Learn about why more advertising means less happiness; how to calculate your maximum heart rate; and how parents and kids can help language researchers during the pandemic, with help from an app called KidTalk.
Learn about why more advertising means less happiness; how to calculate your maximum heart rate; and how parents and kids can help language researchers during the pandemic, with help from an app called KidTalk.
The more ads we see, the less happy we are by Kelsey Donk
Max heart rate? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Julien)
KidTalk lets parents create audio scrapbooks while helping language research by Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/advertising-makes-us-unhappy-the-myth-of-maximum-heart-rate-and-how-parents-can-help-language-researchers-with-an-app
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why more advertising means less happiness; and, we’ll answer a listener question about how to calculate your maximum heart rate. You’ll also learn about how parents and kids can help language researchers during the pandemic.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
What makes a happy country? The food? Nice weather? Lots of community resources? Maybe. But thanks to new research, we know one thing that makes a country unhappy: advertising. The more billboards, commercials, and internet ads we see, the less happy we are. Yeah: it’s not just you.
As for “why” ads can make us unhappy — if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. By definition, advertisements make us want things. They’re designed to make you feel like your life needs something to be complete. When you sense a void in your life, you’ll spend more on things to fill it.
Advertisers would disagree with that, though. They’d say their ads aren’t about making people feel incomplete. They just provide people with information on what’s out there to buy.
Well, researchers decided to put this argument to the test by looking at the data. They looked at the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 European citizens from 27 countries. And they didn’t just do a quick dip. They checked in on how these people had been doing from 1980 to 2011, and they also tracked the amount of advertising spending in their countries over the same period.
They found that when companies spend more money on advertising in one country, the well-being of people who live there goes down. According to the study, when people are exposed to a lot of advertising, their aspirations rise. But it’s not that they just have a lot of hope for their future selves. Instead, advertising makes people feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. Advertising is a real buzzkill.
And this was more than just an interesting correlation. The researchers controlled for other factors that might be affecting happiness, and used a lot of statistical methods to ensure that one really was causing the other. They were even able to show that a rise or fall in advertising one year could predict a rise or fall in a whole country’s happiness in the following years. Ugh.
So if scrolling through targeted ads on Instagram or flipping through glossy placements in magazines makes you feel lousy, you’re not alone. Advertising doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon. But for now, maybe pick up a book instead.
We got a listener question from Julien, who writes, “Wondering if you could do an episode on Max HR [maximum heart rate] for us exercise buffs. I was just calculating my own and started wondering about the history of 220 minus age and why that made any sense.” Right up my alley, Julien!
These days, the most common places you’ll find people talking about maximum heart rate are in fitness circles. Athletes commonly use their maximum heart rate to calculate how strenuous a given workout should be. Like a moderate intensity workout should make your heart beat between 50 and 70 percent of its absolute maximum; vigorous intensity is more like 70 to 85 percent. (And side note: you don’t have to do this. If you can carry on a conversation during a workout but not sing, it’s medium intensity. If you can’t say more than a few words, it’s vigorous.) Anyway, you could figure out your maximum heart rate by exercising as hard as you possibly can for an extended period of time — I mean, scientists actually measure it by making people run on a treadmill that gets steeper every few minutes until they quit — but that’s hard. Instead, most people use the formula that Julien mentioned: 220 minus your age.
How was this formula calculated, you might ask? Did scientists measure thousands of people from diverse backgrounds and plot their heart rates on a graph that mapped exactly onto this formula? No, no they did not. It was devised in 1970 by a young physician who was prepping for a conference presentation about how strenuously heart disease patients could exercise. He found 10 studies that recorded the maximum heart rates of various people, and he plotted the data points on a graph. He drew a line through the points and noticed that the data tended to follow the formula 220 minus age.
But here’s the thing: the dots were all over the place. The line showed a trend, but there were plenty of outliers. And anyway, the people in these studies weren’t representative of the whole population. Since then, there have been many other studies that have calculated more accurate, but also more complicated formulas for maximum heart rate, but 220 minus age remains the one that fitness buffs use the most. My advice? If you wear a watch that tracks your heart rate, do some hard sprints and see where your heart rate maxes out. Then, use that number to calculate your workout intensity. You’re your best comparison, after all. Thanks for your question, Julien! If you have a question, send it in to podcast at curiosity dot com or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
You know that saying “kids say the darndest things?” Well, those things they say are really important to language researchers. Unfortunately, the pandemic is making it kinda hard for scientists to actually get kids into their labs. So researchers are asking for help from willing parents. They’ve created an app parents can use to capture the cute things their kids say. The researchers get data AND parents get digital memories to look back on — everybody wins! We’re covering this app today because whether you have kids or not, it’s a pretty neat idea — but this is NOT a sponsored segment. Just to be clear.
The app is called KidTalk, and here’s why it’s important. Scientists who study children’s language development typically know the average age that kids develop the ability to produce various sounds — but when you look at individual children, there’s a lot of variation. Maybe one kid will learn to make an “s” sound at age 3, but another doesn’t until age 7. And another might not be able to produce adult speech at all without therapy. Scientists aren’t sure why. They typically study this stuff by inviting families to their labs or going to schools. But of course COVID-19 has closed schools and shuttered labs. So researchers are getting creative to keep their work going.
In that spirit, a team from Boston College and the University of Maryland created KidTalk, an app that lets families create virtual audio scrapbooks. You just record clips of your child speaking and save them to your scrapbook. You can even share the clips with family, which makes the app a great way to keep everyone connected during such an isolated time. And of course, on a broader scale, these speech samples will help researchers learn more about kids’ language development over time and how they’re being impacted by COVID-19.
KidTalk is web based, so you don’t have to download anything to your device. You just pull up the site in a browser at kid-talk-scrapbook-dot-org, then set up your profile, and hit record. Next, you type out what your kid is actually saying. This is particularly important because it helps researchers understand what’s being said. There’s even a game where you can listen to clips from other children and guess what’s being said. That’s all part of the research, too — another study is focused on the strategies adults use to understand childrens’ speech. That might even help voice assistants recognize when they’re asking to play “Baby Shark” for the seventeenth time.
Just like that you’ll have a digital timeline of your child’s development, and you’ll be doing a great service to science. Happy scrapbooking!
Leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208!
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about why some words are more memorable than others;
The hilarious way fish eggs make their way to landlocked lakes;
Why you have tiny rocks in your ears;
The surprising origins of chemotherapy; (started as a chemical weapon? Other way to tease this story without giving it away?)
And more!
CODY: Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Ashley Hamer, and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!