A Case of Bilateral Carotid Body Tumors Requiring Surgical Resection: The Importance of Physical Exams.

We present the case of a 61-year-old man who presented to his primary care provider for a routine visit and was found to have a pulsatile mass in his right neck. This case report shows the importance of a thorough physical exam during patient visits. In this case, the physical exam resulted in the diagnosis of a carotid body tumor (CBT) prior to the patient becoming symptomatic from it.

People are more error-prone after committing an error.

Humans tend to slow down after making an error. A longstanding account of this post-error slowing is that people are simply more cautious. However, accuracy typically does not improve following an error, leading some researchers to suggest that an initial 'orienting' response may initially impair performance immediately following error.

Understanding the Phase of Responsivity and Noise Sources in Frequency-Domain Multiplexed Readout of Transition Edge Sensor Bolometers.

Cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments have deployed focal planes with transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers cooled to sub-Kelvin temperatures by multiplexing the readout of many TES channels onto a single pair of wires. Digital Frequency-domain Multiplexing (DfMux) is a multiplexing technique used in many CMB polarization experiments, such as the Simons Array, SPT-3 G, and EBEX. The DfMux system studied here uses LC filters with resonant frequencies ranging from 1.

Reward Accelerates the Preparation of Goal-directed Actions under Conflict.

Our goals sometimes conflict with our prepotent habitual responses, which often leads to impaired performance on a variety of tasks. People are better at exerting cognitive control to overcome prepotent and automatic responses when they are motivated by the prospect of reward. The standard experimental paradigms used to study this phenomenon examine free RTs that allow participants to select a variety of response strategies including delaying response initiation to avoid committing errors.

Reward influences the allocation but not the availability of resources in visual working memory.

Visual working memory possesses capacity constraints limiting the availability of resources for encoding and maintaining information. Studies have shown that prospective rewards improve performance on visual working memory tasks, but it remains unclear whether rewards increase total resource availability or simply influence the allocation of resources. Participants performed a continuous report visual working memory task with oriented grating stimuli.

Icon arrays reduce concern over COVID-19 vaccine side effects: a randomized control study.

On April 13, 2021, the CDC announced that the administration of Johnson and Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine would be paused due to a rare blood clotting side effect in ~ 0.0001% of people given the vaccine. Most people who are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine list potential side effects as their main concern (PEW, 2021); thus, it is likely that this announcement increased vaccine hesitancy among the American public.

How well do ordinary Americans forecast the growth of COVID-19?

Across three experiments (N = 1565), we investigated how forecasts about the spread of COVID 19 are impacted by data trends, and whether patterns of misestimation predict adherence to social-distancing guidelines. We also investigated how mode of data presentation influences forecasting of future cases by showing participants data on the number of COVID-19 cases from a 5-week period in either graphical, tabular, or text-only form. We consistently found that people shown tables produced more accurate forecasts compared to people shown line-graphs of the same data; yet people shown line-graphs were more confident in their estimates.

Graphs do not lead people to infer causation from correlation.

Media articles often communicate the latest scientific findings, and readers must evaluate the evidence and consider its potential implications. Prior work has found that the inclusion of graphs makes messages about scientific data more persuasive (Tal & Wansink, 2016). One explanation for this finding is that such visualizations evoke the notion of "science"; however, results are mixed.

Heuristics contribute to sensorimotor decision-making under risk.

Research in psychophysics argues that incentivized sensorimotor decisions (such as deciding where to reach to get a reward) maximize expected gain, suggesting that these decisions may be impervious to cognitive biases and heuristics. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments, directly comparing the predictive accuracy of an optimal model and plausible suboptimal models. We obtained strong evidence that people deviated from the optimal strategy by excessively avoiding loss regions when the potential loss was zero and failing to shift far enough away from loss regions when potential losses outweighed the potential gains.

Effectiveness of Evidence-Based Telecoaching Delivered Through an Employer-Sponsored Mental Health Benefits Platform.

Coaches delivering telemental health services as part of an employer-sponsored benefit may increase access to affordable and effective care. We examined the effectiveness of evidence-based telecoaching delivered via videoconferencing to people requesting mental health services during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We analyzed data from 1,228 employees (mean age = 35 ± 8 years; 67.

Interactive effects of incentive value and valence on the performance of discrete action sequences.

Incentives can be used to increase motivation, leading to better learning and performance on skilled motor tasks. Prior work has shown that monetary punishments enhance on-line performance while equivalent monetary rewards enhance off-line skill retention. However, a large body of literature on loss aversion has shown that losses are treated as larger than equivalent gains.

Family Minds: A randomized controlled trial of a group intervention to improve foster parents' reflective functioning.

Family Minds is a brief group psychoeducational parenting intervention designed to increase the reflective functioning (RF) and mentalization skills of foster parents. RF is important for foster parents who have to build relationships with children whose adverse experiences increase their risk for psychosocial challenges. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) for Family Minds was conducted in Texas with 89 foster parents.

Reward modulates cortical representations of action.

People are capable of rapid improvements in performance when they are offered a reward. The neural mechanism by which this performance enhancement occurs remains unclear. We investigated this phenomenon by offering people monetary reward for successful performance in a sequence production task.

A cryogenic continuously rotating half-wave plate mechanism for the POLARBEAR-2b cosmic microwave background receiver.

We present the design and laboratory evaluation of a cryogenic continuously rotating half-wave plate (CHWP) for the POLARBEAR-2b (PB-2b) cosmic microwave background receiver, the second installment of the Simons Array. PB-2b will observe at 5200 m elevation in the Atacama Desert of Chile in two frequency bands centered at 90 GHz and 150 GHz. In order to suppress atmospheric 1/f noise and mitigate systematic effects that arise when differencing orthogonal detectors, PB-2b modulates linear sky polarization using a CHWP rotating at 2 Hz.

Influences of immigration stress and occupational exploitation on Latina seasonal workers' substance use networks: a qualitative study.

US female Latina seasonal farm workers (LSW) are a medically underserved community experiencing severe health disparities. We explored the relationship between alcohol and prescription medication, and LSW social networks using a qualitative approach. In 2015, this study used convenience sampling to recruit 28 LSWs in South Florida for three focus group discussions in Spanish.

Rewards interact with explicit knowledge to enhance skilled motor performance.

From typing on a keyboard to playing the piano, many everyday skills require the ability to quickly and accurately perform sequential movements. It is well known that the availability of rewards leads to increases in motivational vigor whereby people enhance both the speed and force of their movements. However, in the context of motor skills, it is unclear whether rewards also lead to more effective motor planning and action selection.

Adverse Childhood Experience histories in foster parents: Connections to foster children's emotional and behavioral difficulties.

Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are known risk factors for negative health and behavioral outcomes, including caregiving. Foster parents are key to supporting foster children, yet there is limited research on their ACE history and how it might relate to their foster children's behavior.

Objective: This study addressed three research questions: (1) What are ACE totals in this sample of foster parents and how do they compare with the original CDC-Kaiser study? (2) Does foster parents' ACE exposure relate to foster child behavior? (3) Is the relation between foster parents' ACEs and children's challenging behaviors different based on the specific ACE?

Participants & Setting: Participants were 89 foster parents (age M = 43.

Hematologic, serum biochemical, and cortisol changes associated with anticipation of exercise and short duration high-intensity exercise in sled dogs.

Background: Many studies have demonstrated changes in clinicopathologic variables in response to exercise in athletic dogs. These changes have been attributed to the duration and intensity of exercise. However, inconsistencies in the timing of collection of resting blood samples can be a confounding variable when interpreting results.

Laryngeal muscles are spared in the dystrophin deficient mdx mouse.

Purpose: Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is caused by the loss of the cytoskeletal protein, dystrophin. The disease leads to severe and progressive skeletal muscle wasting. Interestingly, the disease spares some muscles.

Short preoperative treatment with erlotinib inhibits tumor cell proliferation in hormone receptor-positive breast cancers.

Purpose: To administer the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor erlotinib to patients with operable untreated breast cancer during the immediate preoperative period and to measure an antiproliferative and/or a proapoptotic effect in the post-therapy specimen and determine a biomarker profile associated with evidence of erlotinib-mediated cellular activity.

Patients And Methods: Newly diagnosed patients with stages I to IIIA invasive breast cancer were treated with erlotinib 150 mg/d orally for 6 to 14 days until the day before surgery. Erlotinib plasma levels were measured by tandem mass spectrometry the day of surgery.

Spectrum of pattern dystrophy in pseudoxanthoma elasticum.

Objective: To study the prevalence, type, and features of pattern dystrophy in patients with pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE).

Methods: A search of the photographic records at the Vanderbilt Eye Institute using the keywords "angioid streaks and pseudoxanthoma elasticum" yielded 28 names. Of the 23 subjects meeting the patient selection criteria, 22 were confirmed to have a positive diagnosis for PXE after reviewing the medical history information.

Does inhaled pollen enter the sinus cavities?

Background: While there is evidence of an increased incidence of sinusitis in patients with allergic rhinitis, it is unclear whether an allergic process occurs in the sinus tissues per se.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine whether inhaled pollen reaches the sinus mucosa.

Methods: Tc99m labeled ragweed pollen was inhaled by five non-atopic adults.

The single-stapled ileo pouch anal anastomosis: a reasonable compromise.

Minimal anal sphincter disruption and preservation of the transitional epithelium during ileal pouch anal anastomosis (IPAA) are believed to play important roles in improving functional outcome. As a result, many surgeons have abandoned the traditional mucosectomy in favor of a double-stapled technique. The natural history of the retained colonic epithelium that occurs with this approach is uncertain.

An effective computer-based tardive dyskinesia monitoring system.

To promote early recognition and treatment of neuroleptic-induced tardive dyskinesia we used our facility's pharmacy and appointment data bases to develop an automated reminder system that significantly improved physician monitoring of patients receiving antipsychotic drug therapy. The system prompts staff to perform regular examinations for abnormal involuntary movements and to review patients' consent to therapy with antipsychotic medication. The average prevalences in the 15 months after automated reminders began, in a population of over 800 patients, increased from 53% to 85% for an annually completed abnormal involuntary movement scale in medical records and from 38 to 74% for a statement of informed consent.