Relationship Factors’ Impact on Condom Use Among College Students

Research indicates that a number of college students are at risk for HIV, sexually transmitted diseases, and unplanned pregnancy as a result of their sexual behaviors. Specific behaviors placing college students at risk include having sex with multiple partners, poor communication about safer sex practices with their sexual partners and not using condoms consistently and correctly when engaging in sexual activity. The purpose of this paper is to identify potential differences in safer sex practices and factors that influence condom use among college students. A four-page, 18-item survey was developed to determine participants’ condom use and the impact of relationship status and other demographic factors on condom use. Analyses revealed that the number of lifetime vaginal sexual partners and participants’ sex influenced condom use. There were no significant differences in relationship status, duration, trust, honesty and condom use. These findings should be considered with designing interventions to increase condom use among college students.     

Uncovering a New Moral Dilemma of Economic Optimization in Biotechnological Processing

The trend of emerging biorefineries is to process the harvest as efficiently as possible and without any waste. From the most valuable phytomass, refined medicines, enzymes, dyes and other special reactants are created. Functional foods, food ingredients, oils, alcohol, solvents, plastics, fillers and a wide variety of other chemical products follow. After being treated with nutrient recovery techniques (for fertilizer production), biofuels or soil improvers are produced from the leftovers. Economic optimization algorithms have confirmed that such complex biorefineries can be financially viable only when a high degree of feedstock concentration is included. Because the plant material is extremely voluminous before processing, the farming intensity of special plants increases in the nearest vicinity of agglomerations where the biorefineries are built for logistical reasons. Interdisciplinary analyses revealed that these optimization measures lead to significantly increased pollen levels in neighbouring urban areas and subsequently an increased risk of allergies, respectively costs to the national health system. A new moral dilemma between the shareholder’s profit and public interest was uncovered and subjected to disputation.     

Developing a System for Processing Health Data of Children Using Digitalized Toys: Ethical and Privacy Concerns for the Internet of Things Paradigm

EDUCERE (Ubiquitous Detection Ecosystem to Care and Early Stimulation for Children with Developmental Disorders) is a government funded research and development project. EDUCERE objectives are to investigate, develop, and evaluate innovative solutions for society to detect changes in psychomotor development through the natural interaction of children with toys and everyday objects, and perform stimulation and early attention activities in real environments such as home and school. In the EDUCERE project, an ethical impact assessment is carried out linked to a minors’ data protection rights. Using a specific methodology, the project has achieved some promising results. These include use of a prototype of smart toys to detect development difficulties in children. In addition, privacy protection measures which take into account the security concerns of health data, have been proposed and applied. This latter security framework could be useful in other Internet of Things related projects. It consists of legal and technical measures. Special attention has been placed in the transformation of bulk data such as acceleration and jitter of toys into health data when patterns of atypical development are found. The article describes the different security profiles in which users are classified.     

Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for Research Performing Organisations: The Bonn PRINTEGER Statement

This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations. The aim of the statement is to complement existing instruments by focusing specifically on institutional responsibilities for strengthening integrity. It takes into account the daily challenges and organisational contexts of most researchers. The statement intends to make research integrity challenges recognisable from the work-floor perspective, providing concrete advice on organisational measures to strengthen integrity. The statement, which was concluded February 7th 2018, provides guidance on the following key issues:

1. § 1.
   Providing information about research integrity
    
2. § 2.
   Providing education, training and mentoring
    
3. § 3.
   Strengthening a research integrity culture
    
4. § 4.
   Facilitating open dialogue
    
5. § 5.
   Wise incentive management
    
6. § 6.
   Implementing quality assurance procedures
    
7. § 7.
   Improving the work environment and work satisfaction
    
8. § 8.
   Increasing transparency of misconduct cases
    
9. § 9.
   Opening up research
    
10. § 10.
    Implementing safe and effective whistle-blowing channels
     
11. § 11.
    Protecting the alleged perpetrators
     
12. § 12.
    Establishing a research integrity committee and appointing an ombudsperson
     
13. § 13.
    Making explicit the applicable standards for research integrity
     

     

Do shame and perfectionistic self-presentation explain the link between early affiliative memories and eating psychopathology?

This study tested a model examining the impact that early affiliative memories (both with family and peers) on eating psychopathology, and whether these links are carried by the mechanisms of external shame and body image-related perfectionistic self-presentation, in a sample of 480 female college students. Path analyses’ results revealed that this model accounted for 48% of disordered eating’s variance and suggests that the lack of early positive emotional memories is associated with higher levels of shame (feelings of inferiority and unattractiveness), and with higher tendency to adopt body image-related perfectionistic strategies, that seem to explain excessive eating concern and rigid control of one’s eating behaviors. This study offers important insights for future research and for the development of intervention programs, by revealing the importance of assessing and targeting shame and perfectionistic strategies and suggesting the importance of promoting adaptive emotion regulation strategies.     

A systematic review of psychoneuroimmunology-based interventions

Psychoneuroimmunology-based interventions are used to attenuated disease progression and/or side effects of pharmacological treatment. This systematic review evaluates the different therapeutic and/or clinical psychoneuroimmunology-based interventions associated to both psychological, neuroendocrine and immunological variables. The review was conducted for all English, Portuguese and Spanish language articles published between 2005 and 2015. Independent investigators analyzed 42 studies concerning human psychoneuroimmunology-based interventions. Decreased levels of cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine (stress-related hormones) were associated to interventions like yoga, meditation, tai chi, acupuncture, mindfulness, religious/spiritual practices, cognitive behavior therapy, coping and physical exercises. Moreover, those interventions were also associated to reductions in inflammatory processes and levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines in cancer, HIV, depression, anxiety, wound healing, sleep disorder, cardiovascular diseases and fibromyalgia. Despite the associations between PNI variables and clinical/therapeutic interventions, only one study evidenced significant effects on a disease progression.     

Early development of letter specialization in left fusiform is associated with better word reading and smaller fusiform face area

A functional region of left fusiform gyrus termed “the visual word form area” (VWFA) develops during reading acquisition to respond more strongly to printed words than to other visual stimuli. Here, we examined responses to letters among 5‐ and 6‐year‐old early kindergarten children (N = 48) with little or no school‐based reading instruction who varied in their reading ability. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure responses to individual letters, false fonts, and faces in left and right fusiform gyri. We then evaluated whether signal change and size (spatial extent) of letter‐sensitive cortex (greater activation for letters versus faces) and letter‐specific cortex (greater activation for letters versus false fonts) in these regions related to (a) standardized measures of word‐reading ability and (b) signal change and size of face‐sensitive cortex (fusiform face area or FFA; greater activation for faces versus letters). Greater letter specificity, but not letter sensitivity, in left fusiform gyrus correlated positively with word reading scores. Across children, in the left fusiform gyrus, greater size of letter‐sensitive cortex correlated with lesser size of FFA. These findings are the first to suggest that in beginning readers, development of letter responsivity in left fusiform cortex is associated with both better reading ability and also a reduction of the size of left FFA that may result in right‐hemisphere dominance for face perception.     

Developmental associations between bilingual experience and inhibitory control trajectories in Head Start children

Children from lower socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds tend to be at‐risk for executive function (EF) impairments by the time they are in preschool, placing them at an early disadvantage for academic success. The present study examined the potentially protective role of bilingual experience on the development of inhibitory control (IC) in 1146 Head Start preschoolers who were followed for an 18‐month period during the transition to kindergarten as part of the longitudinal Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2009 study. Using three waves of data, we predicted individual variation in developmental trajectories of IC for three groups that differed in bilingual experience—English monolinguals, Spanish‐English bilinguals, and a group of children who transitioned from being Spanish monolingual to Spanish‐English bilinguals during the course of the study. Compared to their English monolingual peers, bilingual children from Spanish‐speaking homes showed higher IC performance at Head Start entry, as well as steeper IC growth over time. Children who were Spanish monolingual at the beginning of Head Start showed the lowest IC performance at baseline. However, their rate of IC growth exceeded that of children who remained English monolingual and did not differ from that of their peers who entered Head Start being bilingual. These results suggest that acquiring bilingualism and continued bilingual experience are associated with more rapid IC development during the transition from preschool to kindergarten in children from lower SES backgrounds.     

Relativism of Distance - a Step in the Naturalization of Meta-Ethics

Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical findings which seem to support some of Williams’ main ideas on this issue have received scant attention. In this article, we would like to focus on the phenomenon of moral relativism regarding spatiotemporal distance as an entry point to the nature of folk moral relativism and the methodology of meta-ethics. To do so, we first introduce Williams’ relativism of distance. Then we compare Williams’ approach on this matter to recent experimental approaches on folk relativism. On this score the main result is that Williams’ proposal is consistent with several well-established insights on the experimental study of folk relativism. Williams’ relativism of distance is not only empirically plausible, but it is also of relevance for shaping the methodology of an empirically informed meta-ethics. We close this paper by stressing this methodological contribution.     

Construct and concurrent validity of the Cambridge neuropsychological automated tests in Portuguese older adults without neuropsychiatric diagnoses and with Alzheimer’s disease dementia

We aimed to analyze the construct and concurrent validity of the Rapid Visual Information Processing (RVP), Paired Associates Learning (PAL), Reaction Time (RTI), and Spatial Working Memory (SWM) tests from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB®). Inclusion criteria were checked in a first session. The CANTAB and additional pencil-and-paper tests were administered within 1 week. The participants (aged 69–96 years) were 137 Portuguese adults without neuropsychiatric diagnoses and 37 adults with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease dementia. Comparisons were made between the CANTAB tests and between these tests and the Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT), Verbal Fluency (VF) test, and some Wechsler Memory Scale-III and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III subtests. Most intra-test correlations were stronger than the CANTAB inter-test correlations. The RVP correlated more with VF animals (.44), the PAL with RCFT immediate recall (–.52), the RTI with RVP mean latency (.42), and the SWM with Spatial Span backward (–.39).