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The IMPACC cohort, composed of >1,000 hospitalized COVID-19 participants, contains five illness trajectory groups (TGs) during acute infection (first 28 days), ranging from milder (TG1-3) to more severe disease course (TG4) and death (TG5). Here, we report deep immunophenotyping, profiling of >15,000 longitudinal blood and nasal samples from 540 participants of the IMPACC cohort, using 14 distinct assays. These unbiased analyses identify cellular and molecular signatures present within 72 h of hospital admission that distinguish moderate from severe and fatal COVID-19 disease. Importantly, cellular and molecular states also distinguish participants with more severe disease that recover or stabilize within 28 days from those that progress to fatal outcomes (TG4 vs. TG5). Furthermore, our longitudinal design reveals that these biologic states display distinct temporal patterns associated with clinical outcomes. Characterizing host immune responses in relation to heterogeneity in disease course may inform clinical prognosis and opportunities for intervention.

This essay considers Calvino’s Six Memos and other works in the context of the ‘geologic turn’ in contemporary environmental humanities. The introductory section shows how Calvino anticipated key notions now becoming prevalent in this work, including an ontology and ethics that respects “the unity of all things, animate or inanimate” (Memos). The next section, “Worlds Composed of Rocks,” rereads Calvino texts through a geologic lens—it treats “Lightness” through the lens of what Gaston Bachelard calls “the Medusa Complex,” examines geologic elements in the three retellings of the Orpheus myth in The Complete Cosmicomics, and briefly compares Calvino’s “The Stone Sky” to N.K. Jemisin’s recent geo-fiction The Stone Sky. The final section, Words Composed of Rocks, takes up Calvino’s semiotics as expressed in the Six Memos, Cosmicomics, and essays in Collection of Sand. Calvino’s interest in giving voice to natural materials is connected to Serpil Opperman’s notion of ‘Storied Matter,’ Roger Caillois’s ‘writing of stones,’ and Francis Ponge’s prose poems, among other sources. The essay features artworks and photos by the author, reflective of a contemporary merging of critical and creative engagements with literature in producing theoretical work in the geo-humanities.

Given the legacy of John Bowlby, Attachment theory has often portrayed separation from a caregiver as likely to provoke protest, despair, and ultimately detachment in infants and young children. Indeed, the emotional challenge of separation is built into a key measurement tool of Attachment theory, the Strange Situation. However, James Robertson, one of Bowlby's leading collaborators, voiced dissent. He argued that young children can cope with separations--even when they last for several days or weeks. They are able to keep the absent person in mind provided an alternative, familiar caregiver remains available. Observational and experimental findings lend support to Robertson's claim. Recent analyses of natural language provide further support. Although young toddlers (ranging from 20 to 26 months) often make contact- or attachment-related comments about absent caregivers, such comments become less frequent with age whereas reflective references to absent caregivers--comments that do not express contact-related concerns about their absence--are often produced by young toddlers and remain frequent throughout early childhood. Children's early-emerging ability to keep an absent attachment figure in mind raises intriguing questions about their responses to the permanent absence of an attachment figure--as in the case of death. Consistent with contemporary research showing that many grieving adults report continuing bonds to a deceased attachment figure--rather than a gradual process of emotional detachment--children also report such continuing bonds. By implication, children and adults are prone to construe the death of a loved one not just as a biological endpoint that terminates the possibility of any continuing relationship but instead as a departure that can be bridged by a continuation of the earlier bond in an altered form.

There is extensive research on the development of cheating in early childhood but research on how to reduce it is rare. The present preregistered study examined whether telling young children about a story character's emotional reactions towards cheating could significantly reduce their tendency to cheat (N = 400; 199 boys; Age: 3-6 years). Results showed that telling older kindergarten children about the story character's negative emotional reaction towards rule violation significantly reduced cheating, but telling them about the positive emotional reaction towards rule adherence did not. These results show that children as young as age 5 are able to use information about another child's emotional reaction to guide their own moral behavior. In particular, highlighting another child's negative emotional reaction towards a moral transgression may be an effective way to reduce cheating in early childhood. This finding, along with earlier cheating reduction findings, suggests that although cheating is common in early childhood, simple methods can reduce its occurrence.

We investigated children's information seeking in response to a surprising claim (Study 1, N = 109, 54 Female, Range = 4.02-6.94 years, 49% White, 21% Mixed Ethnicity, 19% Southeast Asian, infStudy 2, N = 154, 74 Female, Range = 4.09-7.99, 50% White, 20% Mixed Ethnicity, 17% Southeast Asian, September 2020-December 2020). Relative to younger children, older children more often expressed skepticism about the adult's surprising claims (1-year increase, OR = 2.70) and more often suggested exploration strategies appropriate for testing the specific claim they heard (1-year increase, OR = 1.42). Controlling for age, recommending more targeted exploration strategies was associated with a greater likelihood of expressing skepticism about the adult's claim.

Postsecondary attainment is often viewed as an accomplishment yielding financial, social, and economic gains. Moreover, education has been a passport to a better quality of life. However, certain populations are often hindered from achieving these aforementioned goals. In particular, Black males are viewed from a deficit perspective, especially when it comes to excelling and achieving in the sphere of education. The authors discuss the collaborative role of school psychologists and school counselors as change agents in the college and career readiness of Black males. Specifically, the authors present an innovative approach to using a culturally responsive multitiered system of support that infuses Critical Race Theory to address the negative postsecondary outcomes Black males encounter. School psychologists and school counselors are appropriately trained to implement this model; therefore, recommendations for policy, practice, and research are provided in this article.

Including robots in children's lives calls for reflection on the psychological and moral aspects of such relationships, especially with respect to children's ability to differentiate intentional from unintentional false statements, that is, lies from mistakes. This ability calls for an understanding of an interlocutor's intentions. This study examined the ability of 5-6-year-olds to recognize, and morally evaluate, lies and mistakes produced by a human as compared to a NAO robot, and to attribute relevant emotions to the deceived party. Irrespective of the agent, children had more difficulty in understanding mistakes than lies. In addition, they were disinclined to attribute a lie to the robot. Children's age and their understanding of intentionality were the strongest predictors of their performance on the lie-mistake task. Children's Theory of Mind, but not their executive function skills, also correlated with their performance. Our findings suggest that, regardless of age, a robot is perceived as an intentional agent. Robot behaviour was more acceptable for children because his actions could be attributed to someone who programmed it to act in a specific way.

Background: Childhood adversity is linked with mental health concerns, including complex trauma (CT), whereas positive experiences may be restorative. Treatment for CT with adolescents commonly uses therapies administered indoors. Yet outdoor adventure, being rich in positive experiences, may also be appropriate. Purpose: This article examines how adventure practices may be healing for adolescents with CT. Methodology/Approach: A scoping review of literature since 2014 on adventure therapy (AT) for 12- to 18-year-olds with CT was undertaken. Refining searches from six databases identified six texts which met inclusion criteria. A seventh paper was added manually. Findings/Conclusions: CT-informed adventure tended toward a tri-phasic approach: safety, processing, and integration. Adventure benefits included improvements in attachment, skills, schemas, and stress management. An ecological approach was identified, through the analysis, as were some well-intended but harmful practices that a human rights-based practice framework may help avoid. Implications: Adopting an ecological and human rights-based approach as frames for AT research and practice may yield new insights and enhance program effectiveness for youth with CT. This should apply to adventure generally and specifically to AT; however, more research is needed given the paucity of available texts.

This study investigated cross-cultural similarities and variations in children's developing understanding of mixed emotions. Four- to 9-year-old US (n = 56) and Chinese (n = 98) children listened to stories in which the protagonist encountered a situation combining positive and negative components. Children were asked whether the story protagonist would feel the appropriate positive emotion as well as the appropriate negative emotion. Despite being able to recall the positive and negative components of the stories, both US and Chinese children often agreed to only one emotion. However, when children did not agree to only one emotion, US children were more likely than Chinese children to agree to both emotions, whereas Chinese children were more likely than US children to deny both emotions. Overall, the findings confirm that the recognition of mixed emotions is challenging for children under the age of 10. They also suggest, however, that mixed emotions are conceptualized differently in the two cultures: US children tend to assume that positive and negative emotions can coexist whereas Chinese children tend to assume that they neutralize each other.

The All of Us Research Program seeks to engage at least one million diverse participants to advance precision medicine and improve human health. We describe here the cloud-based Researcher Workbench that uses a data passport model to democratize access to analytical tools and participant information including survey, physical measurement, and electronic health record (EHR) data. We also present validation study findings for several common complex diseases to demonstrate use of this novel platform in 315,000 participants, 78% of whom are from groups historically underrepresented in biomedical research, including 49% self-reporting non-White races. Replication findings include medication usage pattern differences by race in depression and type 2 diabetes, validation of known cancer associations with smoking, and calculation of cardiovascular risk scores by reported race effects. The cloud-based Researcher Workbench represents an important advance in enabling secure access for a broad range of researchers to this large resource and analytical tools.

Single molecule Förster resonance energy transfer (smFRET) is a unique biophysical approach for studying conformational dynamics in biomacromolecules. Photon-by-photon hidden Markov modeling (H2MM) is an analysis tool that can quantify FRET dynamics of single biomolecules, even if they occur on the sub-millisecond timescale. However, dye photophysical transitions intertwined with FRET dynamics may cause artifacts. Here, we introduce multi-parameter H2MM (mpH2MM), which assists in identifying FRET dynamics based on simultaneous observation of multiple experimentally-derived parameters. We show the importance of using mpH2MM to decouple FRET dynamics caused by conformational changes from photophysical transitions in confocal-based smFRET measurements of a DNA hairpin, the maltose binding protein, MalE, and the type-III secretion system effector, YopO, from Yersinia species, all exhibiting conformational dynamics ranging from the sub-second to microsecond timescales. Overall, we show that using mpH2MM facilitates the identification and quantification of biomolecular sub-populations and their origin.

In a recent op-ed, we described the present challenges Black youth are facing regarding mental health. Sadly, these statistics continue to be alarming as rates remain high in comparison to [...]

Research on the development of children's decontextualized language has focused primarily on their references to events displaced in time. Here, we examine children's early emerging ability to talk about individuals who are elsewhere and therefore not participating in the conversation. We analyzed the references made by three Mandarin-speaking children aged 20-40 months to absent members of their social network. Even in the earliest period of the study (20-26 months), children produced a considerable number of such references, with the majority initiated either fully or partially by the children themselves. Thus, children were not simply echoing references made by their interlocutors. These early references often expressed attachment-related concerns with respect to absent family members. For example, children expressed a desire for the absent family member, called out their name, or asked about their location. Over time, however, they talked about absent individuals, including family members, in a more neutral or reflective fashion, commenting on their characteristics and activities. The findings highlight the early emergence of references that are displaced in space from the utterance context.

Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children's understanding of emotion, we argue that it is also important in developmental research to look beyond the small set of emotions associated with distinctive facial expressions. At the same time, we caution against any premature rejection of a universalist approach to children's understanding of emotion. We review three different lines of evidence in support of this stance: (1) children's ability to appropriately cite situational elicitors for emotions beyond the basic set; (2) their developing understanding of the relations between emotions and other mental processes; and (3) their realization that a person's facially expressed emotion may not indicate their felt emotion. In each of these three domains, we target studies that have included children from a variety of cultures to assess how far they respond similarly or differently. We conclude that there is robust evidence for similar conceptual progress in children's understanding of emotion across a range of cultural settings.

This paper describes the novel development and application of a multi-scale geographically weighted discriminant analysis (MSGWDA). This is applied to a case study of survey data of attitudes to a proposed motorbike / scooter ban in Han Noi, Vietnam. It uses discriminant analysis to examine attitudes to the ban in relation to travel purposes, distances, respondent age and so on. The main part of the paper focuses on describing the novel MSGWDA approach, and the results indicate the varying scales of relationship between the different input variables and the categorical responses variable. The paper also reflects on the pervasive logic of the approaches used to fit multiscale geographically weighted bandwidths (for example in regression). These have historically been based on the iterative back-fitting approaches used in GAMs, but risk missing potentially important variable interactions amongst un-evaluated bandwidths because of the sequence of their application. It is argued that although pragmatic in the 1990s, it may be possible to apply more deterministic approaches with increased memory and readily accessible computing power in order to better navigate such highly dimensional search spaces.

Geographically weighted Poisson regression (GWPR) is widely used for spatial regression analysis of count data. However, it tends to be unstable because of a fundamental drawback of Poisson regression. To overcome the drawback, we introduce a log-linear approximation to estimate GWPR without relying on Poisson regression framework. The proposed approach approximates GWPR using the basic GWR modeling with transformed explained variables. Monte Carlo experiments show that the proposed GWPR outperforms the conventional GWPR in terms of both estimation accuracy and computationally efficiency. Finally, the proposed GWPR is applied to an analysis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

BackgroundEarly microbiota perturbations are associated with disorders that involve immunological underpinnings. Cesarean section (CS)-born babies show altered microbiota development in relation to babies born vaginally. Here we present the first statistically powered longitudinal study to determine the effect of restoring exposure to maternal vaginal fluids after CS birth.MethodsUsing 16S rRNA gene sequencing, we followed the microbial trajectories of multiple body sites in 177 babies over the first year of life; 98 were born vaginally, and 79 were born by CS, of whom 30 were swabbed with a maternal vaginal gauze right after birth.FindingsCompositional tensor factorization analysis confirmed that microbiota trajectories of exposed CS-born babies aligned more closely with that of vaginally born babies. Interestingly, the majority of amplicon sequence variants from maternal vaginal microbiomes on the day of birth were shared with other maternal sites, in contrast to non-pregnant women from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) study.ConclusionsThe results of this observational study prompt urgent randomized clinical trials to test whether microbial restoration reduces the increased disease risk associated with CS birth and the underlying mechanisms. It also provides evidence of the pluripotential nature of maternal vaginal fluids to provide pioneer bacterial colonizers for the newborn body sites. This is the first study showing long-term naturalization of the microbiota of CS-born infants by restoring microbial exposure at birth.FundingC&D, Emch Fund, CIFAR, Chilean CONICYT and SOCHIPE, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Emerald Foundation, NIH, National Institute of Justice, Janssen.