareness, we try another attempt to ward off death anxiety. We violently defend beliefs and practices that provide a sense of stability and meaning in our lives.”

Kashdan says this practice often has an ugly side—intolerance and abuse. “When people are reminded that death is impending, their racist tendencies increase,” he says. In a series of experiments conducted by the University of Missouri-Columbia, for example, white people asked to read about a crime committed by another person give harsher penalties for black compared with white defendants after being reminded of their mortality.

Kashdan wondered what might prevent these defensive, intolerant reactions from occurring. In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he and his colleagues looked at what might happen when mindfulness and the terror of death collide.

“A grudge match between humanity and death,” says Kashdan.

If mindful people are more willing to explore whatever happens in the present, even if it uncomfortable, will they show less defensiveness when their sense of self is threatened by a confrontation with their own mortality?

Based on the results of 7 different experiments, the answer appears to be yes. When reminded about their death and asked to write about what will happen when their bodies decompose (in grisly detail), less mindful people showed an intense dislike for foreigners that mention what’s wrong with the United States (pro-U.S. bias), greater prejudice against black managers who discriminated against a white employee in a promotion decision (pro-white bias), and harsher penalties for social transgressions such as prostitution, marital infidelities, and drug use by physicians that led to surgical mishaps.

Across these various situations, on the contrast, mindful people showed a lack of defensiveness toward people that didn’t share their worldview. Mindful people were diplomatic and tolerant regardless of whether they were prompted to think about their slow, systematic decline toward obliteration.

“What we found was that when asked to deeply contemplate their death, mindful people spent more time writing (as opposed to avoiding) and used more death-related words when reflecting on the experience. This suggests that a greater openness to processing the threat of death allows compassion and fairness to reign. In this laboratory staged battle, mindfulness alters the power that death holds over us,” Kashdan says.

Shane Caswell

Although football season has come to a close, reports of players sustaining major concussions were all too common this year. As a result, the NFL and other sports leagues — from professional to youth levels — are increasingly concerned about making the sport safer for its players.

Keeping players safe is what Shane Caswell, associate professor of athletic training and director of the Sports Medicine Assessment, Research and Testing (SMART) Laboratory in Mason’s College of Education and Human Development, hopes to accomplish in his research. It focuses on the prevention of traumatic brain injury in sport.

In his most recent study, Caswell, a certified athletic trainer, and his colleagues, examined the concussion trends of more than 150,000 student athletes at Fairfax County Public Schools for 11 consecutive years, beginning in 1997 and ending in 2008. They found that concussions rates in high school sports are rising at a 15 percent annual rate.

The results showed that boys’ sports accounted for three quarters of all concussions and football topped the list of sports with the highest concussion rates. Girls’ soccer came in a distant second among concussion rates. But, surprisingly, in similar girls’ and boys’ spots, the concussion rate for girls was roughly twice what was reported for boys.

The study followed student athletes from six boys’ sports – football, lacrosse, wrestling, soccer, basketball and baseball – and six girls’ sports – field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, basketball, cheerleading and softball.

“At the completion of the study, we were not surprised to find that the collision sports of football and boys’ lacrosse contributed to the high number of total concussions,” says Caswell.

“Despite these findings, we observed increasing concussion rates in every sport, which leads us to suggest that although the highest percentage of concussions occur in high-impact sports, efforts to detect, treat and prevent concussion should not be limited to those sports.”

More information about the study can be found here.

Looking to get promoted at work, ladies? You better keep those masculine behaviors in check.

A new study by researchers at George Mason University and Stanford University found that women who demonstrate stereotypical masculine traits should be mindful of their behavior if they want to get ahead in the workplace.

Previous research has shown that women who exhibit conventional male characteristics such as self-confidence and dominance may suffer from the “backlash effect” in which they are viewed negatively for not acting in a traditionally feminine manner.

But according to researchers Olivia O’Neill, assistant professor in Mason’s School of Management, and Charles O’Reilly, professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, women who are able to self-monitor their masculine behavior use it to their advantage and get more promotions at work than both men and other women.

“Although masculine women are seen as more competent than feminine women, they are also seen as less socially skilled and, consequently, less likeable and less likely to get promoted,” says O’Neill. “Our research shows that self-monitoring this behavior can have beneficial effects for masculine women, leading to more promotions and success in the workplace.”

Results of the study showed that masculine women who are good at self-monitoring, or knowing when to ‘turn on and off’ these masculine traits, had a higher likelihood of being promoted than those women who were not as successful at self-monitoring. By contrast, self-monitoring did not make a difference in the number of promotions men received.

More information can be found here.

According to a recent study by Mason researchers David Anderson and Hugh Gusterson, teens are clearly receiving the message to not drink and drive. But they don’t understand the dangerous impact that consuming large amounts of alcohol can have on their growing bodies.

The study “Understanding Teen Drinking Cultures in America” reveals that culture plays the biggest role in teen drinking and aims to help parents, community leaders and schools develop strategies that will effectively reduce the rate of teen alcohol consumption.

The research found that teens typically begin drinking in high school and view the experience as an important rite of passage to adulthood.  Getting alcohol from older youths, most notably older siblings, teens reported consuming the most alcohol at parties, very often with the intention of drinking to get drunk.

Especially alarming is that teens view the act of drinking as the focal point of most social gatherings and usually do it without the knowledge of adults.

Although it was determined that parents and community members play an important role in communicating with teens about risky alcohol-related behaviors, research shows that many parents underestimated how much teens drink and at what age they started drinking.

School officials and teens themselves agreed that alcohol awareness programs at school are ineffective and lack a consistent focus and that there is too much discrepancy between what teens are told about alcohol in schools and their own personal experiences.

“Although extensive research demonstrates the complexity of why teens drink, there is a lack of comprehensive attention to understanding this behavior,” says Anderson.

“Investigating a variety of teen drinking cultures – including teens’ earliest experiences, patterns of alcohol consumption and the messages they may or may not get about alcohol from peers, parents, community leaders and others – gives special insight into how to tackle what is becoming an increasingly difficult problem in communities across the country.”

More information about the study can be found here.