Publications by authors named "Nichole Kelly"

Executive functioning (EF) has been linked to chronic disease risk in children. Health behaviors are thought to partially explain this association. The current cross-sectional study evaluated specific domains of EF and varied health behaviors in three pediatric life stages.

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  • Despite the known benefits of physical activity (PA), only 20% of youth globally engage in enough PA, prompting a systematic review of healthcare prescriptions aimed at increasing PA among this group.* -
  • The review analyzed 64 full articles, ultimately identifying 9 relevant studies from various locations, mainly in medical settings, which found that most PA prescriptions were verbally and written, but had minimal effects on increasing youth PA levels.* -
  • The conclusions emphasized a lack of robust research on the effectiveness of PA prescriptions delivered by healthcare practitioners, suggesting that future studies should focus on objectively measured PA and include more diverse youth participants.*
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Certain caregiver feeding practices, including restrictive feeding for weight control, restrictive feeding for health, emotion regulation feeding, and reward feeding, are known to negatively influence short- and long-term child eating and health outcomes. Beyond body size, the precise psychosocial characteristics of caregivers more likely to engage in such feeding practices are unknown. In particular, caregivers who have experienced discrimination based on their weight, who have internalized those biased beliefs, or who find food to be very rewarding may be more likely to use restrictive or controlling feeding practices.

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Children in rural communities consume more energy-dense foods relative to their urban peers. Identifying effective interventions for improving energy intake patterns are needed to address these geographic disparities. The primary aim of this study was to harness the benefits of physical activity on children's executive functioning to see if these improvements lead to acute changes in eating behaviors.

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Weight-based discrimination (WBD) is common and associated with reduced physical and emotional functioning. WBD is common in the workplace, yet no studies have evaluated a WBD intervention delivered in a worksite setting. This study evaluated the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effectiveness of a 3-hour, remote-delivered WBD intervention at a large public university.

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  • Measuring children's dietary intake is challenging due to social desirability bias, where they may alter their behavior to be viewed more favorably.
  • The study assessed 82 children to see if this bias influenced their calorie consumption during a lab meal, focusing on differences by food type and sex.
  • Results showed that higher social desirability bias led to lower calorie intake from snacks for all children and from fruits and vegetables specifically for boys, indicating that social perceptions may affect eating habits.
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Introduction: Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have the potential to improve students' mood, behavior and cognitive functioning; yet, little is known about the feasibility and acceptability of adapting such programs for rural middle schools.

Methods: An exploratory qualitative evaluation was conducted to examine the feasibility and acceptability of an initial trial delivery of , a trauma-informed, mindfulness-based mental health curriculum. In this single-group design study, 10 weekly lessons were taught in a middle school located in a rural town in the pacific northwest during 6th grade students' P.

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Background: Longitudinal measures of diet spanning pregnancy through adolescence are needed from a large, diverse sample to advance research on the effect of early-life nutrition on child health. The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, which includes 69 cohorts, >33,000 pregnancies, and >31,000 children in its first 7-y cycle, provides such data, now publicly available.

Objectives: This study aimed to describe dietary intake data available in the ECHO Program as of 31 August, 2022 (end of year 6 of Cycle 1) from pregnancy through adolescence, including estimated sample sizes, and to highlight the potential for future analyses of nutrition and child health.

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Background: The extent to which physical and social attributes of neighborhoods play a role in childhood asthma remains understudied.

Objective: To examine associations of neighborhood-level opportunity and social vulnerability measures with childhood asthma incidence.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cohort study used data from children in 46 cohorts participating in the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program between January 1, 1995, and August 31, 2022.

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  • The study investigates loss of control (LOC) eating among young men, looking at how emotions play a role before and after these eating episodes.
  • 31 young men participated in a 14-day assessment, tracking their eating habits and emotions, but results showed no significant change in negative affect before or after LOC eating.
  • Surprisingly, while negative emotions didn’t seem to drive LOC eating, participants experienced a significant decrease in positive emotions like happiness and excitement after binge eating, suggesting a need for further research on these emotional shifts.
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School communities are not immune to the alarming increase in opioid-related deaths occurring in the United States during the past decade. The purpose of this article is to share how a middle school in New York State, beginning in the late fall of 2022, successfully implemented a program to reduce the likelihood of opioid overdose deaths in their building through expansion of the accessibility of and education and training in use of naloxone, an opioid antagonist. The program is applicable for all K-12 campuses and follows the Model of Greater Awareness, Improved Training, and Increased Availability of and Accessibility to Intervention Devices, based on the steps successfully used for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest emergencies.

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U.S. Hispanic/Latino adults are at heightened risk for developing diet-related chronic diseases.

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Objective: To evaluate whether social networking site (SNS) and dating app use is associated with disordered eating in young men.

Methods: 42 men (18-35y) who reported ≥4 loss of control (LOC) eating episodes in the prior month completed a 14-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol. Five times throughout the day, participants responded to prompts regarding their dietary restraint, body dissatisfaction, and LOC eating.

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Importance: Physical and social neighborhood attributes may have implications for children's growth and development patterns. The extent to which these attributes are associated with body mass index (BMI) trajectories and obesity risk from childhood to adolescence remains understudied.

Objective: To examine associations of neighborhood-level measures of opportunity and social vulnerability with trajectories of BMI and obesity risk from birth to adolescence.

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Disordered eating (DE) exhibited by individuals with intersecting marginalized identities may be less likely to be perceived as pathological compared to DE exhibited by individuals with non-marginalized identities. The present experiment tested the intersectional impact of weight status and race stimuli on responses to DE in a college sample. Undergraduate students (N = 193, M = 18.

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Article Synopsis
  • Loss of control (LOC) eating is a common but under-researched disordered eating behavior among men, often linked with disinhibited eating habits.
  • A study with 42 young men used daily assessments over 14 days to examine how various eating behaviors impact feelings of negative affect.
  • Results showed that while multiple disinhibited eating behaviors correlated with negative emotions, the sensation of losing control during eating was specifically highlighted as a key area for potential therapeutic intervention.
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Societal changes during the COVID-19 pandemic may affect children's health behaviors and exacerbate disparities. This study aimed to describe children's health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, how they vary by sociodemographic characteristics, and the extent to which parent coping strategies mitigate the impact of pandemic-related financial strain on these behaviors. This study used pooled data from 50 cohorts in the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes Program.

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Much of the work on the development of appetite self-regulation in early childhood employs tasks assessing Delay of Gratification (DoG). While this skill is thought to rely on "cool" cognitive processes like effortful control, executive functioning, and self-regulation, demonstration of how laboratory measures of food DoG relate to common assessments of those cognitive processes in community samples of children is needed. This study presents secondary data investigating the associations between two laboratory tasks of food DoG, the Snack Delay and Tongue Tasks, and an array of laboratory and parent-report cognitive measures in a sample of 88 children ages 3-6 ( age = 4.

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Objective: Depression in adolescence is linked to risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D). In this secondary data analysis of a randomized controlled trial comparing cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to a control program to ameliorate insulin resistance via reducing depression symptoms, we examine which CBT change mechanisms (e.g.

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Background/objectives: Previous research indicates that youth with obesity exhibit deficits in executive functioning (EF), which often take the form of impaired response inhibition. One aspect of EF not previously studied in obesity is the adaptive process known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), the suppression/inhibition of intrusive or non-target items by the retrieval of specific items from memory. The present study investigated if child or adolescent obesity disrupts the ability to inhibit retrieval of intrusive memories.

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African American men are rarely the focus of attention in investigations of loss of control (LOC) eating. Theory and extant data support a robust link between body dissatisfaction and LOC eating behaviors in women. Ethnic identity may buffer this association, as the degree to which racially and ethnically diverse women identify with their ethnic group has been shown to decrease the relevancy of the Western culture body ideal, thereby decreasing disordered eating pathology.

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Objective: Beyond sleep duration, other facets of sleep such as variability and timing may be associated with obesity risk in youth. However, data are limited. Using a longitudinal design, this study tested whether multiple facets of sleep were associated with fat mass gain over 1 year.

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Parental distress is associated with less healthful child feeding practices. In this preliminary study, we examined how changes in distress from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic were associated with similar changes in feeding practices in a sample of mothers of preschool-aged children. In addition, we examined how pre-pandemic laboratory measures of maternal self-regulation moderated this association.

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Extant research supports a direct association between parent's own emotional eating and their child's emotional eating, and demonstrates correlations among parent emotional eating, feeding practices, and child emotional eating. However, the majority of this work focuses on the separate influences of these factors. The current study aims to add to the literature by simultaneously examining the indirect effects of three major parental feeding practices (i.

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