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The main characteristic of Moebius syndrome is a lack of facial expressions, which involves stigmatization in many social contexts. We examined whether an applicant with this syndrome would be rated lower in personnel selection despite having equal qualifications. In two experiments, participants rated two applicants. Ratings of an applicant with Moebius syndrome were significantly lower when videos of job interviews had been watched without giving information about the syndrome. However, ratings did not differ when still images had been presented accompanied by an audio track or when participants were informed about Moebius syndrome ahead of the video. Discriminatory decisions in personnel selection could be reduced by educating about stigma, here, a neurologically caused lack of facial expressions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare not conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Everyday expression of prejudice continues to pose a social challenge across societies. We tend to assume that to the extent people are egalitarian, they are more likely to confront prejudice-but this might not necessarily be the case. We tested this assumption in two countries (US and Hungary) among majority members of society, using a behavioral paradigm for measuring confronting. Prejudice was directed at various outgroup minority individuals (African Americans, Muslims and Latinos in the US, and Roma in Hungary). Across four experiments (N = 1116), we predicted and found that egalitarian (anti-prejudiced) values were only associated with hypothetical confronting intentions, but not with actual confronting, and stronger egalitarians were more likely to overestimate their confronting than weaker egalitarians-to the point that while intentions differed, the actual confronting rate of stronger and weaker egalitarians were similar. We also predicted and found that such overestimation was associated with internal (and not external) motivation to respond without prejudice. We also identified behavioral uncertainty (being uncertain how to intervene) as a potential explanation for egalitarians' overestimation. The implications of these findings for egalitarians' self-reflection, intergroup interventions, and research are discussed., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Background: National dementia guidelines provide recommendations about the most effective approaches to diagnosis and interventions. Guidelines can improve care, but some groups such as people with minority characteristics may be disadvantaged if recommended approaches are the same for everyone. It is not known if dementia guidelines address specific needs related to patient characteristics. The objectives of this review are to identify which countries have national guidelines for dementia and synthesise recommendations relating to protected characteristics, as defined in the UK Equality Act 2010: age, disability, gender identity, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation., Methods and Findings: We searched CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Medline databases and the Guideline International Network library from inception to March 4, 2020, for dementia guidelines in any language. We also searched, between April and September 2020, Google and the national health websites of all 196 countries in English and in each country's official languages. To be included, guidelines had to provide recommendations about dementia, which were expected to be followed by healthcare workers and be approved at a national policy level. We rated quality according to the iCAHE guideline quality checklist. We provide a narrative synthesis of recommendations identified for each protected characteristic, prioritising those from higher-quality guidelines. Forty-six guidelines from 44 countries met our criteria, of which 18 were rated as higher quality. Most guidelines (39/46; 85%) made at least one reference to protected characteristics, and we identified recommendations relating to age, disability, race (or culture, ethnicity, or language), religion, sex, and sexual orientation. Age was the most frequently referenced characteristic (31/46; 67%) followed by race (or culture, ethnicity, or language; 25/46; 54%). Recommendations included specialist investigation and support for younger people affected by dementia and consideration of culture when assessing whether someone had dementia and providing person-centred care. Guidelines recommended considering religion when providing person-centred and end-of-life care. For disability, it was recommended that healthcare workers consider intellectual disability and sensory impairment when assessing for dementia. Most recommendations related to sex recommended not using sex hormones to treat cognitive impairment in men and women. One guideline made one recommendation related to sexual orientation. The main limitation of this study is that we only included national guidelines applicable to a whole country meaning guidelines from countries with differing healthcare systems within the country may have been excluded., Conclusions: National guidelines for dementia vary in their consideration of protected characteristics. We found that around a fifth of the world's countries have guidelines for dementia. We have identified areas of good practice that can be considered for future guidelines and suggest that all guidelines provide specific evidence-based recommendations for minority groups with examples of how to implement them. This will promote equity in the care of people affected by dementia and help to ensure that people with protected characteristics also have high-quality clinical services., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction: European societies are rapidly becoming multicultural. Cultural diversity presents new challenges and opportunities to communities that receive immigrants and migrants, and highlights the need for culturally safe healthcare. Universities share a responsibility to build a fair and equitable society by integrating cultural content in the nursing curricula. This paper aims to analyze European student nurses´ experience of learning cultural competence and of working with patients from diverse cultural backgrounds., Materials and Methods: A phenomenological approach was selected through a qualitative research method. 7 semi-structured focus groups with 5-7 students took place at the participants' respective universities in Spain, Belgium, Turkey and Portugal., Results: 5 themes and 16 subthemes emerged from thematic analysis. Theme 1, concept of culture/cultural diversity, describes the participants' concept of culture; ethnocentricity emerged as a frequent element in the students' discourse. Theme 2, personal awareness, integrates the students' self-perception of cultural competence and their learning needs. Theme 3, impact of culture, delves on the participants' perceived impact of cultural on both nursing care and patient outcomes. Theme 4, learning cultural competence, integrates the participants' learning experiences as part of their nursing curricula, as part of other academic learning opportunities and as part of extra-academic activities. Theme 5, learning cultural competence during practice placements, addresses some important issues including witnessing unequal care, racism, prejudice and conflict, communication and language barriers, tools and resources and positive attitudes and behaviors witnesses or displayed during clinical practice., Conclusion: The participants' perceived level of cultural competence was variable. All the participants agreed that transcultural nursing content should be integrated in the nursing curricula, and suggested different strategies to improve their knowledge, skills and attitudes. It is important to listen to the students and take their opinion into account when designing cultural teaching and learning activities., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Scientific research aims to bring forward innovative ideas and constantly challenges existing knowledge structures and stereotypes. However, women, ethnic and cultural minorities, as well as individuals with disabilities, are systematically discriminated against or even excluded from promotions, publications, and general visibility. A more diverse workforce is more productive, and thus discrimination has a negative impact on science and the wider society, as well as on the education, careers, and well-being of individuals who are discriminated against. Moreover, the lack of diversity at scientific gatherings can lead to micro-aggressions or harassment, making such meetings unpleasant, or even unsafe environments for early career and underrepresented scientists. At the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), we recognized the need for promoting underrepresented scientists and creating diverse role models in the field of neuroimaging. To foster this, the OHBM has created a Diversity and Inclusivity Committee (DIC). In this article, we review the composition and activities of the DIC that have promoted diversity within OHBM, in order to inspire other organizations to implement similar initiatives. Activities of the committee over the past four years have included (a) creating a code of conduct, (b) providing diversity and inclusivity education for OHBM members, (c) organizing interviews and symposia on diversity issues, and (d) organizing family-friendly activities and providing childcare grants during the OHBM annual meetings. We strongly believe that these activities have brought positive change within the wider OHBM community, improving inclusivity and fostering diversity while promoting rigorous, ground-breaking science. These positive changes could not have been so rapidly implemented without the enthusiastic support from the leadership, including OHBM Council and Program Committee, and the OHBM Special Interest Groups (SIGs), namely the Open Science, Student and Postdoc, and Brain-Art SIGs. Nevertheless, there remains ample room for improvement, in all areas, and even more so in the area of targeted attempts to increase inclusivity for women, individuals with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, racial/ethnic minorities, and individuals of lower socioeconomic status or from low and middle-income countries. Here, we present an overview of the DIC's composition, its activities, future directions and challenges. Our goal is to share our experiences with a wider audience to provide information to other organizations and institutions wishing to implement similar comprehensive diversity initiatives. We propose that scientific organizations can push the boundaries of scientific progress only by moving beyond existing power structures and by integrating principles of equity and inclusivity in their core values., (Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Women (compared to men) and individuals from minority ethnic groups (compared to the majority group) face unfavourable labour market outcomes in many economies 1,2 , but the extent to which discrimination is responsible for these effects, and the channels through which they occur, remain unclear 3,4 . Although correspondence tests 5 -in which researchers send fictitious CVs that are identical except for the randomized minority trait to be tested (for example, names that are deemed to sound 'Black' versus those deemed to sound 'white')-are an increasingly popular method to quantify discrimination in hiring practices 6,7 , they can usually consider only a few applicant characteristics in select occupations at a particular point in time. To overcome these limitations, here we develop an approach to investigate hiring discrimination that combines tracking of the search behaviour of recruiters on employment websites and supervised machine learning to control for all relevant jobseeker characteristics that are visible to recruiters. We apply this methodology to the online recruitment platform of the Swiss public employment service and find that rates of contact by recruiters are 4-19% lower for individuals from immigrant and minority ethnic groups, depending on their country of origin, than for citizens from the majority group. Women experience a penalty of 7% in professions that are dominated by men, and the opposite pattern emerges for men in professions that are dominated by women. We find no evidence that recruiters spend less time evaluating the profiles of individuals from minority ethnic groups. Our methodology provides a widely applicable, non-intrusive and cost-efficient tool that researchers and policy-makers can use to continuously monitor hiring discrimination, to identify some of the drivers of discrimination and to inform approaches to counter it.

Background: Responses to anticipateddiscrimination are common among mental health service users and can have adetrimental impact on their recovery. Since 2009, the Time to Change (TTC)anti-stigma program in England has aimed to improve service users' empowerment,reducing public stigma and discrimination. In this paper, we aim to evaluatewhether service users' awareness of TTC is associated with fewer responses toanticipated discrimination., Methods: We used data collected for the evaluation of TTC from samples of mental health service users interviewed by telephone in annual surveys 2009-2014., Results: Five thousand and nine hundredand twenty-three participants completed the survey, mainly suffering from mooddisorders (depression, 28.4%, n = 1,681) and schizophrenia related disorders(15.4%, n = 915).In 23.2% of cases,participants were aware of any aspects of the TTC program, while participationin TTC was reported by 2.6%. Being aware of the TTC program was notsignificantly associated with responses to anticipated discrimination, exceptfor those participating in the TTC campaign in 2013. Stopping oneself fromapplying for work was significantly associated with experienced discriminationin both finding (p < 0.001) and keeping (p < 0.001) a job.Concealing mental health problems was associated with a general experience ofbeing shunned (p < 0.001)., Conclusions: Awareness of a nationalanti-stigma program may not be sufficient to encourage people to seek work/educationor to be open about their illness in situations in which they currentlyanticipate discrimination. There is the need to identify new multi-levelstrategies for challenging anticipated discrimination, even focusing ondifferent target groups.

Competing Interests: Competing interests: Simone Vigod reports receiving royalties for authorship of materials related to depression and pregnancy, from UpToDate, Inc. No other competing interests were declared.

Recent events encompassing social injustices, healthcare disparities, and police brutality against Black citizens highlight the continued need to strive toward unbiased and inclusive practices in all realms of the world. Our voices as cell biologists are powerful tools that can be used to combat inequities in the scientific landscape. In this inaugural Voices essay, we discuss how exclusion and inclusion events have contributed to our scientific journeys and how scientists can work to create an inclusive environment for our trainees and colleagues. As underrepresented minority scientists in the early and late stages of our scientific training, we frame the trainee experience to provide insight from unique perspectives. This essay also provides actionable items that the cell biology community can implement to promote inclusivity. We anticipate that initiating an open dialogue focused on diversity and inclusion will promote growth in the field of cell biology and enable scientists to assess and assume their role in creating welcoming environments. We believe that scientists at all stages in their careers can make meaningful and habitual contributions to supporting inclusivity in cell biology, thereby creating a future where diversity, equity, and inclusion are expected, not requested.

Contact-based interventions are commonly regarded as best practice in stigma reduction. In this Open Forum, the author used the findings from eight systematic reviews to critically evaluate the quality of the evidence for the effectiveness of such interventions. He found that trials of contact-based interventions lacked methodological rigor, reporting was biased toward positive results, the trials were subject to demand characteristics, no dose effects were observed, effects did not last, and no evidence supported behavior change. Standards for future trials are proposed and implications for reducing stigma and discrimination are discussed.

Background: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) individuals experience higher rates of health disparities. These disparities may be driven, in part, by biases of medical providers encountered in health care settings. Little is known about how medical, nursing, or dental students are trained to identify and reduce the effects of their own biases toward LGBTQ individuals. Therefore, a systematic review was conducted to determine the effectiveness of programs to reduce health care student or provider bias towards these LGBTQ patients., Methods: The authors performed searches of online databases (MEDLINE/PubMed, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, Ingenta, Science Direct, and Google Scholar) for original articles, published in English, between March 2005 and February 2017, describing intervention studies focused on reducing health care student or provider bias towards LGBTQ individuals. Data extracted included sample characteristics (i.e., medical, nursing, or dental students or providers), study design (i.e., pre-post intervention tests, qualitative), program format, program target (i.e., knowledge, comfort level, attitudes, implicit bias), and relevant outcomes. Study quality was assessed using a five-point scale., Results: The search identified 639 abstracts addressing bias among medical, nursing, and dental students or providers; from these abstracts, 60 articles were identified as medical education programs to reduce bias; of these articles, 13 described programs to reduce bias towards LGBTQ patients. Bias-focused educational interventions were effective at increasing knowledge of LGBTQ health care issues. Experiential learning interventions were effective at increasing comfort levels working with LGBTQ patients. Intergroup contact was effective at promoting more tolerant attitudes toward LGBTQ patients. Despite promising support for bias education in increasing knowledge and comfort levels among medical, nursing, and dental students or providers towards LGBTQ persons, this systematic review did not identify any interventions that assessed changes in implicit bias among students or providers., Conclusions: Strategies for assessing and mitigating implicit bias towards LGBTQ patients are discussed and recommendations for medical, nursing, and dental school curricula are presented.