Rütgers (Germany)

Close social relationships are critical for emotional well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted in-person contact with friends, particularly among young adults, for whom friendships support key developmental goals. In a longitudinal study of U.S. college students (N = 205; 10,088 observations), we examined how close friendship networks related to emotional well-being during the early months of the pandemic (May-October 2020). Leveraging prepandemic social network data and 28 days of ecological momentary assessments of affect and social interactions, we found that students with more close college friends reported higher positive affect and lower negative affect in daily life, even while physically separated from those friends. These individuals were buffered from the emotional toll of pandemic-related stressors, a pattern not explained by personality, interaction frequency, or living conditions. Rather, participants with more close friends experienced higher quality online interactions. Additionally, personal disclosures, whether in-person or online, were consistently associated with greater feelings of closeness. Notably, individuals with fewer close friends showed the largest boost in closeness following partner disclosures, suggesting that emotional sharing may play a compensatory role for those with limited social ties. These findings illustrate how friendships can continue to shape affective experiences from afar and highlight disclosure as a key mechanism through which closeness and its emotional benefits can be cultivated. Integrating social network structure, daily affect, and interaction-level processes, this work advances affective science by providing evidence of how the social regulation of emotion extends beyond physical proximity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Abstract This article examines the career of activist Frances Kellor (1873–1952), as an important figure among a small group of female pioneers who, prior to 1920, chose to forgo the segregated women’s political cultures of settlement houses, reform organizations, and the suffrage movement, to compete head-on with men in government and party politics. It describes the mixed success of Kellor’s early career efforts to acquire political power, then examines in detail her most visible institutional appointment as Chief of the Progressive Service, in Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party (1913–1914). The article argues that earlier accounts of the Service have depicted Kellor as an unempathetic taskmaster and negative force, ignoring some primary source evidence that she operated in the face of a hostile campaign by male subordinates to unseat her. It suggests there are grounds to reappraise her performance in this groundbreaking role. It discusses Kellor’s own, later reflections on the masculine realm of public affairs, and how early pioneers in the long, slow process to integrate men and women in political and government institutions were (inevitably) unable to replicate the legislative successes of Progressive Era female pressure group politics.

Abstract In this paper, we give a complete list of strongly tempered anomaly-free hyperspherical Hamiltonian spaces-those that are dual to symplectic vector spaces under the relative Langlands duality. We show that the period integrals attached to the list contain many previously studied Rankin-Selberg integrals and period integrals, thus giving a new conceptual understanding of these integrals. The list also proposes many new interesting period integrals to study.

Abstract The US–Mexico borderlands occupy a marginal position in national decision-making, a status that has legitimized violent policies such as Prevention Through Deterrence, militarization, and intensified surveillance. While such state narratives and practices have profound material and symbolic effects on border communities, the lived experiences of children remain largely overlooked in both scholarship and policy. This article addresses this gap by foregrounding border children as knowledge producers. Drawing on multimodal dissertation research—map making and storytelling activities conducted with elementary school students in El Paso, Texas—the study explores how children interpret and contest borders as material, symbolic, and discursive formations. The analysis reveals three central findings. First, children articulate how border violence is embedded in daily life, from surveillance in public spaces to the racialized policing of appearance and belonging. Second, they resist and reconfigure dominant state discourses through narratives that assert dignity, community ties, and alternative understandings of security. Third, children imagine futures that transcend restrictive national categories, offering visions of justice and belonging that disrupt universalized accounts of ‘the border experience’. By centring children’s voices, this article contributes to border studies by demonstrating how border violence is negotiated in the everyday, and to childhood studies by positioning children as agentive knowledge producers. It further advances methodological debates by showing the value of multimodal approaches for accessing children’s lived perspectives. Ultimately, engaging children’s knowledge enables a de-essentialization of the border experience and opens conceptual and political space for more just futures.

Harmful algal bloom (HAB) toxins are shown to be associated with Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) progression. Several studies link the HAB toxin microcystin to hepatic inflammasome activation, but the role of cylindrospermopsin (CYN) in Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) pathology remains unknown. Using a mouse model of MASLD, we show that CYN exposure served as a second hit for MASLD to MASH progression, as shown by histopathology and NAS scoring. The pathology was attenuated by the use of NADPH oxidase 2 (NOX2) inhibitor apocynin and peroxynitrite inhibitor phenylboronic acid. Inhibition of peroxynitrite and other redox signaling processes decreased stellate cell activation and fibronectin protein in the hepatic lobules, thus confirming the involvement of the above nitrosative moiety in early fibrotic remodeling, crucial for MASH progression. Redox inhibitors also decreased the endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase (eNOS)/inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase (iNOS) protein ratio, thus raising the yield of inducible nitric oxide and facilitating the uncoupling of eNOS. Mechanistically, peroxynitrite inhibitors coupled with attenuation of redox processes prevented Thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP) colocalization with NLRP3 and resulted in the inhibition of NLRP3 inflammasome activation, a crucial mediator of hepatic inflammation in MASH. Hepatocyte-hepatic macrophage crosstalk, crucial for MASH progression, was shown to induce NOX2 activation, the generation of 3-nitrotyrosine in close proximity to iNOS, a predictive nitric oxide source, thus confirming the role of these cells in activating the inflammation cascade. The results show a crucial role of peroxynitrite in TXNIP-NLRP3 induced inflammasome activation and can be a crucial therapeutic target in treating MASH etiology from environmental exposure.

Change monitoring is an essential task for cranberry farming as it provides both breeders and growers with the ability to analyze growth, predict yield, and make treatment decisions. However, this task is often done manually, requiring significant time on the part of a cranberry grower or breeder. Deep learning based change monitoring holds promise, despite the caveat of hard-to-interpret high dimensional features and hand-annotations for fine-tuning. To address this gap, we introduce a method for modeling crop growth based on fine-tuning vision transformers (ViTs) using a self-supervised approach that avoids tedious image annotations. We use a two-fold pretext task (time regression and class prediction) to learn a latent space for the time-lapse evolution of plant and fruit appearance. The resulting 2D temporal tracks provide an interpretable time-series model of crop growth that can be used to: 1) predict growth over time and 2) distinguish temporal differences of cranberry varieties. We also provide a novel time-lapse dataset of cranberry fruit featuring eight distinct varieties, observed 52 times over the growing season (span of around four months), annotated with information about fungicide application, yield, and rot. Our approach is general and can be applied to other crops and applications (code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/ronan-39/tlt/).

HighlightsWhat are the main findings?Modern high-resolution anterior segment tomographers are capable of extracting surface height data from the corneal front and back surfaces and from the epithelium–stroma interface.The higher refractive index of the corneal epithelium suggests that the cornea should be considered as a dual-layer structure to account for potential inhomogeneity in the epithelial thickness.What is the implication of the main finding?Model surfaces, such as floating best-fit spheres or conoids, could be fitted to the height map data within a specific region of interest to determine relevant surface characteristics such as curvatures, asphericities, and apex positions.Based on a dataset with bilateral repeat measurements in a cataractous population, we were able to confirm that the extracted surface characteristics seem to be very robust. However, surface asphericity should be extracted from a larger region of interest to ensure more robust data.We investigated the repeatability of the MS-39 in determining power vector components—the spherical equivalent (SEQ) and astigmatic powers (C0 and C45) and asphericity (Q)—of corneal epithelium, stroma, and endothelium in a large patient cohort. In this retrospective cross-sectional single-centre study, we evaluated a dataset containing 600 MS-39 anterior segment tomography measurements from 200 eyes (three repeat measurements each) taken prior to cataract surgery. The exported measurements included height map data for the epithelium, stroma, and endothelium surface. Model surfaces (spherocylinder (SphCyl), cylindrical conoid (CylConoid), and biconic (Biconic), all in the 3/6 mm zone) were fitted using nonlinear iterative optimisation, minimising the height difference between the measurement and model. The mean (MEAN) and standard deviation (SD) for each sequence of measurements were derived and analysed. In the 3 mm and 6 mm zone, the MEAN SEQ was 53.47/53.56/53.57 and 53.21/53.54/53.54 D for SphCyl/CylConoid/Biconic for the epithelium, −4.47/−4.51/−4.51 and −4.45/−4.50/−4.50 D for the stroma, and −6.23/−6.26/−6.26 and −6.18/−6.29/−6.30 D for the endothelium. With the three surface models and the 3/6 mm zone, the SD for SEQ/C0/C45 was in the range of 0.04 to 0.11/0.05 to 0.13/0.04 to 0.11 D for epithelium; 0.01 to 0.02/0.01 to 0.05/0.01 to 0.06 D for stroma; and 0.01 to 0.02/0.02 to 0.07/0.03 to 0.07 D for endothelium. Fitting floating model surfaces with astigmatism to map data of the corneal epithelium, stroma, and endothelium seems to be a robust and reliable method for extracting equivalent power and astigmatism using all the datapoints within a region of interest.

Pediatric SARS-CoV-2 infection results in clinical presentations ranging from asymptomatic/mild infection to severe pulmonary COVID-19, to Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), characterized by hyperinflammation and multi-organ involvement. While various aspects of antibody responses to pediatric SARS-CoV-2 infection manifestations have been reported, parallel studies of antibody responses to viral and self-antigens are understudied. We tested whether clinical presentations of increasing severity corresponded to different antiviral antibody and autoantibody signatures. Using custom arrays, we found that, relative to uninfected subjects, all SARS-CoV-2 infection manifestations were associated with increased autoantibody production, suggesting pediatric SARS-CoV-2 infection as a risk factor for autoimmune complications. Subtle differences were seen in autoantibody patterns among infection groups, with some autoantibodies more associated with mild manifestations and others with severe ones. When we compared MIS-C and severe COVID-19 subjects, we found differences in IgG (mostly IgG1) abundance but not in Fc-mediated effector functions. Thus, MIS-C may be associated with abnormal antibody function, suggesting that this syndrome, and perhaps other post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, may be associated with antibody dysfunction. Our study shows that the antibody repertoire varies with clinical presentation of SARS-CoV-2 in children and its analysis may help understand long COVID pathogenesis.ImpactOur study shows that the antibody repertoire varies with the clinical presentation of SARS-CoV-2 in children, which has implications for understanding long COVID pathogenesis.

Binocular vision fuses similar stimuli into a single percept, yet incompatible stimuli result in other experiences such as rivalry, lustre and diplopia. We measured neural responses to binocular stimuli with different phase relationships, intending to understand them using contemporary binocular models. Steady-State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) were recorded from 15 observers in response to monocular and binocular stimulation at 3Hz, using either on-off or counterphase flicker. Across the eyes, binocular stimuli could be (i) in spatial and temporal phase, (ii) in temporal phase but spatial antiphase, (iii) in spatial phase but temporal antiphase, or (iv) in spatial and temporal antiphase (for counterphase flicker this is identical to condition(i)). Responses to monocular on-off flicker showed peaks at the fundamental frequency (3Hz) and its harmonics (integer multiples of 3Hz). In contrast, counterphase flicker produced responses only at twice the flicker frequency (6Hz) and its harmonics. Binocular in-phase stimulation resulted in a similar pattern of responses, consistent with ‘ocularity invariance’ – the observation that binocular and monocular stimuli appear equal at high contrasts. Changing the phase relationship modulated the harmonics pattern in complex ways: in particular, on-off flicker in temporal antiphase reduced the fundamental response, but there was no such effect for counterphase flicker. We modelled the data using a progression of binocular combination algorithms that increased in complexity from a simple linear sum to a two-stage binocular gain control model with parallel monocular and binocular phase-selective channels (the Lustre model; Georgeson et al., 2016). The most complex model (lustre) outperformed all other models in capturing the variance of our SSVEP data, although simpler phase-insensitive models performed similarly well in most experimental conditions. Simpler models struggled to capture the response magnitude to counterphase stimuli. Our findings suggest explaining neural responses to binocular stimuli with different phase relationships requires phase-selective channels.