Publications by authors named "Hedger K"

 Playing drinking games (DGs) is a common, socially-interactive risky drinking activity. During the pandemic, many students either returned home to live with their parents or remained on campus. Because DGs often require social interaction, playing DGs in-person can increase students' risk for COVID-19 exposure.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

With increasing replacement of native forests with agriculture, it is important to understand the factors allowing non-human primates to persist, including interactions with potential predators. For small-bodied nocturnal primates, smaller carnivores and domestic dogs that often characterise agroforestry landscapes may be a particular threat, especially for primates like slow lorises, which rely on canopy connectivity and are particularly vulnerable on the ground. We present data collected over 12 years in Indonesia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Among college students, student-athletes are at increased risk for heavy alcohol consumption, participation in risky drinking practices (e.g., playing drinking games [DG]), and adverse alcohol-related consequences relative to non-student-athletes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Pregaming, or drinking before going out, is a commonly practiced risky behavior. Drinking motives are well-established predictors of alcohol use and negative alcohol consequences. Given the influence of context on drinking practices, motives specific to pregaming may affect pregaming behaviors and outcomes above and beyond general drinking motives.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Predrinking and drinking games (DGs) are common risky drinking practices among adolescents and young adults in many different countries around the world. However, most studies on these behaviors have been conducted with university student samples in a limited number of countries. Despite the risks of negative alcohol-related consequences associated with predrinking and DGs, these activities are quite prevalent among young people.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: The Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised Short Form (DMQ-R-SF) is widely used among alcohol researchers studying adolescents and young adults. The psychometric properties of the DMQ-R-SF have been examined among university students in many countries, but to our knowledge, not in Australia, New Zealand or Argentina. We sought to examine the reliability and endorsement of the items on the DMQ-R-SF, and test the associations between the DMQ-R-SF subscales and alcohol use, and negative alcohol consequences between university students from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Southeast Asia is considered a global hotspot of emerging zoonotic diseases. There, wildlife is commonly traded under poor sanitary conditions in open markets; these markets have been considered 'the perfect storm' for zoonotic disease transmission. We assessed the potential of wildlife trade in spreading viral diseases by quantifying the number of wild animals of four mammalian orders (Rodentia, Chiroptera, Carnivora and Primates) on sale in 14 Indonesian wildlife markets and identifying zoonotic viruses potentially hosted by these animals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Many community paramedic interventions aim to reduce unnecessary emergency department visits among high utilizers of acute care, but fewer focus specifically on reducing summons for emergency medical services (EMS). We implemented an EMS-based pilot program that identified high utilizers of 9-1-1 and facilitated community paramedic outreach encounters to understand and address potentially unnecessary 9-1-1 calls. This study compares the pre- and post-intervention incidence rate of 9-1-1 calls among program participants.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Methamphetamine (MA) abuse remains an urgent public health problem. Understanding how the drug affects brain function will help to identify how it leads to abuse and dependence. Previous studies indicate that MA and other stimulants have complex effects on resting state functional connectivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Plant exudates are an important food source for many primates. The Critically Endangered Javan slow loris (Nycticebus javanicus) was previously found to prefer Acacia decurrens exudate in an anthropogenically disturbed site, while its feeding habits in secondary natural forest remain unknown. Knowledge of the chemical characteristics of the plant exudates that Javan slow lorises consume is limited, especially with respect to those that they feed on in natural forests.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose Of Review: Many drug users claim to use drugs to cope with negative emotions, which may, in turn, result in persistent emotional blunting or anhedonia even when they are not using drugs. The purpose of this review is to describe the ways acute administration of psychoactive drugs impacts brain regions during emotion-related tasks, as a first step in understanding how drugs influence emotion processing in the brain.

Recent Findings: Drugs have varying effects on neural responses to emotional stimuli.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The wildlife trade has facilitated the introduction of invasive non-native species, which may compete with native species for resources and alter ecosystems. Some of these species have great potential to become invasive if released or escaped from captivity. Here we studied the pet trade in a group of open countryside birds, the mynas ( spp.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In mammals, colouration patterns are often related to concealment, intraspecific communication, including aposematic signals, and physiological adaptations. Slow lorises ( spp.) are arboreal primates native to Southeast Asia that display stark colour contrast, are highly territorial, regularly enter torpor, and are notably one of only seven mammal taxa that possess venom.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Immature mammals require opportunities to develop skills that will affect their competitive abilities and reproductive success as adults. One way these benefits may be achieved is through play behavior. While skills in developing use of tusks, antlers, and other weapons mammals have been linked to play, play in venomous animals has rarely been studied.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Parkinson's disease (PD) is typically well recognized by its characteristic motor symptoms (e.g., bradykinesia, rigidity, and tremor).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aims: The limited existing research on drinking games and predrinking among university students in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand suggests that participation in these risky drinking practices is relatively widespread among this population. Drinking norms and alcohol use can vary across countries and in different regions of the globe. The measurement of drinking games and predrinking participation between studies also differs, making cross-country comparisons difficult.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Heart rate variability (HRV) is the inter-beat interval variation between consecutive heartbeats and an autonomic reflection of emotional regulatory abilities to flexibly respond to challenges, such as psychosocial stress. Whereas there are known sex differences in stress-induced hormonal and emotional responses, we identified a gap in our understanding of sex-specific autonomic cardiac control during stress. Thus, we assessed HRV prior to, during and after administration of a public speech task in healthy participants (n = 929) according to sex.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rationale: Methamphetamine (MA) use is steadily increasing and thus constitutes a major public health concern. Women seem to be particularly vulnerable to developing MA use disorder, as they initiate use at a younger age and transition more quickly to problematic use. Initial drug responses may predict subsequent use, but little information exists on potential gender differences in the acute effects of MA prior to dependence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chronic use of methamphetamine impairs frontostriatal structure and function, which may result in increased incentive-motivational responses to drug cues and decreased regulation of drug-seeking behavior. However, less is known regarding how the drug affects these circuits after acute administration. The current study examined the effects of a single dose of methamphetamine on resting state frontostriatal functional connectivity in healthy volunteers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The psychostimulant drug ±3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) reportedly produces distinctive feelings of empathy and closeness with others. MDMA increases social behavior in animal models and has shown promise in psychiatric disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). How it produces these prosocial effects is not known.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rationale: The behavioral and reward-related effects of stimulant drugs have been studied extensively; yet the effect of stimulants on sensory processing is still relatively unknown. Prior brain imaging studies have shown that single doses of stimulant drugs increase neural function during cognitive and attentional processes. However, it is not clear if stimulant drugs such as methamphetamine (MA) affect neural responses to novel sensory stimuli, and whether these effects depend on the visual features of the stimuli.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Cigarette smoking is a well-known public health concern, and there is an urgent need to develop new treatments to reduce smoking or facilitate abstinence. One factor that is known to contribute to relapse is stress, making the stress response an important target for treatment. The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) is believed to have stress-reducing effects, and in addition there is evidence that it reduces drug craving.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Despite widespread knowledge of the dangers of cigarette consumption, smoking continues to be a public health concern. One compound that has shown potential for treatment in preclinical models is the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT). The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of intranasal oxytocin on cigarette craving, behavioral economic demand for cigarettes, and cigarette consumption, in regular smokers after 18 hours of abstinence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Drug cues, or conditioned responses to stimuli paired with drugs, are widely believed to promote drug use. The acquisition of these conditioned responses has been well characterized in laboratory animals: neutral stimuli paired with drugs elicit conditioned responses resembling the motivational and incentive properties of the drug itself. However, few studies have examined acquisition of conditioning, or the nature of the conditioned response, in humans.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF