Media Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-sectional Study.

Background: Throughout the pandemic, the general population was encouraged to use media to be kept informed about sanitary measures while staying connected with others to obtain social support. However, due to mixed findings in the literature, it is not clear whether media use in such a context would be pathogenic or salutogenic.

Objective: Therefore, the associations between COVID-19-related stressors and frequency of media use for information-seeking on trauma- and stressor-related (TSR) symptoms were examined while also investigating how social media use for support-seeking and peritraumatic distress interact with those variables.

A two-step chemical vapor deposition process for the growth of continuous vertical heterostructure WSe/h-BN and its optical properties.

The expansion of two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals heterostructure materials growth and synthesis leads to impressive results in the development and improvement of electronic and optoelectronic applications. Herein, a vertical WSe/hBN heterostructure was obtained a dual CVD system, in which prior to the WSe growth a continuous monolayer hBN was obtained on a SiO/Si substrate. Comparing growth on SiO/Si and quartz substrates, we found that the underlayer of hBN leads to a desorption/diffusion process of tungsten (W) and selenium (Se) producing high-quality and large-area WSe growth.

French translation and validation of the International Trauma Questionnaire in a Canadian community sample.

Background: The diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) was recently included into the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Recognizing the need for a brief and specific measure CPTSD symptoms as defined by the ICD-11, Cloitre and her team (2018) developed the original English version of the International Trauma Questionnaire (ITQ). The ITQ is composed of two scales-'post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)' and 'disturbances in self-organization' (DSO), respectively subdivided into three subscales.

A Year Through the COVID-19 Pandemic: Deleterious Impact of Hormonal Contraception on Psychological Distress in Women.

Background: Women are more at risk than men of suffering from psychological distress during disease outbreaks. Interestingly, no biological factors have been studied to explain this disparity in such contexts. Sex hormone variations induced by hormonal contraceptives (HC) have been associated with mental health vulnerabilities.

Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spreading under the influence of environmental factors and strategies to tackle the pandemic: A systematic review.

COVID-19 is deemed as the most critical world health calamity of the 21st century, leading to dramatic life loss. There is a pressing need to understand the multi-stage dynamics, including transmission routes of the virus and environmental conditions due to the possibility of multiple waves of COVID-19 in the future. In this paper, a systematic examination of the literature is conducted associating the virus-laden-aerosol and transmission of these microparticles into the multimedia environment, including built environments.

Remote cognitive assessment in severe mental illness: a scoping review.

Many individuals living with severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, present cognitive deficits and reasoning biases negatively impacting clinical and functional trajectories. Remote cognitive assessment presents many opportunities for advancing research and treatment but has yet to be widely used in psychiatric populations. We conducted a scoping review of remote cognitive assessment in severe mental illness to provide an overview of available measures and guide best practices.

Research on African adolescents' sexual and reproductive health: Ethical practices and challenges.

Sexual and reproductive health issues remain a huge public health challenge, especially in developing countries. These problems arise acutely in socio-cultural contexts marked by social prohibitions relating to adolescent sexuality. However, it is important to listen to adolescents to better understand how they experience their sexuality, the issues associated with it and their needs and expectations.

Relations between prior school performance and later test anxiety during the transition to secondary school.

Background: When exposed to evaluative situations, up to 40% of students develop test anxiety, reflected, namely, by extensive worry, intrusive thoughts, and physiological arousal. Though the negative influence of test anxiety on later school performance is well documented, the role of students' initial achievement in the development of later test anxiety is less clear.

Aims And Sample: To better capture the nature of the relations between prior mathematics and language arts achievement and later test anxiety across genders, this study examined linear and curvilinear relationships among 1,569 French-speaking Canadian students followed across the transition to secondary school, a critical period for test anxiety.

Remote Ischemic Preconditioning Does Not Improve the Six Minutes Walk Test Performance in Chronic Heart Failure Patients: a Randomised Pilot Trial.

Cycles of ischemia and reperfusion induced with a pressure cuff on a skeletal muscle, also know as remote ischemic preconditioning (RIPC), appears to improve performance in different time-trial events in healthy individuals. Our primary goal was to assess the effect of RIPC in heart failure (HF) patients' functional capacity using the six-minute walk test (6MWT). A randomized crossover design comparing RIPC (4 × five-minutes of upper arm ischemia) to the SHAM procedure was done in 15 patients prior to a 6MWT.

Understanding and attenuating pandemic-related disruptions: a plan to reduce inequalities in child development.

The Secretary General of the United Nations described the impact of COVID-19-related school closures as a "generational catastrophe." What will be the legacy of the 2020-2021 pandemic-related disruptions in 5, 10, 20 years from now, as regards education and well-being of children and youth? Addressing the disproportionate impact on those growing up in socio-economically disadvantaged areas or on those with pre-existing learning challenges is key to sustainable recovery. This commentary builds on the four literature reviews presented in this Special Section on a Pandemic Recovery Plan for Children and proposes strategies to understand and attenuate the impact of pandemic-related lockdown measures.

Hydraulic tradeoffs underlie local variation in tropical forest functional diversity and sensitivity to drought.

Tropical forests are important to the regulation of climate and the maintenance of biodiversity on Earth. However, these ecosystems are threatened by climate change, as temperatures rise and droughts' frequency and duration increase. Xylem anatomical traits are an essential component in understanding and predicting forest responses to changes in water availability.

Attitudes towards vaccines and intention to vaccinate against COVID-19: a cross-sectional analysis-implications for public health communications in Australia.

Objective: To examine SARS-CoV-2 vaccine confidence, attitudes and intentions in Australian adults as part of the iCARE Study.

Design And Setting: Cross-sectional online survey conducted when free COVID-19 vaccinations first became available in Australia in February 2021.

Participants: Total of 1166 Australians from general population aged 18-90 years (mean 52, SD of 19).

Revisiting the hypothesis that friends buffer against diminished self-esteem arising from poor quality parent-adolescent relationships: A replication study.

This replication study revisited conclusions from 2 previous investigations (Gauze, Bukowski, Aquan-Assee, & Sippola, 1996; van Aken & Asendorpf, 1997), which suggested that support from friends buffers against diminished self-esteem arising from poor quality relationships with mothers during the transition into adolescence. The aim of this replication study was to conduct an independent test of these findings with both concurrent and longitudinal data. Concurrent data for replication analyses were drawn from 4 projects, involving a total of 959 boys and 1,119 girls (ages 10 to 14) from Canada and the United States.

Estimating unmet need for family planning: A new look at the Bradley, Croft, Fishel and Westoff (2012) Algorithm.

Every year, hundreds of millions of women face the painful experience of unwanted pregnancies. To address this situation, access to and use of reproductive health services, including for family planning purposes, has been considered a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). However, many women cannot access family planning services due to a common methodological error in surveys used to estimate unmet needs.

Sport-Specific Agility and Change of Direction in Water Polo: The Reliability and Validity of Two Newly Developed Tests.

Dong, L, Paradelo, D, Delorme, A, Oliveira, J, Parillo, B, Croteau, F, Romeas, T, Dubé, E, Bieuzen, F, Billaut, F, and Berryman, N. Sport-specific agility and change of direction in water polo: The reliability and validity of two newly developed tests. J Strength Cond Res 35(12S): S111-S118, 2021-There is a gap in water-based agility testing that considers both the change-of-direction (COD) and perceptive-reactive components of agility.

A Method for Conducting Preliminary Analysis of the Nature and Context of Sport for Development and Peace Projects in Fieldwork Research: An Illustration With a Malagasy Non-Governmental Organization.

More research on sport for development and peace (SDP) organizations is needed to better understand their actual contributions to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, the unstable, restricted, or even risky contexts in which many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and SDP agencies sometimes operate often leave researchers to face important challenges to develop effective or feasible methods to work with such organizations. This study aimed to address the ontological and epistemological questions about what should be known about a given context in an organization before setting off on fieldwork.

Assessing global developmental delay across instruments in minimally verbal preschool autistic children: The importance of a multi-method and multi-informant approach.

Intellectual assessment in preschool autistic children bears many challenges, particularly for those who have lower language and/or cognitive abilities. These challenges often result in underestimation of their potential or exclusion from research studies. Understanding how different instruments and definitions used to identify autistic preschool children with global developmental delay (GDD) affect sample composition is critical to advance research on this understudied clinical population.

Mental health comorbidities following peer victimization across childhood and adolescence: a 20-year longitudinal study.

Background: Peer victimization is associated with a wide range of mental health problems in youth, yet few studies described its association with mental health comorbidities.

Methods: To test the association between peer victimization timing and intensity and mental health comorbidities, we used data from 1216 participants drawn from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development, a population-based birth cohort. Peer victimization was self-reported at ages 6-17 years, and modeled as four trajectory groups: low, childhood-limited, moderate adolescence-emerging, and high-chronic.

Physiological Demands of Basic Fire Management Tasks in Members of the Canadian Armed Forces: A Pilot Study.

Introduction: Members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) are required to meet the minimum standards of the Fitness for Operational Requirements of CAF Employment (FORCE) job-based simulation test (JBST) and must possess the capacity to perform other common essential tasks. One of those tasks is to perform basic fire management tasks during fire emergencies to mitigate damage and reduce the risk of injuries and/or death until professional firefighters arrive at the scene. To date however, the physiological demands of common firefighting tasks have mostly been performed on professional firefighters, thus rendering the transferability of the demands to the general military population unclear.

Category learning in autism: Are some situations better than others?

Autism is diagnosed according to atypical social-communication and repetitive behaviors. However, autistic individuals are also distinctive in the high variability of specific abilities such as learning. Having been characterized as experiencing great difficulty with learning, autistics have also been reported to learn spontaneously in exceptional ways.

Exploring Variations in Individuals' Relationships to Sexual Fantasies: A Latent Class Analysis.

Sexual fantasies represent a vast and highly personal dimension of human sexuality that remains understudied empirically. This article used a person-oriented approach to examine the reactions of arousal and discomfort that individuals experienced in response to four proposed fantasy scenarios depicting themes of romance, power dynamics (i.e.

Distinguishing Among Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder in a Community Sample of Women.

The diagnosis of complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) was included in the ICD-11 in 2018. Debates are still ongoing in the scientific community regarding the conceptual distinction between CPTSD symptoms and those of comorbid PTSD and borderline personality disorder (BPD). The present study aimed to determine whether (a) patterns of symptoms reported by women in a community sample would reveal a CPTSD profile distinct from PTSD and BPD profiles and (b) the resulting profiles could be compared on measures of cumulative childhood trauma exposure, dissociation, and life satisfaction.

Using a self-directed workbook to support advance care planning with long term care home residents.

Background: While advance care planning (ACP) has been shown to improve the quality of end-of-life (EOL) communication and palliative care, it is rarely practiced in long term care (LTC) homes, where staff time to support the process is limited. This study examines the potential of a publicly available self-directed ACP workbook distributed to LTC residents to encourage ACP reflection and communication.

Methods: Recruitment took place across three LTC homes, between June 2018 and July 2019.

Negotiation of the use of medical contraception: Levers and obstacles within married couples in Benin.

In developing countries, millions of married women who want to use medical contraception are unable to do so for various reasons. To address this gap in access to contraception international development actors are emphasizing, among other things, the implementation of empowerment programs for women to enable them to take ownership of issues related to their sexual and reproductive health. Nevertheless, studies show that beyond their socio-demographic characteristics, negotiating contraception as a couple is the essential determinant of medical contraception usage among married women in developing countries.