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Chemoattractant cytokine molecules, or chemokines, control lymphocyte traffic, partly by triggering arrest of lymphocytes rolling on endothelium. Many systemic memory T cells in blood are found to carry the chemokine receptor CCR4, responding to its ligands TARC and MDC. It is suggested that CCR4 and TARC are important in recognition of skin vasculature by circulating T cells.

The authors investigate the extent to which the contrast brightness of ship tracks, that is, the relative change in observed solar reflectance, in visible and near-infrared imagery can be explained by the microphysics of the background cloud in which they form. The sensitivity of visible and near-infrared wavelengths for detecting reflectance changes in ship tracks is discussed, including the use of a modified cloud susceptibility parameter, termed the 'contrast susceptibility,' for assessing the sensitivity of background cloud microphysics on potential track development. It is shown that the relative change in cloud reflectance for ship tracks is expected to be larger in the near-infrared than in the visible and that 3.7- [micro]m channels, widely known to be useful for detecting tracks, have the greatest sensitivity. The usefulness of contrast susceptibility as a predictor of ship track contrast is tested with airborne and satellite remote sensing retrievals of background cloud parameters and track contrast. Retrievals are made with the high spatial resolution Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Airborne Simulator flown on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's high-altitude ER-2 aircraft, and with the larger-scale perspective of the advanced very high resolution radiometer. Observed modifications in cloud droplet effective radius, optical thickness, liquid water path, contrast susceptibility, and reflectance contrast are presented for several ship tracks formed in background clouds with both small and large droplet sizes. The remote sensing results are augmented with in situ measurements of cloud microphysics that provide data at the smaller spatial scales.

Objective: We studied the effects of normal pregnancy on heart rate variability as a noninvasive index of maternal cardiovascular autonomic modulation.Study Design: Twenty-four-hour Holter recordings were obtained for 8 healthy pregnant volunteers during early pregnancy (Results: Maternal heart rate variability declined during pregnancy. Virtually all indexes were significantly decreased with respect to the nonpregnant state in early pregnancy, and respiratory rate was increased. Changes in heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiratory rates between subsequent stages were modest. Individual changes in heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiration during pregnancy varied in both magnitude and direction.Conclusion: Most of the change in cardiac autonomic modulation and respiration during pregnancy occurs within the first 6 weeks after conception. There is considerable variability in individual heart rate and heart rate variability changes during a normal pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Cell-based therapies show promise in repairing cardiac tissue and improving contractile performance following a myocardial infarction. Despite this, ischemia-induced death of transplanted cells remains a major hurdle to the efficacy of treatment. ‘Superhealer’ MRL/MpJ mesenchymal stem cells (MRL-MSCs) have been reported to exhibit increased engraftment resulting in reduced infarct size and enhanced contractile function. This study determines whether intrinsic differences in mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) assist in explaining the enhanced cellular survival and engraftment of MRL-MSCs. Findings Compared to wild type MSCs (WT-MSCs), mitochondria from intact MRL-MSCs exhibited an increase in routine respiration and maximal electron transport capacity by 2.0- and 3.5-fold, respectively. When routine oxygen utilization is expressed as a portion of maximal cellular oxygen flux, the MRL-MSCs have a greater spare respiratory capcity. Additionally, glutamate/malate succinate-supported oxygen consumption in permeabilized cells was elevated approximately 1.25- and 1.4-fold in the MRL-MSCs, respectively. Conclusion The results from intact and permeabilized MSCs indicate MRL-MSCs exhibit a greater reliance on and capacity for aerobic metabolism. The greater capacity for oxidative metabolism may provide a protective effect by increasing ATP synthesis per unit substrate and prevent glycolysis-mediated acidosis and subsequent cell death upon transplantation into the glucose-and oxygen-deprived environment of the infarcted heart.

Although sexual assault is widely accepted as morally wrong, not all instances of sexual assault are evaluated in the same way. Here, we ask whether different characteristics of victims affect people's moral evaluations of sexual assault perpetrators, and if so, how. We focus on sex robots (i.e., artificially intelligent humanoid social robots designed for sexual gratification) as victims in the present studies because they serve as a clean canvas onto which we can paint different human-like attributes to probe people's moral intuitions regarding sensitive topics. Across four pre-registered experiments conducted with American adults on Prolific (N = 2104), we asked people to evaluate the wrongness of sexual assault against AI-powered robots. People's moral judgments were influenced by the victim's mental capacities (Studies 1 & 2), the victim's interpersonal function (Study 3), the victim's ontological type (Study 4), and the transactional context of the human-robot relationship (Study 4). Overall, by investigating moral reasoning about transgressions against AI robots, we were able to gain unique insights into how people's moral judgments about sexual transgressions can be influenced by victim attributes., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Moral dilemmas are inescapable in daily life, and people must often choose between two desirable character traits, like being a diligent employee or being a devoted parent. These moral dilemmas arise because people hold competing moral values that sometimes conflict. Furthermore, people differ in which values they prioritize, so we do not always approve of how others resolve moral dilemmas. How are we to think of people who sacrifice one of our most cherished moral values for a value that we consider less important? The "Good True Self Hypothesis" predicts that we will reliably project our most strongly held moral values onto others, even after these people lapse. In other words, people who highly value generosity should consistently expect others to be generous, even after they act frugally in a particular instance. However, reasoning from an error-management perspective instead suggests the "Moral Stringency Hypothesis," which predicts that we should be especially prone to discredit the moral character of people who deviate from our most deeply cherished moral ideals, given the potential costs of affiliating with people who do not reliably adhere to our core moral values. In other words, people who most highly value generosity should be quickest to stop considering others to be generous if they act frugally in a particular instance. Across two studies conducted on Prolific (N = 966), we found consistent evidence that people weight moral lapses more heavily when rating others' membership in highly cherished moral categories, supporting the Moral Stringency Hypothesis. In Study 2, we examined a possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon. Although perceptions of hypocrisy played a role in moral updating, personal moral values and subsequent judgments of a person's potential as a good cooperative partner provided the clearest explanation for changes in moral character attributions. Overall, the robust tendency toward moral stringency carries significant practical and theoretical implications., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The status of disgust as a sociomoral emotion is debated. We conducted a stringent test of whether social stimuli (specifically, political outgroup members) can elicit physical disgust, as distinct from moral or metaphorical disgust. We employed stimuli (male faces) matched on baseline disgustingness, provided other ways for participants to express negativity toward outgroup members, and used concrete self-report measures of disgust, as well as a nonverbal measure (participants' facial expressions). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 915), we found that political outgroup members are judged to be "disgusting," although this effect is generally weaker for concrete self-report measures and absent for the nonverbal measure. This suggests that social stimuli are capable of eliciting genuine physical disgust, although it is not always outwardly expressed, and the strength of this result depends on the measures employed. We discuss implications of these results for research on sociomoral emotions and American politics.

Propaganda frequently leverages themes of dirtiness and disease to foster negative attitudes toward marginalized social groups. Although history suggests that this tactic is highly successful, empirical evidence is required to evaluate propaganda's potential efficacy. Inspired by previous evidence that children rapidly form attitudes about social groups, we conducted an exploratory investigation into whether 5- to 9-year-olds' (N = 48) judgments of novel foreign groups could be swayed by visually depicting one of these groups as disgusting in poster-sized illustrations. Across a wide battery of tasks, there was no clear indication that children readily internalize messages from propaganda in evaluating members of novel social groups. This finding held regardless of the type of disgustingness that was depicted in the propaganda, and generalized across the age range we investigated. Overall, our results are encouraging in a practical sense, suggesting that children are not easily swayed by negative misrepresentations of immigrants in propaganda., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Immoral actions can elicit a wide array of responses, ranging from pugnacious confrontation to passive distancing. What leads onlookers to react so differently to various violations? Across four studies (N = 2085), we investigated how responses vary depending on whether moral transgressions are committed by adults or by children. Findings reliably demonstrated that adult participants were more likely to avoid adult transgressors, and more likely to instruct child transgressors about why their actions were wrong. These patterns arose from varying cost-benefit structures, derived in part from asymmetries in interpersonal power between adults and children, rendering adults' direct confrontation of children both less costly and more beneficial. Although adults' transgressions were judged to be relatively more wrong, participants had greater anxiety about the negative consequences of confronting adults, and they viewed adults' personalities as less malleable, thus diminishing the effectiveness of confrontation. In contrast, 4- to 9-year-old children did not differ in their willingness to avoid or instruct adult and child transgressors. Across studies, the content of transgressions (e.g., being harmful or impure) mattered little for determining the nature of responses. Overall, diverse responses to moral transgressions were uniquely tailored to the different costs and benefits associated with confronting adult and child transgressors., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: Many studies have analyzed the cost-effectiveness of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), but hospital costs have not been as thoroughly reported. This study reviewed the associated hospital costs for non-surgical patients who received ICDs from 2015 to 2019., Methods: We performed a retrospective single-center analysis of patients who received an ICD between 2015 and 2019. ICD cost was analyzed with respect to time using linear regression t-test analysis., Results: For 304 patients, we trended cost of the devices over time. 168 (55.2%) cases were single-chamber devices, 53 (17.4%) were dual-chamber, 59 (19.4%) were cardiac resynchronization therapy-defibrillators (CRT-D), and 24 (7.9%) were subcutaneous devices. The cost of all ICDs decreased by -$1.82/day (p<0.001), R 2 = 0.056. By type, cost of single-chamber devices decreased by -$2.56/day (p<0.001), R 2 = 0.47, dual-chamber ICD by -$3.50/day (p<0.001), R 2 = 0.51, CRT-D by -$4.07/day (p<0.001), R 2 = 0.47, and subcutaneous by -$3.33/day (p<0.001), R 2 = 0.83., Conclusion: This is the first detailed analysis of ICD costs that we are aware of. The cost of all ICDs decreased modestly and became much greater when categorized by type. Overall hospital cost associated with ICD implantation did not show a significant trend, but total supply cost showed a significant decrease over time., (© 2021. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

This article describes the data reported in the paper "Being in the know: Social network analysis of gossip and friendship on college campuses" (Yucel et al. 2021). Data were collected from a Men's and Women's collegiate crew team members from a small liberal arts college. Participants ( N  = 44) reported information about how often they gossip about members of the team (positively, negatively), who they have had hooked-up with on the team, who they consider to be friends with on the team, whether they have to sabotaged or been sabotaged by any teammates, their well-being and feelings of loneliness. This data brief provides detailed information about data preparation and participants responses to all survey items., Competing Interests: This work was supported by Psi Chi, The International Honor Society in Psychology and the Franklin & Marshall College Committee on Grants. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships which have, or could be perceived to have, influenced the work reported in this article., (© 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc.)

The present studies examine developmental changes in the elicitors of disgust by examining adults' and children's ideas of what is disgusting. In three experiments, we asked adults and children between the ages of 3 and 12 to report what is "disgusting," what is "gross," or what might have caused someone to make a disgust face. In Study 1, parents of 3- to 12-year-old children ( n = 120) were asked what they thought was disgusting and what they thought their children would find disgusting and completed a picky eating questionnaire to examine the extent to which children's eating habits may be related to disgust. In Studies 2 and 3 ( n = 98 per study), children were asked what they thought was disgusting. In Study 3, children's parents also completed a questionnaire about their child's food pickiness. Typically eaten foods that were not contaminated or spoiled were frequently mentioned in all studies, both by children and their parents. There was considerable diversity in the disgust elicitors that were mentioned across participants, highlighting the importance of examining individual differences in the development of disgust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Young children, like adults, understand that human agents can flexibly choose different actions in different contexts, and they evaluate these agents based on such choices. However, little is known about children's tendencies to attribute the capacity to choose to robots, despite increased contact with robotic agents. In this paper, we compare 5- to 7-year-old children's and adults' attributions of free choice to a robot and to a human child by using a series of tasks measuring agency attribution, action prediction, and choice attribution. In morally neutral scenarios, children ascribed similar levels of free choice to the robot and the human, while adults were more likely to ascribe free choice to the human. For morally relevant scenarios, however, both age groups considered the robot's actions to be more constrained than the human's actions. These findings demonstrate that children and adults hold a nuanced understanding of free choice that is sensitive to both the agent type and constraints within a given scenario., (© 2021 Cognitive Science Society LLC.)

Gossip (evaluative talk about others) is ubiquitous. Gossip allows important rules to be clarified and reinforced, and it allows individuals to keep track of their social networks while strengthening their bonds to the group. The purpose of this study is to decipher the nature of gossip and how it relates to friendship connections. To measure how gossip relates to friendship, participants from men's and women's collegiate competitive rowing (crew) teams (N = 44) noted their friendship connections and their tendencies to gossip about each of their teammates. Using social network analysis, we found that the crew members' friend group connectedness significantly correlated with their positive and negative gossip network involvement. Higher connectedness among friends was associated with less involvement in spreading negative gossip and/or being a target of negative gossip. More central connectedness to the friend group was associated with more involvement in spreading positive gossip and/or being a target of positive gossip. These results suggest that the spread of both positive and negative gossip may influence and be influenced by friendship connections in a social network., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Previous examinations of the scope of moral concern have focused on aggregate attributions of moral worth. However, because trade-offs exist in valuing different kinds of entities, tabulating total amounts of moral expansiveness may conceal significant individual differences in the relative proportions of moral valuation ascribed to various entities. We hypothesized that some individuals ("tree-huggers") would ascribe greater moral worth to animals and ecosystems than to humans from marginalized or stigmatized groups, while others ("human-lovers") would ascribe greater moral worth to outgroup members than to the natural world. Additionally, because moral valuation is often treated as being zero-sum, we hypothesized that there would be no difference in aggregate levels of moral concern between tree-huggers and human-lovers. Finally, because attributions of mental capacities substantially contribute to moral valuation, we predicted that tree-huggers and human-lovers would show different patterns of mind attribution for animals versus humans. Three studies (N = 985) yielded evidence in support of our hypotheses. First, over one-third of participants valued nature over outgroups. Second, extending moral value to animals and nature was not indicative of more expansive moral concern overall; instead, tree-huggers and human-lovers were identical in their aggregate ascriptions of moral worth. Third, tree-huggers had relatively amplified tendencies to attribute mental capacities to animals and relatively reduced tendencies to attribute mental capacities to outgroup members-thus having elevated rates of both anthropomorphism and dehumanization. These findings necessitate a reconceptualization of both the extension of moral worth and the attribution of minds., (© 2021 Cognitive Science Society LLC.)

Lee and Schwarz propose grounded procedures of separation as a domain-general mechanism underlying cleansing effects. One strong test of domain generality is to investigate the ontogenetic origins of a process. Here, we argue that the developmental evidence provides weak support for a domain-general grounded procedures account. Instead, it is likely that distinct separation procedures develop uniquely for different content domains.