It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, January 14, 2023
Study refutes industry claims that ban on menthol cigarettes leads to increased use of illegal smokes
Research on Canada’s ban shows no uptick in illicit cigarettes
A new research study has found that banning menthol cigarettes does not lead more smokers to purchase menthols from illicit sources, contradicting claims made by the tobacco industry that the proposed ban of menthol cigarettes in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will lead to a significant increase in illicit cigarettes.
Researchers at the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Waterloo evaluated the impact of federal and provincial menthol cigarette bans in Canada by surveying smokers of menthol and non-menthol cigarettes before and after Canada’s menthol ban.
Smokers were asked whether their usual cigarette brand was menthol-flavoured and to report their last brand purchased. Those who were still smoking after the menthol ban were also asked where they last purchased their cigarettes.
Results showed that after the ban, there was no significant change in the purchase of cigarettes from First Nations reserves, the main source of illicit cigarettes in Canada.
“The tobacco industry has a long history of claiming that policies to reduce smoking will lead to substantial increases in illicit trade,” said Dr. Janet Chung-Hall, a research scientist for ITC and lead author of the new study. “We can add the Canadian menthol ban to the long list of effective policies, such as graphic warnings and plain packaging, whose evaluation disproved the scare tactics by industry—showing that illicit trade did not, in fact, increase.”
A 2022 study that combined the ITC Project data with data from a comparable Ontario evaluation study showed that the Canadian menthol ban led to an increase of 7.3 per cent in quitting among menthol smokers above that of non-menthol smokers. Projecting this effect to the U.S., whose Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed its own menthol ban, the ITC researchers estimate that a U.S. menthol ban would lead 1.33 million smokers to quit.
“Our previous research from Canada and the Netherlands showed that a menthol cigarette ban leads to significant reductions in smoking,” said Dr. Geoffrey Fong, principal investigator of the ITC Project and professor of psychology and public health sciences at Waterloo. “These findings combine to provide powerful evidence in support of FDA’s proposed menthol ban.”
Smoking is still the number-one preventable cause of disease and death around the world. Health authorities, including the World Health Organization, have long called for banning menthol in cigarettes because they promote smoking. Canada was one of the first countries to ban menthol cigarettes, with more than 30 countries implementing similar bans to date.
The rise of the far right in Western democracies in recent years has revived interest in how these movements and parties engage in politics. Given the generalizations that indicate that these ideologies are only constructed based on hate speech, two researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) argue that this political tendency in Spain also uses love and other positive feelings to a great extent, although it does so from its own perspective, which is based around the family, the nation and equality.
What role do rejected realities play among so much love?
On 8 March 2020, a few days before the declaration of the lockdown for the Covid pandemic in Spain, and while a wide range of feminist demonstrations were being held in various Spanish cities, the political party VOX organized an event at the Palacio de Vistalegre in Madrid. At that event, the third largest political force in Spain's Congress of Deputies set out a large proportion of its arguments. After analysing the main speeches that were given on that day, the researchers examine how the party's leaders use love as an element for division.
"Very conservative ideologies use love for the same reason as the left, the mainstream right and any other type of ideology. This political trend doesn't use love to hide its true face, which is a rejection of those who don't identify with its values. This political tendency loves – but the problem is what it loves. It loves a Spain which is a single nation and exclusive. The far right generates hate for the things it loves, but that love is completely genuine," explained Alexandre Pichel.
As the researchers point out in the article, love is used as a tool for establishing a difference between "us" (traditional families, white men and native Spaniards) and "them", who may be the elite (embodied in the governing classes and feminism) or those who are different (non-traditional families or migrants). To that end, the leaders of the far right create this feeling in their speeches through their relationship with the family, equality and violence.
Love and the traditional family
Over the last decade, defending the traditional family structure has become one of the cornerstones of the ultra-conservative discourse. The researchers observe that feminism and the LGBTQI movement are highlighted in these discourses as the main threats to a type of family unit that is identified as the only "normal and natural" one. In addition, in their article Pichel and Enguix conclude that this type of family provides a direct link with the past, tradition and the cultural legacy of previous generations, i.e. with some of the cornerstones of the most conservative discourse.
The experts point out that conservative ideas about the family define the political boundaries between opponents of the traditional family (who are identified as feminists and LGBTQI people) and those who protect, love and are willing to pass on Spain's national and moral, natural sexual and gender values. The researchers argue that, within the discourse of this political doctrine, "feminists, queers and leftists betray the moral norms of the nation and aim to destroy Spain and the traditional family".
Love for equality
"On the far right, equality stems from the idea of a completely uniform society. If the Spanish people is uniform, then inequality is impossible," explained Pichel. "On the other hand, in leftist movements and feminism, equality is considered in terms of a concept that understands and highlights differences in order to create an open community. The far right believes that gender quotas are restrictive of gender equality, since they don't understand the need to specify differences. The same applies to sex education in schools. This idea of equality leads ultra-conservative schools of thought to masculinize and heterosexualize a uniform society."
Love plays a role in this area. This love is for the traditional woman, the central figure of the family, for example. From this perspective, the researchers argue that the most conservative facets of Spanish politics believe that women have already reached their maximum levels of intelligence, freedom, strength and independence, and as such they have no need for feminism. In their study, the UOC experts point out that love is once again used to divide and to build a wall between conservative-leaning Spain, and feminism and everyone who defends policies for gender equality.
Love and its relationship with gender violence
The authors believe that the discourse of the Spanish far right uses the distinction between gender violence and sexual violence to maintain an ambivalent narrative. On the one hand, they use it to accuse feminism of criminalizing men with regard to gender violence. While, on the other hand, they use it to portray immigrant men as potential sexual abusers. As the researchers say in their paper, "nativism, nationalism, and xenophobia are entangled with affects and violence in a complex way."
"The link between love and the family, Spain and its idea of equality is the result of what the British sociologist Jeff Hearn calls the hegemony of men. If we look at the affective and political mechanisms that are used, we can see how the defence of men is present in each one," said Pichel. "The far right loves the family in order to protect the concept of paternal domination, it loves the country to restore the role of men as national leaders, and it loves equality to defend men against the advances made by feminism."
The UOC's research and innovation (R&I) is helping overcome pressing challenges faced by global societies in the 21st century by studying interactions between technology and human & social sciences with a specific focus on the network society, e-learning and e-health.
Over 500 researchers and 51 research groups work in the UOC's seven faculties, its eLearning Research programme and its two research centres: the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the eHealth Center (eHC).
The university also develops online learning innovations at its eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC), as well as UOC community entrepreneurship and knowledge transfer via the Hubbik platform.
Open knowledge and the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development serve as strategic pillars for the UOC's teaching, research and innovation. More information: research.uoc.edu.
Many people look to diet trends or new exercise regimens—often with questionable benefit—to get a healthier start on the new year. But there is one strategy that's been shown time and again to boost both mood and health: meditation.
I am very excited about how meditation can be used as a tool to provide powerful new insights into the ways the mind and brain work, and to fundamentally change a person's outlook on life. And as a mental health researcher, I see the promise of meditation as a low- or no-cost, evidence-based tool to improve health that can be relatively easily integrated into daily life.
Meditation requires some training, discipline and practice—which are not always easy to come by. But with some specific tools and strategies, it can be accessible to everyone.
What are mindfulness and meditation?
There are many different types of meditation, and mindfulness is one of the most common. Fundamentally, mindfulness is a mental state that, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn a renowned expert in mindfulness-based practices, involves "awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally."
This means not ruminating about something that happened in the past or worrying about that to-do list. Being focused on the present, or living in the moment, has been shown to have a broad array of benefits, including elevating mood, reducing anxiety, lessening pain and potentially improving cognitive performance.
Mindfulness is a skill that can be practiced and cultivated over time. The goal is that, with repetition, the benefits of practicing mindfulness carry over into everyday life—when you aren't actively meditating. For example, if you learn that you aren't defined by an emotion that arises transiently, like anger, then it may be harder to stay angry for long.
The health benefits of meditation and other strategies aimed at stress reduction are thought to stem from increasing levels of overall mindfulness through practice. Elements of mindfulness are also present in practices like yoga, martial arts and dance that require focusing attention and discipline.
The vast body of evidence supporting the health benefits of meditation is too expansive to cover exhaustively. But the studies I reference below represent some of the top tier, or the highest-quality and most rigorous summaries of scientific data on the topic to date. Many of these include systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which synthesize many studies on a given topic.
Mindfulness-based programs also show promise as a treatment option for anxiety disorders, which are the most common mental disorders, affecting an estimated 301 million people globally. While effective treatments for anxiety exist, many patients do not have access to them because they lack insurance coverage or transportation to providers, for instance, or they may experience only limited relief.
In addition to improving mood and lowering stress, mindfulness has been shown to elevate cognitive performance, cut down on mind wandering and distractibility and increase emotional intelligence.
It's important to note, however, that for those affected by mental or substance use disorders, mindfulness-based approaches should not replace first-line treatments like medicine and psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Mindfulness strategies should be seen as a supplement to these evidence-based treatments and a complement to healthy lifestyle interventions like physical activity and healthy eating.
How does meditation work? A look into the brain
Studies show that regular meditators experience better attention control and improved control of heart rate, breathing and autonomic nervous system functioning, which regulates involuntary responses in the body, such as blood pressure. Research also shows that people who meditate have lower levels of cortisol—a hormone involved in the stress response—than those who don't.
A recent systematic review of neuroimaging studies showed that focused attention meditation is associated with functional changes in several brain regions involved in cognitive control and emotion-related processing. The review also found that more experienced meditators had stronger activation of the brain regions involved in those cognitive and emotional processes, suggesting that the brain benefits improve with more practice.
This research does have limits. These include a lack of a consistent definition for the types of programs used, and a lack of rigorously controlled studies. In gold-standard randomized controlled trials with medications, study participants don't know whether they are getting the active drug or a placebo.
In contrast, in trials of mindfulness-based interventions, participants know what condition they are assigned to and are not "blinded," so they may expect that some of the health benefits may happen to them. This creates a sense of expectancy, which can be a confounding variable in studies. Many meditation studies also don't frequently include a control group, which is needed to assess how it compares with other treatments.
Benefits and wider applications
Compared with medications, mindfulness-based programs may be more easily accessible and have fewer negative side effects. However, medication and psychotherapy—particularly cognitive behavioral therapy—work well for many, and a combination approach may be best. Mindfulness-based interventions are also cost-effective and have better health outcomes than usual care, particularly among high-risk patient populations—so there are economic benefits as well.
Researchers are studying ways to deliver mindfulness tools on a computer or smartphone app, or with virtual reality, which may be more effective than conventional in-person meditation training.
Importantly, mindfulness is not just for those with physical or mental health diagnoses. Anyone can use these strategies to reduce the risk of disease and to take advantage of the health benefits in everyday life, such as improved sleep and cognitive performance, elevated mood and lowered stress and anxiety.
Where to get started?
Many recreation centers, fitness studios and even universities offer in-person meditation classes. For those looking to see if meditation can help with the treatment of a physical or mental condition, there are over 600 clinical trials currently recruiting participants for various conditions, such as pain, cancer and depression.
If you want to try meditation from the comfort of your home, there are many free online videos on how to practice, including meditations for sleep, stress reduction, mindful eating and more. Several apps, such as Headspace, appear promising, with randomized controlled trials showing benefits for users.
The hardest part is, of course, getting started. However, if you set an alarm to practice every day, it will become a habit and may even translate into everyday life—which is the ultimate goal. For some, this may take some time and practice, and for others, this may start to happen pretty quickly. Even a single five-minute session can have positive health effects.
The stress of following daily political news can negatively affect people's mental health and well-being, but disengaging has ramifications, too, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
There are strategies that can help people manage those negative emotions—such as distracting oneself from political news—but those same strategies also reduce people's drive to act on political causes they care about, the research found.
"When it comes to politics, there can be a trade-off between feeling good and doing good," said Brett Q. Ford, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. "Protecting oneself from the stress of politics might help promote well-being but it also comes at a cost to staying engaged and active in democracy."
The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Previous research and polling data have found that politics can be a major stressor in people's lives, according to the researchers. However, most of that research has focused on major political events such as presidential elections. Ford and her colleagues wanted to explore the emotional and mental health effects of everyday political news and how people use different strategies to manage those negative emotions.
"Politics isn't just something that affects people every four years during election season—it seems to seep into daily life. But we just don't know much about the day-to-day impact politics might have," Ford said.
To learn more, she and her colleagues began by asking a politically diverse sample of 198 Americans to answer a series of questions each night for two weeks about the political event they thought about most that day, the emotions they felt in response, how they managed those emotions, their general psychological and physical well-being that day, and how motivated they felt to engage in political action.
Overall, the researchers found that thinking about daily political events evoked negative emotions in participants—even though the survey question had not asked participants to think of negative political events. Participants who experienced more politics-related negative emotions reported worse day-to-day psychological and physical health on average—but they also reported greater motivation to act on political causes by doing things such as volunteering or donating money to political campaigns.
The survey also asked participants about several strategies they might have used to manage their negative emotions, including distracting themselves from the news and "cognitive reappraisal," or reframing how they thought about a news event to make it seem less negative. Participants who successfully used these strategies to manage their negative emotions reported better daily well-being, but also less motivation to take political action.
Next, the researchers replicated these results over three weeks with a larger group of 811 participants that included not only Democrats and Republicans but also people affiliated with a different political party or no party.
In a second set of experiments, Ford and her colleagues asked participants to watch political news clips from the highest-rated liberal and conservative-leaning news shows rather than simply asking them to report on politics they had encountered. In these experiments, participants watched a clip from either the Rachel Maddow Show (for liberal participants) or Tucker Carlson Tonight (for conservative participants).
In a first experiment, the researchers found that participants who watched the political clip experienced more negative emotions than those who watched a neutral, non-political news clip, and reported more motivation to volunteer for political causes or take other political action. The effect held true for participants across political parties.
In a final experiment, the researchers asked participants to try out several different emotion regulation strategies as they watched the clips—distraction, cognitive reappraisal or acceptance of their negative feelings. Replicating the results from the diary studies, the researchers found two of the strategies, distraction and cognitive reappraisal, consistently reduced participants' negative emotions which in turn predicted better well-being, but indirectly reduced the likelihood that they would want to take political action.
Overall, the results suggest that politics have a significant daily effect on many Americans' health and well-being, according to the authors.
"Modern politics—its daily controversies, incivility and ineptitude—puts a regular emotional burden on Americans," said Matthew Feinberg, Ph.D., a coauthor of the paper and professor of organizational behavior at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
This has important implications, particularly for activists who wish to get people involved in advocating for political causes without harming their mental health, according to the researchers.
"In a way, this is a trade-off between individual wellness and collective wellness," Ford said.
"We are working toward identifying strategies that people can use to protect their own well-being without coming with costs to the broader collective. This paper begins to address this by studying emotional acceptance—a strategy that is linked with greater well-being for individuals in daily life, and which doesn't seem to come with consistent costs to collective action. It is important that people have a variety of tools they can use to manage the chronic stress of day-to-day politics while also maintaining the motivation to engage with politics when needed."
Further research should examine the effects of politics on well-being in different countries, the researchers suggest. "The U.S. faces high levels of political polarization in a largely two-partysystem and a media often revolving around inciting moral outrage," Feinberg said. "It would be interesting to see the extent to which daily politics would affect citizens from in other countries that are less polarized or with different political systems."
More information: Brett Q. Ford etal, The Political is Personal: The Costs of Daily Politics, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000335. On PsyArXiv: psyarxiv.com/hdz97/
Largest decentralized study of its kind shows high levels of engagement with study app
by Huma Ltd
Fenland COVID-19 study flow diagram. Credit: Journal of Medical Internet Research (2022). DOI: 10.2196/40602
A new study, which was a collaboration between Huma Therapeutics and the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, shows that participants using Huma's clinical trial platform had high, sustained levels of engagement in an observational, fully remote COVID-19 study.
The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, involved 62.61% (2524/4031) participants from the longitudinal Fenland study, making it the largest population-based study to-date exploring how digital technologies can support population research.
From the participants, 90.21% (2277/2524) completed the app-based onboarding process and signed e-consent. In addition to using the study app (available for both iPhone and Android), each was also sent a digital pulse oximeter (to measure blood oxygen levels) and thermometer. They were provided with remote set-up assistance and were asked to record the following biomarkers:
blood spot samples to test for the presence of coronavirus antibodies.
Participants had a positive experience with the study app, finding it easy to use and quick to report measurements and symptoms. They took part in the observational study for at least 6 months and most kept completing measures until asked to stop; there was minimum drop off in engagement over the study period. On average, people used the study app for 34.5 weeks (7.9 months), with only 2.5% of participants withdrawing from the study. It was interesting to see a higher engagement rate amongst the participants aged over 65.
Dr. Arrash Yassaee, Global Clinical Director at Huma, said, "Huma is committed to building robust clinical and scientific evidence for its technology. The high level of engagement and retention we've seen in this study is very encouraging. User-friendly clinical trial technologies such as Huma's have great potential to transform population-based health research by increasing access and reducing the burden on participants. This kind of data collection is incredibly valuable for understanding health and disease processes in the real world and gathering insights that can make a difference to people's lives."
Dr. Kirsten Rennie, a Senior Research Associate at MRC Epidemiology Unit and an expert in quantitative measures of physical activity and diet, who led the study said, "Enrolment and retention in traditional cohort-based observational studies is a constant challenge and participation has been declining in recent years. Here we saw not only great enrolment and retention, but also engagement which has helped us create a useful checklist for other researchers to follow."
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated interest in the use of digital health solutions for remote health monitoring. But while these technologies have shown benefits for patients with chronic or acute health conditions, less is known about their utility in population-based health research, where it is becoming increasingly hard to recruit participants and keep them engaged over months or even years.
More information: Kirsten L Rennie et al, Engagement With mHealth COVID-19 Digital Biomarker Measurements in a Longitudinal Cohort Study: Mixed Methods Evaluation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (2022). DOI: 10.2196/40602
Regression-estimated effects of informing US residents about state vaccination incentive programs on further COVID-19 vaccination, other health behaviors, morals and civic responsibility, and perceived safety, efficacy and trust. The figure is based on experimental data from a general population sample of US residents in 12 states that introduced incentive programs for COVID-19 vaccination. The figure shows regression-estimated effects of the incentives condition (informing participants about the existence of incentive programs in their state) relative to the control condition, as pre-registered. All regressions use controls consisting of gender, age, education, employment status, income and state of residence in 2021 (see Extended Data Fig. 3 for results without controls). The blue dots indicate the estimated impact in standard deviations on the respective variables; all outcomes are defined as pre-registered. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals (two-sided CI: mean ± 1.96 s.e.) from OLS regressions with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. The dashed gray lines indicate the threshold for small effect sizes of 0.2 standard deviations (Cohen’s d). The sample sizes for the control and incentives conditions are n incentives = 1,521 and n control = 1,541. Credit: Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05512-4
A study finds that paying people to take a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine didn't lower the likelihood of seeking the second or third dose or of other positive health behaviors and didn't erode morals, sense of civic duty, or feelings of self-determination.
The study, led by Swiss and Swedish researchers, was published yesterday in Nature. The researchers note that, while financial incentives to encourage healthy and prosocial behaviors often generate initial behavioral change, critics say that they can corrode prosocial motivations, lead to moral decay, and increase feelings of coercion, reducing the likelihood of practicing healthy behaviors without a payment.
The team offered 1,131 Swedish participants in a previous randomized, controlled trial (RCT) 200 Swedish krona (SEK), or roughly $24 US, to receive a first COVID-19 vaccine dose within 30 days. That group was compared with 3,888 matched participants not offered the incentive.
Just as likely to seek subsequent doses
The researchers combined the RCT data with vaccination records on second-dose uptake and survey results from January (first dose uptake) and June 2022 (third dose). A total of 726 participants in the financial incentive group and 2,512 controls responded to the first survey, and 606 and 2,100, respectively, completed the second.
The payment boosted uptake by four percentage points 30 days after the trial ended. Uptake remained elevated for at least three months.
The authors identified no negative effects of financial incentives on subsequent planned or actual COVID-19 vaccine uptake or timing, morals, sense of civic duty, trust in vaccination providers or in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, attitudes toward financial incentives, or feelings of self-determination or coercion.
Nor was there evidence that incentives received in the previous five months for behaviors such as flu shot uptake or blood donation had any negative effects on the decision to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. "Our findings inform not only the academic debate on financial incentives for behavior change but also policy-makers who consider using financial incentives to change behavior," they wrote.
More information: Florian H. Schneider et al, Financial incentives for vaccination do not have negative unintended consequences, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05512-4
