A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world

Sequential application of steady and pulsatile medium perfusion enhanced the formation of engineered bone

In native bone, cells experience fluctuating shear forces that are induced by pulsatile interstitial flow associated with habitual loading. We hypothesized that the formation of engineered bone can be augmented by replicating such physiologic stimuli to osteogenic cells cultured in porous scaffolds using bioreactors with medium perfusion. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the effect of fluid flow regime on in vitro bone-like tissue development by human adipose stem cells (hASC) cultivated on porous three-dimensional silk fibroin scaffolds. To this end, we varied the sequential relative durations of steady flow (SF) and pulsatile flow (PF) of culture medium applied over a period of 5 weeks, and evaluated their effect on early stages of bone formation. Porous silk fibroin scaffolds (400-600 μm pore size) were seeded with hASC (30×10(6) cells/mL) and cultured in osteogenic medium under four distinct fluid flow regimes: (1) PF for 5 weeks; (2) SF for 1 week, PF for 4 weeks; (3) SF for 2 weeks, PF for 3 weeks; (4) SF for 5 weeks. The PF was applied in 12 h intervals, with the interstitial velocity fluctuating between 400 and 1200 μm/s at a 0.5 Hz frequency for 2 h, followed by 10 h of SF. In all groups, SF was applied at 400 μm/s. The best osteogenic outcomes were achieved for the sequence of 2 weeks of SF and 3 weeks of PF, as evidenced by gene expression (including the PGE2 mechanotransduction marker), construct compositions, histomorphologies, and biomechanical properties. We thus propose that osteogenesis in hASC and the subsequent early stage bone development involve a mechanism, which detects and responds to the level and duration of hydrodynamic shear forces.We gratefully acknowledge funding support of this work by the NIH (DE161525, AR061988 and EB02520 to G.V.-N.), and the FCT PhD grant (SFRH/BD/42316/2007 to C.C.). The authors thank Dr. Darja Marolt and Supansa Yodmuang for their help with the experiments, Professor David L. Kaplan (Tufts University) for providing silk scaffolds, and Professor Jeffrey M. Gimble (Louisiana State University) for providing adipose stem cells used in this study