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Results for “Social Discrimination”

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PubMed2003

Socially mediated speciation.

We employ a simple model to show that social selection can lead to prezygotic reproductive isolation. The evolution of social discrimination causes the congealing of phenotypically similar individuals into different, spatially distinct tribes. However, tribal formation is only obtained for certain types of social behavior: altruistic and selfish acts can produce tribes, whereas spiteful and mutualistic behaviors never do. Moreover, reduced hybrid fitness at tribal borders leads to the selection of mating preferences, which then spread to the core areas of the respective tribes. Unlike models of resource competition, our model generates reproductive isolation in an ecologically homogeneous environment. We elaborate on how altruistic acts can lead to reproductive isolation, but also predict that certain types of competition can lead to the speciation effect. Our theory provides a framework for how individual-level interactions mold lineage diversification, with parapatric speciation as a possible end product.

Social Behavior↗

PubMed2001

Matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge in African elephants.

Despite widespread interest in the evolution of social intelligence, little is known about how wild animals acquire and store information about social companions or whether individuals possessing enhanced social knowledge derive biological fitness benefits. Using playback experiments on African elephants (Loxodonta africana), we demonstrated that the possession of enhanced discriminatory abilities by the oldest individual in a group can influence the social knowledge of the group as a whole. These superior abilities for social discrimination may result in higher per capita reproductive success for female groups led by older individuals. Our findings imply that the removal of older, more experienced individuals, which are often targets for hunters because of their large size, could have serious consequences for endangered populations of advanced social mammals such as elephants and whales.

Aging↗

PubMed1982

The relationship between life change events, social supports, and dysmenorrhea.

A survey of 156 female undergraduate nursing students was conducted to determine the relationship between life change events and dysmenorrhea and the mediating effect of social supports on this relationship. Data were collected using the Anderson College Schedule of Recent Experience (subjects estimated personal readjustment to life changes), the Moos Menstrual Distress Questionnaire, and a social support index constructed by the authors. Correlations were obtained separately for high and low social support groups; these ranged from .19 to .62 and were significant (p less than .05) for both groups. Presence or absence of a confidant was the most discriminating social support dimension (r = .32 for those with a confidant and .62 for those without). For subjects using oral contraceptives there was no relationship between life change and dysmenorrhea, while users of other contraceptives showed a significant positive relationship (p less than .05). Life change and social supports together accounted for only 16% of the variance in menstrual distress scores. Methodological difficulties in using the life change and social support tools were identified.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2001

A global review of legislation on HIV/AIDS: the issue of HIV testing.

OBJECTIVE: Critical review of worldwide legislation on HIV/AIDS, with a focus on the issue of HIV testing, mainly in a military context. DESIGN: Analysis of health legislation on HIV/AIDS among 121 of the 191 member states of the World Health Organization (WHO), representing 85% of the world's population. METHODS: The WHO Directory of Legal Instruments Dealing with HIV Infection and AIDS has been the main source consulted. Relevant findings of two global surveys were used to examine HIV testing in the military. RESULTS: AIDS cases are reportable in 60% of the 121 countries, whereas HIV infections in no more than 26%. Notifications are kept confidential by law in 20% of countries. Only 17% have developed HIV-specific legislation against social discrimination, whereas 10% have passed legislation establishing financial reimbursement to those who have acquired HIV infection after injection of HIV-contaminated biologic material, support for occupational risk, and/or social protection for patients. Only 42% of the 121 countries report having legal instruments that require screening of donated blood. Legislative measures that address, generally in a prescriptive but sometimes also in a protective way, vulnerable groups, such as commercial sex workers, men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and recipients of multiple transfusions of blood or blood-derivatives, are reported in 27% of countries. Other categories considered potentially vulnerable, for which specific legislation has been passed, include immigrants (17% of countries), prisoners (5%), and health personnel (14%). Further legislative measures for HIV prevention address testing pregnant women in the prenatal period (7% of countries), supporting condom promotion (11%), measures requiring quarantine, isolation, or coercive hospitalization of HIV-infected people or AIDS patients (9%), or imposing penal sanctions for HIV-infected people who deliberately expose others to the risk of transmission (10%). A National AIDS Committee responsible for addressing issues related to HIV/AIDS has been established by law in 39% of the 121 countries. Global surveys show that 27 countries carry out compulsory HIV screening on recruitment of military personnel. CONCLUSIONS: These data represent a useful tool to make governments aware of the problem of underreporting of legal instruments to the WHO and of the need to promote legislation in line with the idea that public health and human rights are complementary, not conflicting, goals.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗

PubMed2005

Evaluation of a sexual health approach to reducing HIV/STD risk in the transgender community.

Despite reports of high prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among the transgender community, very little prevention education has targeted this population. To fill this gap, we developed and evaluated a transgender-specific intervention, All Gender Health, which incorporates prevention strategies into comprehensive sexuality education. Transgender participants (N=181) attended the two-day seminar in community-based venues. The curriculum was delivered via lectures, panel discussions, videos, music, exercises and small group discussions. Attitudes toward condom use, safer sex self-efficacy and sexual risk behaviour were evaluated before participation in the intervention (pre-test), immediately after participation (post-test) and at three-month follow-up. Compared to pre-test values, significant improvements were seen in attitudes toward condom use and in safer sex self-efficacy at post-test, and in attitudes toward condom use, increased monogamy and decreased sexual risk behaviour at three-month follow-up. Pre-test data identified unprotected anal, vaginal and oral sex as the most commonly reported risk behaviours. Many respondents also indicated problems with social discrimination, depression, suicidal ideation and sexual functioning. Future interventions should address these risk co-factors. Alternative interventions need to be developed to target those who, as a result of social marginalization, are less likely to be reached with an intensive seminar-based intervention.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Nurses' role in the developments in learning disability care.

This article looks at the changes in the attitude of society towards people with a learning disability over the last 20 years. Their status in the world as well as their right to be recognized as individuals will be discussed. Nurses have had to move away from the medical and dependence model of care and adjust their practice and behaviour to practice in a more relaxed and domestic style, in which risk-taking, decision-making, choice and opportunity for the clients are key features of the service. This article will highlight the role that learning disability nurses have played in these changes and the adjustments that they have had to make to their clinical practice. Within the new culture of independence and rights for people with a disability, it emphasizes the need for nurses to ensure that they address their own accountability and responsibility. Strategies that have been developed to address social discrimination and exclusion will also be explored.

Community Health Services↗

PubMed2003

Implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research related to non-Western populations.

In this article, I argue that implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research transcends the limitations of modern cultural theories in exploring the health problems of non-Western populations. Providing nursing care in pluralist countries like Canada remains a challenge for nurses. First, nurses must reflect on their ethnic background and stereotypes that may impinge on the understanding of cultural differences. Second, dominant health ideologies that underpin nurses' everyday practice and the structural barriers that may constrain the utilization of public healthcare services by non-Western populations must be further examined. Postcolonial feminism is aimed at addressing health inequities stemming from social discriminative practices. I will draw on extant literature and data of an ongoing ethnography exploring the Haitian caregivers' ways of caring for ageing relatives at home to unveil how the larger social and cultural world has an impact on caregivers' everyday lives. Marginalized locations represent privileged sites from which health problems, intersecting with power, race, gender, and social classes, can be addressed. Postcolonial feminism provides the analytic lens to look at the impact of these factors in shaping health experiences. It also suggests redirecting nursing cultural research and practice to achieve social justice in the healthcare system.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

PubMed2000

[Nutrition of children with cleft lip and cleft palate, a bibliographic study].

The present study aimed at describing the children with congenital lip-palate malformation, emphasizing their alimentation, such as the difficulties and alternative methods to feed these children and nursing care in this process. The bibliographic review showed that there are many aspects in the alimentation care to fissured children, involving complex affective, social, economic and cultural relations that influence in mother-child relationship, in social discrimination of the fissured children and in mothers' difficulty to feed and give care to the child. Authors found the need to implement breast feeding, pointing out the physiological, psychological and social limitations that involve the child and the family as well as the importance of alimentation to physical and emotional development, favouring the surgical correction of lips and/or palate fissures as well as the rehabilitation process.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Social acceptance of the physically handicapped child in the ordinary school.

It has been recommended by both the Snowdon and Warnock reports that greater efforts should be made to provide integrated education for physically handicapped children. The attitudes of the peer group toward the child with a physical handicap are of particular importance in deciding whether to integrate or segregate the disabled child. The present paper reports an exploratory study carried out in schools in Scotland, the purpose of which was to examine the social acceptability of the physically handicapped child in the ordinary school. The subjects, 38 children in the age group 9--11 years, of normal intelligence and with visible physical handicaps affecting movement, were drawn from ordinary day schools. A normal sample of control children was also studied. A modified version of Centers & Centers Social Discrimination test (1963) was administered. The results obtained show that physically handicapped children were not so well accepted by their peers as were their normal controls. The only characteristics which were positively related to social acceptability of the physically handicapped were certain components of emotional adjustment, extraversion and teachers' estimates of their mathematical ability. It is suggested that peer acceptance might be enhanced by greater dissemination of information and advice to both teachers and the normal peer group.

Cerebral Palsy↗

PubMed2001

Person X situation interactionism in self-encoding (I am...when...): implications for affect regulation and social information processing.

Although Person X Situation (P X S) interactionism is central in current social-cognitive conceptions of personality organization, its implications for the encoding of the self remain unexplored. Two studies examined the causal role of P X S interactionism in self-encoding on affect regulation and discriminative social perception. Following failure (Studies 1 and 2) and success (Study 2) ideation, participants were prompted to encode the self either in P X S interactionist terms (I am...when...) or in traitlike unconditional terms (I am...). Interactionist (compared with unconditional) self-encoding led to less affective extremity, suggesting that such encoding may prevent individuals from generalizing specific success and failure experiences to the self as a whole. Study 2 also found that interactionist self-encoding attenuated the endorsement of global stereotypes, suggesting that such encoding may enhance fine-grained social perception as well.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2004

Oxytocin, vasopressin, and social recognition in mammals.

While pheromones may act as social memory signals, oxytocin and vasopressin acting in the brain appear to be critical for the neural processing of olfactory signatures used for social discrimination. Evidence from a variety of laboratories using a range of animal models, as well as an array of molecular and pharmacological techniques, have helped to determine the neuroanatomical and functional roles oxytocin and vasopressin play in social cognition. In this review we discuss the considerable evidence for the roles of oxytocin and vasopressin in social recognition in rats and mice, as well as in offspring recognition in sheep and mate preference in monogamous voles.

Animals↗

PubMed2005

Self-mortification and the stigma of leprosy in northern India.

This article examines the biocultural dynamics of social discrimination and physical disfigurement among people with leprosy, or Hansen's disease (HD), in Banaras, northern India. Based on the narratives and observations ofpeople living in colony and street settings, I trace three destructive processes by which the social stigmata of leprosy become physically expressed. First, strategies of concealment further the progression and spread of HD through late detection and undertreatment. Second, the internalization of stigma can lead to bodily dissociation and injury through self-neglect. Finally, some people intentionally seek injuries under conditions of desperate poverty. As a result of such mortification processes, these people came to embody, quite literally, the prejudices that exacerbated their condition in the first place.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

The effects of infusion of arginine vasopressin, oxytocin, or their antagonists into the olfactory bulb upon social recognition responses in male rats.

In the present report, the peptides arginine vasopressin (AVP), oxytocin (OXT) or their respective antagonists were infused bilaterally into the olfactory bulb to assess their effects upon recognition responses. Recognition responses were determined in a social discrimination paradigm and consisted of measuring the amount of investigation directed to either the same (previously exposed) or novel juvenile rats under conditions in which clear recognition responses are either present as tested with a 30 min inter-exposure interval or absent as tested with a 120 min inter-exposure interval. Infusion of AVP or OXT resulted in preserved recognition responses, as tested with a 120 min inter-exposure interval, compared with that observed in vehicle-infused controls. When animals were infused with the AVP or OXT antagonists using two different doses and tested for the display of recognition as tested with the 30 min inter-exposure interval, no effects of these antagonists were obtained with either dose. These results demonstrate that the olfactory bulb represents an additional important central nervous system target site where these peptides can act to preserve social recognition responses. Moreover, our results suggest that the underlying mechanisms by which peptides function within the olfactory bulb differ as a function of whether they are involved with the display versus preservation of recognition responses.

Aging↗

PubMed2000

[Consequences and complications of obesity].

Obesity increases the risk of metabolic complications such as diabetes, dyslipidemia, systemic hypertension and cardiovascular disease. These are mainly responsible for the increased mortality of obese people. Other metabolic consequences of obesity are: gallstones, steatosis of the liver and the polycystic ovary syndrome. Beside the body mass index the distribution of body fat is important. Centralized obesity, as measured by the waist-to-hip circumference ratio (WHR), is associated with increased mortality and morbidity. Insulin resistance and hyperinsulinaemia seem to play a central role in the pathogenesis of this association. Obesity has not only metabolic complications. There is a relationship between obesity and impaired respiratory function. Furthermore is obesity a risk factor for osteoarthrosis of the knee, the hip and even the hand and for pulmonary embolism and venous thrombosis. Obesity can also lead to psycho-social problems such as depression, social discrimination and isolation.

Body Constitution↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[Social aspects of diabetes mellitus].

A diabetic patient may suffer from social discriminations. We will briefly describe the problems related to licence driving, employment and insurances. Diabetic associations work to attenuate such discriminations and try to provide a practical help to diabetic patients confronted to such difficulties.

Automobile Driving↗

PubMed2000

[Determination of carbohydrate trasferrin (CDT) in the legal medical assessment of being fit to drive].

BACKGROUND: According to the literature carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is thought to be the most sensitive and specific marker of alcohol abuse, but must always be combined with other laboratory tests. Until now the amount of CDT that indicates a state of chronic alcoholism has not been established. Therefore, our aim was to quantify the percentage of CDT that discriminates social drinkers from alcoholics. METHODS: A retrospective study was carried out covering a period of four months on patients who came to us after having their driving licenses suspended for drink driving: 100 male and female subjects aged between 21 and 65 years were examined. This population was compared to a control group of 50 subjects matched for age, who consumed a moderate amount of alcohol, and had never had their driving licenses suspended. RESULTS: The percentage of CDT was found by heterogenous enzyme immunoassay that involves column separation and turbidimetry. There was a notable difference in the amount of CDT between the two groups. The ANOVA and Levene tests were used for statistical analysis. CONCLUSIONS: The authors found the percentage amount of CDT that discriminates the two groups, highlighting the important role of this marker of alcohol abuse in a relevant social context.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Measures of social class based on education for use in health studies in developing countries.

In this paper we consider the appropriateness of education, compared to occupation and income, as a measure of social class for use in health-related studies in developing societies in transition. Three evaluation criteria were used, namely, the feasibility of constructing the measure, its sensitivity in reflecting relevant social class life conditions, and its ability to produce a family-level measure of social class. We used two data sets from community health surveys in areas of Amman city, Jordan, and in Beirut city, Lebanon, to define a family-based average educational score. We then proceeded, using the Beirut data, to test the score's ability to discriminate social class effects on family health, compared to a more standard representation based on the educational level of the head of the family. It was found that the performance of the average educational score was often better than, but not consistently superior to, the educational level of the head of the family.

Developing Countries↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Social recognition memory requires two stages of protein synthesis in mice.

Olfactory recognition memory was tested in adult male mice using a social discrimination task. The testing was conducted to begin to characterize the role of protein synthesis and the specific brain regions associated with activity in this task. Long-term olfactory recognition memory was blocked when the protein synthesis inhibitor anisomycin was injected 20 min before, immediately after, or 6 h after sampling. No effect was observed when anisomycin was administered 3 h or 18 h after sampling. Immunohistochemical analysis of Fos expression revealed that sampling-like exposure to a juvenile increased the activity of a subset of cells in the accessory olfactory bulb and the brain areas that are associated with it. Additionally, increased Fos expression was measured in the main olfactory bulb and the piriform cortex, whereas no signs of activation were seen in the cortical nucleus of the amygdala, all components of the main olfactory system. No increases in Fos immunoreactivity were observed after 4 h. Our data suggest that long-lasting olfactory recognition memory requires two stages of protein synthesis. The first stage takes place within 1-2 h and the second stage between 6-7 h after sampling. The first but not the second stage is paralleled by an increase in the number of Fos-immunoreactive cells in brain areas associated with both the main and accessory olfactory systems. It therefore appears that the role of the second stage of protein synthesis in recognition memory depends on the integrity of the first stage of protein synthesis.

Animals↗