Demographic, occupational factors and pandemic-related stressors associated with heightened mental health difficulties among UK health and social care workers supported by regional Resilience Hubs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, 40 mental health and well-being hubs were funded in England to support health and social care staff affected by the pandemic.

Aims: To describe the characteristics of staff accessing four hubs for support and identify characteristics associated with clinically significant mental health difficulties and work and social functioning.

Method: Routinely collected screening data were analysed from 1973 individuals across 4 hubs, including mental health, demographic and occupational data and pandemic-related stressors.

What Makes Iconic Pitch Associations "Natural": The Effect of Age on Affective Meanings of Uptalk and Creak.

While the field of sociophonetics generally views social meanings of linguistic features as indexical and socially constructed, prosodic features have long been argued to have supposedly natural, iconic, universal associations, according to "biological codes," for example, the frequency code that links high versus low pitch with small versus large body size, female versus male gender (via sexual dimorphism), and hence, affective meanings like uncertainty versus confidence. This study looks at affective meanings of two features of New Zealand English associated with opposing pitch extremes: Uptalk with high pitch and creaky voice with low. In a matched-guise experiment, listeners of different ages were asked to rate short speech samples from young women containing uptalk and creaky voice on a series of affective meaning scales.

Divergent patterns of cranial suture fusion in marsupial and placental mammals.

Cranial sutures, both open and closed, support a myriad of skull functions, including redistributing strain, accommodating brain expansion, supporting cranial bone growth, and protecting the brain. Thus, variation in the degree, timing, and pattern of suture fusion has functional implications. Using a comparative ontogenetic framework across Mammalia, we quantified degree and pattern of suture fusion through ontogeny for 22 mammalian species ( = 165).