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IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the mental health of individuals with chronic conditions such as Wilson’s Disease (WD). This study investigates stress, anxiety, depression, quality of life, cognitive function, vaccination rates, infection rates, and perceptions related to the pandemic and vaccines among WD patients.MethodsThe study analyzed COVID-19 perceptions and vaccine attitudes of 62 adult WD patients enrolled in the international multisite WD Registry. A subgroup of 33 participants completed a series of mental health scales. The effect of working essentially, income loss, wellness activity initiation, and infection of COVID-19 during the pandemic was observed.ResultsResults indicate that, overall, the pandemic did not exacerbate anxiety or cognitive function in WD patients but did lead to increased depression among essential workers. Patients experiencing income loss exhibited higher levels of stress and anxiety. Despite these challenges, WD patients showed high vaccination rates and positive attitudes towards vaccines.DiscussionThe findings underscore the significant impact of the pandemic on the mental health of WD patients.

Measurement(s) Motivation • Emotional Well-being • Socioeconomic Indicator • Culture • Cultural Diversity Technology Type(s) survey method • digital curation Sample Characteristic - Organism Homo sapiens Sample Characteristic - Location Australia • Austria • Bolivia • Brazil • Bulgaria • Canada • Chile • China • Colombia • Czech Republic • Germany • Hong Kong • India • Israel • Italy • Japan • Kenya • Lebanon • Mexico • The Netherlands • New Zealand • Nigeria • Pakistan • Peru • The Philippines • Portuguese Republic • Romania • Russia • Saudi Arabia • Senegal • Serbia • Singapore • Slovak Republic • South Korea • Spain • Sweden • Thailand • Turkey • Uganda • Ukraine • United Kingdom • United States of America

Greater “emotional fit” with one's cultural group is often associated with positive psychological and relational outcomes. However, the few empirical studies on this link have been limited to the comparison of Anglo-Western, independent, and East Asian, interdependent cultural contexts. In the current paper, we conceptually replicated findings from three studies on the link between emotional fit and well-being in Anglo-Western and East Asian contexts, using different methods and more comprehensive samples. Moreover, we expanded emotional fit research to the understudied Mediterranean region, characterized by an emphasis on “honor” and a distinct blend of independence and interdependence. We collected data from N = 3,097 participants from 12 countries and asked participants to report their emotional experience in 10 hypothetical situations and to rate their well-being in different domains. Our results largely replicated established positive links between emotional fit and well-being in the Anglo-West and East-Asia, as i) experiencing more culturally valued emotions (from which we infer cultural fit) was linked to better general well-being; ii) actual, calculated emotional fit in relationship-focused situations predicted better relational well-being; and iii) only in East Asia calculated emotional fit in culturally central contexts predicted psychological well-being and thriving. Our exploratory analyses on the Mediterranean region showed a non-homogenous pattern: while general well-being was consistently most strongly predicted by the intensity of disengaging emotions, relational and psychological well-being were differentially predicted by calculated emotional fit in relationship-focused situations across different Mediterranean sub-regions. The current work consolidates insights into how our well-being is shaped by the interplay between culture and emotional fit and strengthens evidence that there may be ‘universalism without uniformity’.

The sense of feeling at home by people ‘on the move’ was inquired through an adaptation of the homemaking approach. Two groups of people who make their living by working in agricultural sites (internally mobile seasonal agricultural workers and internationally displaced migrant workers) were reached out to examine associations between feeling at home, social interactions, perceived degradation, and subjective well-being. Results showed that both worker groups (seasonal and displaced workers) felt at home despite precarious working and living conditions. Expectedly, feeling at home was predicted significantly by social interactions with others; however, the type of interactions also determined the direction of the effects. While within-group interaction (binding ties) predicted feeling at home positively, across-groups interaction (bridging ties) predicted it negatively for both groups. Additionally, perceived degradation and subjective well-being moderated the effect of feeling at home partially: the effect emerged for a cross-groups but not for within-group interactions. In conclusion, the notion of binding and bridging ties could help to attain an increased explanatory power rather than contact theory alone in understanding the patterns of feeling at home.

The COVID-19 pandemic heightened risk factors for suicide globally. Using prominent sociocultural theories of suicide, we investigated whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected suicide rates differently across demographic groups and regions in the United States of America. In Study 1, we found that after 2020 suicide rates increased especially among young Black and Alaskan Native populations. Conditional process analyses were conducted to shed light on racial disparities in the temporal impact of unemployment on suicide from 2018 to 2021. The results showed that suicides among younger Asians and Blacks were affected by the surge in unemployment, whereas Whites, especially the older population, benefitted from the increased unemployment. In Study 2, we explored the regional variation in the temporal associations between suicide, unemployment, and depression across the 50 U.S. states from 2019 to 2021 taking into account pre-pandemic between-state conditions. Multilevel regression analyses showed that urbanism (characterized by low firearm proportion, high income, high cultural looseness, and high population density) but not social integration (characterized by low social capital, high collectivism, and high southerness), partially explained the regional variation in the temporal pattern of suicide rates. We also found that in states with already high depression levels, the temporal increase in depression predicted increases in suicide from 2019 to 2021, whereas it had minimal impact in states with low average depression. We emphasize the need for future theories to consider longitudinal designs and highlight two key takeaways: (1) the pandemic reshaped racial disparities in suicide, and (2) the temporal effects brought by the national crisis on suicide patterns depended on existing between-state differences.

Summary: Ultra-high chip power densities that are expected to surpass 1-2kW/cm2 in future high-performance systems cannot be easily handled by conventional cooling methods. Various emerging cooling methods, such as liquid cooling via microchannels, thermoelectric coolers (TECs), two-phase vapor chambers, and hybrid cooling options have been designed to efficiently remove heat from high-performance processors. However, selecting the optimal cooling solution for a given chip and determining the optimal cooling parameters for that solution to achieve high efficiency are open problems. These problems are, in fact, computationally expensive because of the massive space of possible solutions. To address this design challenge, this article introduces a deep learning-based cooling design optimization flow that rapidly and accurately converges to the optimal cooling solution as well as the optimal cooling parameters for a given chip floorplan and its power profile.

The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals' well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime, it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled. Importantly, the required behaviors are aimed not only at safeguarding one's own health. Instead, individuals are asked to adapt their behaviors to protect the community at large. This raises the question of which social concerns and moral principles make people willing to do so. We considered in 23 countries (N = 6948) individuals' willingness to engage in prescribed and discretionary behaviors, as well as country-level and individual-level factors that might drive such behavioral intentions. Results from multilevel multiple regressions, with country as the nesting variable, showed that publicized number of infections were not significantly related to individual intentions to comply with the prescribed measures and intentions to engage in discretionary prosocial behaviors. Instead, psychological differences in terms of trust in government, citizens, and in particular toward science predicted individuals' behavioral intentions across countries. The more people endorsed moral principles of fairness and care (vs. loyalty and authority), the more they were inclined to report trust in science, which, in turn, statistically predicted prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions. Results have implications for the type of intervention and public communication strategies that should be most effective to induce the behavioral changes that are needed to control the COVID-19 outbreak.

Despite the rising number of men and women in counter-stereotypical roles, it is rare for men to serve as primary caregivers in families with dependent children. In two studies, we examined how British men and women perceive and emotionally react to primary caregiver (vs. breadwinner) fathers, whether their perceptions and reactions are contingent upon individual differences in masculine honor endorsement, and the potential mediators in these relationships. Results showed that both men and women perceived the primary caregiver fathers more positively – warmer and not less competent – than the primary breadwinner fathers, yet endorsement of masculine honor ideals increased men’s (but not women’s) tendency to attribute less positive emotions (e.g., proud and satisfied) and more negative emotions (e.g., ashamed and resentful) to the primary caregiver (vs. breadwinner) fathers. Mediated moderation analyses showed that for men with high masculine honor orientation, their less positive and more negative emotional attributions were driven by perceived loss of reputation among male friends, whereas for men with low masculine honor orientation, their more positive and less negative emotional attributions were driven by perceived gain of wife’s and children’s admiration. By shifting the focus to men’s individual differences and motives, these findings offer nuanced explanations for why some men may feel eager about serving as caregiver fathers, whereas others may feel reluctant to do so.

HIV +Elite and Viremic controllers (EC/VCs) are able to control virus infection, perhaps because of host genetic determinants. We identified 16% (21 of 131) EC/VCs with CD4 +T cells with resistance specific to R5-tropic HIV, reversed after introduction of ccr5. R5 resistance was not observed in macrophages and depended upon the method of T cell activation. CD4 +T cells of these EC/VCs had lower ccr2 and ccr5 RNA levels, reduced CCR2 and CCR5 cell-surface expression, and decreased levels of secreted chemokines. T cells had no changes in chemokine receptor mRNA half-life but instead had lower levels of active transcription of ccr2 and ccr5, despite having more accessible chromatin by ATAC-seq. Other nearby genes were also down-regulated, over a region of ~500 kb on chromosome 3p21. This same R5 resistance phenotype was observed in family members of an index VC, also associated with ccr2/ccr5 down-regulation, suggesting that the phenotype is heritable.

Individuals’ cultural tendencies of horizontal/vertical individualism and collectivism interact with their dispositional traits and contextual factors to shape social interactions. A key dispositional trait is social value orientation (SVO), a general tendency toward competition (proself) vs. cooperation (prosocial) in social exchanges. The present study (N = 1032) explored the relationship between SVO and personal cultural tendencies of horizontal/vertical individualism and collectivism in two different cultural settings, the United States (a vertical individualist setting) and South Korea (a vertical collectivistic setting). We hypothesized that each value orientation would be associated with the congruent personal cultural tendency across settings. We further hypothesized that this association would be specific to the context, so that SVO would play a more relevant role where the cultural theme was less dominant. Results indicated that, across contexts, proself individuals endorsed vertical individualistic values more strongly than prosocial individuals. Conversely, prosocial individuals endorsed horizontal collectivistic values more strongly than proself individuals. In addition, the effect of SVO was different in the two cultural contexts. Compared to proself individuals, prosocial individuals endorsed horizontal collectivism more strongly in the United States context, and horizontal individualism less strongly in the Korea context. Theoretical implications and limitations of the findings, as well as directions for future work are discussed.

Cultures differ in many important ways, but one trait appears to be universally valued: prosociality. For one’s reputation, around the world, it pays to be nice to others. However, recent research with American participants finds that evaluations of prosocial actions are asymmetric—relatively selfish actions are evaluated according to the magnitude of selfishness but evaluations of relatively generous actions are less sensitive to magnitude. Extremely generous actions are judged roughly as positively as modestly generous actions, but extremely selfish actions are judged much more negatively than modestly selfish actions (Klein & Epley, 2014). Here we test whether this asymmetry in evaluations of prosociality is culture-specific. Across 7 countries, 1,240 participants evaluated actors giving various amounts of money to a stranger. Along with relatively minor cross-cultural differences in evaluations of generous actions, we find cross-cultural similarities in the asymmetry in evaluations of prosociality. We discuss implications for how reputational inferences can enable the cooperation necessary for successful societies.

Adopting a social psychological approach, across three studies (N = 927) in two western immigrant‐receiving societies (UK and Canada), we examined the role of honour in acculturation variables (i.e., immigrants' heritage and mainstream cultural orientation and well‐being), controlling for some of the commonly studied predictors of immigrant adaptation. We assessed honour as concern (Studies 1 and 2) and as a desired attribute for men and women (Study 3) and studied well‐being in terms of acculturative stress (Study 1) and subjective evaluation of one's life (Studies 1 and 3). We examined our questions among groups of immigrants originating from honour (Studies 1 and 2) and dignity cultural groups (Study 1) and from first‐ and second‐generation immigrants (Study 3). Overall, despite some significant associations at the bivariate level between honour and acculturation outcomes, findings provided mixed support for the claim that honour (measured as concerns and cultural codes) plays a significant role in immigrant acculturation above and beyond commonly studied predictors of immigrant adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the mental health of individuals with chronic conditions such as Wilson's Disease (WD). This study investigates stress, anxiety, depression, quality of life, cognitive function, vaccination rates, infection rates, and perceptions related to the pandemic and vaccines among WD patients. Methods: The study analyzed COVID-19 perceptions and vaccine attitudes of 62 adult WD patients enrolled in the international multisite WD Registry. A subgroup of 33 participants completed a series of mental health scales. The effect of working essentially, income loss, wellness activity initiation, and infection of COVID-19 during the pandemic was observed. Results: Results indicate that, overall, the pandemic did not exacerbate anxiety or cognitive function in WD patients but did lead to increased depression among essential workers. Patients experiencing income loss exhibited higher levels of stress and anxiety. Despite these challenges, WD patients showed high vaccination rates and positive attitudes towards vaccines. Discussion: The findings underscore the significant impact of the pandemic on the mental health of WD patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Vildan. Manav, Elif. Avci, Ozan. Erdem, Asude. Polat, Cem. Leblebici, Ayse. K Aksu Erasmus syndrome is a rare syndrome accompanied by interstitial lung disease and scleroderma caused by silica [...]

Objective: People's psychological tendencies are attuned to their sociocultural context and culture‐specific ways of being, feeling, and thinking are believed to assist individuals in successfully navigating their environment. Supporting this idea, a stronger "fit" with one's cultural environment has often been linked to positive psychological outcomes. The current research expands the cultural, conceptual, and methodological space of cultural fit research by exploring the link between well‐being and honor, a central driver of social behavior in the Mediterranean region. Method: Drawing on a multi‐national sample from eight countries circum‐Mediterranean (N = 2257), we examined the relationship between cultural fit in honor and well‐being at the distal level (fit with one's perceived society) using response surface analysis (RSA) and at the proximal level (fit with one's university gender group) using profile analysis. Results: We found positive links between fit and well‐being in both distal (for some, but not all, honor facets) and proximal fit analyses (across all honor facets). Furthermore, most fit effects in the RSA were complemented with positive level effects of the predictors, with higher average honor levels predicting higher well‐being. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the interplay between individual and environmental factors in honor as well as the important role honor plays in well‐being in the Mediterranean region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science research has highlighted "honor" as a central value driving social behavior in Mediterranean societies, which requires individuals to develop and protect a sense of their personal self-worth and their social reputation, through assertiveness, competitiveness, and retaliation in the face of threats. We predicted that members of Mediterranean societies may exhibit a distinctive combination of independent and interdependent social orientation, self-construal, and cognitive style, compared to more commonly studied East Asian and Anglo-Western cultural groups. We compared participants from eight Mediterranean societies (Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus [Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities], Lebanon, Egypt) to participants from East Asian (Korea, Japan) and Anglo-Western (the United Kingdom, the United States) societies, using six implicit social orientation indicators, an eight-dimensional self-construal scale, and four cognitive style indicators. Compared with both East Asian and Anglo-Western samples, samples from Mediterranean societies distinctively emphasized several forms of independence (relative intensity of disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, happiness based on disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, dispositional [vs. situational] attribution style, self-construal as different from others, self-directed, self-reliant, self-expressive, and consistent) and interdependence (closeness to in-group [vs. out-group] members, self-construal as connected and committed to close others). Our findings extend previous insights into patterns of cultural orientation beyond commonly examined East–West comparisons to an understudied world region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Insulinoma is a rare disease, however the most common cause of hypoglycemia due to excess insulin secretion. Diagnosis and localization can be challenging. This study evaluated the clinical features, diagnostic workup, management, and outcomes of patients with insulinoma. Methods: The records of 13 patients with insulinoma who were followed up at İstanbul University, İstanbul Faculty of Medicine were retrospectively reviewed. Results: The mean age of the 13 patients (female/male: 11/2) was 43.9±12.5 years at diagnosis. The mean tumor diameter was 14.3±6.7 mm and localized at the head in 30.8%, at the tail and/or body in 61.6%, and at both the head and body in 7.6% of patients. The tumor was correctly localized by magnetic resonance imaging in 10/13 patients, 68Ga DOTATATE positron emission tomography/computed tomography in 4/8, endoscopic ultrasound in 3/7, and selective arterial calcium stimulation in 4/4 patients. Eleven patients were operated. Distal pancreatectomy was performed in 4 patients, distal pancreatectomy plus splenectomy in 3, and enucleation in 4 of the patients. The median follow-up duration was 4 years. In 8 patients, cure was achieved with surgery alone. Somatostatin receptor analog (SSRA) treatment was initiated in 2 cases and one of whom developed lymph node metastasis 2.5 years after surgery under SSRA treatment and she was reoperated. These patients had stable disease at the last visit. Conclusion: Insulinomas are usually small tumors, but they can cause severe symptoms. A multidisciplinary approach is required for diagnosis and treatment. In some patients, different imaging modalities may be necessary for tumor localization.

Abstract Analyses of complex behaviors of Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) have become increasingly important in diseases diagnosis. The changes of the phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI) signal formed by the velocity of flowing CSF are represented as a set of velocity-encoded images or maps, which can be thought of as signal data in the context of medical imaging, enabling the evaluation of pulsatile patterns throughout a cardiac cycle. However, automatic segmentation of the CSF region in a PC-MRI image is challenging, and implementing an explained ML method using pulsatile data as a feature remains unexplored. This paper presents lightweight machine learning (ML) algorithms to perform CSF lumen segmentation in spinal, utilizing sets of velocity-encoded images or maps as a feature. The Dataset contains 57 PC-MRI slabs by 3T MRI scanner from control and idiopathic scoliosis participants are involved to collect data. The ML models are trained with 2176 time series images. Different cardiac periods image (frame) numbers of PC-MRIs are interpolated in the preprocessing step to align to features of equal size. The fivefold cross-validation procedure is used to estimate the success of the ML models. Additionally, the study focusses on enhancing the interpretability of the highest-accuracy eXtreme gradient boosting (XGB) model by applying the shapley additive explanations (SHAP) technique. The XGB algorithm presented its highest accuracy, with an average fivefold accuracy of 0.99% precision, 0.95% recall, and 0.97% F1 score. We evaluated the significance of each pulsatile feature's contribution to predictions, offering a more profound understanding of the model's behavior in distinguishing CSF lumen pixels with SHAP. Introducing a novel approach in the field, develop ML models offer comprehension into feature extraction and selection from PC-MRI pulsatile data. Moreover, the explained ML model offers novel and valuable insights to domain experts, contributing to an enhanced scholarly understanding of CSF dynamics.

Past research has shown that economic inequality shapes individuals' self-construals. However, it has been unclear which dimensions of self-construal are associated with and affected by economic inequality. A correlational (Study 1: N = 264) and an experimental study (Study 2: N = 532) provided converging evidence linking perceived economic inequality with two forms of independent (vs. interdependent) self-construal: Difference from Others and Self-Reliance. In Study 3 (N = 12,634) societal differences in objective economic inequality across 48 nations predicted feelings of Difference from Others, but not Self-Reliance. Importantly, we found no significant associations of economic inequality with the other six dimensions of self-construal. Our findings help extend previous results linking economic inequality to forms of "social distance." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In honor cultures, maintaining a positive moral reputation (e.g., being known as an honest person) is highly important, whereas in dignity cultures, self-respect (e.g., competence and success) is strongly emphasized. Depending on their cultural background, people respond differently to threats to these two dimensions of honor. In two studies, we examined the effects of morality-focused and competence-focused threats on people's goal pursuit in two honor cultures (Turkey, Southern United States, and Latinx) and in a dignity culture (Northern United States). In Study 1, Turkish participants were more likely to reject a highly qualified person as a partner in a future task if that person threatened their morality (vs. no-threat), even though this meant letting go of the goal of winning an award. Participants from the U.S. honor and dignity groups, however, were equally likely to choose the people who gave them threatening and neutral feedback. In Study 2, Turkish and U.S. honor participants were more likely to persist in a subsequent goal after receiving a morality threat (vs. no-threat), whereas U.S. dignity participants were more likely to persist in a subsequent goal after receiving a competence threat (vs. no-threat). These results show that people's responses to honor threats are influenced by the dominant values of their culture and by the tools that are available to them to potentially restore their reputation (e.g., punishing the offender vs. working hard on a different task). This research can have implications for multicultural contexts in which people can have conflicting goals such as diverse work environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study stabilization problem on a model for covid-19 by using Routh-Hurwitz criterion and Gershgorin circles. Using Routh-Hurwitz criterion, we prove the necessity of unstability and stability conditions for the model that we extend from an existing one. We give the necessary conditions for stability on this model by using the Gershgorin Circle Theorem and give examples.

Objective: The aim of this study; to examine the relationship between hepatosteatosis, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and hepatic fibrosis and the severity of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS). Materials and Methods: Our study included 120 patients who underwent polysomnography in the otorhinolaryngology outpatient clinic between January 2021 and January 2022, and who had previously undergone liver biopsy under ultrasonography (USG) guidance. Patients with simple snoring with apnea-hypopnea index (AHI)

Public health is facing a worldwide challenge due to the emergence of multiple antibiotic resistance in ESKAPE (Enterococcus faecalis, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Escherichia coli) infections. The natural antimicrobial nature of bee venoms makes them promising antimicrobial candidates against antibiotic-resistant pathogens. In this study, melittin and apamin bee venoms were investigated to generate novel antimicrobial agents effective against ESKAPE microorganisms. The antimicrobial and antibiofilm activities of melittin and apamin synthesized from endemic Apis mellifera L. bee venom were tested against ESKAPE microorganisms using minimal inhibition, minimal bactericidal inhibition and time-kill curve methods. The in-vitro cytotoxicity effect of melittin and apamin for L929 fibroblast cells was also examined. Synthesized melittin and apamin (0.78-600 μg/mL) were antimicrobial against ESKAPE pathogens. Time-kill curve studies confirmed the growth retardation effect and bactericidal activity of melittin and apamin. Antibiofilm studies also showed that melittin and apamin significantly (melittin 8%-82%, apamin 1.8%-78%) inhibited the biofilm formed by ESKAPE pathogens. Melittin and apamin were not cytotoxic to L929 fibroblast cells. We found that melittin and apamin have high antibacterial properties. These naturally synthesized bee venoms offer a promising powerful solution to fight various pathogens.

Air cargo significantly contributes to trade, bridging the gap between production and consumption in a timely and reliable manner. The specific industry is a complex system, participating many players and requiring many documents and actions. Greece’s economic growth is highly dependent on the exportation and import of goods. The current study intends to analyse the Greek air cargo industry, implementing a more holistic approach, identifying the main problems and challenges, and making useful recommendations. In-depth focus group discussion with the participation of twelve (12) experts (n=12) and observation applied to collect the required information. The main findings present the high level of bureaucracy, the lack of cooperation between the partners and the use of technology that caused significant problems in the industry’s performance, while some effective interventions were proposed. The study provides useful insights to the related practitioners, policy-makers and academicians.