Immigration documentation statuses evoke racialized faceism in mental representations.

U.S. immigration discourse has spurred interest in characterizing who illegalized immigrants are or perceived to be. What are the associated visual representations of migrant illegality? Across two studies with undergraduate and online samples (N = 686), we used face-based reverse correlation and similarity sorting to capture and compare mental representations of illegalized immigrants, native-born U.S. citizens, and documented immigrants. Documentation statuses evoked racialized imagery. Immigrant representations were dark-skinned and perceived as non-white, while citizen representations were light-skinned, evaluated positively, and perceived as white. Legality further differentiated immigrant representations: documentation conjured trustworthy representations, illegality conjured threatening representations. Participants spontaneously sorted unlabeled faces by documentation status in a spatial arrangement task. Faces' spatial similarity correlated with their similarity in pixel luminance and "American" ratings, confirming racialized distinctions. Representations of illegalized immigrants were uniquely racialized as dark-skinned un-American threats, reflecting how U.S. imperialism and colorism set conditions of possibility for existing representations of migrant illegalization.

Facecraft: Race Reification in Psychological Research With Faces.

Faces are socially important surfaces of the body on which various meanings are attached. The widespread physiognomic belief that faces inherently contain socially predictive value is why they make a generative stimulus for perception research. However, critical problems arise in studies that simultaneously investigate faces and race. Researchers studying race and racism inadvertently engage in various research practices that transform faces with specific phenotypes into straightforward representatives of their presumed race category, thereby taking race and its phenotypic associations for granted. I argue that research practices that map race categories onto faces using bioessentialist ideas of racial phenotypes constitute a form of racecraft ideology, the dubious reasoning of which presupposes the reality of race and mystifies the causal relation between race and racism. In considering how to study racism without reifying race in face studies, this article places these practices in context, describes how they reproduce racecraft ideology and impair theoretical inferences, and then suggests counterpractices for minimizing this problem.

Bridging the serodivide: attitudes of PrEP users towards sex partners living with HIV.

The introduction of biomedical HIV prevention methods, such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), holds the potential to overcome the serodivide. We investigated the attitudes of PrEP users towards having sex with partners living with HIV. PrEP users in the Netherlands were recruited online and completed three questionnaires over a period of six months. We investigated changes over time in feelings of fear of HIV, comfort, and attitudes towards condom use when having sex with men living with HIV (MLHIV). A majority of PrEP users in our sample (up to 71.6%) had sex with MLHIV. Feeling comfortable to have sex with MLHIV did not change over time, but was already at a high level at T1. Most importantly, feeling safe not to use condoms with HIV-positive partners significantly increased, and did so in a rather short period of time after the onset of PrEP use (3-6 months). Taken together, the findings suggest that that PrEP may contribute to decreasing the serodivide between MSM rather quickly after the onset of PrEP use.

Quality of Sex Life and Perceived Sexual Pleasure of PrEP Users in the Netherlands.

Next to its benefits for HIV prevention, PrEP may have psychosocial benefits relating to improved quality of sex life. The aim of the current study was to investigate the onset of changes in the quality of sex life and sexual pleasure of PrEP users in the first months of commencing PrEP use. Moreover, we investigated what factors were related to the quality of sex life of PrEP users. We recruited 145 participants via the Dutch PrEP-advocacy website PrEPnu.nl, and they received follow-up questionnaires after three and six months. We found that PrEP users reported an increase in the quality of their sex life, which was related to reduced fear of HIV since they started using PrEP but not to decreased condom use. PrEP users were more interested in experimenting with sex practices, but they did not always feel more desirable as a sex partner because of PrEP use. Health-care providers and health promotion campaigns could emphasize the positive effects of PrEP on the quality of sex life, in addition to the HIV-preventive effects of PrEP, to decrease PrEP stigma and increase PrEP uptake.

Slow Uptake of PrEP: Behavioral Predictors and the Influence of Price on PrEP Uptake Among MSM with a High Interest in PrEP.

Despite the improved availability and affordability of PrEP in the Netherlands, PrEP uptake is low among men who have sex with men (MSM). To optimize uptake, it is important to identify facilitators and barriers of PrEP use. During our study period, the price of PrEP dropped significantly after generic PrEP was introduced. We investigated whether the price drop predicts PrEP uptake, alongside behavioral and demographic characteristics. Participants (N = 349) were recruited online and completed three questionnaires over a period of 6 months, between February 2017 and March 2019. After 6 months, 159 (45.6%) participants were using PrEP. PrEP uptake was greater among MSM who ever had postexposure prophylaxis (PEP) treatment, among MSM with a better perceived financial situation, and when the price of PrEP dropped. MSM in a tighter perceived financial situation may use PrEP more when it would be free or fully reimbursed.

RESUMEN: A pesar de la disponibilidad y asequibilidad a PrEP en Los Paises Bajos, el consumo de PrEP es bajo entre hombres que tienen sexo con hombres (HSH). Para optimizar su consumo, es importante identificar los factores facilitadores y las barreras del uso de PrEP. Durante nuestro estudio, el precio de PrEP se redujo significativamente, después de que se introdujo la PrEP genérica al mercado. Investigamos las características demograficas y de conducta y si la caída en el precio predice el consumo de PrEP. Participantes (N = 349) fueron reclutados en linea y completaron tres cuestionarios en un periodo de seis meses, entre Febrero de 2017 y Marzo de 2019. Despues de seis meses, 159 participantes (45.6%) estaban usando PrEP. El consumo de PrEP fue mayor cuando el precio de PrEP bajó y entre HSH que se sometieron a un tratamiento de profilaxis posexposición (PEP) y que tenían una buena situación financiera. HSH con una percibida situacion finaciera más precaria podrían usar PrEP más cuando sea gratis o reembolsada totalmente.

Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences.

Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals' beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives-achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented-impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants' representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants'. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.

Socio-Sexual Experiences and Access to Healthcare Among Informal PrEP Users in the Netherlands.

The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of informal PrEP users regarding access to PrEP and PrEP-related healthcare, community responses, sexual behavior and well-being. We interviewed 30 men who have sex with men (MSM) in semi-structured online interviews between March and August 2018. Interviews were analyzed using interpretive description. Informal PrEP users were well informed about the use of PrEP, but sometimes did not make use of renal testing. Participants reported a lack of PrEP knowledge among healthcare providers, which limited their access to PrEP and put them at risk, as they received incorrect information. Although some participants reported negative reactions from potential sex partners, most received positive reactions and were sometimes seen as more desirable sex partners. PrEP healthcare services should not only be accessible to formal PrEP users, but also to PrEP users who procure PrEP informally.

Quantifying idiosyncratic and shared contributions to judgment.

Identifying relative idiosyncratic and shared contributions to judgments is a fundamental challenge to the study of human behavior, yet there is no established method for estimating these contributions. Using edge cases of stimuli varying in intrarater reliability and interrater agreement-faces (high on both), objects (high on the former, low on the latter), and complex patterns (low on both)-we showed that variance component analyses (VCAs) accurately captured the psychometric properties of the data (Study 1). Simulations showed that the VCA generalizes to any arbitrary continuous rating and that both sample and stimulus set size affect estimate precision (Study 2). Generally, a minimum of 60 raters and 30 stimuli provided reasonable estimates within our simulations. Furthermore, VCA estimates stabilized given more than two repeated measures, consistent with the finding that both intrarater reliability and interrater agreement increased nonlinearly with repeated measures (Study 3). The VCA provides a rigorous examination of where variance lies in data, can be implemented using mixed models with crossed random effects, and is general enough to be useful in any judgment domain in which agreement and disagreement are important to quantify and in which multiple raters independently rate multiple stimuli.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis sorting among men who have sex with men.

Factors such as race, masculinity, and sexually transmitted infections have been documented to influence partner selection in men who have sex with men (MSM). Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has received mixed evaluations as a responsible step in HIV prevention and as an enabler of risker sexual practices. PrEP may consequently serve as an additional factor in partner choice. We examine the role that PrEP use and "promiscuity" play in affiliation and dating decisions by men who have sex with men with different HIV and PrEP stati. We invited 450 MSM across the United States from a smartphone geo-locating sex application to complete a survey of which 339 successfully finished the task. The survey contained vignettes of fictional men who were promiscuous or monogamous and either taking PrEP or not. Participants provided responses on whether to affiliate with these characters in three social domains: as friends, dates, or sex partners. Neither PrEP nor promiscuity influenced friendship choices. There was a preference for dating monogamous characters. Critically, PrEP influenced sexual affiliations for HIV negative individuals who showed a preference for PrEP-using characters. The pattern of results provides quantitative evidence for PrEP-based sexual sorting aimed at reducing risk of HIV transmission.

Control Engagement During Sentence and Inhibition fMRI Tasks in Children With Reading Difficulties.

Recent reading research implicates executive control regions as sites of difference in struggling readers. However, as studies often employ only reading or language tasks, the extent of deviation in control engagement in children with reading difficulties is not known. The current study investigated activation in reading and executive control brain regions during both a sentence comprehension task and a nonlexical inhibitory control task in third-fifth grade children with and without reading difficulties. We employed both categorical (group-based) and individual difference approaches to relate reading ability to brain activity. During sentence comprehension, struggling readers had less activation in the left posterior temporal cortex, previously implicated in language, semantic, and reading research. Greater negative activity (relative to fixation) during sentence comprehension in a left inferior parietal region from the executive control literature correlated with poorer reading ability. Greater comprehension scores were associated with less dorsal anterior cingulate activity during the sentence comprehension task. Unlike the sentence task, there were no significant differences between struggling and nonstruggling readers for the nonlexical inhibitory control task. Thus, differences in executive control engagement were largely specific to reading, rather than a general control deficit across tasks in children with reading difficulties, informing future intervention research.

Perceptual biases during cued task switching relate to decision process differences between children and adults.

Previous work suggests that children engage preparatory processing differently than adults in cued task switching. One potential consequence is that they are differentially biased by visual properties of the stimuli, for example, target-choice similarity. We tested this possibility in 215 children and young adults ranging from 6 to 27 years of age. Participants played a cue-target game with varying levels of working memory and attentional demand where they matched multidimensional stimuli according to a cued dimension. Younger age, low working memory demand, and matching fine grained dimensions (i.e., pattern) increased the bias of target-choice similarity on task performance. Older age, high working memory, and matching global dimensions (i.e., shape) mitigated the bias. Developmental transitions to adult performance differed by task demands but generally occurred during adolescence. A drift diffusion analysis revealed age and task differences in decision making strategies consistent with how similarity impacted task performance, indicating that, especially with low working memory demand, children made impulsive, similarity-driven decisions. Our findings support the idea that children engage in preparation strategies that exacerbate perceptual biases on task performance; improvements are observed with age or through changes in task structure and stimuli. These results have implications for interpreting cognitive control performance in children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Robust effects of affective person learning on evaluation of faces.

People form impressions of others from multiple sources of information. Facial appearance is one such source and judgments based on facial appearance are made after minimal exposure to faces. A more reliable source of information is affective person learning based on others' past actions. Here we investigated whether the effects of such appearance-independent learning on face evaluation emerge after rapid face exposure, a response deadline procedure, and a lack of explicit recognition of the faces. In three experiments, participants learned to associate novel faces with negative and positive behaviors, and then evaluated the faces presented on their own, without the behaviors. Even after extremely brief exposures (e.g., 35 ms), participants evaluated faces previously associated with negative behaviors more negatively than those associated with positive behaviors (Experiment 1). The learning effect persisted when participants were asked to evaluate briefly presented faces before a response deadline (Experiment 2), although the effect was diminished. Finally, although this learning effect increased as a function of face recognition (Experiment 3), it was present with only minimal recognition, suggesting that participants do not need to deliberately retrieve behavioral information for it to influence face evaluation. Together, the findings suggest that person learning unrelated to facial appearance is a powerful determinant of face evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication.

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.

Consistent Performance Differences between Children and Adults Despite Manipulation of Cue-Target Variables.

Two behavioral experiments assessed the plasticity and short-term improvement of task switching in 215 children and adults. Specifically, we studied manipulations of cued attention to different features of a target stimulus as a way to assess the development of cognitive flexibility. Each experiment had multiple levels of difficulty via manipulation of number of cued features (2-4) and number of response options (2 or 4). Working memory demand was manipulated across the two experiments. Impact of memory demand and task level manipulations on task accuracy and response times were measured. There were three overall goals: First, these task manipulations (number of cued features, response choices, and working memory load) were tested to assess the stability of group differences in performance between children ages 6-16 years and adults 18-27 years, with the goal of reducing age group differences. Second, age-related transitions to adult-level performance were examined within subgroups of the child sample. Third, short-term improvement from the beginning to the end of the study session was measured to probe whether children can improve with task experience. Attempts to use task manipulations to reduce age differences in cued task switching performance were unsuccessful: children performed consistently worse and were more susceptible to task manipulations than adults. However, across both studies, adult-like performance was observed around mid-adolescence, by ages 13-16 years. Certain task manipulations, especially increasing number of response options when working memory demand was low, produced differences from adults even in the oldest children. Interestingly, there was similar performance improvement with practice for both child and adult groups. The higher memory demand version of the task (Experiment 2) prompted greater short-term improvement in accuracy and response times than the lower memory demand version (Experiment 1). These results reveal stable differences in cued switching performance over development, but also relative flexibility within a given individual over time.

Knowledge of Social Affiliations Biases Economic Decisions.

An individual's reputation and group membership can produce automatic judgments and behaviors toward that individual. Whether an individual's social reputation impacts interactions with affiliates has yet to be demonstrated. We tested the hypothesis that during initial encounters with others, existing knowledge of their social network guides behavior toward them. Participants learned reputations (cooperate, defect, or equal mix) for virtual players through an iterated economic game (EG). Then, participants learned one novel friend for each player. The critical question was how participants treated the friends in a single-shot EG after the friend-learning phase. Participants tended to cooperate with friends of cooperators and defect on friends of defectors, indicative of a decision making bias based on memory for social affiliations. Interestingly, participants' explicit predictions of the friends' future behavior showed no such bias. Moreover, the bias to defect on friends of defectors was enhanced when affiliations were learned in a social context; participants who learned to associate novel faces with player faces during reinforcement learning did not show reputation-based bias for associates of defectors during single-shot EG. These data indicate that when faced with risky social decisions, memories of social connections influence behavior implicitly.

Inhibition of mammary tumor growth and metastases to bone and liver by dietary grape polyphenols.

The cancer preventive properties of grape products such as red wine have been attributed to polyphenols enriched in red wine. However, much of the studies on cancer preventive mechanisms of grape polyphenols have been conducted with individual compounds at concentrations too high to be achieved via dietary consumption. We recently reported that combined grape polyphenols at physiologically relevant concentrations are more effective than individual compounds at inhibition of ERalpha(-), ERbeta(+) MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cell proliferation, cell cycle progression, and primary mammary tumor growth (Schlachterman et al., Transl Oncol 1:19-27, 2008). Herein, we show that combined grape polyphenols induce apoptosis and are more effective than individual resveratrol, quercetin, or catechin at inhibition of cell proliferation, cell cycle progression, and cell migration in the highly metastatic ER (-) MDA-MB-435 cell line. The combined effect of dietary grape polyphenols (5 mg/kg each resveratrol, quercetin, and catechin) was tested on progression of mammary tumors in nude mice created from green fluorescent protein-tagged MDA-MB-435 bone metastatic variant. Fluorescence image analysis of primary tumor growth demonstrated a statistically significant decrease in tumor area by dietary grape polyphenols. Molecular analysis of excised tumors demonstrated that reduced mammary tumor growth may be due to upregulation of FOXO1 (forkhead box O1) and NFKBIA (IkappaBalpha), thus activating apoptosis and potentially inhibiting NfkappaB (nuclear factor kappaB) activity. Image analysis of distant organs for metastases demonstrated that grape polyphenols reduced metastasis especially to liver and bone. Overall, these results indicate that combined dietary grape polyphenols are effective at inhibition of mammary tumor growth and site-specific metastasis.

On the use of in vivo cargo velocity as a biophysical marker.

Molecular motors move many intracellular cargos along microtubules. Recently, it has been hypothesized that in vivo cargo velocity can be used to determine the number of engaged motors. We use theoretical and experimental approaches to investigate these assertions, and find that this hypothesis is inconsistent with previously described motor behavior, surveyed and re-analyzed in this paper. Studying lipid droplet motion in Drosophila embryos, we compare transport in a mutant, Delta(halo), with that in wild-type embryos. The minus-end moving cargos in the mutant appear to be driven by more motors (based on in vivo stall force observations). Periods of minus-end motion are indeed longer than in wild-type embryos but the corresponding velocities are not higher. We conclude that velocity is not a definitive read-out of the number of motors propelling a cargo.

Gene expression changes induced in the testis by transplacental exposure to high and low doses of 17{alpha}-ethynyl estradiol, genistein, or bisphenol A.

The purpose of this study was to determine (1) the transcriptional program elicited by exposure to three estrogen receptor (ER) agonists: 17 alpha-ethynyl estradiol (EE), genistein (Ges), and bisphenol A (BPA) during fetal development of the rat testis and epididymis; and (2) whether very low dosages of estrogens (evaluated over five orders of magnitude of dosage) produce unexpected changes in gene expression (i.e., a non-monotonic dose-response curve). In three independently conducted experiments, Sprague-Dawley rats were dosed (sc) with 0.001-10 microg EE/kg/day, 0.001-100 mg Ges/kg/day, or 0.002-400 mg BPA/kg/day. While morphological changes in the developing reproductive system were not observed, the gene expression profile of target tissues were modified in a dose-responsive manner. Independent dose-response analyses of the three studies identified 59 genes that are significantly modified by EE, 23 genes by Ges, and 15 genes by BPA (out of 8740), by at least 1.5 fold (up- or down-regulated). Even more genes were observed to be significantly changed when only the high dose is compared with all lower doses: 141, 46, and 67 genes, respectively. Global analyses aimed at detecting genes consistently modified by all of the chemicals identified 50 genes whose expression changed in the same direction across the three chemicals. The dose-response curve for gene expression changes was monotonic for each chemical, with both the number of genes significantly changed and the magnitude of change, for each gene, decreasing with decreasing dose. Using the available annotation of the gene expression changes induced by ER-agonist, our data suggest that a variety of cellular pathways are affected by estrogen exposure. These results indicate that gene expression data are diagnostic of mode of action and, if they are evaluated in the context of traditional toxicological end-points, can be used to elucidate dose-response characteristics.

A determinant for directionality of organelle transport in Drosophila embryos.

BACKGROUND: Motor-driven transport along microtubules is a primary cellular mechanism for moving and positioning organelles. Many cargoes move bidirectionally by using both minus and plus end-directed motors. How such cargoes undergo controlled net transport is unresolved. RESULTS: Using a combination of genetics, molecular biology, and biophysics, we have identified Halo, a novel regulator of lipid droplet transport in early Drosophila embryos. In embryos lacking Halo, net transport of lipid droplets, but not that of other cargoes, is specifically altered; net transport is minus-end directed at developmental stages when it is normally plus-end directed. This reversal is due to an altered balance of motion at the level of individual organelles; without Halo, travel distances and stall forces are reduced for plus-end and increased for minus-end motion. During development, halo mRNA is highly upregulated just as net plus-end transport is initiated (phase II), and its levels drop precipitously shortly before transport becomes minus-end directed (phase III). Exogenously provided Halo prevents the switch to net minus-end transport in phase III in wild-type embryos and induces net plus-end transport during phase II in halo mutant embryos. This mechanism of regulation is likely to be of general importance because the Drosophila genome encodes a family of related proteins with similar sequences, each transiently expressed in distinct domains. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that Halo acts as a directionality determinant for embryonic droplet transport and is the first member of a new class of transport regulators.