Game-winning momentum is just an illusion

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When a team goes on a multi-game winning streak, it has nothing to do with momentum, according to a new study in the journal Economics Letters. By examining varsity college hockey teams winning and losing record, Cornell University researchers discovered that that momentum advantages don’t exist.”Whether it’s sports commentators or stock analysts who are talking, momentum is routinely assumed to be important on a day-to-day basis,” said Kevin M. Kniffin, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. “In our evidence, we see that momentum is really just illusory.”Kniffin and Vince Mihalek, a four-year veteran of Cornell’s men’s ice hockey team, examined 916 games over a six-year period from the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (NCAA, Division 1). Teams in that league regularly play two-game weekend series, which the researchers explain “presents a uniquely ripe environment for momentum to potentially occur.”Because of student academic obligations during weekdays, NCAA Division 1 hockey programs tend to play their games on weekends — offering a temporal parity that ensures uniform times between games and reduces home-ice advantage factors.Within the WCHA, uniquely, the home team hosts visitors for games that start on Friday and Saturday nights in the same arena, says Kniffin. “In other words, if you’d expect to see momentum occur from one game to the next, this would be the exact situation where it would occur.”The study shows that winning the first game of a two-game series does not affect the probability of winning the second. Further, the researchers discovered that “running up the score” by winning the first game by a large margin, neither increases nor decreases the probability of winning the second game, when quality and talent are considered balanced.Said Mihalek: “Lots of coaches preparing for two games in a weekend against different opponents will tend to focus more practice time on the first of the two opponents, partly because of the belief in momentum,” Mihalek noted. “The new paper shows no evidence of momentum across games within a weekend, and, instead, we suggest that teams focus on winning the first game of a weekend because it helps to ensure that they won’t end any given two-game set with a losing record.”The study, “Within-Series Momentum in Hockey: No Returns for Running Up the Score,” will be published in the March 2014 print edition of Economics Letters.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Cornell University. The original article was written by Blaine Friedlander. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Cancer, #Cornell, #Hockey, #Kniffin, #Mihalek, #Pregnancy, #Score, #Student, #Teams, #Winning

Foods and moods: Considering the future may help people make better food choices

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Emotional eating is something we’re all familiar with. Maybe you had had a rough week at work and all you want on Friday night is to plop down and watch a movie with a giant bowl of buttery popcorn. Maybe you’re a student stressed about a big exam and you’re munching on candy as you study. Or maybe your child’s birthday party is coming up and you’ve bought an ice cream cake to serve a small army to celebrate. Happy or sad, up or down, there’s a plethora of media in the world that tells us our moods often dictate the foods we choose to eat.More recent studies, though, have shown that negative moods and positive moods may actually lead to preferences for different kinds of foods. For example, if given the choice between grapes or chocolate candies, someone in a good mood may be more inclined to choose the former while someone in a bad mood may be more likely to choose the latter.But what if we could make better choices in any emotional state?A forthcoming article by University of Delaware associate professor Meryl Gardner finds that there’s more to stress eating than simply emotion and in fact, thinking about the future may help people make better food choices.”We were interested in the ‘why,’” said Gardner. “Why when someone is in a bad mood will they choose to eat junk food and why when someone is in a good mood will they make healthier food choices?”Gardner, a faculty member in UD’s Lerner College of Business and Economics, with co-authors Brian Wansink of Cornell University, Junyong Kim of Hanyang University ERICA and Se-Bum Park of Yonsei University, found that a lot depends on our perspective of time.”In an evolutionary sense, it makes sense that when we feel uncomfortable or are in a bad mood, we know something is wrong and focus on what is close to us physically and what is close in time, in the here and now,” said Gardner. “We’re seeing the trees and not the forest, or how to do things and not why to do things.”To get at the “why,” the researchers married the theories of affective regulation (how people react to their moods and emotions) and temporal construal (the perspective of time) to explain food choice.They conducted four laboratory experiments to examine whether people in a positive mood would prefer healthy food to indulgent food for long-term health and well-being benefits and those in a negative mood would prefer indulgent foods to healthy foods for immediate, hedonistic mood management benefits.In the first study, the researchers investigated the effect of a positive mood on evaluations of indulgent and health foods by examining 211 individuals from local parent-teacher associations (PTAs).The findings indicated individuals in a positive mood, compared to control group participants in a relatively neutral mood, evaluated healthy foods more favorably than indulgent foods.”We expect this is possibly because they put more weight on abstract, higher-level benefits like health and future well-being,” said Gardner. “The remaining question was whether individuals in a negative mood would act differently.”Testing that question in a second study using 315 undergraduate students recruited from a large Midwestern university, the researchers found further support for their hypothesis that individuals in a negative mood liked indulgent foods more than healthy foods.According to Gardner, the finding that people in a positive mood liked the more nutritious options and also liked the idea of staying healthy in their old age is consistent with the hypothesis that time construal is important.”It suggests that positive mood makes people think about the future, and thinking about the future makes us think more abstractly,” said Gardner.The researchers were then left to eliminate goal achievement as an alternative explanation.”Our manipulations of mood in the first two studies involved having participants read positive, negative or neutral articles,” said Gardner. “As it turned out, the positive articles involved someone who had a great life and achieved lots of goals, and the negative articles involved someone who had a sad life and did not achieve goals. …


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#Child, #College, #Cornell, #Economics, #Gardner, #Gent, #Goals, #Hanyang, #Media, #Pregnancy

Child abuse rises with income inequality

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As the Great Recession deepened and income inequality became more pronounced, county-by-county rates of child maltreatment — from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to traumatic brain injuries and death — worsened, according to a nationwide study by Cornell University.The income inequality-child maltreatment study, to be published in the March 2014 edition of the peer-review journal Pediatrics, covers all 3,142 American counties from 2005-09, and is one of the most comprehensive of its kind and the first to target child abuse in places with the greatest gap between rich and poor.”Our study is the first to demonstrate that increases in income inequality are associated with increases in child maltreatment,” said John J. Eckenrode, professor of human development and director of the Family Life Development Center in the College of Human Ecology. “More equal societies, states and communities have fewer health and social problems than less equal ones — that much was known. Our study extends the list of unfavorable child outcomes associated with income inequality to include child abuse and neglect.”Nearly 3 million children younger than 18 are physically abused, sexually abused, physically neglected or emotionally abused each year in the United States, the Cornell researchers noted. That is about 4 percent of the youth population — and those are just the officially documented cases.”Certainly, poor counties with general, overall poverty have significant problems with child abuse,” Eckenrode said. “We were more interested in geographic areas with wide variations in income — think of counties encompassing affluent suburbs and impoverished inner cities, or think of rich/poor Brooklyn, New York — that’s where income inequalities are most pronounced. That’s where the kids are really hurting.” The hurt doesn’t stop when kids graduate — if they do — from school, the Cornell researchers observed.”Child maltreatment is a toxic stressor in the lives of children that may result in childhood mortality and morbidities and have lifelong effects on leading causes of death in adults,” they wrote. “This is in addition to long-term effects on mental health, substance use, risky sexual behavior and criminal behavior … increased rates of unemployment, poverty and Medicaid use in adulthood.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Cornell University. The original article was written by Melissa Osgood. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Child, #Cornell, #Ecology, #Pregnancy, #Science, #Story