Targeting our blind spot. A metacognitive intervention ameliorates negative feelings, evaluations, and stereotypes towards Conservatives in a Liberal sample

Reininger M, Krott NR, Hoenisch M, Scheunemann J, Moritz S. Targeting our blind spot. A metacognitive intervention ameliorates negative feelings, evaluations, and stereotypes towards Conservatives in a Liberal sample. Journal of Social and Political Psychology. 2020;8(2).Political polarization between conservatives and liberals threatens democratic societies. Ameliorating liberal research participants’ negative feelings, evaluations, and stereotypes towards conservatives might be one step into the direction of a political depolarization. In a sample of U.S.-American liberal research participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 271), we randomly assigned participants in a pre-post-design either to a clinical-psychological, metacognitive-intervention (MCT), an educational, or a no-treatment-no-pre-measurement-control-condition. In the MCT-condition, participants were first asked seemingly simple questions that frequently elicited incorrect responses, followed by corrective information. In the educational condition, information was conveyed in a simple narrative form. MCT was significantly more effective in ameliorating liberal participants’ negative feelings, evaluations, and stereotypes towards conservatives compared to the other two control-conditions. Further, MCT-participants significantly reduced their negative feelings, negative evaluations, and perceptions of threat from pre- to post-measurement, significantly more than participants in the educational condition. The results of our preliminary study and its implications are discussed, and recommendations for further research are made

Increased soluble HLA in COVID-19 present a disease-related, diverse immunopeptidome associated with T cell immunity

Summary: HLA-presented antigenic peptides are central components of T cell-based immunity in infectious disease. Beside HLA molecules on cell surfaces, soluble HLA molecules (sHLA) are released in the blood suggested to impact cellular immune responses. We demonstrated that sHLA levels were significantly increased in COVID-19 patients and convalescent individuals compared to a control cohort and positively correlated with SARS-CoV-2-directed cellular immunity. Of note, patients with severe courses of COVID-19 showed reduced sHLA levels. Mass spectrometry-based characterization of sHLA-bound antigenic peptides, the so-called soluble immunopeptidome, revealed a COVID-19-associated increased diversity of HLA-presented peptides and identified a naturally presented SARS-CoV-2-derived peptide from the viral nucleoprotein in the plasma of COVID-19 patients. Of interest, sHLA serum levels directly correlated with the diversity of the soluble immunopeptidome. Together, these findings suggest an inflammation-driven release of sHLA in COVID-19, directly influencing the diversity of the soluble immunopeptidome with implications for SARS-CoV-2-directed T cell-based immunity and disease outcome