Friends Don’t Let Friends Hook Up Drunk

In the words of Coach Carr, don’t get drunk and have sex. Because you will get pregnant. And die. OK, so maybe that isn’t quite how the infamous “Mean Girls” quote goes, but it’s close enough. The “get slizzard and hook up” culture is huge on nearly every college campus, and, unfortunately, while doing “it” or getting close to doing “it” with some random guy on a Friday night seems like a good idea at the time, things aren’t usually quite so blissful the next morning. Or even the night of, when you get back to his place and sober up enough to realize he’s kind of creepy and you’re not as into him as you thought you were

Understanding age-related differences in the content and temporal dynamics of visual information processing

The N170, a negative amplitude peak occurring at approximately 170 ms poststimulus onset, is an event-related potential (ERP) component observed during electroencephalography (EEG) recordings that preferentially responds to faces compared to other objects (Bentin, Allison, Puce, Perez, & McCarthy, 1996; Bötzel, Schulze, & Stodieck, 1995). EEG research has suggested that the N170 may be modulated by the eye region, however this has received much debate (e.g. Bentin et al., 1996; Eimer,1998; Taylor, Itier, Allison, & Edmonds, 2001). Most recently, Rousselet, Ince, Rijsbergen, & Schyns, (2014) used Gaussian apertures (‘bubbles’) (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001) in a reverse correlation experiment to demonstrate that increased visibility of the contralateral eye leads to larger and earlier N170s in a face versus noise detection task. However, these results may be explained by the phenomenon of ‘left gaze bias’ – a preferential looking towards the left visual field. To understand if contralateral eye sensitivity can be explained by a non-feature specific attentional bias to the left, in the first study (Chapter 2) we investigated contralateral eye sensitivity to faces of different image sizes in a face versus noise detection task. Using reverse correlation and Mutual Information (MI) we found that contralateral eye sensitivity is size tolerant, suggesting that contralateral eye sensitivity does reflect feature encoding rather than a general left attentional bias. Next we wanted to address whether eye coding precedes other feature encoding in a more heterogeneous face set. The traditional ‘bubbles’ technique relies on stimuli being spatially aligned i.e. the eyes, nose, mouth of all images in the stimulus set to be in comparable positions for averaging bubble-masks across stimuli. To overcome this limitation, we used an adaption of BubbleWarp (Gill, DeBruine, Jones, & Schyns, 2015) a new technique outlined in Chapter 3, to retrospectively ‘warp’ Gaussian bubble masks to an average face image. Using this new technique, in Chapter 4, we tested the assumption that contralateral eye sensitivity preceded sensitivity to other facial features, specifically the mouth, in a gender and expressive versus non-expressive (EXNEX) categorisation task in young adult participants. Using MI onset analysis, we found idiosyncratic differences in MI onsets suggesting preferential encoding of the eye before other facial features for ~65 % of participants. This revealed that whilst there is an eye 3 coding preference, there is not a constraint to encoding the contralateral eye before other facial features. Aging is marked by a decline in processing speed (Salthouse, 1996) and previous work has suggested that whilst older adults process the contralateral eye in face versus noise detection tasks, this processing is weaker and delayed compared to younger adults (Jaworska, 2017). In Chapter 5 using the same task as in Chapter 4, we quantified age-related differences in feature processing speed by calculating 50 % integration times in younger and older participants. There was a ~20 ms delay in eye encoding for older compared to younger adults. We found a 9 ms delay in mouth encoding in the gender task and no differences in mouth processing speed in the EXNEX task. This suggests that there was not a general, uniform delay in processing speed of all facial features across tasks. Overall, our results demonstrate for the first time that 1) contralateral eye sensitivity is tolerant to changes in stimulus size, stimulus set, task demands and age, 2) contralateral eye sensitivity preferentially precedes sensitivity to the mouth but is not a prerequisite in gender or EXNEX categorisation tasks and 3) older adults process the same facial feature information as younger adults, but feature coding is not uniformly delayed compared to younger adults

Economic inequalities in the effectiveness of a primary care intervention for depression and suicidal ideation.

BACKGROUND: Economic disadvantage is associated with depression and suicide. We sought to determine whether economic disadvantage reduces the effectiveness of depression treatments received in primary care. METHODS: We conducted differential-effects analyses of the Prevention of Suicide in Primary Care Elderly: Collaborative Trial, a primary-care-based randomized, controlled trial for late-life depression and suicidal ideation conducted between 1999 and 2001, which included 514 patients with major depression or clinically significant minor depression. RESULTS: The intervention effect, defined as change in depressive symptoms from baseline, was stronger among persons reporting financial strain at baseline (differential effect size = -4.5 Hamilton Depression Rating Scale points across the study period [95% confidence interval = -8.6 to -0.3]). We found similar evidence for effect modification by neighborhood poverty, although the intervention effect weakened after the initial 4 months of the trial for participants residing in poor neighborhoods. There was no evidence of substantial differences in the effectiveness of the intervention on suicidal ideation and depression remission by economic disadvantage. CONCLUSIONS: Economic conditions moderated the effectiveness of primary-care-based treatment for late-life depression. Financially strained individuals benefited more from the intervention; we speculate this was because of the enhanced treatment management protocol, which led to a greater improvement in the care received by these persons. People living in poor neighborhoods experienced only temporary benefit from the intervention. Thus, multiple aspects of economic disadvantage affect depression treatment outcomes; additional work is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms

Environmental Exposure and Leptospirosis, Peru

Human infection by leptospires has highly variable clinical manifestations, which range from subclinical infection to fulminant disease. We conducted a population-based, cross-sectional seroepidemiologic study in Peru to determine potential relationships of environmental context to human exposure to Leptospira and disease associated with seroconversion. Three areas were studied: a flooded, urban slum in the Peruvian Amazon city of Iquitos; rural, peri-Iquitos villages; and a desert shantytown near Lima. Seroprevalence in Belen was 28% (182/650); in rural areas, 17% (52/316); and in a desert shantytown, 0.7% (1/150). Leptospira-infected peridomestic rats were found in all locales. In Belen, 20 (12.4%) of 161 patients seroconverted between dry and wet seasons (an incidence rate of 288/1,000). Seroconversion was associated with history of febrile illness; severe leptospirosis was not seen. Human exposure to Leptospira in the Iquitos region is high, likely related both to the ubiquity of leptospires in the environment and human behavior conducive to transmission from infected zoonotic sources

Electrocardiographic features of immune checkpoint inhibitor associated myocarditis.

BACKGROUND: Myocarditis is a highly morbid complication of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) use that remains inadequately characterized. The QRS duration and the QTc interval are standardized electrocardiographic measures that are prolonged in other cardiac conditions; however, there are no data on their utility in ICI myocarditis. METHODS: From an international registry, ECG parameters were compared between 140 myocarditis cases and 179 controls across multiple time points (pre-ICI, on ICI prior to myocarditis, and at the time of myocarditis). The association between ECG values and major adverse cardiac events (MACE) was also tested. RESULTS: Both the QRS duration and QTc interval were similar between cases and controls prior to myocarditis. When compared with controls on an ICI (93±19 ms) or to baseline prior to myocarditis (97±19 ms), the QRS duration prolonged with myocarditis (110±22 ms, p CONCLUSIONS: The QRS duration is increased in ICI myocarditis and is associated with increased MACE risk. Use of this widely available ECG parameter may aid in ICI myocarditis diagnosis and risk-stratification

Secondary organic aerosol (SOA) yields from NO3 radical + isoprene based on nighttime aircraft power plant plume transects

Nighttime reaction of nitrate radicals (NO3) with biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) has been proposed as a potentially important but also highly uncertain source of secondary organic aerosol (SOA). The southeastern United States has both high BVOC and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, resulting in a large model-predicted NO3-BVOC source of SOA. Coal-fired power plants in this region constitute substantial NOx emissions point sources into a nighttime atmosphere characterized by high regionally widespread concentrations of isoprene. In this paper, we exploit nighttime aircraft observations of these power plant plumes, in which NO3 radicals rapidly remove isoprene, to obtain field-based estimates of the secondary organic aerosol yield from NO3+isoprene. Observed in-plume increases in nitrate aerosol are consistent with organic nitrate aerosol production from NO3+isoprene, and these are used to determine molar SOA yields, for which the average over nine plumes is 9% (±5%). Corresponding mass yields depend on the assumed molecular formula for isoprene-NO3-SOA, but the average over nine plumes is 27% (±14%), on average larger than those previously measured in chamber studies (12%–14% mass yield as ΔOA∕ΔVOC after oxidation of both double bonds). Yields are larger for longer plume ages. This suggests that ambient aging processes lead more effectively to condensable material than typical chamber conditions allow. We discuss potential mechanistic explanations for this difference, including longer ambient peroxy radical lifetimes and heterogeneous reactions of NO3-isoprene gas phase products. More in-depth studies are needed to better understand the aerosol yield and oxidation mechanism of NO3 radical+isoprene, a coupled anthropogenic–biogenic source of SOA that may be regionally significant

Secondary organic aerosol (SOA) yields from NO_3 radical + isoprene based on nighttime aircraft power plant plume transects

Nighttime reaction of nitrate radicals (NO_3) with biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) has been proposed as a potentially important but also highly uncertain source of secondary organic aerosol (SOA). The southeastern United States has both high BVOC and nitrogen oxide (NO_x) emissions, resulting in a large model-predicted NO_3-BVOC source of SOA. Coal-fired power plants in this region constitute substantial NO_x emissions point sources into a nighttime atmosphere characterized by high regionally widespread concentrations of isoprene. In this paper, we exploit nighttime aircraft observations of these power plant plumes, in which NO_3 radicals rapidly remove isoprene, to obtain field-based estimates of the secondary organic aerosol yield from NO_3+isoprene. Observed in-plume increases in nitrate aerosol are consistent with organic nitrate aerosol production from NO_3+isoprene, and these are used to determine molar SOA yields, for which the average over nine plumes is 9% (±5%). Corresponding mass yields depend on the assumed molecular formula for isoprene-NO_3-SOA, but the average over nine plumes is 27% (±14%), on average larger than those previously measured in chamber studies (12%–14% mass yield as ΔOA∕ΔVOC after oxidation of both double bonds). Yields are larger for longer plume ages. This suggests that ambient aging processes lead more effectively to condensable material than typical chamber conditions allow. We discuss potential mechanistic explanations for this difference, including longer ambient peroxy radical lifetimes and heterogeneous reactions of NO_3-isoprene gas phase products. More in-depth studies are needed to better understand the aerosol yield and oxidation mechanism of NO_3 radical+isoprene, a coupled anthropogenic–biogenic source of SOA that may be regionally significant