Grief and Recovery

Imagine that someone recovers relatively quickly, say, within two or three months, from grief over the death of her spouse, whom she loved and who loved her; and suppose that, after some brief interval, she remarries. Does the fact that she feels better and moves on relatively quickly somehow diminish the quality of her earlier relationship? Does it constitute a failure to do well by the person who died? Our aim is to respond to two arguments that give affirmative answers to these questions. The first argument, which is developed by Dan Moller in “Love and Death”, states that recovering relatively quickly from grief over the deaths of people who are close to us is deeply regrettable, in one respect, because it means that these people were relatively unimportant to us. The second, which derives from some classic literary discussions of grief, states that such a recovery is regrettable because it amounts to abandoning the person who died. Responding to these arguments promises to dissolve certain anxieties about whether we do well by the people we love when they die. Beyond this, it promises to help us better understand what it means to cultivate good relationships with these people during their lives

Biomarkers in solid organ transplantation: establishing personalized transplantation medicine.

Technological advances in molecular and in silico research have enabled significant progress towards personalized transplantation medicine. It is now possible to conduct comprehensive biomarker development studies of transplant organ pathologies, correlating genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic information from donor and recipient with clinical and histological phenotypes. Translation of these advances to the clinical setting will allow assessment of an individual patient's risk of allograft damage or accommodation. Transplantation biomarkers are needed for active monitoring of immunosuppression, to reduce patient morbidity, and to improve long-term allograft function and life expectancy. Here, we highlight recent pre- and post-transplantation biomarkers of acute and chronic allograft damage or adaptation, focusing on peripheral blood-based methodologies for non-invasive application. We then critically discuss current findings with respect to their future application in routine clinical transplantation medicine. Complement-system-associated SNPs present potential biomarkers that may be used to indicate the baseline risk for allograft damage prior to transplantation. The detection of antibodies against novel, non-HLA, MICA antigens, and the expression of cytokine genes and proteins and cytotoxicity-related genes have been correlated with allograft damage and are potential post-transplantation biomarkers indicating allograft damage at the molecular level, although these do not have clinical relevance yet. Several multi-gene expression-based biomarker panels have been identified that accurately predicted graft accommodation in liver transplant recipients and may be developed into a predictive biomarker assay

WHEN DOES NEGATIVE BRAND PUBLICITY HURT? The Moderating Influence of Analytic Versus Holistic Thinking

Negative publicity can diminish positive consumer perceptions of a brand. We explore the impact of processing style on mitigating the effects of negative publicity. We hypothesize that holistic thinkers are less susceptible to negative publicity information than are analytic thinkers. Holistic thinkers are more likely to consider external context-based explanations for the negative publicity, resulting in little or no revision of beliefs about the parent brand. Analytic thinkers, in contrast, are less likely to consider contextual factors, attributing negative information to the parent brand and updating their brand beliefs accordingly. Across three studies, we find support for our predictions.Brand publicity, holistic thinking

How equity sensitivity affects attitudes and behaviors

Research on equity sensitivity has continued steadily since the introduction of the construct in 1985. While the initial study (Huseman, Hatfield, & Miles, 1985) examined the relationship of equity sensitivity to job satisfaction, more recent research has expanded the scope of inquiry to include variables such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) (Konovsky & Organ, 1996), and organizational commitment (O\u27Neill & Mone, 1998). However, the extant research leaves open to debate some major theoretical questions. How does equity sensitivity affect attitudes and behaviors? How are perceptions of justice involved

Civic Trust

It is a commonplace that there are limits to the ways we can permissibly treat people, even in the service of good ends. For example, we may not steal someone’s wallet, even if we plan to donate the contents to famine relief, or break a promise to help a colleague move, even if we encounter someone else on the way whose need is somewhat more urgent. In other words, we should observe certain constraints against mistreating people, where a constraint is a moral principle that we should not violate, even when that is the only way to prevent further, similar violations or other, greater evils. But, despite its intuitive appeal, the view that there are constraints has drawn considerable criticism, and attempts to provide a rationale for constraints have been, at best, substantially incomplete. In this paper, I develop a novel rationale for constraints that fills important gaps left by views in the literature. The account helps make sense of constraints by identifying a morally significant relation that we bear to people when, and only when, we observe certain constraints against mistreating them. Put roughly, observing these constraints is a condition for being worthy of a form of trust that I call civic trust, and being worthy of such trust is an essential part of living with others in the sort of harmony that characterizes morally permissible interaction. By focusing, in ways other accounts do not, on the role that observing constraints plays in our psychological lives, this approach not only makes the structure of constraints more intelligible, but also helps us better appreciate the force of our reason to observe constraints, and better understand the kind of moral community to which we should aspire

Noble gases in diamonds: Occurrences of solarlike helium and neon

We have measured noble gases in 17 diamond samples, mostly inclusion free, from diverse, known locations. The ^3He/^4He ratios are characterized by a large spread (10^4), ranging from values below atmospheric to close to the solar ratio. Highest ratios were seen for an Australian colorless diamond composite and an Arkansas diamond. These samples also have imprecise but intriguing neon isotopic ratios, which are close to the solar value. An origin for the solarlike He and Ne in the diamond samples is unlikely to be accounted for by the presence of nucleogenic or spallogenic components. For single diamond stones a positive correlation is found between ^3He/^4He and ^(13)C/^(12)C, possibly indicating that heavy carbon is accompanied by primordial helium. However, the He result for the Australian colorless diamond composite with low δ^(13)C value requires another explanation, possibly sedimentary carbon contaminated with cosmic dust. The wide variation in ^4He/^(40)_*Ar ratios observed from diamond samples suggests a complex history for the source regions and the diamond crystallization processes. Results for two Australian diamond composites (colorless and colored), which came from the same kimberlite pipe, are especially notable: the colorless stones contain no radiogenic components but solarlike He and Ne isotopic ratios, whereas the colored stones are enriched in radiogenic and fissiogenic components. Seemingly the Australian diamonds crystallized in a heterogeneous environment in the mantle source region. A pair of Arkansas diamonds, believed to be from a single pipe, exhibits similar anomalies

Identification of common blood gene signatures for the diagnosis of renal and cardiac acute allograft rejection.

To test, whether 10 genes, diagnostic of renal allograft rejection in blood, are able to diagnose and predict cardiac allograft rejection, we analyzed 250 blood samples from heart transplant recipients with and without acute rejection (AR) and with cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection by QPCR. A QPCR-based logistic regression model was built on 5 of these 10 genes (AR threshold composite score >37%  = AR) and tested for AR prediction in an independent set of 109 samples, where it correctly diagnosed AR with 89% accuracy, with no misclassifications for AR ISHLT grade 1b. CMV infection did not confound the AR score. The genes correctly diagnosed AR in a blood sample within 6 months prior to biopsy diagnosis with 80% sensitivity and untreated grade 1b AR episodes had persistently elevated scores until 6 months after biopsy diagnosis. The gene score was also correlated with presence or absence of cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) irrespective of rejection grade. In conclusion, there is a common transcriptional axis of immunological trafficking in peripheral blood in both renal and cardiac organ transplant rejection, across a diverse recipient age range. A common gene signature, initially identified in the setting of renal transplant rejection, can be utilized serially after cardiac transplantation, to diagnose and predict biopsy confirmed acute heart transplant rejection