Observed Mass-Scale Call-Response Dynamics Between Public Health Officials and the American Public in the Surging COVID-19 Pandemic Summer 2020

By any objective measure, the United States has mishandled its response to the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 outbreak, with 177,394 deaths and 5,745,721 cases. In the world, there have been some 796,330 deaths and 22,848,030 validated coronavirus cases (with 15,500,447 recovered). The real rates are thought to be 3x – 10x higher given the low access to tests. In this moment, there are multiple epidemics ongoing in the U.S., resulting in massive government and private industry expenditures, disrupted markets, and social roiling. In journalistic coverage and social image sets, the interactive call-response between public health officials and the general American public may be seen in the Summer of 2020 (in a time of phased shutdowns and re-openings and re-closings). This work offers an original content analysis of over 2,431 journalistic articles and 2,224 social images captured July 3, 2020 to understand where the call-response communications broke down and the message got lost at enormous social and personal cost. A sidebar offers an analysis of COVID-19 social memes.

Social visual attentional engagement and memory in Phelan-McDermid syndrome and autism spectrum disorder: a pilot eye tracking study

Background The current study used eye tracking to investigate attention and recognition memory in Phelan-McDermid syndrome (PMS), a rare genetic disorder characterized by intellectual disability, motor delays, and a high likelihood of comorbid autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Social deficits represent a core feature of ASD, including decreased propensity to orient to or show preference for social stimuli. Methods We used a visual paired-comparison task with both social and non-social images, assessing looking behavior to a novel image versus a previously viewed familiar image to characterize social attention and recognition memory in PMS (n = 22), idiopathic ASD (iASD, n = 38), and typically developing (TD) controls (n = 26). The idiopathic ASD cohort was divided into subgroups with intellectual disabilities (ID; developmental quotient < 70) and without (developmental quotient > 70) and the PMS group into those with and without a co-morbid ASD diagnosis. Results On measures of attention, the PMS group with a comorbid ASD diagnosis spent less time viewing the social images compared to non-social images; the rate of looking back and forth between images was lowest in the iASD with ID group. Furthermore, while all groups demonstrated intact recognition memory when novel non-social stimuli were initially presented (pre-switch), participants with PMS showed no preference during the post-switch memory presentation. In iASD, the group without ID, but not the group with ID, showed a novelty preference for social stimuli. Across indices, individuals with PMS and ASD performed more similarly to PMS without ASD and less similarly to the iASD group. Conclusion These findings demonstrate further evidence of differences in attention and memory for social stimuli in ASD and provide contrasts between iASD and PMS.

Youth in Residential Care: A Cross-Sectional Mediation Analysis of Youth’s Perceptions of Their Social Images, Self-Representations, and Adjustment Outcomes

Individuals’ perceptions of their social images [i.e., meta-representations (MR)] and perceived stereotyping threat create involuntary stress responses that may affect important outcomes, such as self-esteem, academic achievement, and mental health. This study aimed to (1) analyze the indirect associations between residential care youth’s MR and their psychological adjustment (i.e., externalizing and internalizing problems) through their self-representations (SR) and (2) test the moderating role of youth’s age and residential unit size in those associations. A sample of 926 youth aged between 12 and 25years old filled out self-report questionnaires regarding their representations about how people in general perceive them (i.e., MR) and their SR. Residential care professionals filled in the socio-demographic questionnaires and the Child Behavior Checklist. Data were analyzed through multiple mediation models and moderated mediation models. Results showed that (1) youth’s behavioral MR were indirectly associated with higher internalizing and externalizing behavior through higher levels of behavioral SR and (2) youth’s emotional MR were associated with higher internalizing problems through higher emotional SR, but also with lower internalizing problems through lower levels of behavioral SR. These results emphasize the importance of stimulating positive SR, by showing that they can be a protective factor for youth in residential care.

Brief Report: Preferred Processing of Social Stimuli in Autism: A Perception Task

In this study we investigate whether persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) perceive social images differently than control participants (CON) in a graded perception task in which stimuli emerged from noise before dissipating into noise again. We presented either social stimuli (humans) or non-social stimuli (objects or animals). ASD were slower to recognize images during their emergence, but as fast as CON when indicating the dissipation of the image irrespective of its content. Social stimuli were recognized faster and remained discernable longer in both diagnostic groups. Thus, ASD participants show a largely intact preference for the processing of social images. An exploratory analysis of response subsets reveals subtle differences between groups that could be investigated in future studies.

Sexual Division in Parenting: A Normative Context That Hinders Co-Responsibility

Recent decades have seen an increase in women’s employment rates and an expansion of egalitarian values. Previous studies document the so-called “motherhood penalty,” which makes women’s employment more difficult. Demands for greater shared child-rearing between parents are hindered by a normative climate that supports differentiated gender roles in the family. Using data from the Center for Sociological Research [Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas] (2018), this study shows that the Spanish population perceives that differentiated social images of motherhood and fatherhood still persist. The “sexual division in parenting” index is proposed and the profile of the individuals who most perceive this sexual division is analyzed. The results show that women and younger people are the most aware of this social normativity that unequally distributes child care, making co-responsibility difficult. The political implications of these results are discussed.

Testing the Relationship Between Looking Time and Choice Preference in Long-tailed Macaques

Visual bias in social cognition studies is often interpreted to indicate preference, yet it is difficult to elucidate whether this translates to social preference. Moreover, visual bias is often framed in terms of surprise or recognition. It is thus important to examine whether an interpretation of preference is warranted in looking time studies. Here, using touchscreen training, we examined (1) looking time to non-social images in an image viewing task, and (2) preference of non-social images in a paired choice task, in captive long-tailed macaques, Macaca fascicularis. In a touchscreen test phase, we examined (3) looking time to social images in a viewing task, and (4) preference of social images in a paired choice task. Finally, we examined (5) looking time to social images in a non-test environment. For social content, the monkeys did not exhibit clear preferences for any category (conspecific/heterospecific, in-group/outgroup, kin/non-kin, young/old) in the explicit choice paradigm, nor did they differentiate between images in the viewing tasks, thus hampering our interpretation of the data. Post-hoc analysis of the training data however revealed a visual bias towards images of food and objects over landscapes in the viewing task. Similarly, across choice-task training sessions, food and object images were chosen more frequently than landscapes. This suggests that the monkeys’ gaze may indeed indicate preference, but this only became apparent for non-social stimuli. Why these monkeys had no biases in the social domain remains enigmatic. To better answer questions about attention to social stimuli, we encourage future research to examine behavioral measures alongside looking time.

Intact Differentiation of Responses to Socially-Relevant Emotional Stimuli Across Psychotic Disorders: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study

Event-related potential (ERP) studies of motivated attention in schizophrenia typically show intact sensitivity to affective vs. non-affective images depicting diverse types of content. However, it is not known whether this ERP pattern: 1) extends to images that solely depict social content, (2) applies across a broad sample with diverse psychotic disorders, and (3) relates to self-reported trait social anhedonia. We examined late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes to images involving people that were normatively pleasant (affiliative), unpleasant (threatening), or neutral in 97 stable outpatients with various psychotic disorders and 38 healthy controls. Both groups showed enhanced LPP to pleasant and unpleasant vs. neutral images to a similar degree, despite lower overall LPP in patients. Within the patients, there were no significant LPP differences among subgroups (schizophrenia vs. other psychotic disorders; affective vs. non-affective psychosis) for the valence effect (pleasant/unpleasant vs. neutral). Higher social anhedonia showed a small, significant relation to lower LPP to pleasant images across all groups. These findings suggest intact motivated attention to social images extends across psychotic disorder subgroups. Dimensional transdiagnostic analyses revealed a modest association between self-reported trait social anhedonia and an LPP index of neural sensitivity to pleasant affiliative images.

Visual preference for social vs. non-social images in young children with autism spectrum disorders. An eye tracking study

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are associated to social attention (SA) impairments. A gaze bias to non-social objects over faces has been proposed as an early marker of ASD. This bias may be related to the concomitant circumscribed interests (CI), which question the role of competing objects in this atypical visual behavior. The aim of this study was to compare visual attention patterns to social and non-social images in young children with ASD and matched typical controls (N = 36; age range 41–73 months) assessing the role of emotion in facial stimuli and the type of competing object. A paired preference task was designed pairing happy, angry, and neutral faces with two types of objects (related or not related to autism CI). Eye tracking data were collected, and three indexes were considered as dependent variables: prioritization (attentional orientation), preference, and duration (sustained attention). Results showed that both groups had similar visual pattern to faces (prioritization, more attention and longer visits to faces paired with objects non-related to their CI); however, the ASD group attended to faces significantly less than controls. Children with ASD showed an emotional bias (late orientation to angry faces and typical preference for happy faces). Finally, objects related to their CI captured attention in both groups, significantly reducing SA in children with ASD. Atypical SA is present in young children with ASD regardless the competing non-social object. Identifying strengths and difficulties in SA in this population may have substantial repercussion for early diagnosis, intervention, and ultimately prognosis.

SOCIAL IMAGES OF EYE DONATION:THE PATHWAY TOWARDS MAKING A 'GIFT OF SIGHT'

Stupendous possibility of scientific and technological advancement in the field of health care services, the corneal transplantation emerges as a mechanism to enhance the life of a corneal blind person. The number of corneal transplantation has increased with the decrease in graft failure.The institutionalization of corneal transplantation and eye donation has blurred the line between human and machine.This brings a transformation in the outlook of people towards body and eye in the society.The body is considered as a machine and cornea (part of eye anatomy) is regarded as spare part which can be exchanged to replace the healthy donated cornea with the damage cornea of a recipient.The paper seeks to understand the perception towards dead body and willingness for eye donation in the society. The symbolic meaning attached with body and eye in the society is also outlined in the paper.The aim of the paper is to describe the representation of eye and willingness for eye donation among students of Panjab University and its affiliated colleges in Chandigarh,India.