Are excluding e-cigarettes a loophole in the smokefree public housing rule?

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) required all Public Housing Authorities to become smokefree in July 2018, following an 18-month implementation period that began February 2017. The HUD rule included all combustible tobacco products; e-cigarettes were not included. This purpose of this study is to characterize e-cigarette use overall and initiation after the implementation of the smokefree rule among tobacco users living in public housing. Data were collected from 396 adult (18+ years) current tobacco users at the time of rule implementation residing in the District of Columbia Housing Authority between July 2018 and November 2021. Measures include e-cigarette use, age of initiation, reasons for e-cigarette use, e-cigarette use susceptibility (among non-users), and sociodemographic characteristics. Descriptive and crosstab statistics were calculated to characterize e-cigarette use. Nearly-one-quarter of tobacco users reported lifetime use of e-cigarettes (24 %, n = 95) and 4.8 % (n = 19) indicated past 30-day e-cigarette use. Of the lifetime users, twenty-two (23.2 %) initiated their use after the smoke-free rule went into effect, with only two of those residents indicating they did so because of the rule. Of those who never used an e-cigarette, 23.5 % (n = 70) indicated being curious about e-cigarettes and 10.7 % (n = 40) said they may use e-cigarettes in the next year. Results indicate low use of e-cigarette products and low uptake due to the rule. Few tobacco users who never used e-cigarettes indicated intentions to use. Results suggest that omitting e-cigarettes from the HUD rule has not led to significant use of these products in this sample.

Exploring a sustainable building's impact on occupant mental health and cognitive function in a virtual environment.

Even though people spend the majority of their time indoors, the role of buildings in shaping human experience is still not well understood. The objective of this experimental project is to develop, test, and validate a data-driven neuroscience approach to understand the built environment's impact on occupant cognitive function and mental health. The present study utilized virtual environments and electroencephalogram (EEG) and event-related potential (ERP) approaches, to provide objective neurophysiological information about how sustainable buildings (SBs) impact people's affective and cognitive functioning differently compared to conventional building (CBs). The long-term goal is to assess the validity of sustainable building design protocols in promoting and increasing mental health and well-being and the mechanism used to accomplish these increases. The findings showed test subjects demonstrated increased visual system engagement and modulated attentional focus and control processing in the SB compared to the CB environments. The findings can be explained by the cognitive load theory, which is consistent with the interpretation of greater focus on the present environment and reduced internal mental processing (cf. mindfulness), based on the observed increased theta/delta activities and greater engagement of visual systems and corresponding decreases in frontal activity in the SB environment. In addition, the combination of virtual environment (VE) and EEG/ERP has the potential to advance design methods by soliciting occupants' responses prior to completion of the projects. Building design is more than aesthetics; expanding the horizon for neuroscience would eventually result in a new knowledge base for building design, particularly sustainable building design, since the sustainability of the building often needs to be quantified.

Pretending to Be Better Than They Are? Emotional Manipulation in Imprisoned Fraudsters.

Fraud can cause severe financial losses and affect the physical and mental health of victims. This study aimed to explore the manipulative characteristics of fraudsters and their relationship with other psychological variables. Thirty-four fraudsters were selected from a medium-security prison in China, and thirty-one healthy participants were recruited online. Both groups completed an emotional face-recognition task and self-report measures assaying emotional manipulation, psychopathy, emotion recognition, and empathy. Results showed that imprisoned fraudsters had higher accuracy in identifying fear and surprise faces but lower accuracy in identifying happiness than controls (t = 5.26, p < 0.001; t = 2.38, p < 0.05; t = 3.75, p < 0.001). Significantly lower scores on non-prosocial factors on the Managing the Emotions of Others scale (MEOS) were found for imprisoned fraudsters, relative to controls (t = 3.21, p < 0.01). Imprisoned fraudsters had low scores in the assessment of psychopathy than the control group, especially Factor 1 (t = 2.04, p = 0.05). For empathy, imprisoned fraudsters had significantly higher scores in perspective-taking than controls (t = 2.03, p = 0.05). Correlation analyses revealed that psychopathic traits were positively correlated with non-prosocial factors in both groups. However, the relationships between emotional manipulation and emotional recognition and empathy were not consistent across the groups. The results suggest that fraudsters may pretend to be as prosocial as healthy controls, who had lower antisocial tendencies, normal empathy ability, and would like to manipulate others' emotions positively during social interaction.

Factor structure and construct validity of the short form of managing the emotions of others (MEOS-SF) scale in the Chinese sample.

OBJECTIVES: Emotional manipulation is an important strategy in social interaction. The English version of MEOS-SF has been developed to make the measurement of such manipulation ability more efficient. The purpose of the current study was to assess the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of MEOS-SF. METHODS: Explore factor analysis and Confirmatory factor analysis were adopted to examine the Chinese version of the MEOS-SF factor structure in 645 Chinese participants (mean age = 24.68 ± 6.01 years) recruited online. RESULTS: Factor analysis supported a new three-factor model that included Conceal, Prosocial, and Non-prosocial, different from the original English MEOS-SF. Enhance and Divert merged to Prosocial factor while Worsen and Inauthentic merged to Non-prosocial factor because both prosocial and non-prosocial pairs had similar objectives, which would be perceived as the same thing by people in Eastern culture. As expected, MEOS-SF factors were found to be correlated with the Big Five, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and trait EI. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggested that the Chinese version of MEOS-SF had acceptable psychometric properties and could be used to assess emotional manipulation.