Humble leaders can help make groups more effective

Study of teachers links leadership to psychological empowerment

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Leaders of teacher groups who were thought of as humble helped improve professionalism and collaboration among team members, new research has shown.

The study, done in China, found that teachers in the Chinese equivalent of professional learning communities (PLCs) were more willing to share their knowledge and expertise when they rated their PLC leaders as being higher in humility.

The reason was that humble leaders made teachers feel more empowered to share their knowledge because they felt psychologically safe to take risks, said study co-author Roger Goddard, professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University.

“A little humility on the part of leaders goes a long way in helping groups be more productive and collaborative,” Goddard said.

“When people feel their leader admits mistakes and is open to learning from others, everyone contributes more and makes these groups more effective.”

Goddard conducted the study with Yun Qu of Beijing Normal University in China and Jinjie Zhu, a doctoral student in education at Ohio State.  The study was published online recently in the journal Educational Studies.

In the United States and elsewhere, PLCs are designed to facilitate professional development through discussions in which teachers share their best practices and what they have learned through their experiences in the classroom.

“Teachers can feel fairly isolated in the classroom,” Goddard said. “PLCs help teachers build a sense of community and learn from each other about how to improve classroom instruction.”

In China, the equivalent of PLCs are called Teaching Research Groups (TRGs). The leaders of TRGs are experienced teachers who are not traditional administrators, but do serve as supervisors and coordinators and are involved in teacher evaluations, lesson planning and teacher selection.

This study involved 537 teachers from 238 TRGs in a variety of both urban and rural schools in China.

Teachers rated their TRG leaders on three dimensions of humility: their willingness to view themselves accurately, such as admitting when they didn’t know how to do something; their appreciation of others’ strengths; and their teachability, such as being open to other teachers’ advice.

Results showed that teachers who rated their TRG leaders as being higher in humility were more likely to report that they shared their knowledge and expertise in TRG meetings.

“The whole point of these groups is for teachers to share their knowledge, so the fact that humble leaders inspired individuals in their groups to be more willing to do this is very significant,” Goddard said.

The study also found why humble leaders were so effective in helping their teachers share their knowledge.

Results showed that in TRGs with more humble leaders, teachers reported higher levels of psychological safety – they felt they could take risks and knew that others would not act in a way to undermine their efforts.

That feeling of safety led them to feel more psychologically empowered: They felt their jobs had meaning, they had autonomy to do their work, and they felt they were competent and that their work had impact in the school.

So humble leadership led to teachers feeling psychologically safe, which made them feel empowered and ultimately led them to share their experience and knowledge more fully with their colleagues, Goddard said.

“This feeling of teachers that they could safely share their knowledge comes from having a leader who has humility – an openness to learning from others, a willingness to revise opinions, and an appreciation for the strengths of others,” he said.

While this research was done in China, Goddard said he believes the results would be similar in the United States and elsewhere.

“There’s a lot of evidence that suggests trust is a key part of successful organizations. And feeling psychologically safe and empowered to share your knowledge in the workplace is part of building trust, and that’s what humble leaders help create,” he said.

“That is as true in the United States as it is in China.”

In the same way, the results should be applicable outside of education.

“Many of the same principles that make successful organizations cut across cultures and fields.  It makes sense that humble leaders will build trust and better relationships that will increase the effectiveness of any groups that have to work together,” Goddard said.

---

JOURNAL

Educational Studies

DOI

10.1080/03055698.2022.2103648 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Modesty brings gains: linking humble leadership to knowledge sharing via psychological safety and psychological empowerment in professional learning communities

Positive neighbor involvement important if teens don't develop mother-child bond

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Teens who live in neighborhoods with trusted, engaged adults can still develop critical social skills that were not nurtured early in life, according to a new University of Michigan study. 

Previous studies have shown the importance of early mother-child bonding that contributes to teens having social skills, such as positive behaviors that optimize relationships with others, solid academic performance and self-management of emotions. 

But what happens when that connection isn't formed? Social cohesion — or the trust and bonds among neighbors — can benefit the adolescents, researchers said. 

The study focused on social skills among 15-year-olds as a function of early attachment between mothers – also considered primary caregivers – and their 3-year-old kids, as well as neighborhood social cohesion.

Data from 1,883 children ages 1, 3 and 15 came from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a nationally representative study of children born in 20 U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000.

The present study asked 39 questions to determine the children's attachment, such as "is easily comforted by contact or interaction with mother when crying or otherwise distressed."  A higher score indicated a greater level of security in the child’s attachment with the mother. 

To measure adolescent social skills, behavior questions were asked of the 15-year-old participants. High scores in child attachment were positively correlated with increased adolescent social skills, the study showed. 

At age 3, some of the traits reflecting closeness would be "hugs or cuddles with mother without being asked to do so," "responds positively to helpful hints from mother," and "when a mother says follow, child does so willingly."

High scores in neighborhood social cohesion at age 3 were positively correlated with increased adolescent social skills. And when the bond between the mother-child wasn't strong, the impact neighbors had on kids' social skills was important, the research indicated. 

"Children who live in neighborhoods with a high degree of social cohesion may have more opportunities to engage within their community and interact with other trusted adults, as well as form friendships with children," said study lead author Sunghyun Hong, a doctoral student of social work and psychology.

These connections with other sources of support may be the driving force behind the buffering impact of social cohesion on social skills for children who had insecure attachments to their caregivers

"This underscores the value of children having access to supportive and loving relationships with the mother and the surrounding community, even from early childhood," Hong said. 

The data was collected in the late 90s to early 20s, in which mothers were frequently the primary caregivers. However, in recent decades, the definition of primary caregivers has been expanding with families having diverse forms, including more fathers who are engaged in co-parenting and are the sole primary caregiver. Thus, if the research involved father, the study's results would be similar, Hong said. 

The findings, which appear in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, show that living in a neighborhood with high social cohesion is as important as having high attachment security to the mother," she said. 

"This means that when we think about policies and programs to empower our children in the community, we must consider directly supporting the family relations and investing in their surrounding community relations," Hong said.

The study's co-authors were U-M psychology graduate student Felicia Hardi and Kathryn Maguire-Jack, associate professor of social work.

Abstract: The moderating role of neighborhood social cohesion on the relationship between early mother-child attachment security and adolescent social skills

Hong

Hardi

Maguire-Jack

---

JOURNAL

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Children suffering adversity more likely to thrive when parents are emotionally supported

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Emotional support for parents may bolster family resilience and help young children flourish despite adversity, according to a Rutgers study.

“While exposure to adversity increases risks for children, we found that very often children who demonstrated positive signs of flourishing even after being exposed to negative life events, were raised by parents or caregivers who had access to their own supportive networks,” said Lawrence C. Kleinman, the vice chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, who coauthored the study published in the Journal of Pediatrics Nursing with colleagues from Case Western Reserve University and the University of San Diego.  “This finding about the importance of networks was true both for families who exhibited higher levels of resilience and lesser resilience.”

Experts in children’s well-being have known that kids with greater flourishing traits – such as curiosity and the ability to bounce back when faced with challenges – have fewer problems in school, achieve higher grades and make healthier lifestyle choices while children with less flourishing characteristics are more likely to be bullied and demonstrate antisocial behavior.

What wasn’t clearly understood is what promotes flourishing in children who experience adverse childhood experiences, or ACES.  ACES represent, hardships that can range from physical abuse to the death or incarceration of a parent. To examine the flourishing-adversity correlation, researchers measured the factors associated with flourishing and family resilience among children ages 6 months to 5 years.

Using an enhanced data set of 14,494 young children derived from the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health, an annual household-based survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, Kleinman and his colleagues assessed the potential effect of adversity on family resilience and child flourishing.

They found that among resilient families – defined as families with strong teamwork and communication skills – the likelihood of the child flourishing was greater when the family lived in a supportive neighborhood and had emotional support in raising children. But even within families lacking these aspects of resilience, child flourishing was more likely when parents had emotional support.

Primary care health systems – particularly practices that demonstrate characteristics of a patient-centered medical home (PCMH) –  are among the most important venues for parents to obtain emotional support, Kleinman said.

However, for many at-risk children and their caregivers, access to PCMH care can be limited, especially for those reliant on Medicaid, which places a de facto cap on visit lengths because of reimbursement costs.

“Short visits may be insufficient to address the complexity of the Medicaid population, which is characterized by a greater amount of financially disadvantaged families and children with chronic health-care needs,” the researchers wrote.

Expanding reimbursement mechanisms to enable pediatric primary care clinicians to spend more quality time with children and families could facilitate flourishing in children, they said.

“Increasing the availability of parent-centered services in settings that are traditionally conceptualized as pediatric may offer additional opportunities to bolster emotional support for parents and adult caregivers,” said Kleinman. “This is a logical next step to promote flourishing in the face of childhood adversity. Efficiency should not be designed as seeing the most patients in the shortest time, ” Kleinman added.  “Quality takes time and is a pre-requisite for efficiency.”

Dealing with angry customers on social media? De-escalate the high arousal with active listening and empathy

News from the Journal of Marketing

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Dartmouth College, Babson College, and LUISS University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that shows how to de-escalate customer anger on social media sites by using language that signals active listening and empathy.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Complaint De-escalation Strategies on Social Media” and is authored by Dennis Herhausen, Lauren Grewal, Krista Hill Cummings, Anne L. Roggeveen, Francisco Villarroel Ordenes, and Dhruv Grewal.

Social media is rife with angry customers venting their grievances about brands and companies.

According to the latest Customer Rage Study, completed in February 2020, the number of customers who prefer to register complaints via digital platforms rather than by phone or in-person has tripled over the past three years. The study also found that 48% of consumers in the U.S. rely on social media to gauge other people’s experiences with products and services.

What should worry companies is that less than one-third of the respondents indicated being satisfied with service recoveries and two-thirds expressed anger after a failure. The anonymity provided by social media has boosted expressions of anger and many firms struggle to offer effective responses to dissatisfied customers. Failing to de-escalate anger may be a critical reason that many companies fail in their recovery attempts.

Although recent research indicates that firms should address public complaints to limit the detrimental effects on other customers, it is unclear which response strategies are best suited to de-escalate angry customers and evoke a feeling of gratitude in the person making the complaint on social media. Using natural language processing on real social media complaints and in controlled experiments, this research team explains two effective response strategies that firms could adopt to de-escalate negative arousal and enhance costumer gratitude in social media: active listening and empathy.

• Active listening implies paying attention to customers’ complaints and following up by demonstrating that attention through actions such as repeating, paraphrasing, or adapting the language to the customer.

• Empathy involves connecting at an emotional level with complaining customers by indicating understanding of their feelings with explicit expressions of validation and affirmation.

In a text-based context, active listening concerns the style of the response (i.e., linguistic style matching) and empathy is related to the content of the response (i.e., using empathetic words).

When dealing with highly aroused consumers on social media, increasing active listening and empathy in a firm’s response evokes gratitude, even if the actual failure is not yet recovered. The researchers say that “Our three field studies show that increasing active listening by 1% increases the probability of customer gratitude by up to 14% and increasing empathy by 1% increases the probability of customer gratitude by up to 90%. Thus, compared to active listening, empathy is a stronger lever to enhance desired outcomes.”

These findings offer easy-to-implement implications that will help for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and governmental agencies that handle complaints via social media. “Since social media interactions are often driven by high arousal and negative emotions, we hope our findings not only change the way companies deal with angry customers, but also make interaction partners more receptive to each other’s perspective and have better social media conversations,” say the researchers.

While past research often focused on how companies could resolve customers’ problems and this research explores methods to de-escalate anger, a combination of both is a potential direction for future research. Sometimes it might be warranted to first solve the problem and then de-escalate the negative high arousal emotions, while at other times it might be best to prioritize de-escalation.

Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221119977

About the Journal of Marketing 

The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Shrihari Sridhar (Joe Foster ’56 Chair in Business Leadership, Professor of Marketing at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University) serves as the current Editor in Chief.
https://www.ama.org/jm

About the American Marketing Association (AMA) 

As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what is coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM® professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences.
https://www.ama.org

---

JOURNAL

Journal of Marketing

DOI

10.1177/00222429221119977 

ARTICLE TITLE

Complaint Deescalation Strategies on Social Media

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Aug-2022

Food advertisements on Twitch can lead to cravings, purchases

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Food advertisements on social media are pervasive, but research has not yet comprehensively documented the effects of these ads on adolescents and young adults. A new study by researchers at Penn State and Dartmouth College found that advertisements on the social media platform Twitch can lead to cravings for and purchasing of nutrient-poor foods like candy and energy drinks among some adolescents and young adults.

Twitch is a streaming platform that allows viewers to have conversations while sharing a common video feed. It offers channels across a broad range of topics including travel, sports, food, art and music. But videogame play is the original — and by far most common — use of the platform.

The use of Twitch is growing rapidly, with over six billion hours of content viewed on the platform during the first three months of 2021. This represented a 97% increase over the same period in 2020.

“People can be baffled by Twitch, but anyone old enough to have played home videogames as a teenager likely had a similar experience,” said Travis Masterson, assistant professor of nutrition, Broadhurst Career Development Professor for the Study of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, and co-author of the research. “You would go over to a friend’s house after school, or on Saturday morning, and if they were trying to get through a particularly tough part of a videogame, you might sit and watch them play. The videogame was an excuse for a conversation. This was certainly true for me. Twitch offers the same opportunity to hang out in a community with your friends, but now it is all online.

“Endorsement deals on Twitch can be worth many millions of dollars, and younger people — who are always attractive to advertisers — are moving their eyeballs away from television into these more interactive forms of entertainment, often to Twitch specifically," added Masterson.

The researchers noted that, as the popularity of Twitch increased, advertising for nutrient-poor foods like candy and energy drinks became more common on the platform. The research team, which included Jennifer Emond, associate professor of biomedical data science and pediatrics at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, and Catherine Pollack, Emond’s former graduate student, wanted to understand how advertising on Twitch affected the cravings and purchasing habits of viewers.

The team recruited 568 Twitch users through Reddit. Participants were predominantly male and either non-Hispanic White or Asian. Using three existing instruments for measuring food cravings, the researchers sought to understand whether they could predict which people were more susceptible to food advertising.  

In a new publication in the journal Public Health Nutrition, the researchers demonstrated that some Twitch viewers are more likely than others to remember, crave and purchase brands that they see advertised on the streaming platform. The researchers also found that three questions from an instrument called the External Food Cue Responsiveness inventory could help identify members of this "highly susceptible" group. Highly susceptible viewers endorsed the statements, "I want food or drinks that I see others eating," "I want to eat when people talk about food" and "I notice restaurant signs/logos." 

Fifteen percent of study participants reported experiencing cravings of products they saw advertised on Twitch, and 8% reported buying the advertised products. Masterson said that the researchers were concerned that people who are highly susceptible to advertising and who spend multiple hours per day on Twitch could be prone to buying foods that undermine their health.

“In academic research, we are playing catch up with food advertisers,” Masterson explained. “Advertising is pervasive for a reason: It works, and companies understand how it works. People tend to understand that children are susceptible to advertising messages, but we often like to think that once we grow up and start making our own decisions, adults are immune to advertising’s power. But advertising didn’t grow to be a $100 billion-plus industry in the United States because it is ineffective. Advertising works on us, and on a subset of us, it is especially effective.”

Masterson added that academic researchers need to understand consumer behavior as well as advertisers, so that society can determine what advertising is or is not safe in different environments.

“This is a single study, and these results cannot be generalized to everyone, but the study still has broad implications,” said Masterson. “This research shows that some people are highly susceptible to advertising and that the External Food Cue Responsiveness inventory can help researchers identify those vulnerable people.

“I am a gamer. I am on Twitch and am part of these communities,” Masterson continued. “It bothers me when I am watching League of Legends, for example, and I see a branded candy ad in the middle of the game. It bothers me because I know that these ads affect people, including me. This work provides researchers with one tool for understanding who is most affected, and in the long run, that could promote greater health for gamers and everyone who is exposed to food advertising.”

---

JOURNAL

Public Health Nutrition

DOI

10.1017/S1368980022001628 

Neighborhood associations should reflect the communities they belong to, argues a new study

Darla Fortune says it is problematic when organizers are a homogenous group with limited interest in serving all residents

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: DARLA FORTUNE: “WHEN WE ASKED LEADERS ABOUT WHO IS INVOLVED, WE ENCOUNTERED A LOT OF AMBIVALENCE.” PHOTO BY DAVID WARD view more 

CREDIT: DAVID WARD

The difference between a desirable, vibrant neighbourhood and one that is stagnant and moribund can depend on the strength of its local associations. These groups often act as the engine of local public life, organizing the kinds of sporting activities, cookouts, festivals and holiday celebrations that tighten the community fabric.

But a recent paper published in the World Leisure Journal argues that these associations may not always be as inclusive as they seem. Researchers interviewed community leaders in an anonymous, mid-sized city in Ontario. They found that these volunteer groups, which often receive funding and in-kind support from the municipality for the purpose of encouraging neighbourhood belonging, can be insular, exclusive and resistant to change. They also do not always reflect the dynamic communities they are intended to serve.

The research was led by Sarah Byrne and Lindsay Kalbfleisch, former undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo. Darla Fortune, an associate professor of applied human sciences in Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science, supervised the study.

“We went into this research project thinking that everything was going to be positive — that these associations are creating connections between neighbours at festivals and events they plan,” Fortune says. “And that did happen. But we were surprised that the most active members say that while fostering a sense of belonging played a big role in what they do, it wasn’t necessary for everyone in the neighbourhood to be included.”

Fun for some, not all

The researchers noted that the nine association leaders they interviewed were almost exclusively white, affluent homeowners, with the majority raising young families. Others were retirees whose children no longer lived at home.

They note that their contributions are often valuable: they organize community activities and ensure facilities such as pools and parks are maintained, sports leagues are managed and Easter egg hunts and Christmas tree lighting ceremonies are planned. And when families experience challenges, such as with a birth or death in the family, these associations often act as a valued support network.

“But when we asked these leaders about who is involved, we encountered a lot of ambivalence,” Fortune notes. Few events were planned for older adults, and despite the multicultural nature of the neighbourhoods, association events were almost exclusively organized around Christian-inspired themes. The leaders interviewed often said that they would continue to plan events as they had in the past because they personally experienced a sense of belonging through their involvement.

“Nobody told us that they did not want to involve all of their neighbours. But there was no intentional effort to reach out to them.”

Reaching out to the community

The researchers argue that municipally funded neighbourhood associations hold a place of power within their communities and while attending to the goals of leaders — who may not represent the broader neighbourhood — associations risk perpetuating exclusion based on difference. Their hope is that these associations and the municipalities that support them can diversify and expand their focus to foster a genuine sense of belonging for all residents, not just a limited, often affluent subgroup.

“It isn’t necessarily a problem that the most active community members are young white families,” Fortune says. “However, they should be willing to take into consideration that there are people in the mix whose needs have to be met, and that they should be heard from even if they are not actively involved members.”

Read the paper: “Neighbourhood associations may promote belonging, but for whom?”

---

JOURNAL

World Leisure Journal

DOI

10.1080/16078055.2022.2099453 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Neighbourhood associations may promote belonging, but for whom?

Rugby concussion to be studied in grassroots games for the first time by University of Essex

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

 

IMAGE: TWO COLCHESTER RUFC PLAYERS PRACTICE TACKLING view more 

CREDIT: THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX/EAST NEWS

Concussion in grassroots rugby will be investigated in a new cutting-edge technology trial which could transform player safety across the globe.   
    
For the first time the impact of collisions, head injuries and recovery time will be explored across an entire amateur season by researchers at the University of Essex working with wearable tech firm PhysiGo and Colchester Rugby Club’ 

The study comes as the devastating impact of repeated head trauma hits the headlines with some professional players - including England ace Steve Thompson and former Wales captain Ryan Jones – announcing they are suffering from early-onset dementia. 

The research team, from Essex’s School of Sport, Rehabilitation and Exercise Sciences, will record impacts and rotational forces experienced by players using wearable GPS units with embedded artificial intelligence.    
    
The devices combined with rigorous scientific testing will allow Dr Ben Jones to study the first team and youth side across all 22 games of their gruelling season.   
    
Dr Jones, a former England 7’s international who also played scrumhalf for Premiership Rugby sides Northampton Saints and Worcester Warriors, said: “This isn’t a case of trying to make the game soft or ruining it for the millions of people who enjoy it the world over, we just need to know more about its potential risks.   
    
“For years elite athletes have had the benefit of high-level analysis whereas the clubhouses that are the foundation of the game have been left behind.   
 
“Through this study, we can help improve safety and safeguard the sport for future generations.”   

Dr Ben Jones takes a baseline brain scan

CAPTION

A Colchester player takes part in a game of Where's Wally whilst his brain is scanned

CREDIT

University of Essex/East News

Over eight months, forwards and backs’ baseline brain activation will be monitored off-pitch using functional near-infrared spectroscopy combined with cognition testing.   
    
This will allow the team of sports scientists to see if and why key measures of cognition like brain oxygenation levels and differences in general blood flow are affected.    
    
The location and effect of persistent low-level impacts will also be assessed to understand if tackles, small collisions and bumps affect mental ability.   
 
Talks are also underway with governing bodies to introduce sensor-equipped head guards that will provide additional data on concussion risk. 
    
England and British and Irish Lions legend Rory Underwood MBE sits on PhysiGo’s Advisory board.  
 
He said:  “We are not looking to reduce the physicality of the game but use innovative ways of collecting data to gain a better awareness and understanding of the impact of the game.  
    
“This will provide coaches, medical and S&C staff, and players with better quality information and insight to enable better decision making when managing player welfare and "Return to Play" protocols.    

Dr Ben Jones interviews a player about their concussion history

CREDIT

University of Essex/East News

“The aim is to make the game as safe as possible for players, without losing the physical nature of the sport, to improve and prolong their playing career, at all levels.”   
   
Colchester Rugby Club, who play in the Regional 1 South East League, have welcomed the study and the data it will give them.   
 
Club Chairman Karl O’Brien said: “This research underlines our commitment to player welfare 
    
“We are a large community club with five senior men’s teams, in excess of 600 mini and youth players, an ever-growing number of girls and ladies' teams plus a newly formed LGBT squad of players and as always are fully committed to all of these players enjoying their rugby in a safe environment.   
    
“To be allowed to work with the excellent team from the University of Essex is absolutely fantastic for us all and we are proud to be helping people to enjoy the great game for many years to come as safely as possible.”    
    
PhysiGo is in close contact with World Rugby and is hopeful their equipment – which is designed to be affordable for small clubs – will be introduced in coming years.   
    
The work with Colchester and Essex comes after training research with Alton RFC, in Hampshire, Downlands College in Australia, and Cambridge University Hospital trust.   
    
Matt Baker, chief operating officer and co-founder of PhysiGo, said: “PhysiGo is committed to improving people’s health through AI-enabled wearables and it is especially important in contact sports like Rugby.    
    
“This kind of technology is being made available to elite clubs but we feel it is very important to work with grassroots like Colchester RFC and at a price that is inclusive to all.”   

Colchester RUFC players practice contact training

CREDIT

University of Essex/East News

Enhanced ocean oxygenation during Cenozoic warm periods

Earth’s past warm periods witnessed the shrinkage of the open ocean’s oxygen-deficient zones

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR CHEMISTRY

 

IMAGE: STUDIES OF SEDIMENT CORES SHOW THAT OPEN OCEAN OXYGEN-DEFICIENT ZONES (IN RED) SHRANK DURING LONG WARM PERIODS IN THE PAST. view more 

CREDIT: A. AUDERSET, MPI FOR CHEMISTRY, PRODUCED WITH THE "OCEAN DATA VIEW" PROGRAM USING DATA FROM THE "WORLD OCEAN ATLAS (WOA18)".

When oxygen becomes scarce, life has a hard time. This is just as true for mountain regions above 7000 meters but also for bodies of water. For example, in tropical ocean regions off of West America and West Africa and in the northern Indian Ocean, only specialized microbes and organisms with a slow metabolism such as jellyfish can survive.

In the last 50 years, oxygen-deficient zones in the open ocean have increased. This poses major problems not only for marine ecosystems, but also for coastal inhabitants and countries that rely on fisheries as a source of food and income. Scientists have attributed this development to rising global temperatures: Less oxygen dissolves in warmer water, and the tropical ocean’s layers can become more stratified. But how will this development continue, and what happened in past warm periods?

A team led by Alexandra Auderset and Alfredo Martínez-García at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz has shown in a recent study that, in the open ocean, oxygen-deficient zones shrank during warm periods of the past.

The past oxygen content of the oceans can be read in sediments

The researchers read this finding from marine sediment archives. Drill cores can be used to determine past environmental conditions in a similar way to tree rings. Among other things, the sediment layers provide information about the oxygen content of the sea in the past. This is due to microorganisms such as foraminifera, which once lived on the sea surface and whose skeletons sank to the sea floor where they became part of the sediment. During their lifetime, these zooplankton absorbed chemical elements such as nitrogen, whose isotope ratio in turn depended on environmental conditions. Under oxygen-deficient conditions, bacterial denitrification occurs. In this process, the nutrient nitrate is chemically reduced to molecular nitrogen (N2) by bacteria. As they prefer to absorb light isotopes from the water instead of heavy ones, the ratio of light 14N shifts to heavy 15N in periods when the bacteria were active in the oceans. This changing isotopic signal, in turn, can be used to determine the extent of earlier oxygen-deficient zones.

The tropical Pacific Ocean was well oxygenated during past warm periods

Using nitrogen isotopes from foraminifera, the scientists from Mainz and Princeton University showed that denitrification of the water column in the eastern tropical North Pacific was greatly reduced during two warm phases of the Earth's modern era, the Cenozoic, about 16 and 50 million years ago.

"We had not expected this clear effect. From the correlation between high global temperatures and low denitrification rates, we conclude that the tropical Pacific’s oxygen-deficient zones shrank", says Auderset about the results, which were recently published in the journal Nature.

“It’s been a decades-long campaign to develop the methods that allowed for these findings”, says Daniel Sigman, Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences, whose group collaborated in the study. “And it turns out that even these first results are altering our view of the relationship between climate and the ocean’s oxygen conditions.”

It cannot, however, yet be precisely estimated what this means for the current expansion of the oxygen-deficient open ocean zones: “Unfortunately, it remains unclear whether our finding of shrinking marine oxygen-deficient zones is applicable to the coming decades or only to the much longer term", adds the paleoclimatologist Auderset. “This is because we don’t yet know whether short- or long-term processes were responsible for the change.”

Paleoclimate researchers Alexandra Auderset and Alfredo Martínez-García were able to deduce the oxygen content of the oceans in the past from the remains of microorganisms found in marine sediment. They determined the nitrogen isotope ratios in their laboratory, as part of a long-term collaboration with Daniel Sigman and his research group at Princeton University.

CREDIT

Simone Moretti, MPI for Chemistry

Searching for the cause

One leading possibility for the decline in oxygen-deficient zones under warming involves a reduction in the upwelling-fueled biological productivity of tropical surface waters. A decline in productivity could have occurred because winds weakened in the equatorial Pacific under warmer climate.

In the current study, the authors also found that during the two warm periods of the Cenozoic – the mid-Miocene climate optimum about 16 million years ago and the early Eocene climate optimum about 50 million years ago – the temperature difference between high and low latitudes was much smaller than at present. Both, the global warming and the weakening of high-to-low latitude temperature difference, should have worked to weaken tropical winds, reducing the upwelling of nutrient-rich deep seawater. This, in turn, would have resulted in lower biological productivity at the surface and less sinking of dead algal organic matter into the deep ocean, providing less fuel for the oxygen consumption that produces oxygen-deficient conditions. This chain of events can occur relatively quickly. Thus, if a similar change applies to human-driven global warming as well, then there could be a decline in the extent of open ocean oxygen deficiency in the coming decades.

Alternatively, the cause may lie in the Southern Ocean, thousands of kilometers away. During past prolonged warm periods, the exchange water between Southern Ocean surface waters and the deep ocean (“deep ocean overturning") may have accelerated, leading to higher oxygen in the ocean interior as a whole and thus shrinking the low-oxygen zones. If stronger Southern Ocean-driven deep ocean overturning was the main cause of the shrunken tropical oxygen-deficient zones, then this effect would take more than a hundred years at earliest to come into play.

“Both mechanisms probably play a role”, says Martínez-García, “The race is now on to figure out which mechanism is most important.”

---

JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-05017-0 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Enhanced ocean oxygenation during Cenozoic warm periods

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

31-Aug-2022