Randomized controlled trial of an intervention to prevent adherence failure among HIV-infected patients initiating antiretroviral therapy.

OBJECTIVE: Compare the efficacy of a multicomponent social support intervention to standard-of-care counseling on medication adherence among HIV-infected patients initiating antiretroviral therapy. DESIGN: Randomized controlled trial. Generalized estimating equations tested for differences in the percentage of participants achieving 90% adherence. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Pill-taking, electronically monitored over 6 consecutive months; plasma viral load (VL), assessed at 3 and 6 months following initiation of therapy. RESULTS: Of 226 participants who were randomized and began the trial, 87 (38%) were lost to the study by 6 months. The proportion of adherent participants declined steadily over time, with no time by group interaction. Sustained adherence was associated with increased odds of achieving an undetectable VL (OR=1.78; 95% CI=1.01, 3.13). In intention-to-treat analyses, a larger proportion of the intervention group than the control group was adherent (40.15% vs. 27.59%, p=.02) and achieved an undetectable VL p=.04). However, the majority of participants who remained on study experienced some reduction in VL (>or=1-log drop or undetectable), regardless of experimental condition. CONCLUSION: The multicomponent social support intervention significantly improved medication adherence over standard-of-care counseling; evidence for improved virologic outcomes was inconsistent. Early discontinuation of care and treatment may be a greater threat to the health of HIV patients than imperfect medication-taking.     

Mental imagery and dyslexia: a deficit in processing multipart visual objects?

Dyslexic and normal control subjects memorized simple line patterns inside a grid and subsequently judged whether an "X" would have fallen on the pattern had it been present in an empty grid. The patterns were letters and novel shapes. The grids were presented to the left visual field, to the right visual field, or in central vision. Dyslexic subjects had difficulty generating images of multipart patterns, but this deficit was limited to letters. The findings suggest that dyslexics may have selective difficulty integrating visual information stored in long-term memory.     

COVID-19, Sex,Addictions, Women's Health,Care of the Elderly,and Medical Education

Journal of Religion and Health -     

A review of research on chaplains and community-based clergy in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine: 1998-2000

Based on the content analysis of quantitative research appearing in three medical journals, the authors conclude that, despite the shared ideal of providing spiritual care to patients on the part of physicians and chaplains, there is little attention given in these journals demonstrating and promoting this shared perspective. Suggestions for future research that would focus on this common medicine/religion interface and concern are noted.     

Arguments for adjuncts

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant information.     

Smiles as signals of lower status in football players and fashion models: Evidence that smiles are associated with lower dominance and lower prestige

Across four studies, the current paper demonstrates that smiles are associated with lower social status. Moreover, the association between smiles and lower status appears in the psychology of observers and generalizes across two forms of status: prestige and dominance. In the first study, faces of fashion models representing less prestigious apparel brands were found to be more similar to a canonical smile display than the faces of models representing more prestigious apparel brands.?In a second study, after being experimentally primed with either high or low prestige fashion narratives, participants in the low prestige condition were more likely to perceive smiles in a series of photographs depicting smiling and non-smiling faces. A third study of football player photographs revealed that the faces of less dominant (smaller) football players were more similar to the canonical smile display than the faces of their physically larger counterparts. Using the same football player photographs, a fourth study found that smiling was a more reliable indicator of perceived status-relevant personality traits than perceptions of the football players' physical sizes inferred from the photographs.     

Negative internal causal attributions of a specific offense and forgiveness

Causal attributions are important social‐cognitive predictors of forgiveness. This article presents the Transgression Attribution Questionnaire (TAQ), a measure of one's negative internal causal attributions of a specific offense. In 4 studies, scores on the TAQ showed initial evidence of estimated internal consistency, temporal stability, and construct validity. Negative internal attributions for the cause of a transgression predicted lower levels of empathy and forgiveness. Furthermore, scores on the TAQ predicted forgiveness over and above the hurtfulness of the offense, relationship commitment, and a general measure of internal causal attributions in relationships. The current research bridges research on internal causal attributions and forgiveness. Implications for the social‐cognitive study of forgiveness and the measurement of causal attributions are discussed.     

Challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice: support for urban adolescents' critical consciousness development

This mixed-model study examined the relationship between urban adolescents' perceived support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice from peers, family, and community members and their critical consciousness development. These relationships were examined by relating participants' qualitative perceptions of support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice to quantitative data obtained from Likert-type measures of the reflection and action components of critical consciousness. Perceived support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice had a significant impact upon the reflection component of critical consciousness; the significance criterion was supported by effect size estimates. Support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice was not significantly related to the action component of critical consciousness. Participants perceived the most support for challenging racism, moderate support for challenging social injustice, and the least support for challenging sexism. Additionally, female participants perceived more support for challenging sexism than male participants. These results suggest that the informal interactions of urban adolescents play a role in shaping their critical consciousness, and hold implications for psychosocial interventions and research with marginalized populations.