Economics is everywhere, including art.

Alexandra Nica, director of the undergraduate program and professor of instruction in the department of economics at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, takes a closer look.

Alexandra Nica is director of the undergraduate program and professor of instruction in the Department of Economics at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Iowa and her BA from the University of Transylvania in Romania.

Did Jackson Pollock ever think much about economics? Probably not, but economics students think about Jackson Pollock.

I teach the intermediate macroeconomics class at Tippie and not long ago I noticed that my students struggled to give concise analysis of graphs and data because they were unable to visualize what they looked like. I realized they needed to learn to slow down and look closer at details to help them make more sense of the whole.

I also knew that art was one tool I could use to help them. As a concert pianist myself, I know how art helps with visualization because art rewards those who looks closely at the details. So I brought my students to the university’s renowned Stanley Museum of Art, where docents helped them dive deep into some of the works in our extensive collection.

They closely examined paintings by Joan Miro and Katja Farin. They looked at sculpture from Elizabeth Catlett and pieces from the museum’s extensive collection of African art. They began to see things they didn’t expect and realized that close looking is as effective in finding meaning in one of Pollock’s abstract expressionist masterpieces as in a chart tracking US GDP.

The experience showed the value of creativity in moving past a basic reading and providing concise summaries, especially when looking at graphs. Students learned they can tease out meaning from economic data using an artist’s tools to see that things aren’t always as simple as they seem. As a result, they now write clearer paragraphs with better in-depth analysis than before, even when the graphs are more complicated. This will be important for their careers, when their bosses will expect a concise, three-sentence summary of what a visual says and what it actually means.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

Quitting smoking is good for you, no matter when in life it happens.

Mikaela Bloomberg, senior research fellow in social epidemiology and social statistics at the department of epidemiology and public health at the institute of epidemiology and health care at University College London, explores why.

Mikaela Bloomberg is a Senior Research Fellow in Social Epidemiology and Social Statistics at University College London’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. She is part of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing research team, where her work examines how social and behavioural pathways contribute to inequalities in health and wellbeing in later life. Her research integrates lifecourse perspectives with longitudinal population data to understand how socioeconomic circumstances and behavioural patterns shape cognitive ageing, dementia risk, and other ageing-related outcomes.

The harmful effects of smoking are well known. Smoking damages heart and lung health and is also linked to poorer cognitive outcomes: people who smoke tend to show faster decline in cognitive abilities such as memory and thinking skills and are more likely to develop dementia.However, research suggests that some of smoking’s health harms are reversible—not only for heart and lung health, but also for the brain. For example, people who quit smoking earlier in life have dementia risks and later-life cognitive abilities similar to those who never smoked.What has been less clear is whether quitting later on can still make a difference once cognitive decline has already begun. Age-related cognitive decline typically accelerates from around age 65, so by that stage, many assume their cognitive trajectory is already set. We wanted to know whether quitting could still slow that decline.To find out, we analysed data from over 9000 adults aged 40 and older across 12 countries, tracking their performance on cognitive tests over 18 years. We matched people who quit smoking with continuing smokers based on their age, sex, education level, and cognitive abilities before quitting. We examined cognitive trajectories in the years before and after quitting and compared these with the matched control group. Before quitting, both groups declined at a similar rate. But in the years after, those who quit experienced 20%-50% slower cognitive decline than those who continued to smoke. This was true whether they quit in midlife or later.These findings matter because many long-term smokers believe there’s no point in quitting after decades of smoking. Our results suggest that when it comes to maintaining cognitive health, it is never too late to quit.

Read More:

[The Lancet] - Cognitive decline before and after mid-to-late-life smoking cessation: a longitudinal analysis of prospective cohort studies from 12 countries

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

Juvenile birds may lean on siblings more than parents to learn to solve a puzzle.

Sonja Wild, postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, explores why.

Sonja Wild is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Davis. Her research aims to uncover the mechanisms underlying behavioral plasticity in free-ranging social animals. She is particularly interested in underlying cognitive processes — such as social learning phenomena and individual decision-making processes — and the fitness outcomes of behavioral variation at the individual level. Her research across different animal species from dolphins over songbirds to ground squirrels has sparked far-reaching interest beyond the scientific community.

Learning from others is one of the most efficient ways to obtain new skills or information. In animals — including us humans — this process called ‘social learning’ is especially important for young individuals who have to learn essential survival skills right after birth. In many species, parents play a key role in this process. Offspring copy what their parents do, a form of ‘cultural inheritance’ that leads to behaviors being passed down within families through generations. But what happens in species where parents do not stick around for very long?That’s what we set out to explore in the great tit, a small songbird whose young reach independence from their parents after just a few weeks. We presented juvenile birds with foraging puzzles that could be opened by sliding a door either to the left or to the right. Through automated tracking, we recorded if and when each bird learned to solve the puzzle. Young birds whose parents knew how to solve the task were much more likely to learn it themselves, which points to cultural inheritance. But having a closer look at the learning pathways, a different story emerged. The first juvenile to learn in each family often learned not from its parents, but mostly from unrelated adults. And once one sibling learned to solve, all other siblings tended to copy the already knowledgeable sibling rather than their parents. Our study provides a contrast to the strict trans-generational cultures where transmission mainly occurs from parents to offspring and gives insights into the more variable learning pathways via siblings and non-parental adults in species with limited parental care and multiple offspring.

[PLOS Biology] - Siblings and nonparental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

Do men and women experience asthma differently?

Shannon Kay, assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine, determines how to make care more personalized.

Shannon Kay was born in Long Island and raised in New York City. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Manhattan College, and completed medical school at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. She then completed internship, residency, and Chief residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before coming to Yale as a Pulmonary and Critical Care fellow in 2019.

Asthma is the most prevalent respiratory disease in the world, and it is caused by inflammation in the lungs related to an individual’s genetics and their environment. There are clear differences in the way asthma affects males and females across the lifespan. For example, asthma is more common and more likely to be triggered by allergies in young boys compared to girls. After puberty, asthma becomes more prevalent in females, who are more likely to experience asthma throughout adulthood. Females report changes in their asthma symptoms corresponding with their menstrual cycle, pregnancy, menopause, and taking medications like hormonal contraceptives or hormone replacement therapy. This suggests a hormonal influence on lung inflammation. Importantly, females are more likely to have severe asthma that is less responsive to our current therapies.In this study, we set out to explore the way asthma affects males and females differently by looking at gene expression levels in blood and respiratory samples. Gene expression is a measurement of which genes from our DNA are being used to make proteins, which gives us a clue about the biology happening in our bodies. We combined studies from across the world to maximize our analysis. Ultimately, we found differences in the expression of 61 genes between males and females with asthma. The expression level of these genes in blood samples correlated with important features including patient-reported symptoms, lung function measurements, and markers of inflammation. Our findings suggest that these changes in gene expression may contribute to sex differences in asthma.We hope to build on this work by studying hormonal effects in the lungs, evaluating differences in response to newer asthma medications called biologics, and exploring the intersection between asthma and other conditions like obesity. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to more personalized medical care for all patients with asthma.

Read More:

[ATS Journals] - Sex-biased Gene Expression Underlies Immune Dysfunction in Asthma

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

Hepatitis C infection can be dangerous for mothers and babies, so how do we treat it?

Madeline McCrary, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, determines one option.

Leah Madeline McCrary is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at WashU Medicine. She specializes in infectious complications of substance use, including Hepatitis C and Serratia endocarditis, and works to expand access to treatment for people who use drugs, pregnant individuals, and rural populations. She is currently collaborating to integrate infectious disease care into perinatal substance use programs to improve Hepatitis C treatment during and after pregnancy.

Hepatitis C is a viral infection that can damage the liver and, if untreated, lead to cirrhosis, cancer, or even death. Many people are first diagnosed during pregnancy. The stakes are high—not only for mothers, but also for babies: the virus can be passed from mother to child, with a transmission rate of about 1 in 10.

Unfortunately, treatment often never begins. Insurance may end, follow-up gets missed, or the demands of the postpartum period make clinic visits difficult. As a result, some women return for a second or third pregnancy still infected, despite the availability of a highly effective cure.

But curing hepatitis C protects more than just one person. It prevents long-term complications, reduces household transmission, and lowers the risk of passing the virus to future children.

To address this gap, we partnered across maternal–fetal medicine and infectious diseases to pilot a new approach. Instead of referring mothers to outpatient clinics, we offered hepatitis C treatment at the bedside before hospital discharge. We also used streamlined referrals and telehealth, building on earlier work.

We reviewed records from 149 women diagnosed with hepatitis C during pregnancy. Those who began treatment in the hospital were about twice as likely to complete therapy and be cured, compared to those referred to outpatient care. More than half in the outpatient group never even attended their first appointment.

Treating hepatitis C before discharge helps reduce loss to follow-up, increases cure rates, and protects long-term health. And the impact goes beyond the individual—by curing the infection, we protect families and future pregnancies.

This success was possible through collaboration across specialties. With new guidelines supporting treatment during pregnancy, the goal ahead is clear: cure should be the norm, not the exception.

Read More:

[WashU Medicine] - Innovative approach helps new mothers get hepatitis C treatment

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

On this Student Spotlight: Can you become addicted to ultra-processed foods?

Lucy Loch, doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at the University of Michigan, examines whether this is the case.

Lucy Loch is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where she is mentored by Dr. Ashley Gearhardt and Dr. Julie Lumeng. Her research focuses on the life course development of addictive-like eating, examining how early experiences and exposure to ultra-processed foods influence appetite, self-regulation, and risk for later life health outcomes. Supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Lucy bridges developmental and addiction science to uncover why certain foods and life experiences may make some individuals more susceptible to overeating. Her work has appeared in journals including Addiction, Current Obesity Reports, and Physiology & Behavior.

Ultra-processed foods are industrially made products that often contain high levels of refined carbohydrates, added fats, and other ingredients designed to make them especially tasty and rewarding. Over the past few decades, these foods have become a major part of the American diet. Research shows that some people experience addictive-like responses to ultra-processed foods, including intense cravings and difficulty controlling their intake.This study examined how common ultra-processed food addiction, is among older adults in the United States, and how it relates to health and social well-being. Data was analyzed from more than two thousand adults between the ages of fifty and eighty who participated in a nationally representative survey. Participants completed a validated questionnaire that applies the diagnostic criteria for substance use disorders such as, cravings, loss of control, and continued use despite negative effects, to food ultra-processed food consumption. Older adults in this study also reported on their physical health, mental health, and feelings of social isolation.The findings showed that about one in eight older adults met the criteria for ultra-processed food addiction. Rates were higher among women than men, and highest among women aged fifty to sixty-four, where roughly one in five met the diagnostic criteria for ultra-processed food addiction. Additionally, ultra-processed food addiction was strongly linked to poorer health outcomes. Those who described themselves as overweight, or in worse physical or mental health, were significantly more likely to meet criteria for UPFA. People who reported feeling socially isolated were also at increased risk.These results suggest that ultra-processed food addiction is an overlooked issue among older adults, especially women who were in a developmentally vulnerable period when these foods became widespread in the American food supply in the 1970s and 1980s. This study highlights important connections between addictive eating behaviors, physical and mental health, and social well-being, offering new insights for understanding nutrition and aging.

Read More:

[Wiley] - Ultra-processed food addiction in a nationally representative sample of older adults in the USA

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

Eating ultra-processed foods may hinder brain health during aging.

Benjamin Katz, associate professor of human development and family science at Virginia Tech, examines this relationship.

Ben Katz, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor within the Department of Human Development and Family Science and the Director of the Cognitive Aging and Translational Science Laboratory at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the development of executive function throughout the lifespan. Executive function refers to a broad set of cognitive skills, including working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, that are closely linked to our abilities to learn, reason, think and decide. He is particularly interested in how experience and intervention, ranging from cognitive training to non-invasive brain stimulation to lifestyle behaviors, like diet and exercise, might be used to modulate these processes, to help a range of individuals including older adults concerned about Alzheimer’s disease, or children and emerging adults in academic settings. He uses a wide range of methodologies, including multi-level analytic approaches and fMRI neuroimaging , in the context of this work.

Ultra-processed foods, which includes sugar-sweetened sodas, packaged deli meats, and ready-made snacks, have been closely linked to poorer physical health. Recent research has also connected consumption of ultra-processed foods to issues with brain health during aging. But the industrial processing involved in creating different foods varies widely. For example, while sugar-sweetened beverages might include artificial flavorings, a packaged deli-meat may be more likely to include high levels of sodium to extend shelf-life. In my lab, two of our graduate students, Elayna Seago and Maria Rego, worked with me and my colleague Brenda Davy to better understand how specific ultra-processed foods might be related to someone’s chance of developing dementia. We examined seven years of data from several thousands US older adults who completed a survey called the Health and Retirement Study, which includes information about diet and cognition. We found that only some ultra-processed foods were associated with a heightened risk of developing cognitive impairment, which can include issues with memory and attention. On average, each additional daily serving of sugar-sweetened beverages, like sodas, was linked to a 6% higher chance of developing cognitive impairment by the end of the study. And each additional daily serving of ultra-processed animal products, like packaged deli meats, was linked to a 17% higher risk of developing cognitive impairment. We didn’t identify increased risk from other ultra-processed foods, like dairy items or savory snacks. Next, we’re hoping to better understand which aspects of these foods might be linked to worse brain health, as well as what specific neural mechanisms might be impacted. Our results show how important it is to consider these foods individually – a whole grain bread may have higher levels of processing but still be healthy overall. Each ultra-processed food is ultra-processed in different ways – with very different risks.

Read More:

[Science Direct] - Differential association of ultraprocessed food categories with risk of developing cognitive impairment in middle-aged and older adults in a longitudinal panel study

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

If customer service is already excellent in a sector, how can a hotel differentiate itself from competitors?

Rin Yoon, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Iowa, determines this.

Rin Yoon is assistant professor of marketing at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. She studies consumer psychology at the moment of transaction, with the goal of helping organizations design more effective incentives and payment environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, a B.A. in Communication Studies, with a minor in Statistics, from UCLA, and an M.S. in Marketing from Korea University Business School.

When you hear the word, ‘hotel’, maybe you think of the soft robe, the Egyptian cotton sheets, the body wash bottles that somehow smell out of this world.

The hospitality industry, after all, is built on customer satisfaction. It’s hard to find any sector more obsessed with keeping customers happy. But here’s the catch: when every hotel already offers great service, satisfaction stops being a competitive advantage.

So what else makes guests become loyal to a hotel and write those five-star reviews?

Our research suggests it’s psychological ownership — that subtle feeling that a space is mine, even if it’s only for one night.

We analyzed thousands of TripAdvisor hotel reviews, ran a field study at a hotel, and simulated various check-in experiences, and found this -- guests who felt a greater sense of ownership of their rooms, were more likely to put more time and effort into endorsing the hotel, took better care of the space, and were more likely to remain loyal to the brand.

So our message to anyone in a market where satisfaction is no longer a differentiator but simply the floor is this: we can boost loyalty by making customers feel the product truly belongs to them. The best part? Psychological ownership is low-cost, easy to implement, and surprisingly powerful. For hotels trying to stand out in a sea of excellent service, turning “the room” into “my room” may just be the next big competitive edge.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

If you need to persuade someone, maybe let AI do the talking.

Vered Shwartz, assistant professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, explores why this might be.

Vered Shwartz is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and the author of “Lost in Automatic Translation: Navigating Life in English in the Age of Language Technologies”. Her research interests focus on natural language processing, with the fundamental goal of building models capable of human-level understanding of natural language. She is currently working on testing and improving the capabilities of large language models and vision and language models, developing culturally-competent AI, and responsible NLP applications in sensitive domains (e.g., legal, medical). Before joining UBC, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to that, she did her PhD (2019) in Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University.

Who is more persuasive, AI chatbots or humans? It turns out, AI. In a recent study, we recruited people to role play a person considering a lifestyle change such as becoming vegan or attending grad school. Half of the participants were paired with a human who was tasked with persuading them to make a particular decision, and the other half was paired with GPT-4, a popular AI large language model or LLM. People were not only more easily persuaded by GPT-4, but also perceived it as more empathetic. Analyzing the conversations, we found several reasons. First, GPT-4 has access to vast knowledge from training on text from the web. Crucially, it’s also able to access that knowledge quickly and generate long responses. While the human participants were allowed to use Google, they were slower at the task. The result is that GPT-4 generated not only multiple arguments in favor of the decision but also concrete logistical support – for example recommending brands of meat substitutes – which proved very effective. This speed also allowed GPT-4 to add “niceties” such as greetings and validation which likely made people feel seen and further helped persuade them. Finally, GPT-4’s choice of words made it seem more authoritative, further increasing its persuasiveness. Because of their authoritative style, we typically assume that LLMs “know what they are talking about”, although they often “hallucinate” facts. As more people turn to LLMs for advice, this perception could lead to adverse effects. Recently, a person was hospitalized after taking sodium bromide based on advice from ChatGPT for reducing table salt consumption.As individuals, it’s more important than ever to get basic AI education and develop critical thinking. LLMs are a very useful tool, but not a perfect one, and we must ensure we’re all aware of their risks and limitations.

Read More:The 3rd Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

Trusting financial advisors is key to the best outcomes, but what determines the most trustworthy financial advisors?

Jesse Ellis, Alan T. Dickson distinguished professor of finance at North Carolina State University, looks at their beginnings.

Jesse Ellis is the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished Professor of Finance at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. His research explores financial advisor behavior, institutional investing, and the cultural and psychological foundations of financial decision-making. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including The Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science.

Financial advisors manage trillions of dollars and help families make their biggest financial decisions. But here’s the catch: financial products are complex, and most people lack the expertise to know whether they’re getting good advice. Economists call this a credence good: clients have to trust the expert because they can’t easily evaluate the service.

So what keeps advisors from exploiting that trust? Regulation and market incentives help, but they’re not enough: about one in thirteen financial advisors has a record of misconduct. When monitoring is hard, personal ethics do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Where do those ethics come from? People form core moral beliefs during adolescence, absorbing norms from the culture around them. We asked whether advisors’ professional conduct is shaped by the ethical climate of their childhood hometowns.

We tracked more than 86,000 financial advisors from their childhood addresses into their adult careers. Using regional data on political corruption, corporate fraud, and other ethical violations, we built a misbehavior index capturing each area’s ethical climate. Does growing up in a place with higher tolerance for rule-breaking predict misconduct decades later?

Yes—by a lot. Advisors raised in Staten Island show misconduct rates around 16 percent; those from Omaha just over 2 percent. Even after advisors move across the country, childhood hometown culture predicts misconduct more strongly than their current location’s culture. The pattern appears even within the same branch office—comparing advisors working at the same firm in the same location, those raised in higher-misbehavior areas are more likely to misbehave than their coworkers.

The takeaway: monitoring and reputation help, but ethical behavior in finance also reflects the moral standards we internalize growing up—what Adam Smith called the impartial spectator that guides us when no one is watching.

Read More:

[Oxford Academic] - Childhood Exposure to Misbehavior and the Culture of Financial Misconduct

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com