Exploring the relationship between social class, mental illness stigma and mental health literacy using British national survey data

This is the accepted manuscript version. The final version is available from Sage at http://hea.sagepub.com/content/19/4/413.abstract.The relationship between social class and mental illness stigma has received little attention in recent years. At the same time, the concept of mental health literacy (MHL) has become an increasingly popular way to frame knowledge and understanding of mental health issues. British Social Attitudes survey data present an opportunity to unpack the relationships between these concepts and social class, an important task given continuing mental health inequalities. Regression analyses were undertaken which centred on depression and schizophrenia vignettes, with an asthma vignette used for comparison. The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC), education and income were used as indicators of class. A number of interesting findings emerged. Overall, class variables showed a stronger relationship with mental health literacy than stigma. The relationship was gendered such that women with higher levels of education, especially those with a degree, had the lowest levels of stigma and highest levels of MHL. Interestingly, class showed more of an association with stigma for the asthma vignette than it did for both the depression and schizophrenia vignettes, suggesting that mental illness stigma needs to be contextualised alongside physical illness stigma. Education emerged as the key indicator of class, followed by the NS-SEC, with income effects being marginal. These findings have implications for targeting health promotion campaigns and increasing service use in order to reduce mental health inequalities.This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council

Breeders' rights and open source crop germplasm

The freedom to operate (FTO) and the costs of acquiring and protecting intellectual property (IP) has become a major concern among both private and public plant breeders, especially in the IP intensive transgenic crops. Despite the developments in biotechnology, crop breeding still remains a sequential process where the best new varieties build on the successful varieties of the past. Given this breeding process, if FTO reduces the ability of breeders to access the best germplasm this could slow the rate of global crop improvement in both transgenic and non-transgenic crops. This potential problem has led many agricultural science leaders to raise concern about the possibility of an anti-commons developing because of growing freedom to operate issues.One of the solutions that is proposed for the growing FTO issue in plant breeding is the development of “open source” research platforms similar to those that led to the development of the Linux computer operating system. With an open source research process anyone is able to use the research platform to develop commercial products but any improvements made to the research platform become part of the platform for future users. The proponents of this approach, such as CAMBIA, argue that it will maintain access to critical intellectual property and allow optimal sharing of knowledge to take place.In this paper we examine the intellectual property rights associated with crop germplasm and varieties in Canada. We show that the “breeder rights” that are built into many current systems of breeder rights systems create a de facto open source system. This system allows breeders to use previously released varieties as breeding material for their own breeding programs allowing them to improve their own germplasm base. Once this is done, and a new variety is released from the program, it then becomes available for other breeders to use in the same manner. Few would argue that this system has not had a long history of success.As a counterfactual we consider the case where provisions of the UPOV 1991 act are used to give plant breeders the rights to not only protect their current varieties from being illegally copied but would also give them claim over any future varieties developed that use their variety as breeding material. In the factual, a three stage model has two public sector breeders seeking to maximize the benefits of their varieties over a heterogeneous group of iii farmers. In the first stage of the model the breeders decide the optimum amount of germplasm to share between each other. The second stage of the model requires the breeders to decide the optimal level of yield it should set as a plant breeding target. In the final stage farmers make an adoption choice basing their decision on the variety that best suits their farm. Backward induction is then used to solve both of the models. Applying the results of this simulation to the wheat plant breeding system in western Canada, shows that such a revised breeders’ rights system would quickly lead to a large number of potential owners for each variety released, which would then increase transactions costs and eventually lead to an anti-commons or FTO issue. In the case where there are no intellectual property rights on varieties breeders are able to produce a variety that more farmers will adopt because breeders’ costs will be lower due to germplasm sharing. Once intellectual property rights are introduced into the system, breeders choose to reduce the amount of variety sharing, which then reduces the number of farmers who would adopt the new variety, thus decreasing the benefits for farmers. Given this outcome, jurisdictions that implement the provisions of UPOV 1991 which may hinder FTO, may find benefits from developing other legal measures to maintain an open source type access to germplasm

Is the GSI anomaly due to neutrino oscillations? - A real time perspective -

We study a model for the "GSI anomaly" in which we obtain the time evolution of the population of parent and daughter particles directly in real time, considering explicitly the quantum entanglement between the daughter particle and neutrino mass eigenstates in the two-body decay. We confirm that the decay rate of the parent particle and the growth rate of the daughter particle do \emph{not} feature a time modulation from interference of neutrino mass eigenstates. The lack of interference is a consequence of the orthogonality of the mass eigenstates. This result also follows from the density matrix obtained by tracing out the unobserved neutrino states. We confirm this result by providing a complementary explanation based on Cutkosky rules applied to the Feynman diagram that describes the self-energy of the parent particle.Comment: 11 page

Spectral convergence in tapping and physiological fluctuations: coupling and independence of 1/f noise in the central and autonomic nervous systems.

When humans perform a response task or timing task repeatedly, fluctuations in measures of timing from one action to the next exhibit long-range correlations known as 1/f noise. The origins of 1/f noise in timing have been debated for over 20 years, with one common explanation serving as a default: humans are composed of physiological processes throughout the brain and body that operate over a wide range of timescales, and these processes combine to be expressed as a general source of 1/f noise. To test this explanation, the present study investigated the coupling vs. independence of 1/f noise in timing deviations, key-press durations, pupil dilations, and heartbeat intervals while tapping to an audiovisual metronome. All four dependent measures exhibited clear 1/f noise, regardless of whether tapping was synchronized or syncopated. 1/f spectra for timing deviations were found to match those for key-press durations on an individual basis, and 1/f spectra for pupil dilations matched those in heartbeat intervals. Results indicate a complex, multiscale relationship among 1/f noises arising from common sources, such as those arising from timing functions vs. those arising from autonomic nervous system (ANS) functions. Results also provide further evidence against the default hypothesis that 1/f noise in human timing is just the additive combination of processes throughout the brain and body. Our findings are better accommodated by theories of complexity matching that begin to formalize multiscale coordination as a foundation of human behavior

The impact of social sciences on health behaviour interventions has diminished – more interdisciplinary, culture-focused research is needed

Capturing the impact of social sciences on other disciplines is notoriously difficult. Daniel Holman, Rebecca Lynch, and Aaron Reeves have looked at the example of health behaviour interventions (HBIs), a field recently criticised for failing to draw on alternative, social sciences approaches that emphasise the structured and contextual aspects of behaviour and health. A bibliometric analysis of the HBIs field over the last decade reveals that despite an increase in the number of papers published, the proportion of those that explicitly address issues related to social context has actually diminished. Rather than continuing to focus on individualistic explanations of behaviour, a more thoroughly interdisciplinary approach is required; one that adopts a more nuanced conception of how the social and cultural context shapes behaviour