Housing: An Under-Explored Influence on Children’s Well-Being and Becoming

Research on housing has tended to focus on adult outcomes, establishing relationships between housing and a number of aspects of health and well-being. Research exploring the influence of housing on children has been more limited, and has tended to focus on adult concerns around risk behaviours, behavioural problems and educational attainment. While these outcomes are important, they neglect the impact of housing on children’s lives beyond these concerns. There are a number of reasons to believe that housing would play an important role in children’s well-being more broadly. Family stress and strain models highlight how housing difficulties experienced by adults may have knock on effects for children, while Bronfenbrenner’s ecological approach to human development emphasises the importance of children’s experiences of their environments, of which the home is among the most important. This paper summaries the existing evidence around housing and child outcomes, predominantly educational and behavioural outcomes, and argues for the extension of this work to consider the impact of housing on children’s lives more broadly, especially their subjective well-being

Clever girl: Benevolent sexism and cardiovascular threat

Benevolent sexism is a double-edged sword that uses praise to maintain gender inequality, which consequently makes women feel less efficacious, agentic and competent. This study investigated whether benevolently sexist feedback that was supportive could result in cardiovascular responses indicative of threat (lower cardiac output/higher total peripheral resistance). Women received either supportive non-sexist or supportive yet benevolent sexist feedback from a male evaluator following practice trials on a verbal reasoning test. As expected, women receiving benevolent sexist feedback exhibited cardiovascular threat during a subsequent test, relative to women receiving non-sexist feedback. There was no support for an alternative hypothesis that benevolent sexist feedback would lead to cardiovascular responses consistent with disengaging from the task altogether (i.e., lower heart rate and ventricular contractility). These findings illustrate that the consequences of benevolent sexism can occur spontaneously, while women are engaged with a task, and when the sexist feedback is intended as supportive

The Role of Cargo Binding Strength in Polymer-Mediated Intracellular Protein Delivery

Delivering proteins into the intracellular environment is a critical step toward probing vital cellular processes for the purposes of ultimately developing new therapeutics. Polymeric carriers are widely used to facilitate protein delivery with guanidinium-rich macromolecules leading the way within this category. Although binding interactions between natural proteins and synthetic polymers have been studied extensively, the relationship between polymer–protein binding and intracellular delivery is seldom explored. Elucidating the role of cargo binding in delivery is a promising direction that is expected to provide new insights that further optimize intracellular protein delivery. Herein, model polymeric carriers called protein transduction domain mimics (PTDMs) were studied for their ability to bind to a variety of protein cargoes, including an antibody, where the proteins encompassed a range of sizes (∼16–151 kDa) and isoelectric points (4.7–11.4). The PTDM–protein complexes were also delivered into Jurkat T cells in an attempt to establish a general correlation between binding ability and delivery outcomes. Binding assays resulted in a vast range of dissociation constants (K_d), which spanned from 3.5 to 4820 nM and indicated a variety of binding strengths between PTDM and protein. More significantly, PTDMs preferentially bound certain types of proteins over others, such as the antibody fragment over the whole antibody. Furthermore, increased PTDM–protein binding affinity did not correlate with protein delivery, suggesting that the successful internalization of complexes is independent of binding equilibrium. Although binding did not correlate with internalization here, the potential for binding affinity to impact other aspects of delivery, like cargo functionality inside the cell, remains an open possibility

The effect of types of postsecondary education on drinking: does age of enrollment matter?

Using longitudinal data from early adolescence through young adulthood, this study examined the association between different types of postsecondary education (PSE), age of enrollment in PSE, and the trajectory of alcohol use for Canadian young adults (N = 521). Trajectories of alcohol use were compared across young adults at 2-year colleges, 4-year universities, transfer programs (started at a 2-year college and transferred to a 4-year university), and terminal high school graduates. While initial findings revealed significant differences in the drinking trajectories of 2-year college students and 4-year university students, all differences were accounted for by variability in the age of enrollment. Overall, there were few differences in heavy drinking across types of institutions, but younger students increased their alcohol use more than older students following enrollment. However, young adults who do not attend PSE may be at greatest risk for heavy drinking over time