(L to R): Sehyun Ju, Qiujie Gong, and Karen Kramer.< College of ACES

 Family mealtimes are important for parents and children as a space to communicate, socialize, and build attachment relationships. But it can be difficult for busy parents to balance family and work life. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explores how parents’ job stress influences their attendance at family mealtimes, and in turn, children’s socioemotional development.

“We all struggle to maintain the balance between work life and family life. But this might be especially challenging for parents, who are engaging in childcare after a busy and stressful day at work. And when it comes to co-parenting in dual-earner families, which comprises 65% of families with children in United States, we do not know much about how mothers and fathers share caregiving roles under work stress,” said lead author Sehyun Ju, doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U. of I.

The study included data from more than 1,400 dual-earner families, consisting of heterosexual married couples with children, in a nationally representative survey that traced children’s development across family, home, child care, and school environments from 9 months to kindergarten. The researchers focused on the interplay of child characteristics, family mealtimes, and parents’ job and financial dissatisfaction.

“We found that children of parents who expressed higher work-related stress when the children were 2 years old had lower socioemotional competency at age 4 to 5, measured by lower positive and higher negative social behaviors,” Ju explained. 

There were significant differences regarding the impact of mothers’ and fathers’ work stress. For mothers, higher job dissatisfaction did not impact frequency of family mealtimes; however, it was directly associated with lower socioemotional competency in their children. 

On the other hand, fathers who had higher job and financial dissatisfaction were less likely to attend family mealtimes with their children, and this in turn resulted in the children having lower socioemotional competency at age 4 to 5. 

“Even when the mother increased her mealtime presence to compensate for the father’s absence, the child’s socioemotional development was still negatively impacted. This indicates fathers may have a unique influence that cannot be replaced by the mother. Future intervention programs should help both parents obtain a better balance between work and family, and highlight the importance of family routines to promote healthy child development,” stated co-author Qiujie Gong, a doctoral student in HDFS.

The findings speak to the pervasiveness of traditional gender roles, added Karen Kramer, associate professor in HDFS and co-author on the study. “Mothers are considered primary caregivers, and they are expected to be present and feed their children no matter what. The study showed they didn’t adjust their mealtime frequencies in response to job dissatisfaction as fathers did.”

Kramer notes the study is unique in combining topics from different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and nutrition, and connecting them in a holistic way that provides insights for policy measures.

“We have to acknowledge the challenges that families face in creating consistent routines. It’s not just an outcome of individual influences. Outside factors, such as parents’ work environment and financial situation can affect their interactions, mealtimes, and child development. For example, dinner time for young kids is typically around five or six o’clock, but the expectation that parents are home early in the day doesn’t align with being an ideal worker. Policy initiatives to help provide a work environment and community support that facilitate family mealtimes would be important,” Kramer concluded.

Alexz Farrall demonstrating the use of PAWS CREDIT Vittoria D’Alessio, University of Bath

A soft ball that ‘personifies’ breath, expanding and contracting in synchronicity with a person’s inhalations and exhalations, has been invented by a PhD student at the University of Bath in the UK. The ball is designed to support mental health, giving users a tangible representation of their breath to keep them focused and to help them regulate their emotions.

Alexz Farrall, the student in the Department of Computer Science who invented the device, said: “By giving breath physical form, the ball enhances self-awareness and engagement, fostering positive mental health outcomes.”

Generally, breathing is an ignored activity, yet when done deeply and with focus, it’s known to alleviate anxiety and foster wellbeing. Measured breathing is highly rated by mental health practitioners both for its ability to lower the temperature in emotionally charged situations and to increase a person’s receptivity to more demanding mental-health interventions.

Disciplines that frequently include mindful breathing include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and trauma-focused therapies.

Most people, however, struggle to sustain attention on their breathing. Once disengaged from the process, they are likely to return to thinking mode and be less receptive to mental-health interventions that require concentration.

“I hope this device will be part of the solution for many people with problems relating to their mental wellbeing,” said Mr Farrall.

Focus lowers anxiety

Recent research led by Mr Farrall shows a significant improvement in people’s ability to focus on their breathing when they use his shape-shifting ball. With their attention heightened, study participants were then able to pay closer attention to a guided audio recording from a meditation app.

Among those who used the ball, there was an average 75% reduction in anxiety and a 56% increase in protection against worry-induced thoughts. In contrast, those relying only on the audio recordings experienced a 31% reduction in anxiety (recording 44% more anxiety than their counterparts).

Additionally, those accessing the ball alongside audio guidance showed significantly higher Heart Rate Variability (indicative of better stress resilience and emotional regulation) than those using only audio, demonstrating the superior calming effect of a combined ball+audio approach.

The study’s results were presented earlier this year at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – the premier international conference of human-computer interaction.

Stop the drop out

Explaining how the device supports a user, Mr Farrall said: “When an individual holds the ball, their breath becomes a physical thing between their hands. They can feel and see the flow of air as the object expands and contracts.

“This allows them to become more aware of their own internal sensations and more receptive to psychological change. It gives a personalised and engaging experience, and is accessible to everyone.”

Mental health issues costs the NHS around £118 billion annually, yet the demand for services significantly exceeds supply, leaving many unable to access mental health support. While digital technologies like apps have emerged to bridge this gap, many people don’t use them for long enough to enjoy the promised benefits, with one study showing that only 3.9% of users stick with an app programme over a 15-day period.

Mr Farrall’s interactive ball – named the Physical Artefact for Well-being Support (PAWS) – offers a potential solution by giving people an extra incentive to actively participate in managing their mental health. In time, Mr Farrall hopes his ball will be a tool used both by mental-health professionals and private individuals.

“I want this device to be a genuine catalyst for mental health improvement, not just in clinical settings but also for home users,” he said.

Professor Jason Alexander, who supervises Mr Farrall’s project from the Department of Computer Science at Bath, said: “The beauty of PAWS is that the concept is so simple – letting someone ‘feel’ their breath – yet it has the potential to revolutionise the delivery and outcomes of mental health support not only in the UK but worldwide.”

Haptic feedback

The ball works through haptic feedback, where sensors attached to the user’s body transmit data about their respiration patterns to the ball via a computer.

In the Bath study, the PAWS prototype used an electronic and pneumatic circuit to convert pulmonary activity to pneumatic activation. Future versions, however, will leverage Bluetooth technology and smart geometric structures to eliminate the need for wires, and make the device easier and more comfortable to use.

Plans for a larger study are underway to delve deeper into the potential benefits of PAWS. This next study will incorporate insights from mental health experts and people who have spent some time using the ball.

Scientific excellence requires diversity – research conducted by men and women, by people from different backgrounds and with varied worldviews. The need for diversity extends to scientific experiments themselves, but even today the vast majority of studies in the life sciences are done on male mice only, which could harm the findings, as well as our ability to extrapolate from them to humans. A new study by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science addresses this challenge, revealing in unprecedented detail how the brains of male and female mice respond differently to stress. In the study, published in Cell Reports, researchers from Prof. Alon Chen’s joint laboratory at the Weizmann Institute and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich discovered that a subcategory of brain cells responds to stress in a totally different manner in males and females. The findings could lead to a better understanding of health conditions affected by chronic stress, such as anxiety, depression and even obesity and diabetes, and they could pave the way toward personalized therapies for these disorders.

Mental and physical disorders caused by chronic stress are constantly on the rise, putting a significant strain on society. They affect both men and women, but not necessarily in the same way. Although plenty of evidence suggests that men and women deal differently with stress, the causes of these differences are not yet fully understood, and in any event, personalized treatments for men and women are still beyond the reach of medicine. But researchers from Chen’s laboratory, which specializes in studying the response to stress, hypothesized that innovative research methods could help to change the picture. Previous studies in other labs had uncovered certain sex differences in the response to stress, but those findings were obtained using research methods that could mask significant differences in the responses of specific cells or even entirely erase the roles played by relatively rare cells. Chen’s laboratory, in contrast, uses advanced methods that allow scientists to analyze brain activity at an unprecedented resolution – on the level of the individual cell – and could therefore shed new light on the differences between the sexes.

“We turned the most sensitive research lens possible onto the area of the brain that acts as a central hub of the stress response in mammals, the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of the hypothalamus,” says Dr. Elena Brivio, who led the study. “By sequencing the RNA molecules in that part of the brain on the level of the individual cell, we were able to map the stress response in male and female mice along three main axes: how each cell type in that part of the brain responds to stress, how each cell type previously exposed to chronic stress responds to a new stress experience and how these responses differ between males and females.”

The researchers mapped out gene expression in more than 35,000 individual cells, generating a huge amount of data that provides a picture of stress response that’s unprecedented in its scope and in highlighting the differences between how males and females perceive and process stress. As part of the study, and in keeping with the principles of open-access science, the researchers decided to make the entire detailed mapping publicly available on a dedicated interactive website, which went live at the same time the study was published, providing other researchers with convenient, user-friendly access to the data. “The website will, for example, allow researchers who are focusing on a specific gene to see how that gene’s expression changes in a certain cell type in response to stress, in males as well as females,” Brivio explains.

The comprehensive mapping has already allowed the researchers to identify a long list of differences in gene expression – between males and females, and between chronic and acute stress. The data showed, inter alia, that certain brain cells respond differently to stress in males and females: Some cells are more susceptible to stress in females and some to stress in males. The most significant difference was found in a type of brain cell called the oligodendrocyte – a subtype of glial cell that provides support to nerve cells and plays an important role in regulating brain activity. In males, exposure to stress conditions, especially chronic stress, changed not only the gene expression in these cells and their interactions with surrounding nerve cells but also their very structure. In females, however, no significant change was observed in these cells, and they were not susceptible to stress exposure. “Neurons attract most of the scientific attention, but they only make up approximately a third of all cells in the brain. The method we implemented allows us to see a much richer and fuller picture, including all the cell types and their interactions in the part of the brain under study,” says Dr. Juan Pablo Lopez, a former postdoctoral fellow in Chen’s group and now the head of a research group at the Department of Neuroscience of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.