Poster Session F

Racial and ethnic minority women in the United States are subject to various forms of violent victimization that happen across several social contexts, including interpersonal (e.g., intimate households), community (e.g., where women live and work, local social services), and societal (e.g., justice processes, mass incarceration, economic inequality). Exposure to violence can also have a negative psychological and socio-economic effect on women. We used Beth Richie's Violence Matrix theoretical model to examine violence (physical assault, sexual assault, social disenfranchisement) across social contexts in the lives of minoritized Latinas. Qualitative life history interviews were conducted with 35 adult Mexican American women who live in a structurally marginalized neighborhood who were affiliated with youth street gangs during their adolescence. We used a general inductive approach to analyze the transcripts following the Violence Matrix theoretical model. Findings include themes of commodification of women, violence in medicine, over-extortion of power over women, intergenerational transmission of power over women, neutralization of violence, violence resulting from the denial of basic needs, community violence, violence resulting from interactions with social service agencies and well-being providers. Overall, the themes we found among the interviews highlight the importance of developing interventions that consider the various social contexts in which women are subject to violence.

Eye tracking is a tool that captures where an individual is looking on a screen, which can tell us about various types of perceptual, social, cognitive, and emotional processing. While eye tracking systems are typically designed for adults, they are increasingly used with human and primate infants, whose data may be noisier and less precise. Yet there is a lack of consensus on the most effective methodology for improving data quality in screen-based infant eye tracking studies, particularly those with different species and age groups. Here we examined how some key methodological choices, including enlarging and prolonging the areas of interest (areas on the screen in which the eye tracker detects looks), influence data quality using a Tobii TX300 eye tracker. We tested humans (N=119) at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 14 months of age and rhesus macaques (N=21) at 2 weeks, 3 weeks, and 6 months of age. We found that larger and longer areas of interest improved the proportion of looks detected-increasing valid looks relative to errors-suggesting improvements in capturing eye gaze. These benefits varied by age and species, suggesting that the ideal methods to use may vary depending on the populations studied. To maximize data quality and minimize data loss, we recommend adjusting data collection and extraction approaches for the age groups and species studied, which may better standardize and improve the replicability of eye tracking research.

The Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children and Adolescents (UP-C/A) is effective in treating a variety of psychopathologies in youth; however, this effectiveness has not been examined with an idiographic measure, such as the Top Problems (TPA) assessment. Participants were youth aged 6-17 (M = 11.86, N = 128) who received at least eight sessions of UP-C/A for a primary emotional disorder. We examined change in mean TPA ratings between the first and last sessions of the UP-C/A. We also calculated the reliable change index (RCI) for the difference scores of both informants. Lastly, we examined differences in depression and anxiety symptom severity measured by the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale across the UP-C/A using paired samples t-tests. We found that youth-reported mean TPA ratings significantly decreased by an average of 2.89 units (t(127) = 16.25, p < .001) and parent-reported TPA ratings significantly decreased by an average of 2.96 units (t(127) = 15.46, p < .001). Results of the RCI indicated that 87.5% of youth and 89.8% of parents reported a reliable decrease in TPA ratings. Lastly, depression and anxiety symptom severity decreased significantly from pre- to post-treatment (p's < .001). Overall, these findings not only speak to the ability of idiographic measures, such as the TPA, to capture change in severity over the course of treatment but also speak to the effectiveness of the UP-C/A in treating emotional disorders in youth. 

Humans may have behavioral adaptations that serve as an early defense against infectious pathogens, helping them to avoid exposure to sickness. While adults detect and avoid cues of sickness in faces, less is known about how these abilities develop in children. This understanding is important because children may be particularly vulnerable to catching and spreading contagious diseases. To better understand the development of this sensitivity to sick faces, we tested whether 4- to 5-year-olds (N = 57), 8- to 9-year-olds (N = 52), and adults (N = 51) can discriminate between sick and healthy faces. We found that, while 4- to 5-year-olds did not identify sick faces at rates above chance, both 8- to 9-year-olds and adults did. When asked who they would rather sit next to at dinner, only adults avoided sick faces at rates above chance. For all age groups, performance was better when asked to identify sickness compared to when asked which person they would avoid, suggesting recognition skills may develop before avoidance and that providing viewers with information about a person potentially having an illness may prime them for disease detection. In sum, the ability to distinguish sick from healthy faces emerged during childhood (between 4 to 9 years of age) but improved with age. Characterizing the development of sensitivity to sickness cues may help determine how to facilitate pathogen avoidance behaviors to reduce the spread of illness and ultimately improve child and family health.

Coral restoration projects are increasingly focusing on sexual reproduction to boost genetic variation, particularly after disturbances. Many restoration projects use ceramic settlement tiles as recruitment substrates, but the composition of these tiles is rarely investigated as a means of promoting the growth of early-settlers. To test whether different cementitious materials increase settlement or promote growth, we created tiles using nine cementitious mixes. We conducted a settlement choice assay with larvae of the Caribbean species Orbicella faveolata. Settlement varied across mixes, with 51.8% of total living settlers attaching to FA60 (28.5% Portland cement, 43% fly ash, 28.5% water) tiles while the next closest mixture (SL60: 28.5% Portland cement, 43% slag, 28.5% water) had only 13.5% of total settlers. The least successful tile type in the settlement experiment was AAS1 (67% slag, 7% sodium hydroxide, 26% water) with only 1% of total living settlers. Next, we tested whether chemical compositions of the tiles affected growth rates of recruits. Pictures were taken of individual polyps biweekly under a dissecting microscope and area measurements calculated using ImageJ software. Recruits on FA60 tiles grew fastest among all tile types (2.2x faster than the group mean of nine treatments) and recruits on the AAS1 tiles grew the slowest (18% reduction in size due to major skeleton and tissue loss). We hypothesize the FA60 mix (and potentially other related mixes) may change the water chemistry in the boundary layer surrounding these cementitious materials, therefore enhancing larval settlement and growth, with potential applications for reef restoration efforts.

The vago-vagal reflex is a neural circuit of the tenth cranial nerve involved in the homeostatic regulation of various respiratory and gastrointestinal functions. However, its contribution to blood glucose regulation is not yet fully understood. Focusing on the sensory modality of the vago-vagal loop, we hypothesize that pancreatic sensory neurons detect and communicate information about the pancreatic islet's microenvironment to the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS). We pursued this hypothesis by labeling activated neurons in the NTS in response to β-cell-specific stimulation. We injected mice with an adeno-associated virus containing an insulin promoter that drove the expression of a designer receptor, DREADD, activated by a designer drug, CNO, in β-cells. After administering CNO, we labeled neurons in the brain for cFos, a marker of neuronal activation. cFos staining proved to be an accurate method for detecting neuronal activation in the brain in response to strong intraperitoneal stimulation. However, cFos is not a sensitive reporter for weak and indirect neuronal activation. Despite a tendency for a higher number of cFos positive nuclei in DREADD-mice injected with CNO, this difference was not statistically significant.  For proper analysis, we must increase the sample size and introduce stricter control conditions. 

In adults and children, oxytocin is a neuropeptide positively associated with social engagement. Endogenous peripheral oxytocin can be unobtrusively measured through saliva. However, little is understood about the early development of the endogenous oxytocin system in infancy. Here, we studied whether infants' salivary oxytocin can be reliably measured, is developmentally stable with age, and is linked to social behavior. We longitudinally collected human infants' saliva at 4, 8, and 14 months of age before and after they watched a video of an unfamiliar woman smiling while we tracked their emotional state. We found within-age reliability in infants' salivary oxytocin levels between the first and second samples we collected at each age, and developmental stability in individual differences of infants' oxytocin levels across these ages. At the group level, we detected no changes in infants' salivary oxytocin levels between 4 and 8 months, but found an increase from 8 to 14 months, a novel finding. As we hypothesized, infants' salivary oxytocin levels were positively associated with their positive emotions to a smiling stranger at 4 months of age; however, unexpectedly, this association disappeared at 8 months of age, and then reversed at 14 months of age. Together, these findings suggest that infant salivary oxytocin may be a stable and reliable measure in infancy, but that it may undergo developmental changes in what it reflects. Further studies are needed to more fully explore whether infants' salivary oxytocin levels are associated with other aspects of infants' social and emotional development.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of blindness in adults. Early DR treatment prevents retinal damage and reduces the severity of DR complications. Therefore, early detection is paramount because it allows timely treatment before vision loss. The earliest clinical manifestation of DR is evenly distributed (diffuse) leakage of retinal blood vessels that can develop to focal leakage and other advanced DR complications. DR research relies heavily on rodent models. A characteristic of these DR models is diffuse vascular leakage without the other advanced retinal complications. This makes detection and quantification of DR in these models quite difficult. The Evans blue (EB) assay is sensitive enough to detect diffuse leakage, however, it is invasive and requires animal euthanasia. Therefore, non-invasive sensitive methods for longitudinal studies in the same animals during DR development and treatment are needed, but such methods currently do not exist. In this study, we evaluate the novel non-invasive approach of fluorescence angiography with dual fluorescence (FA-DF) to detect and quantify diffuse retinal vascular leakage in mouse models. FA-DF relies on ratiometric fluorescence measurements of two dyes of different molecular weights that escape the vasculature at different rates after injection. By analyzing the ratio between the dyes inside and outside blood vessels, retinal vascular leakage can be quantified sensitively without euthanizing the animal. Here, we aim to establish FA-DF as a non-invasive method to detect early retinal damage in DR research and further develop it for future use in the clinical setting.

A symbiotic relationship between two organisms accounts for an array of interactions that offer an even greater variety of resources such as food, shelter, protection, essential compounds, and a competitive advantage. Although the benefits of certain mutualisms may be well studied and understood, the specific chemical processes by which these organisms communicate for resources are less documented. For example, aphids form a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, Buchnera aphidicola, that live intracellularly within them in exchange for essential amino acids (Smith and Moran, 2020). The two organisms communicate through a specialized aphid cell called a bacteriocyte that the Buchnera reside in, allowing for specific transport of materials across the membrane. Eukaryotes exhibit mechanisms such as the mTOR pathway that mitigate the nutrition and cell growth factors between certain cell types, incorporating a myriad of transporters and reactions that power the basic components of a multicellular organism (James et. al, 2018). Wilson (2020) hypothesized the endosymbiosis of the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum and the bacteria living within it, Buchnera aphidicola, is regulated by the mTOR pathway. To begin to test this hypothesis, rapamycin, a known inhibitor of the mTOR pathway, was injected into aphids alongside a control treatment to observe whether or not there was an effect on aphid fecundity. After injecting aphids and counting their progeny, I found that the cumulative total of offspring in rapamycin injected aphids was significantly less than that of the controls. The mTOR pathway therefore appears to impact aphid fecundity.

Little is known about the spatial patterns of household water insecurity and their implications for community water interventions. This study analyzes location data of 250 households surveyed in Arua, Uganda, in August-September 2017 to evaluate correlates and geospatial clustering of household water insecurity. The spatial cluster analysis identified clusters or outliers in every community, though with different spatial patterns. Household water insecurity was positively associated with food insecurity, round-trip fetching time, and water-related conflict within households and with neighbors. The observed spatial heterogeneity provides a new view of how household water insecurity experiences may vary in space and time. 

Intimate partner aggression (IPA) is a multi-faceted phenomenon that ranges from severe forms of intimate partner violence to less severe behaviors, common couple violence (Simpson et al., 2007). Communication conflict, which assesses the intensity and frequency of arguments, is often conceptualized as a precursor to common couple violence. The I3 model (I-Cubed; Finkel, 2014) is a key model in explaining IPA and proposes that there are impellance and inhibitory factors that may increase or decrease, respectively, the likelihood that people will act aggressively. The present study examined the interaction between an impellance factor, negative urgency, the tendency to act rashly in response to negative affect (Whiteside & Lynam, 2001), and an inhibitor, cognitive reappraisal, the ability to cognitively restructure an emotion-eliciting situation into non-emotional terms (Gross, 1998b). Participants included 1,159 couples (N = 2,318 individuals; mean age = 33.4; 73.8% White; 86.5% Non-Hispanic) who took part in a randomized controlled trial for an online intervention. For the current report, couples were assessed cross-sectionally at baseline. Each participant completed self-report measures of negative urgency and cognitive reappraisal, along with a measure of couple-level communication conflict. There was a significant interaction between negative urgency and cognitive reappraisal on communication conflict for female partners. For male partners, there was a significant main effect of negative urgency. This study highlights the importance of considering cognitive and emotional individual differences factors in the etiology of IPA and their applicability to intervention efforts.

Preschool experiences have a significant effect on children's language development, however, it is unclear which classroom activities are associated with language abilities and whether this association differs for children with disabilities. Some Classroom activities are highly structured and teacher led, like circle time, while other are less structured like free-play. Here, we 1) examine associations between the proportion of time and the consistency of time children spend in different preschool activity contexts (structured versus unstructured) and their language abilities and 2) ask whether this association differs for children with different developmental disabilities including hearing loss, autism spectrum disorder, and developmental delay. Participants included 138 3-5-year-old children. During classroom observations (every 1-4 week), trained coders noted the time of each activity, including structured activities (story time, organized play, circle time) and unstructured activities (general free-play, outdoor play, meal time). We assessed children's expressive and receptive language abilities with the Preschool Language Scales-5. Results indicated that children spending larger proportions of time in structured activities tended to have higher assessed language abilities, but this varied by disability status such that the effect was stronger for typically developing children. Additionally, there was a negative effect of consistency of time in activities such that, for all children, having more variation across observations of their time in structured activities was associated with stronger language abilities. These findings are a first step for developing personalized interventions and educational practices that could bolster language development in children with developmental disabilities.

The use of FibroScan® measurements, which determines liver shear elasticity, has shown to correlate with the degree of liver fibrosis. Liver fibrosis is characterized by loss of function and diminished blood flow through the liver. A longitudinal study was conducted at the Schiff Center for Liver Diseases at University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital to identify the clinical covariates that are associated with liver disease progression. The central aim of this study is to determine whether providing FibroScan® measurements to the physician at the time of an outpatient hepatology would be useful for patient encounters and aid in the treatment plans, performance of liver biopsies, and patient follow-ups. Furthermore, follow up FibroScan® measurements will be taken to determine how the patient values change over time. This data will show whether patients are experiencing progression or regression of their liver disease as determined by liver stiffness measurements and to determine whether FibroScan® measurements, in conjunction with clinical laboratory correlates and genetic data, can be used to identify patients who are most at risk to have poor clinical outcomes and/or develop hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

Positive affect (PA) is an important construct in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and depressive disorders, and therefore an important treatment target to address for youth with such psychopathology and related impairment. Prior studies have yielded mixed results regarding the role that changes in PA might play with regard to youth interventions. However, evidence has shown the benefits of focusing on PA in treatment for adults, suggesting that additional investigations into the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) on PA in clinical samples of youth may be warranted. The purpose of the current study is to investigate changes in self-reported PA and its relationship to emotional disorder symptoms and avoidance behaviors in a clinical sample of youth (N=222), aged 6-17 years old, who completed a course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) using the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children and Adolescents (UP-C/A). Results indicate that pre-treatment PA was a significant predictor for post-treatment PA but not post-treatment symptoms of depression, anxiety symptoms, or avoidance behaviors. Limitations of the study include limited variability of depression scores at baseline and overall underrepresentation of depressive symptoms within the sample. Future work will investigate whether PA affects certain youth (e.g., those with greater depression, etc.) and their course of psychopathology and treatment more than others. Incorporating novel techniques that specifically target PA (e.g., savoring, etc.) may also be important to highlight with youth that are lower in PA.

The lack of comprehensive and inclusive sexual education in the United States is a significant public health concern that requires a reimagining of health promotion during the age of social media. This necessity bore The Sex Wrap (TSW), a podcast-based sexual health intervention that aims to fill in educational gaps by providing a free platform for sexual health information, resources, and participant-generated questions answered by professionals in the field. TSW podcast research team utilizes Instagram to promote the intervention, which provides a case study for determining the usefulness of social media as a health education tool. Through analysis of user engagement and demographic data we have found that Instagram can be successfully utilized to reach at risk adolescents and emerging adults, draw more individuals to the intervention, and increase access to sexual health information.

Prostate cancer (PC) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death among men. The standard of care for locally advanced PC is androgen deprivation (AD) therapy, which eventually fails, leading to incurable and terminal castration resistant PC (CRPC). CRPC has few therapeutic options, due to the limited molecular understanding of its origins. Through transcriptomics of a novel early CRPC line developed in the Rai lab, it was discovered that the vasodilatory nitric oxide receptor complex, soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC), is downregulated in CRPC. We hypothesize that elevating sGC signaling through FDA-approved agonists will limit CRPC growth. sGC is a heterodimeric protein that consists of two subunits: GC1α (GUCY1A1) and GC1ꞵ (GUCY1B1). In order to respond to sGC agonists, the complex must be intact, requiring both subunits to be expressed at some relatively equivalent threshold level.  Therefore, we analyzed sGC subunit expression levels in cancer cell lines at different stages of CRPC progression, using quantitative PCR (qPCR) to measure mRNA and immunoblotting to measure protein expression. We find that progression to CRPC is associated with striking dysregulation of the subunits with GC1ꞵ either significantly higher or lower than GC1α.  This data will be used to determine the extent to which agonists stimulate sGC activity, to identify threshold levels of subunits that will enable robust response in CRPC patients.

The project's overall objective is to study afferent nociceptor activity in the corneas of transgenic
mice as a novel method for studying oral cancer pain. Using a scanning laser confocal for Ca2+
imaging in vivo, we will assess the change in fluorescence of Ca-reporter GCaMP3 expressing
sensory neurons in response to a known algesic stimulus (10-100 μM capsaicin). This activity
will be compared to that from supernatants of cultures of oral cancer cells. The supernatant will
be obtained from our colleague, Dr. Brian Schmidt. The experiments will also involve the use of
a corneal recording chamber (engineered by our mentor, Dr. Stephen Roper) and a
microperfusion "picospritzer" system. Many issues still exist in terms of optimal protocol. One
obstacle is to stabilize the mouse during experiments without changing the neuron's response to
capsaicin. Nerve fibers in the eye must remain stable, within a few microns, over multiple trials
in order to be able to analyze the data. Another issue is how to control the currents of the tyrode
bath around the eye that impacts capsaicin perfusion. There is an inflow and outflow system
that washes away the capsaicin, causing turbulence even within the short micron distance
between the picospritzer and the cornea. This research will help to develop optimal dosage and
imaging protocols for studying corneal nociceptor activity and analyzing neural responses to
capsaicin.