Publications by authors named "A Mason"

Identifying malleable influences on eating behaviours will advance our ability to improve physical and mental health. Food-related emotional expectancies are the anticipated positive and negative emotions from eating different foods and are theorised to affect eating behaviour, and to be amenable to change. The Anticipated Effects of Food Scale (AEFS) assesses food-related emotional expectancies using 62 one-word items; however, a shorter questionnaire would be useful in large and clinical studies.

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Conservation of threatened species can benefit from an evaluation of genes in the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), whose loci encode proteins that bind pathogens and are often under strong selection to maintain diversity in immune response to diseases. Despite this gene family's importance to disease resistance, little is known about these genes in reptiles including snakes. To address this issue, we assembled and annotated a highly-contiguous genome assembly for the timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus), a pit viper which is threatened or endangered in parts of its range, and analyzed this new genome along with three other rattlesnake genomes to characterize snake MHC loci.

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Background And Objectives: Older people with memory problems living in temporary hostel accommodation have longer stays and higher care needs than those without memory problems. In this ethnographic study, we aimed to elucidate how staff currently support older hostel residents with memory problems, what contextual factors determine support given and, what facilitates positive and meaningful outcomes for staff and residents.

Research Design And Methods: We conducted interviews and participant observations with older people (≥50 years) experiencing memory problems and homelessness (interviews n=17, observations n=13), hostel staff and managers (interviews n=15, observations n=20) from seven residential facilities (six hostels and one care home), and health and social care practitioners (interviews n=17, observations n=7), from September 2021-December 2022 in London, England.

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Introduction: Individuals living with sickle cell disease (SCD) commonly report impaired health-related quality of life (HRQoL). However, impacts of SCD on HRQoL and the unmet needs of SCD treatment/management are under-researched. This study characterized the impact of SCD on HRQoL and identified the unmet needs of individuals with SCD.

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An unexamined assumption in many studies of learning and decision making is that people learn underlying probability distributions. However, the acquisition of distributional knowledge is rarely the focus of investigations. We report five experiments ( = 580 adults) that provide this focus and highlight the factors that impact people's ability to accurately learn and reproduce underlying distributions.

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