We investigated spectral resting-state EEG in persons with chronic stroke-induced aphasia to determine its reliability, sensitivity, and relationship to functional behaviors. Resting-state EEG has not yet been characterized in this population and was selected given the demonstrated potential of resting-state investigations using other neuroimaging techniques to guide clinical decision-making. Controls and persons with chronic stroke-induced aphasia completed two EEG recording sessions, separated by approximately 1 month, as well as behavioral assessments of language, sensorimotor, and cognitive domains. Power in the classic (...) frequency bands was examined via spectral analysis of resting-state EEG data. Results suggest that power in the theta, alpha, and beta bands is reliable for use as a repeated measure. Significantly greater theta and lower beta power was observed in persons with aphasia than controls. Finally, in PWAs theta power negatively correlated with performance on a discourse informativeness measure, while alpha and beta power positively correlated with performance on the same measure. This indicates that spectral rsEEG slowing observed in PWAs in the chronic stage is pathological and suggests a possible avenue for directly altering brain activation to improve behavioral function. Taken together, these results suggest that spectral resting-state EEG holds promise for sensitive measurement of functioning and change in persons with chronic aphasia. Future studies investigating the utility of these measures as biomarkers of frank or latent aphasic deficits and treatment response in chronic stroke-induced aphasia are warranted. (shrink)

Background Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are federally mandated to include both nonscientific and unaffiliated representatives in their membership. Despite this, there is no guidance or policy on the selection of unaffiliated or non-scientist members and reports indicate a lack of clarity regarding members’ roles. In the present study we sought to explore processes of recruitment, training, and the perceived roles for unaffiliated and non-scientist members of IRBs.Methods We distributed a self-administered REDCap survey of members of the Association for the Accreditation (...) of Human Research Protection Programs familiar with IRB member recruitment. The survey included closed and open-ended questions regarding: the operation of the HRPP/IRB(s), how unaffiliated and non-scientist members are recruited, whether they had faced challenges recruiting for these roles, and training and mentorship offered. The survey also collected information regarding the perceived value and roles of unaffiliated and non-scientist members.Results 76 responses were included in the analysis (38% completion rate). The most common approach for recruitment was referral from current IRB members, with almost half of respondents indicating challenges recruiting unaffiliated members. Over 75% indicated no additional training was provided to unaffiliated or non-scientist members compared to affiliated or scientist members. Most common supports provided were travel/parking expenses and honoraria. Commonly perceived roles were to provide an independent voice from the participant perspective, notably regarding consent processes and materials.Conclusions Respondents indicated challenges in defining unaffiliated and non-scientist members and limited practices toward recruitment and support. Future work should more closely examine the challenges in defining these roles and applying the definitions in practice, as well as strategies that may improve recruitment and retention of unaffiliated and non-scientist members. (shrink)

Due to the concerns over the effects of video game play, this study investigated adolescents’ moral development and their video game play. 166 adolescents aged 11-18 years (M = 13.08 SD = 1.91) attending an English school completed an online survey, which included a measure of moral development and questions regarding video game play. In contrast to previous research, male participants were found to have significantly (p = 0.02) higher moral reasoning scores than females. The results also suggested a transition (...) in moral development, which takes place between the ages of 12–14. The results of moral development and video game played suggested both positive and negative relationships. Regression analysis suggested that there was a significant positive relationship between the more types of game genres played and higher moral scores. Although not significant, the results suggested trend for the following variables; years playing video games, mature content, engagement, moral narrative, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, and length of time playing video games had a negative relationship with moral scores. The implications of these results are discussed with regards to moral education and the variables involved in video game play including the role content of video games. (shrink)

Previous research with video game play and moral development with adolescents, found both positive and negative relationships. This study aimed to extend this research to explore moral development and video game play with University students. One hundred and thirty-five undergraduate students (M = 20.29 SD = 2.70) took part in an online survey. The results suggested higher moral reasoning for participants who described themselves as gamers and those which do not players, compared to the those who play but do not (...) identify as gamers. It was suggested that males had higher moral scores and more mature reasoning than females. The results of a regression analysis suggested that there were no significant predictors for moral development from either game play or the demographic variables. The findings suggest that moral development could be less influenced by sex, age, and video game play factors such as video game content and amount of game play, than was previously thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. (...) Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

As organizational leaders worry about the appalling low percentage of people who feel engaged in their work, academics are trying to understand what causes an increase in engagement. We collected survey data from 231 team members from two organizations. We examined the impact of team members’ emotional intelligence (EI) and their perception of shared personal vision, shared positive mood, and perceived organizational support (POS) on the members’ degree of organizational engagement. We found shared vision, shared mood, and POS have a (...) direct, positive association with engagement. In addition, shared vision and POS interact with EI to positively influence engagement. Besides highlighting the importance of shared personal vision, positive mood, and POS, our study contributes to the emergent understanding of EI by revealing EI’s amplifying effect on shared vision and POS in relation to engagement. We conclude by discussing the research and practical implications of this study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. (...) Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

Patients with apraxia perform poorly when demonstrating how an object is used, particularly when pantomiming the action. However, these patients are able to accurately identify, and to pick up and move objects, demonstrating intact ventral and dorsal stream visuomotor processing. Appropriate object manipulation for skilled use is thought to rely on integration of known and visible object properties associated with ‘ventro-dorsal’ stream neural processes. In apraxia, it has been suggested that stored object knowledge from the ventral stream may be less (...) readily available to incorporate into the action plan, leading to an over-reliance on the objects’ visual affordances in object-directed motor behaviour. The current study examined grasping performance in left hemisphere stroke patients with (N = 3) and without (N = 9) apraxia, and in age-matched healthy control participants (N = 14), where participants repeatedly grasped novel cylindrical objects of varying weight distribution. Across two conditions, object weight distribution was indicated by either a memory-associated cue (object colour) or visual-spatial cue (visible dot over the weighted end). Participants were required to incorporate object-weight associations to effectively grasp and balance each object. Control groups appropriately adjusted their grasp according to each object’s weight distribution across each condition, whereas throughout the task two of the three apraxic patients performed poorly on both the memory-associated and visual-spatial cue conditions. A third apraxic patient seemed to compensate for these difficulties but still performed differently to control groups. Patients with apraxia performed normally on the neutral control condition when grasping the evenly weighted version. The pattern of behaviour in apraxic patients suggests impaired integration of visible and known object properties attributed to the ventro-dorsal stream: in learning to grasp the weighted object accurately, apraxic patients applied neither pure knowledge-based information (the memory-associated condition) nor higher-level information given in the visual-spatial cue condition. Disruption to ventro-dorsal stream predicts that apraxic patients will have difficulty learning to manipulate new objects on the basis of information other than low-level visual cues such as shape and size. (shrink)

The inconsistent definition of empathy has had a negative impact on both research and practice. The aim of this article is to review and critically appraise a range of definitions of empathy and, through considered analysis, to develop a new conceptualisation. From the examination of 43 discrete definitions, 8 themes relating to the nature of empathy emerged: “distinguishing empathy from other concepts”; “cognitive or affective?”; “congruent or incongruent?”; “subject to other stimuli?”; “self/other distinction or merging?”; “trait or state influences?”; “has (...) a behavioural outcome?”; and “automatic or controlled?” The relevance and validity of each theme is assessed and a new conceptualisation of empathy is offered. The benefits of employing a more consistent and complete definition of empathy are discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundInternational partnerships in research are receiving ever greater attention, given that technology has diminished the restriction of geographical barriers with the effects of globalisation becoming more evident, and populations increasingly more mobile.DiscussionIn this article, we examine the merits and risks of such collaboration even when strict universal ethical guidelines are maintained. There has been widespread examples of outcomes beneficial and detrimental for both high and low –income countries which are often initially unintended.SummaryThe authors feel that extreme care and forethought should (...) be exercised by all involved parties, despite the fact that many implications from such international work can be extremely hard to predict. However ultimately the benefits gained by enhancing medical research and philanthropy are too extensive to be ignored. (shrink)

It can be hard to see where money fits in the world. Money seems both real and imaginary, since it has obvious causal powers, but is also, just as obviously, something humans have just made up. Recent philosophical accounts of money have declared it to be real, but for very different reasons. John Searle and Francesco Guala disagree over whether money is just whatever acts like money, or just whatever people believe to be money. In developing their accounts of institutions (...) as a part of social reality, each uses money as a paradigm institution, but they disagree on how institutions exist. Searle argues that the institution of money belongs to an ontological level separate from the physical world, held up by the collective intentions of a group, while Guala claims that money is a part of the ordinary physical world and is just whatever performs a “money-like function” in a group, regardless of what that group believes about it. Here, we argue that any purely functional account like Guala’s will be unable to capture the distinctive phenomenon of money, since monetary transactions are defined by the attitudes transactors hold toward them. Money will be obscured or misidentified if defined functionally. As we go on to show by examining recent work by Smit et al., belief in money does not require taking on all of Searle’s ontological commitments, but money and mental contents will stand or fall together. (shrink)

Earth system science (ESS) has identified worrying trends in the human impact on fundamental planetary systems. In this conceptual article, we discuss the implications of this research for business schools and management education (ME). We argue that ESS findings raise significant concerns about the relationship between business and nature and, consequently, a radical reframing is required to embed economic and social activity within the global sustainability of natural systems. This has transformative implications for ME. To illustrate this reframing, we apply (...) the ESS lenses of social-ecological interdependence, multiscalar relations, environmental governance, and environmental values to the ME functional domains of institutional purpose, social context and engagement, pedagogical practice, curricular design, and research focus. Our work contributes to the literature on business education for sustainability and the business-society-nature nexus. We explore and apply key ESS findings and concepts, discuss normative implications of these ideas, and offer guidance on transformational pathways for business schools and ME. (shrink)

The authors conducted a baseline survey of baccalaureate and graduate degree health humanities programs in the United States and Canada. The object of the survey was to formally assess the current state of the field, to gauge what kind of resources individual programs are receiving, and to assess their self-identified needs to become or remain programmatically sustainable, including their views on the potential benefits of program accreditation. A 56-question baseline survey was sent to 111 institutions with baccalaureate programs and 20 (...) institutions with graduate programs. Respondents were asked about three areas: (1) program administration (managing unit, paid director, faculty lines, paid staff, funding sources); (2) educational program (curricular structure, CIP code usage, completion rates); and (3) views on accreditation for the field. A clear majority of respondents agreed that some form of accreditation or consultation service could address resource and sustainability issues. Overall, the survey responses to staffing, curricular structure, and support suggest the need for developing a sustainable infrastructure for health humanities. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented and highly threatening, constrained, and confusing social and educational environment, we decided to expand the traditional focus of the extraneous load in Cognitive Load Theory acknowledging the psychological environment in which learning occurs. We therefore adapted and implemented principles of the CLT to reduce extraneous load for our students by facilitating their educational activities. Given previous empirical support for the principles of CLT, it was expected that the adoption of these principles might enable our (...) students to cultivate attitudes and skills across multiple domains such as online learning and presentation technologies, implementing and maintaining a “classroom atmosphere” in a virtual environment, participating in discussions among large online groups of students, facilitating group work, providing virtual office hours for students, and proactively planning for upcoming semesters. (shrink)

Improvements to the validity of psychological science depend upon more than the actions of individual researchers. Editors, journals, and publishers wield considerable power in shaping the incentives that have ushered in the generalizability crisis. These gatekeepers must raise their standards to ensure authors' claims are supported by evidence. Unless gatekeepers change, changes made by individual scientists will not be sustainable.

Why are young women less likely than young men to persist in academic science and engineering? Drawing on 57 in-depth interviews with PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in the United States, we describe how, in academic science and engineering, motherhood is constructed in opposition to professional legitimacy, and as a subject of fear, repudiation, and public controversy. We call this the “specter of motherhood.” This specter disadvantages young women and amplifies anticipatory concerns about combining an academic career with motherhood. By (...) specifying the content of cultural discourses about motherhood in academic workplaces and the processes by which these ideas circulate, produce disadvantage, and inform young, childless scientists and engineers’ career plans, our findings offer novel insight into mechanisms contributing to inequality in academic careers. (shrink)

New Caledonian crow populations have developed complex tools that show suggestive evidence of cumulative change. These tool designs, therefore, appear to be the product of cumulative technological culture. We suggest that tool-using NC crows offer highly useful data for current debates over the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of CTC.

In the United States, interest in urban agriculture has grown dramatically. While community gardens have sprouted across the landscape, home food gardens—arguably an ever-present, more durable form of urban agriculture—have been overlooked, understudied, and unsupported by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academics. In part a response to the invisibility of home gardens, this paper is a manifesto for their study in the Global North. It seeks to develop a multi-scalar and multidisciplinary research framework that acknowledges the garden’s social and ecological (...) or material dimensions. Given the lack of existing research, we draw on the more extensive literature on home gardens in the South and community gardens in the North to develop a set of hypotheses about the social-ecological effects of urban home food gardens in the North. These gardens, we hypothesize, contribute to food security, community development, cultural reproduction, and resilience at multiple scales; conserve agrobiodiversity; and support urban biodiversity. They may also have negative ecological effects, such as stormwater nutrient loading. Because of the entanglement of the social and the ecological or material in the garden, we review three theoretical perspectives—social ecological systems theory, actor-network theory, and assemblage theory—that have been or could be applied to the multi-scalar and multidisciplinary study of the garden. We also review sampling and analytic methods for conducting home garden research. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities to extend the research agenda beyond descriptive analysis, the primary focus of garden research to date. (shrink)

Introspection, or metacognition, is the capacity to reflect on our own thoughts and behaviours. Here, we investigated how one specific metacognitive ability develops in adolescence, a period of life associated with the emergence of self-concept and enhanced self-awareness. We employed a task that dissociates objective performance on a visual task from metacognitive ability in a group of 56 participants aged between 11 and 41 years. Metacognitive ability improved significantly with age during adolescence, was highest in late adolescence and plateaued going (...) into adulthood. Our results suggest that awareness of one’s own perceptual decisions shows a prolonged developmental trajectory during adolescence. (shrink)

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affirms the existence of a divine woman, a Heavenly Mother as a companion to a Heavenly Father. Feminist philosophers of religion have argued for the importance of a divine feminine as a challenge to patriarchal religion, yet the Heavenly Mother tradition has not created an egalitarian religion in Mormonism. Mormon feminists have charged that relative silence about this teaching is a primary cause of this discrepancy. This paper explores the performative dynamics of (...) speech and silence and their relationship to presence and absence in a feminist analysis of power. (shrink)

Treatments for students with problematic levels of music performance anxiety commonly rely on approaches in which students are referred to psychotherapists or other clinical professionals for individual care that falls outside of their music training experience. However, a more transdisciplinary approach in which MPA treatment is effectively integrated into students’ training in music/performing arts colleges by teachers who work in consultation with clinical psychologists may prove more beneficial, given the resistance students often experience toward psychotherapy. Training singing teachers, and perhaps (...) music teachers at large, to use an evidence-based coaching strategy like Acceptance and Commitment Coaching to directly manage students’ MPA is one such approach. Building on the work of a previous study in which ACC was administered by a singing teacher to a musical theatre student with problematic MPA, we piloted the effectiveness of a six-session, group ACC course for a sample of performing arts students with MPA related to vocal performances, using a mixed-methods design. The coach here was also a singing teacher without a clinical background, and her training in ACC by a clinical psychologist was of a similar duration as the previous teacher’s. Similar to the musical theatre student, the students reported being significantly less fused with their MPA-related cognitions, more accepting of their MPA-related physiological symptoms, and more psychologically flexible while performing in general, and these improvements were maintained after 3 months. Furthermore, they appeared to lower their shame over having MPA and change how they thought in relation to one another. Of note, these improvements were similar to those shown by seven vocal students with MPA after they received Acceptance and Commitment Therapy from a clinical psychologist, but with larger reductions in shame and better acceptance of MPA, which suggests a non-clinical, group ACC intervention that includes supportive discussions to normalize MPA and challenges attempts to control it may be more helpful than individual psychotherapy. These results are promising and indicate a brief training in ACC may be sufficient for singing teachers to provide significant benefit for students with problematic MPA. (shrink)

The study is carried out in five chapters, with the first two offering a reconsideration of the function of the imagination in the Transcendental Deduction and Schematism of the first Critique. The last three follow the order of topics discussed by Kant in the third Critique in regard to judgments of taste, the sublime, and teleology; they conclude with an interpretation of "productive imagination" as a "model for the ideal of intellectual intuition". The comparison between "human and divine spontaneity" is (...) introduced in the first chapter, where Gibbons notes that while we have "Kant's explicit and repeated emphasis on the difference" between these, "in considering the similarity of these types of spontaneity," she wishes "to correct a possible imbalance in Kant's exposition": there are, she suggests, "formal similarities between these types of spontaneity". The main thrust of the first chapter is to respond to a particular reading of Kant—namely, to those unsympathetic interpreters who see in the Deductions an "imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" and also to those who give a "sympathetic reading" but do so in terms of an identification of "all aspects of synthesis with concept application," thereby reducing the "role of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination to that of unifying a manifold of intuition under a concept". Gibbons holds instead that the "theory of synthesis... focuses on the nature of human cognition and what is required for us to know anything about objects" and, further, that it presupposes "the broader function of the imagination as grounding the possibility of concept-application in the first place". (shrink)

Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages contributes to multiple health problems including obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay, especially among children. Excise taxation has been proven efficacious in changing purchasing behaviors related to tobacco use with resulting improvements in public health outcomes. Similar taxes applied to SSBs are starting to take hold internationally and domestically. SSB taxes have been proposed in over 30 U.S. jurisdictions since 2009, but only Berkeley has passed and implemented one to date. Given empirical evidence of their effectiveness, governments (...) should consider implementation of SSB excise taxes based on uniform definitions of SSBs and other factors. (shrink)

Escalating demands for limited food supplies at America’s food banks and pantries during the COVID-19 pandemic have raised ethical concerns underlying “first-come, first-served” distributions strategies. A series of model ethical principles are designed to guide ethical allocations of these resources to assure greater access among persons facing food insecurity.

A child’s death is a profound loss for mothers and affects hundreds of thousands of women. Mothers report inconsolable and progressive grief that is distinct from depression and impacts daily emotions and functions. The brain mechanisms responsible for this relatively common and profound mental health problem are unclear, hampering its clinical recognition and care. In an initial exploration of this condition, we used resting state functional MRI (fMRI) scans to examine functional connectivity in key circuits, and task-based fMRI to examine (...) brain network activity in grieving mothers in response to pictures of their deceased child and as well as recognizable deceased celebrities and unfamiliar individuals. We compared nine mothers who had lost an adult child and aged-matched control mothers with a living child of a similar age. Additionally, we collected diffusion imaging scans to probe structural connectivity and complemented the imaging studies with neuropsychological assessments. Increased functional activation in Ventral Attention/Salience Networks accompanied by a reduced activation in the medial prefrontal cortex in response to the deceased child’s picture robustly distinguished the grieving mothers from controls. Heightened resting-state functional connectivity between the paraventricular thalamic nucleus (PVT) and the amygdala distinguished the grieving mothers from the controls and correlated with subjective grief severity. Structurally, maternal grief and its severity were associated with alterations in corticolimbic white matter tracts. Finally, grieving mothers performed worse than controls on neuropsychological tests of learning, memory, and executive function, linked with grief severity. Reduced activation in cortical regions inhibiting emotions and changes in the PVT circuitry—a region involved in long-term emotional memories and decision making under conflict—distinguish grieving mothers from controls. Notably, the magnitude of neurobiological changes correlates with the subjective severity of grief. Together, these new discoveries delineate a prevalent and under-recognized mental health syndrome and chart a path for its appreciation and care. (shrink)