Addressing climate change with behavioral science: a global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors

Queer Affective Literacies: Examining Rotten Women\u27s Literacies in Japan

In Japan, there is a group of women who are notoriously known as “rotten women” because of their fantasies that perceive male homosocial relationships as homoromantic or homosexual. These transformative homoerotic fantasies are central to Boys Love culture. These “rotten women” or fujoshi engage with Japanese popular media using Boys Love literacies that challenge normative notions of male intimacy. In this paper, I examine Boys Love literacies, which bear intertextual and potentially queer qualities, and the impact these have on readers. I interrogate how an audience, immersed in heteronormative Japanese media, learn these non-normative literacies that I am positioning as a set of new literacies. I analyse Boys Love literacies embedded in fanworks, particularly women’s fan comics, and highlight how these serve as pedagogical tools in understanding the logics of these nuanced literacies. I argue that these comics serve as critical affective mediums that impart the queer and intertextual characteristics of Boys Love culture that challenge heteronormative engagements with Japanese popular media. This paper highlights a kind of cultural literacy production and dissemination that operate on a grassroots level and is produced by young actors who actively explore the queer potential of Japanese media

Genetic loci associated with ideal cardiovascular health: A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies

BACKGROUND: Multiple genetic loci are associated with clinical cardiovascular (CV) disease and individual CV risk factors. Individuals with ideal levels of all major CV risk factors have very low risk for CVD morbidity or mortality. Ideal levels of risk factors can be attained by lifestyle modifications; however, little is known about gene variants associated with ideal CV health. Our objective was to carry out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on the trait. METHODS AND RESULTS: We examined two dichotomous phenotypes of ideal CV health - Clinical (untreated cholesterol < 200 mg/dl; untreated blood pressure (BP) <120/<80; not diabetic) and Clinical+Behavioral (Clinical plus: not a current smoker; BMI <25 kg/m(2)) -among white participants aged 50 ± 5 years. We performed a meta-analysis of four GWAS (total n=11,708) from the MESA, CARDIA, ARIC and Framingham Heart Study cohorts. We identified a SNP (rs445925) in the APOC1/APOE region that was associated with Clinical ideal CV health at genome-wide level of significance (p<2.0×10(−9)). The significance of this region was validated using exome chip genotyping. The association with ideal CV health was attenuated after adjusting for LDL cholesterol. CONCLUSION: A common SNP in the APOC1/APOE region, previously found to be associated with protective levels of cholesterol and lower cardiovascular risk, may be associated with ideal health. In future replication studies, larger sample sizes may be needed to detect loci with more modest effects on ideal CV health. In addition to the important impact of lifestyle modifications, we have identified evidence for gene variation that plays a role in ideal CV health