Month: March 2024

Abstract

Introduction

Previous research on parental influences on sexuality has found that parenting styles influence contraceptive use and risky sexual behaviours. However, no studies have examined the effect of parenting styles on the sexual well-being (SWB) of emerging adults more broadly. The aim of the study was to examine the SWB of emerging adults and to explore the relationship between parenting styles and SWB in emerging adulthood.

Methods

A sample of 152 Canadian emerging adults 18 to 25 years of age completed an online survey administered via social media from January to February 2021. Participants answered a sociodemographic questionnaire and measures of parenting styles, parent-child sexual communication, and SWB.

Results

Emerging adults were found to have healthy sexual well-being (e.g., high sexual satisfaction, low sexual distress). Authoritative parenting was associated with more positive, higher quality parent-child sexual communication, and more positive sexual well-being in emerging adults compared to other parenting styles.

Policy Implications and Conclusions

Although more research on this topic is needed, results indicate that parenting styles can affect the sexual development of emerging adults beyond sexual risk. Therefore, parental figures need to be actively involved in educating their children about sexuality and should provide enough support to foster positive sexual development in emerging adulthood.

Abstract

Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides regional or economic reasons, communities may form and segregate based on political alignment. The latter, referred to as political polarization, is of growing societal concern across the world. Here we map and quantify linguistic divergence across the partisan left-right divide in the United States, using social media data. We develop a general methodology to delineate (social) media users by their political preference, based on which (potentially biased) news media accounts they do and do not follow on a given platform. Our data consists of 1.5M short posts by 10k users (about 20M words) from the social media platform Twitter (now “X”). Delineating this sample involved mining the platform for the lists of followers (n = 422M) of 72 large news media accounts. We quantify divergence in topics of conversation and word frequencies, messaging sentiment, and lexical semantics of words and emoji. We find signs of linguistic divergence across all these aspects, especially in topics and themes of conversation, in line with previous research. While US American English remains largely intelligible within its large speech community, our findings point at areas where miscommunication may eventually arise given ongoing polarization and therefore potential linguistic divergence. Our flexible methodology — combining data mining, lexicostatistics, machine learning, large language models and a systematic human annotation approach — is largely language and platform agnostic. In other words, while we focus here on US political divides and US English, the same approach is applicable to other countries, languages, and social media platforms.

Real innovations in medicine and science are historic and singular; the stories behind each occurrence are precious. At Molecular Medicine we have established the Anthony Cerami Award in Translational Medicine to document and preserve these histories. The monographs recount the seminal events as told in the voice of the original investigators who provided the crucial early insight. These essays capture the essence of discovery, chronicling the birth of ideas that created new fields of research and launched trajectories that persisted and ultimately influenced how disease is prevented, diagnosed, and treated. In this volume, the Cerami Award Monograph is by Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, DSc (hon), FASTMH, FAAP, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, the Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics, and professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. A distinguished vaccinologist, pediatrician, and global health advocate with remarkable achievements in the realm of molecular medicine, this is the story of Dr. Hotez’s scientific journey.

Abstract

Behavioural science has yielded insights about the actions of individuals, particularly as consumers, that affect climate change. Behaviours in other spheres of life remain understudied. In this Perspective, we propose a collaborative research agenda that integrates behavioural science insights across multiple disciplines. To this end, we offer six recommendations for optimizing the quality and impact of research on individual climate behaviour. The recommendations are united by a shift towards more solutions-focused research that is directly useful to citizens, policymakers and other change agents. Achieving this vision will require overcoming challenges such as the limited funding for behavioural and social sciences and structural barriers within and beyond the academic system that impede collaborations across disciplines.

Abstract

Background

Dengue has become a major health issue in tropical regions as the numbers of reported cases and estimated infections continuously increase. In the Philippines, many challenges remain in preventing and controlling the disease amidst all the mitigation efforts of the government. This study sought to measure the health literacy of Filipino teachers and determine the associations among teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and selected practices (KAP) against dengue.

Methods

Elementary and secondary school teachers from the consistently declared dengue hotspots in the City of San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines, from the years 2017 to 2019 were selected as target participants in this cross-sectional study. A self-administered online survey tool was used in this study for both screening of participants and the KAP survey proper. STATA, descriptive statistics, and multiple logistic regression were used for the data analysis. Odds Ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were reported.

Results

The study comprised 604 participants whose mean age was 38.4 years. Television was determined as the top media source of information, and various health staff were the most trusted and common source of information. Good knowledge on dengue treatment (OR = 1.81; 95% CI 1.18–2.78) and dengue prevention (OR = 1.85; 95% CI 1.26–2.71) were positively associated with having good practices on protection against mosquito bites. Good knowledge on dengue signs and symptoms (OR = 1.56; 95% CI 1.02–2.37) and dengue prevention (OR = 2.38; 95% CI 1.59–3.58) were positively associated with having good practices on preventing breeding sites. Those with positive perceived susceptibility to dengue had lower odds of having good practices on protection against mosquito bites (OR = 0.64; 95% CI 0.41–0.99) and of having good practices on preventing breeding sites (OR = 0.46; 95% CI 0.26–0.81).

Conclusion

Even with the existing dengue policies, programs, and strategies, and the high disease literacy rate of Filipinos, dengue remains a struggle with an increasing case rate. Therefore, specific concepts should be emphasized, and interventions should be fine-tuned to better reach and influence the target population to attain a dengue-free Philippines.