Depression and anxiety among parents during the COVID-19 pandemic: the role of cumulative stress and emotion dysregulation

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced many new stressors for parents worldwide. This study investigated the link between parents’ cumulative stress and psychological distress during the pandemic. Parents’ emotion dysregulation was further examined as a moderator between cumulative stress and psychological distress. A total of 155 parents in the United States participated in the present study. Path analysis was conducted to evaluate the effects of cumulative stress, including COVID-19-related stress, general stress, and parental stress, as well as emotion dysregulation on parents’ psychological distress, including depression and anxiety. The present findings indicated that parents’ general stress, parental stress, and emotion dysregulation predicted symptoms of depression. Emotion dysregulation further exacerbated the effect of parental stress on depression. Parents’ general stress and emotion dysregulation were also predictive of anxiety symptoms. In addition, emotion dysregulation exacerbated the effect of COVID-19-related stress on parental anxiety. This study revealed that parents’ stress and emotion dysregulation were additively and interactively associated with their psychological distress. The findings inform researchers and practitioners that parents’ stressors have cumulative effects on their psychological distress and that emotion dysregulation can worsen the negative effect of stress on mental health in challenging times, such as the pandemic

Leptin-dependent differential remodeling of visceral and pericardial adipose tissue following chronic exercise and psychosocial stress

Obesity is driven by an imbalance between caloric intake and energy expenditure, causing excessive storage of triglycerides in adipose tissue at different sites around the body. Increased visceral adipose tissue (VAT) is associated with diabetes, whilst pericardial adipose tissue (PAT) is associated with cardiac pathology. Adipose tissue can expand either through cellular hypertrophy or hyperplasia, with the former correlating with decreased metabolic health in obesity. The aim of this study was to determine how VAT and PAT remodel in response to obesity, stress, and exercise. Here we have used the male obese Zucker rats, which carries two recessive fa alleles that result in the development of hyperphagia with reduced energy expenditure, resulting in morbid obesity and leptin resistance. At 9 weeks of age, a group of lean (Fa/Fa or Fa/fa) Zucker rats (LZR) and obese (fa/fa) Zucker rats (OZR) were treated with unpredictable chronic mild stress or exercise for 8 weeks. To determine the phenotype for PAT and VAT, tissue cellularity and gene expression were analysed. Finally, leptin signalling was investigated further using cultured 3T3-derived adipocytes. Tissue cellularity was determined following haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, whilst qPCR was used to examine gene expression. PAT adipocytes were significantly smaller than those from VAT and had a more beige-like appearance in both LZR and OZR. In the OZR group, VAT adipocyte cell size increased significantly compared with LZR, whilst PAT showed no difference. Exercise and stress resulted in a significant reduction in VAT cellularity in OZR, whilst PAT showed no change. This suggests that PAT cellularity does not remodel significantly compared with VAT. This data indicates that the extracellular matrix of PAT is able to remodel more readily than in VAT. In the LZR group, exercise increased insulin receptor substrate 1 (IRS1) in PAT but was decreased in the OZR group. In VAT, exercise decreased IRS1 in LZR, whilst increasing it in OZR. This suggests that in obesity, VAT is more responsive to exercise and subsequently becomes less insulin resistant compared with PAT. Stress increased PPAR-γ expression in the VAT but decreased it in the PAT in the OZR group. This suggests that in obesity, stress increases adipogenesis more significantly in the VAT compared with PAT. To understand the role of leptin signalling in adipose tissue remodelling mechanistically, JAK2 autophosphorylation was inhibited using 5μM 1,2,3,4,5,6-Hexabromocyclohexane (Hex) in cultured 3T3-derived adipocytes. Palmitate treatment was used to induce cellular hypertrophy. Hex blocked adipocyte hypertrophy in response to palmitate treatment but not the increase in lipid droplet size. These data suggest that leptin signalling is necessary for adipocyte cell remodelling and its absence induces whitening. Taken together, our data suggest that leptin signalling is necessary for adipocyte remodelling in response to obesity, exercise and psychosocial stress

Bank market power and financial reporting quality

Joining the debate on the banking sector’s impact on the real economy, this study examines the impact of banks’ market power on local businesses’ financial reporting quality. Based on the market power hypothesis and the information-based hypothesis, we propose four ways the banking market could affect the financial reporting quality. The proposed mechanisms suggest that borrowers and bank lenders face increased market power by implementing different earnings management and monitoring practices. Our documentary evidence suggests that since the banking market deregulation, restrictions on inter- and intra-state banking and branching have been removed, with banks gaining more power and the market becoming more consolidated. Using a large sample of U.S. listed firms from 1995-2019, we find a favourable impact of bank market power on corporate financial reporting quality, primarily driven by heightened monitoring by banks with greater market power, supporting the monitoring-stringent conjecture. In addition, this positive relationship is more pronounced among firms heavily reliant on local banks. Our results are robust to a rich set of tests, such as using alternative measurements for financial reporting quality and bank market power, including macroeconomic factors, and considering drastic changes in the bank market structure. We also address the endogeneity concerns and test the robustness of our key findings in a loan syndication setting. Our research suggests that facing increased bank market concentration and power, firms must pay additional attention to their financial reporting, which is widely used to access external finance

The invisible hand of touch: testing a tactile sensation-choice satisfaction model in online shopping

This study tests a model of the relationship between online store sensory environments and consumer responses using the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm. The aim is to a) examine the ability of three online product presentation formats (OPPFs) to induce tactile sensations; b) identify the effect of tactile sensations upon choice satisfaction and c) examine the mediating role of cognitive effort and affective experience. Videos are found to induce the greatest tactile sensations followed by zoom image while static image is found to induce the least. Furthermore, the more tactile sensations consumers experience while shopping online, the higher their emotional experience, resulting in lower cognitive effort and higher consumer choice satisfaction. Affective experience is found to mediate the tactile sensations and choice satisfaction relationship. The original contribution of the research is a newly validated model of OPPFs, tactile sensations, customer experience and choice satisfaction that extends theoretical understanding of variables previously untested. Practical Applications: The study offers practical results from which small to medium sized, or new start-up, online clothing retailers can benefit. The study shows the advantages of using OPPFs such as videos and zoom images on retail websites in order to assist shoppers by enhancing the sensory buying experience. Such online retailers may not be able to afford the investment in more complex and costly advanced technologies such as the use of augmented reality in virtual mirroring. The study shows that when online retailers provide videos and/or zoom images on their websites, they allow shoppers to experience greater tactile sensations while evaluating and selecting a product compared to only being able to view it as a static image. Online clothing retailers can continue to rely on these technologies to compensate shoppers for the lack of touch in the online shopping context which is so important when purchasing clothing

The Green's function model intercomparison project (GFMIP) protocol

The atmospheric Green's function method is a technique for modeling the response of the atmosphere to changes in the spatial field of surface temperature. While early studies applied this method to changes in atmospheric circulation, it has also become an important tool to understand changes in radiative feedbacks due to evolving patterns of warming, a phenomenon called the “pattern effect.” To better study this method, this paper presents a protocol for creating atmospheric Green's functions to serve as the basis for a model intercomparison project, GFMIP. The protocol has been developed using a series of sensitivity tests performed with the HadAM3 atmosphere‐only general circulation model, along with existing and new simulations from other models. Our preliminary results have uncovered nonlinearities in the response of the atmosphere to surface temperature changes, including an asymmetrical response to warming versus cooling patch perturbations, and a change in the dependence of the response on the magnitude and size of the patches. These nonlinearities suggest that the pattern effect may depend on the heterogeneity of warming as well as its location. These experiments have also revealed tradeoffs in experimental design between patch size, perturbation strength, and the length of control and patch simulations. The protocol chosen on the basis of these experiments balances scientific utility with the simulation time and setup required by the Green's function approach. Running these simulations will further our understanding of many aspects of atmospheric response, from the pattern effect and radiative feedbacks to changes in circulation, cloudiness, and precipitation

Resource allocation considering task prioritization in ISAC-Assisted Vehicular Network

In the vehicular networks (VN) assisted by the integration of sensing and communication (ISAC), rapid processing of data from sensors is a necessary condition to ensure safe driving and enhance user experience. Utilizing the computational resources of the roadside unit (RSU) can effectively reduce the task processing delay. However, in some areas of the road, uneven distribution of task-vehicles can lead to severe load imbalance in neighbouring RSUs, and these tasks often have different delay requirements. The tasks in the high-load area can be offloaded to the low-load area to balance the load. We use the idle-vehicles in the low-load RSU area that are close to the task-vehicles as relays to hop and offload the tasks to the low-load RSUs. On the other hand, in order to satisfy the delay requirements of the heterogeneous tasks, this paper proposes the priority ordering of the heterogeneous tasks, the more delay-sensitive tasks require more resources to meet their delay requirements, i.e., the higher the priority. In order to both satisfy the delay requirements of heterogeneous tasks and maintain a small average system delay, we establish the optimization problem of minimizing the weighted average system delay and solve it by using the Relay Hopping and Differentiated Task Prioritization (RHATP) algorithm. Simulation results show that under the condition of guaranteeing the delay requirement of high-priority tasks, the strategy can achieve lower system delay and effectively reduce the processing delay in high-load areas. And it still maintains stable performance in different scenarios

VaR and ES forecasting via recurrent neural network-based stateful models

Due to the widespread and quickly escalating effects of large negative returns, as well as due to the increase in the importance of regulatory framework for financial institutions, the accurate measurement of financial risks has become a relevant question in the academia and industry. This paper proposes three novel models based on stateful Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FNN) to build forecasts for Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). We apply the models to six asset return time series spanning over more than 20 years. Our results reveal that the RNN-based stateful models generally outperform the non-stateful RNN models and econometric benchmark models including rolling window models, Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH)-type models, and Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) models, in terms of VaR and ES forecasting

Making fields: women in publishing

This introductory essay to The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing aims to make a theoretical intervention in the re-energised field of feminist book and publishing studies, exploring the varied roles of 'women in publishing' in the long twentieth century. Sections address the legacy of publishing as a 'gentleman's profession' and the structural inequalities embedded within the trade, alongside how feminist methods in book and publishing studies are aiming to redress this. We explore how different methodologies are needed to read (or create) feminist archives against the grain, and the significance of oral history and 'grey literature' in enabling scholars to tell new stories about the varied women who have worked in publishing, printing and bookselling over the last century

Heterogeneity of the attractor of the Lorenz '96 model: Lyapunov analysis, unstable periodic orbits, and shadowing properties

It is well known that the predictability of weather and climate is strongly state-dependent. Special, easily recognisable, and extremely relevant atmospheric states like blockings are associated with anomalous instability. This reflects the general property that the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems can feature considerable heterogeneity in terms of dynamical properties, and specifically, of their instability. The attractor of a chaotic dynamical systems is densely populated by unstable periodic orbits that can be used to approximate any forward trajectory through the so-called shadowing. Dynamical heterogeneity can lead to the presence of unstable periodic orbits with different number of unstable dimensions. This phenomenon - unstable dimensions variability - has considerable implications in terms of the structural stability of the system and of the possibility to model accurately its behaviour through numerical models. As a step in the direction of better understanding the properties of high-dimensional chaotic systems, here we provide an extensive numerical investigation of the variability of the dynamical properties across the attractor of the much studied Lorenz '96 model. By combining the Lyapunov analysis of the tangent space with the study of the shadowing of the chaotic trajectory performed by a very large set of unstable periodic orbits, we show that the observed variability in the number of unstable dimensions, which is a serious breakdown of hyperbolicity, is associated with the presence of a substantial number of finite-time Lyapunov exponents that fluctuate about zero also when very long averaging times are considered. The transition between regions of the attractor with different degrees of instability is associated with a significant drop of the quality of the shadowing. By performing a coarse graining based on the shadowing unstable periodic orbits, we are able to characterise the slow fluctuations of the system between regions featuring, on the average, anomalously high and anomalously low instability. In turn, such regions are associated, respectively, with states of anomalously high and low energy, thus providing a clear link between the microscopic and thermodynamical properties of the system

Atmospheric degradation of ecologically important biogenic volatiles: investigating the ozonolysis of (E)-β-ocimene, isomers of α and β-farnesene, α-terpinene and 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one, and their gas-phase products

Biogenic volatile organic compounds (bVOCs), synthesised by plants, are important mediators of ecological interactions that can also undergo a series of reactions in the atmosphere. Ground-level ozone is a secondary pollutant generated through sunlight-driven reactions between nitrogen oxides (NO ) and VOCs. Its levels have increased since the industrial revolution and reactions involving ozone drive many chemical processes in the troposphere. While ozone precursors often originate in urban areas, winds may carry these hundreds of kilometres, causing ozone formation to also occur in less populated rural regions. Under elevated ozone conditions, ozonolysis of bVOCs can result in quantitative and qualitative changes in the gas phase, reducing the concentrations of certain bVOCs and resulting in the formation of other compounds. Such changes can result in disruption of bVOC-mediated behavioural or ecological interactions. Through a series of gas-phase experiments using Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) and Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS), we investigated the products and their yields from the ozonolysis of a range of ubiquitous bVOCs, which were selected because of their importance in mediating ecological interactions such as pollinator and natural enemy attraction and plant-to-plant communication, namely: (E)-β-ocimene, isomers of α and β-farnesene, α-terpinene and 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one. New products from the ozonolysis of these compounds were identified, and the formation of these compounds is consistent with terpene-ozone oxidation mechanisms. We present the degradation mechanism of our model bVOCs and identify their reaction products. We discuss the potential ecological implications of the degradation of each bVOC and of the formation of reaction products