A Longitudinal Relationship Between Depressive Symptoms and Development of Metabolic Syndrome: The Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study

Despite variability in the burden of elevated depressive symptoms by sex and race and differences in the incidence of metabolic syndrome, few prior studies describe the longitudinal association of depressive symptoms with metabolic syndrome in a diverse cohort. We tested whether baseline and time-varying depressive symptoms were associated with metabolic syndrome incidence in black and white men and women from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study

'Prove me the bam!': victimization and agency in the lives of young women who commit violent offences

This article reviews the evidence regarding young women’s involvement in violent crime and, drawing on recent research carried out in HMPYOI Cornton Vale in Scotland, provides an overview of the characteristics, needs and deeds of young women sentenced to imprisonment for violent offending. Through the use of direct quotations, the article suggests that young women’s anger and aggression is often related to their experiences of family violence and abuse, and the acquisition of a negative worldview in which other people are considered as being 'out to get you' or ready to 'put one over on you'. The young women survived in these circumstances, not by adopting discourses that cast them as exploited victims, but by drawing on (sub)cultural norms and values which promote pre-emptive violence and the defence of respect. The implications of these findings for those who work with such young women are also discussed

Gender norms in Portuguese college sudents' judgments in familial homicides: bad men and mad women

The gender of the offender has been proved to be an important factor in judicial sentencing. In this study, we analyze the judgments of College students regarding perpetrators of familial homicides to evaluate the presence of these gender norms and biases in the larger society. The sample included 303 college students (54.8% female) enrolled in several social sciences and engineering courses. Participants were asked to read 12 vignettes based on real crimes taken from Portuguese newspapers. Half were related to infanticide, and half were related to intimate partner homicide. The sex of the offender was orthogonally manipulated to the type of crime. The results show that gender had an important impact on sentences, with males being more harshly penalized by reasons of perversity and women less penalized by reason of mental disorders. In addition, filicide was more heavily penalized than was intimate partner homicide. The results also revealed a tendency toward a retributive conception of punishment. We discuss how gender norms in justice seem to be embedded in society as well as the need for intervention against the punitive tendency of this population

The architecture of a probation office: a reflection of policy and an impact on practice

This article illustrates how the physicality of a probation office can be considered both integral to, and representative of, several important changes in the probation service’s recent history through analysis of research conducted in a probation office. I suggest that the relationship between the ‘protected’ zone of the office and the ‘unprotected’ zone of the waiting area and interview rooms is similar to Goffman’s ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ and expand on his theory of social action by describing how the architecture of probation represents and potentially perpetuates the rise of risk, punishment and managerialism in probation. The article then moves onto the exterior and location of the office to look at how these represent probation’s move away from the communities it serves as well as inadvertently increasing the amount of punishment certain offenders receive. This has significant consequences if the policy of probation moves towards modes of practice which no longer prioritise standardisation and punishment over professional judgment and the importance of the offender-officer relationship and the article concludes by looking to some examples of more inclusive forms of office design and architecture

Weak Responses to Auditory Feedback Perturbation during Articulation in Persons Who Stutter: Evidence for Abnormal Auditory-Motor Transformation

Previous empirical observations have led researchers to propose that auditory feedback (the auditory perception of self-produced sounds when speaking) functions abnormally in the speech motor systems of persons who stutter (PWS). Researchers have theorized that an important neural basis of stuttering is the aberrant integration of auditory information into incipient speech motor commands. Because of the circumstantial support for these hypotheses and the differences and contradictions between them, there is a need for carefully designed experiments that directly examine auditory-motor integration during speech production in PWS. In the current study, we used real-time manipulation of auditory feedback to directly investigate whether the speech motor system of PWS utilizes auditory feedback abnormally during articulation and to characterize potential deficits of this auditory-motor integration. Twenty-one PWS and 18 fluent control participants were recruited. Using a short-latency formant-perturbation system, we examined participants’ compensatory responses to unanticipated perturbation of auditory feedback of the first formant frequency during the production of the monophthong [ε]. The PWS showed compensatory responses that were qualitatively similar to the controls’ and had close-to-normal latencies (~150 ms), but the magnitudes of their responses were substantially and significantly smaller than those of the control participants (by 47% on average, p<0.05). Measurements of auditory acuity indicate that the weaker-than-normal compensatory responses in PWS were not attributable to a deficit in low-level auditory processing. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with functional defects in the inverse models responsible for the transformation from the domain of auditory targets and auditory error information into the domain of speech motor commands

Non-physical consequences of the Muffin-tin-type intra-molecular potential

We demonstrate using a simple model that in the frame of muffin-tin - like potential non-physical peculiarities appear in molecular photoionization cross-sections that are a consequence of jumps in the potential and its first derivative at some radius. The magnitude of non-physical effects is of the same order as the physical oscillations in the cross-section of a two-atomic molecule. The role of the size of these jumps is illustrated by choosing three values of it. The results obtained are connected to the studied previously effect of non-analytical behavior as a function of r the potential V(r)acting upon a particle on its photoionization cross-section. In reality, such potential has to be analytic in magnitude and first derivative function in distance. Introduction of non-analytic features in model potential leads to non-physical features in the corresponding cross-section - oscillations, additional maxima etc.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Influence of Socioeconomic Status Trajectories on Innate Immune Responsiveness in Children

Lower socioeconomic status (SES) is consistently associated with poor health, yet little is known about the biological mechanisms underlying this inequality. In children, we examined the impact of early-life SES trajectories on the intensity of global innate immune activation, recognizing that excessive activation can be a precursor to inflammation and chronic disease.Stimulated interleukin-6 production, a measure of immune responsiveness, was analyzed ex vivo for 267 Canadian schoolchildren from a 1995 birth cohort in Manitoba, Canada. Childhood SES trajectories were determined from parent-reported housing data using a longitudinal latent-class modeling technique. Multivariate regression was conducted with adjustment for potential confounders.SES was inversely associated with innate immune responsiveness (p=0.003), with persistently low-SES children exhibiting responses more than twice as intense as their high-SES counterparts. Despite initially lower SES, responses from children experiencing increasing SES trajectories throughout childhood were indistinguishable from high-SES children. Low-SES effects were strongest among overweight children (p<0.01). Independent of SES trajectories, immune responsiveness was increased in First Nations children (p<0.05) and urban children with atopic asthma (p<0.01).These results implicate differential immune activation in the association between SES and clinical outcomes, and broadly imply that SES interventions during childhood could limit or reverse the damaging biological effects of exposure to poverty during the preschool years

Automatic Morphological Subtyping Reveals New Roles of Caspases in Mitochondrial Dynamics

Morphological dynamics of mitochondria is associated with key cellular processes related to aging and neuronal degenerative diseases, but the lack of standard quantification of mitochondrial morphology impedes systematic investigation. This paper presents an automated system for the quantification and classification of mitochondrial morphology. We discovered six morphological subtypes of mitochondria for objective quantification of mitochondrial morphology. These six subtypes are small globules, swollen globules, straight tubules, twisted tubules, branched tubules and loops. The subtyping was derived by applying consensus clustering to a huge collection of more than 200 thousand mitochondrial images extracted from 1422 micrographs of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells treated with different drugs, and was validated by evidence of functional similarity reported in the literature. Quantitative statistics of subtype compositions in cells is useful for correlating drug response and mitochondrial dynamics. Combining the quantitative results with our biochemical studies about the effects of squamocin on CHO cells reveals new roles of Caspases in the regulatory mechanisms of mitochondrial dynamics. This system is not only of value to the mitochondrial field, but also applicable to the investigation of other subcellular organelle morphology