The Impact of Intergroup Emotions on Forgiveness in Northern Ireland

Although prejudice researchers have mainly focused their attention on changing attitudes toward outgroups, other outcome variables may also be important. In post-conflict reconciliation, intergroup forgiveness may play a crucial role in helping groups in conflict put the atrocities of the past behind them (Cairns, Tam, Hewstone, & Niens, 2005). Two studies showed that both the specific intergroup emotion of anger and infrahumanization (the attribution of more human emotions to the ingroup than to the outgroup) predicted decreased intergroup forgiveness in Northern Ireland. Results further revealed intergroup contact as a potential means of reducing anger toward the outgroup and improving attitudes toward them. This research integrated prior interpersonal theory with intergroup literature to examine the concept of intergroup forgiveness and its predictors. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for reconciliation in conflict societies

Dissecting the neurocomputational bases of patch-switching

The survival and well-being of humans require solving the patch-switching problem: we must decide when to stop collecting rewards in a current patch and travel somewhere else where gains may be higher. Previous studies suggested that frontal regions are underpinned by several processes in the context of foraging decisions such as tracking task difficulty, and/or the value of exploring the environment. To dissociate between these processes, participants completed an fMRI patch-switching learning task inspired by behavioral ecology. By analyzing >11,000 trials collected across 21 participants, we found that the activation in the cingulate cortex was closely related to several patch-switching-related variables including the decision to leave the current patch, the encounter of a new patch, the harvest value, and the relative forage value. Learning-induced changes in the patch-switching threshold were tracked by activity within frontoparietal regions including the superior frontal gyrus and angular gyrus. Our findings suggest that frontoparietal regions shape patch-switching learning apart from encoding classical non-learning foraging processes. These findings provide a novel neurobiological understanding of how learning emerges neurocomputationally shaping patch-switching behavior with implications in real-life choices such as job selection and pave the way for future studies to probe the causal role of these neurobiological mechanisms

Value Fulfilment and Well-Being: Clarifying Directions over Time

Objective We investigate for the first time in a 9-day dairy study whether fulfillingone’s values predicts well-being or whether well-being predicts valuefulfilment over time. Background The empirical associations between the importance of human values to individuals and their well-being are typically weak and inconsistent. More recently, value fulfillment (i.e., acting in line with one's values) has shown to be more strongly correlated with well-being. Method The present research goes beyond past research by integrating work from clinical, personality, and social psychology to model associations between value fulfillment and positive and negative aspects of well-being over time. Results Across a nine-day diary study involving 1434 observations (N=184), we found that people who were able to fulfill their self-direction values reported more positive well-being on the next day, and those who fulfilled their hedonism values reported less negative well-being on the next day. Conversely, people who reported more positive well-being were more able to fulfill their achievement, stimulation, and self-direction values on the next day, and those who reported more negative well-being were less able to fulfill their achievement values. Importantly, these effects were consistent across three countries/regions (EU/UK, India, Türkiye), the importance people attributed to values, period of the week, and their prestudy well-being. Conclusion These results help to understand the fundamental interconnections between values and well-being while also having relevance to clinical practice

Stability of SARS-CoV-2 phylogenies.

Funder: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; funder-id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000879Funder: European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to unprecedented, nearly real-time genetic tracing due to the rapid community sequencing response. Researchers immediately leveraged these data to infer the evolutionary relationships among viral samples and to study key biological questions, including whether host viral genome editing and recombination are features of SARS-CoV-2 evolution. This global sequencing effort is inherently decentralized and must rely on data collected by many labs using a wide variety of molecular and bioinformatic techniques. There is thus a strong possibility that systematic errors associated with lab-or protocol-specific practices affect some sequences in the repositories. We find that some recurrent mutations in reported SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences have been observed predominantly or exclusively by single labs, co-localize with commonly used primer binding sites and are more likely to affect the protein-coding sequences than other similarly recurrent mutations. We show that their inclusion can affect phylogenetic inference on scales relevant to local lineage tracing, and make it appear as though there has been an excess of recurrent mutation or recombination among viral lineages. We suggest how samples can be screened and problematic variants removed, and we plan to regularly inform the scientific community with our updated results as more SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences are shared (https://virological.org/t/issues-with-sars-cov-2-sequencing-data/473 and https://virological.org/t/masking-strategies-for-sars-cov-2-alignments/480). We also develop tools for comparing and visualizing differences among very large phylogenies and we show that consistent clade- and tree-based comparisons can be made between phylogenies produced by different groups. These will facilitate evolutionary inferences and comparisons among phylogenies produced for a wide array of purposes. Building on the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser at UCSC, we present a toolkit to compare, analyze and combine SARS-CoV-2 phylogenies, find and remove potential sequencing errors and establish a widely shared, stable clade structure for a more accurate scientific inference and discourse

Torture and the UK’s “war on asylum”: medical power and the culture of disbelief

When the now ‘iconic’ images of shackled, humiliated and dehumanised detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq were broadcast globally, in the mid-2000s, the relationship between medical power and torture in the “war on terror” was also thrust sharply into focus. Graphic images of coalition troops photographing and posing in front of hooded, naked prisoners forced into a “human pyramid”, and of people made to wear animal collars, indicated a regime in which degradation had a defining role. The photograph of a soldier gloating over the corpse of a man who had died as a result of torture was just one picture of a network of interrogation camps in which detention by coalition forces could be fatal. Yet if there were any expectations that the presence of medical personnel may have checked this violence, these were shattered by the fact that clinicians – in some cases at least – were integral to its practice. «It is now beyond doubt that Armed Forces physicians, psychologists, and medics were active and passive partners in the systematic neglect and abuse of war on terror prisoners», wrote Steven Miles in 2009 (Miles 2009, X). And as he continued, this involved providing interrogators «with medical information to use in setting the nature and degree of physical and psychological abuse during interrogations». It involved monitoring «interrogations to devise ways to break prisoners down or to keep them alive». It involved pathologists holding back death certificates and autopsy reports in order to minimise the number of fatalities or cover up torture-related deaths as deaths by natural causes (Ibid). Procedures including «cramped confinement, dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding» were among the practices that were «at times (…) legally sanctioned due to medical supervision» in the context of the “war on terror”, according to Hoffman (2011, 1535). He continued to suggest that doctors are not just important to «modern torture methods», they are «irreplaceable». In this context, the “war on terror” is no aberration. As the revolutionary psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon documented in 1959, for example, certain medical practitioners had an integral role in the military occupation of Algeria, and «There are, for instance, psychiatrists … known to numerous prisoners», he suggested, «who have given electric shock treatments to the accused and have questioned them during the waking phase, which is characterized by a certain confusion, a relaxation of resistance, a disappearance of the person's defences.» (Fanon 1959/1965, 138). Indeed, in his analysis of the Algerian revolution, he discussed how resistance to and struggles over the meanings of medical power were integral to the revolution itself. However, while the role of medical power in the practice of torture has been subjected to sustained critique in the context of the “war on terror”, what follows examines the relationship between medical power and torture in the context of what has been depicted – metaphorically – as another (although to some extents related) “war”: the “war” on asylum. According to the UNHCR (2017, 3), between 5 and 35 per cent of those asylum seekers who have been granted refugee status have survived torture. And focusing on the UK as a case study, this chapter examines the institutional and legal structures prohibiting torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, particularly as they apply to those subject to immigration control in this context. But further, it also examines the ideological and political conditions within which claims by those seeking asylum that they have been subjected to torture prior to arrival can be (and have been) ignored, downplayed and denied. It examines how medical expertise has frequently been undermined in the asylum process when this expertise is utilised to add weight to asylum seekers’ claims to have experienced torture. It examines how there have been attempts to narrow the definition of torture in ways which exclude people from the protections to which torture survivors are entitled. But it also explores the ways in which segments of the medical profession have been complicit in riding roughshod over existing safeguards to prevent further harm to those who have experienced torture, thus potentially compounding its effects. In particular, it examines claims that in certain contexts clinicians have administered dangerous “care” in order to ensure the removal of people from the UK, despite them claiming that they – or their family members – face serious harm and persecution on arrival as a result of this. In a historical discussion of medical involvement in torture, Giovanni Maio (2001, 1609) has noted that from its earliest incarnations one of the features of torture has been its use as an «oppressive instrument used in the preservation of power». Furthermore, whilst methods of torture have certainly «developed», and continue to do so, he argues, this «function» of torture is «especially relevant today». This chapter argues that the (mis)treatment of those in the UK who say they have been tortured, preserves and is bound up with a particular manifestation of state power: the aims, rationale and dictates of immigration control. Its claims are perhaps much more mundane than the forms of direct medical complicity in torture alluded to above. But they are nonetheless important. For it is argued that the acts of omission and commission documented in this chapter expose the tensions between the rights of certain “categories” of migrants to be afforded adequate clinical care on the one hand, and the goals and aims of immigration control itself on the other. This poses profound questions about the functions of clinical care and the ethical duties, responsibilities and obligations of clinicians, it is suggested. But as this chapter also crucially explores, this is a form of power that many within the medical profession have historically challenged, and continue to do so

Race/Ethnic Differences in the Associations of the Framingham Risk Factors with Carotid IMT and Cardiovascular Events

Background: Clinical manifestations and outcomes of atherosclerotic disease differ between ethnic groups. In addition, the prevalence of risk factors is substantially different. Primary prevention programs are based on data derived from almost exclusively White people. We investigated how race/ethnic differences modify the associations of established risk factors with atherosclerosis and cardiovascular events. Methods: We used data from an ongoing individual participant meta-analysis involving 17 population-based cohorts worldwide. We selected 60,211 participants without cardiovascular disease at baseline with available data on ethnicity (White, Black, Asian or Hispanic). We generated a multivariable linear regression model containing risk factors and ethnicity predicting mean common carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) and a multivariable Cox regression model predicting myocardial infarction or stroke. For each risk factor we assessed how the association with the preclinical and clinical measures of cardiovascular atherosclerotic disease was affected by ethnicity. Results: Ethnicity appeared to significantly modify the associations between risk factors and CIMT and cardiovascular events. The association between age and CIMT was weaker in Blacks and Hispanics. Systolic blood pressure associated more strongly with CIMT in Asians. HDL cholesterol and smoking associated less with CIMT in Blacks. Furthermore, the association of age and total cholesterol levels with the occurrence of cardiovascular events differed between Blacks and Whites. Conclusion: The magnitude of associations between risk factors and the presence of atherosclerotic disease differs between race/ethnic groups. These subtle, yet significant differences provide insight in the etiology of cardiovascular disease among race/ethnic groups. These insights aid the race/ethnic-specific implementation of primary prevention

Magma plumbing systems: a geophysical perspective

Over the last few decades, significant advances in using geophysical techniques to image the structure of magma plumbing systems have enabled the identification of zones of melt accumulation, crystal mush development, and magma migration. Combining advanced geophysical observations with petrological and geochemical data has arguably revolutionised our understanding of, and afforded exciting new insights into, the development of entire magma plumbing systems. However, divisions between the scales and physical settings over which these geophysical, petrological, and geochemical methods are applied still remain. To characterise some of these differences and promote the benefits of further integration between these methodologies, we provide a review of geophysical techniques and discuss how they can be utilised to provide a structural context for and place physical limits on the chemical evolution of magma plumbing systems. For example, we examine how Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), coupled with Global Positioning System (GPS) and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data, and seismicity may be used to track magma migration in near real-time. We also discuss how seismic imaging, gravimetry and electromagnetic data can identify contemporary melt zones, magma reservoirs and/or crystal mushes. These techniques complement seismic reflection data and rock magnetic analyses that delimit the structure and emplacement of ancient magma plumbing systems. For each of these techniques, with the addition of full-waveform inversion (FWI), the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the integration of geophysics with numerical modelling, we discuss potential future directions. We show that approaching problems concerning magma plumbing systems from an integrated petrological, geochemical, and geophysical perspective will undoubtedly yield important scientific advances, providing exciting future opportunities for the volcanological community