HOUSTON – (June 22, 2009) – Researchers at The University of Texas School of Public Health have developed a game for HIV-positive youth, +CLICK, designed to reduce secondary transmission of the virus.

+CLICK. (The University of Texas School of Public Health)

+CLICK was developed by Christine Markham, Ph.D., and Ross Shegog, Ph.D., assistant professors of behavioral sciences. The game’s usability and credibility were assessed by HIV-positive (HIV+) youth at a Texas Children’s Hospital clinic. Results from the study were published in the May issue of AIDS Care.

According to the World Health Organization, adolescents and young adults ages 13-24 account for 40 percent of new HIV infections worldwide and almost half of all HIV infections in the United States. Many HIV+ youth engage in risky sexual behaviors, according to Markham.

“We wanted to create +CLICK so that we could help educate youth on the importance of making proper, healthy decisions to protect their relationships and themselves as well as help to reduce transmission of the HIV virus,” said Markham, lead investigator of the study.

The game was developed as an adjunct to the youths’ traditional clinic-based self-management education.

The small sample size of 32 study participants included 62.5 percent females and 37.5 percent males. Of those participants, 56.2 percent contracted the virus through birth and 43.8 percent became infected through sexual contact.

Markham and Shegog worked with Mary Paul, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, and Amy Leonard, M.P.H., research coordinator at Baylor College of Medicine, to develop the material presented in the interactive lessons.

Replicating a shopping mall, study participants travel through lessons on abstinence, condoms and contraception, and also watch video clips from experts and peers who are also HIV+. +CLICK is designed to target four behaviors: choosing not to have sex; disclosing HIV status to a potential partner; using condoms correctly and consistently; and using an effective method of birth control along with condoms.

Participants were able to play several of the game’s lessons in approximately 15 minutes during their regularly scheduled clinic visits. “Participants were very receptive and enthusiastic about playing the game,” said Leonard. “They also liked that they were able to ask the clinicians questions about what they learned on the lessons.” Credibility of the game was trusted by 93.8 percent of the participants and 84.4 percent of users found the game to be very easy to use and would tell others about +CLICK, according to the study.

A prototype of the game was used for the study. The game, which is in the last stages of development, is tentatively scheduled to be available to the public in approximately six months. In addition, the research team is working to create a similar web-based game that will focus on medication adherence for HIV+ youth.

This study was funded by the Baylor College of Medicine-University of Texas at Houston Center for AIDS Research.

The University of Texas
Health Science Center
At Houston

Do you poke, play or simply ignore? According to a new study by Queensland University of Technology, the popularity of a Facebook application will largely depend on whether you are male or female, and if it meets the criteria of being “cool”.

Facebook Logo. Credit: facebook

Associate Professor Rebekah Russell-Bennett and Dr Larry Neale, from QUT’s School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, studied the value of applications such as ‘Scrabble’, ‘Mousehunt’ and ‘Superpoke’, which allow people to interact with social networking sites and other users.

Dr Russell-Bennett said when it came to uncovering what made social networking applications successful, it seemed women wanted to express themselves, while men enjoyed the thrill of social competition.

“Facebook users want to possess and share cool applications that enhance their standing within their network of friends,” Professor Russell-Bennett said. “For women this is about self-expression, for men it is about who the best.”

The results of the study titled, “What value do users derive from social networking applications?” will be presented at the UK Academy of Marketing conference in Leeds later this month.

Dr Russell-Bennett said the study was important because from a commercial view, organisations were struggling to understand how to develop a cool application and identify the features that would encourage people to recommend cool applications to friends.

“Popular applications can attract tens of millions of views and uses per month, and given that applications are relatively cheap to develop and are distributed virtually cost-free, this makes them an attractive substitute to traditional advertising,” she said.

QUT researchers Dr Larry Neale and Associate Professor Rebekah Russell Bennett are looking at the value of applications used on facebook. Photo:QUT Marketing and Communication/Erika Fish.

But she said the goal for application developers was to get social networking site members to pass them on to their friends, and this only occurred when the application was considered to have “value”.

“The study found value is measured for women according to the ability of the application to facilitate self-expression of interests, values or personality, and for men according to the ability to facilitate competition and comparison. Both want novelty and rarity,” she said.

Professor Russell-Bennett said applications were also considered cool when they allowed self-categorisation such as discovering which movie star you are, applications which change daily or regularly, applications which allow high levels of interactivity such as scrabble or bowling, and applications which were exclusive and rare.

“Anecdotally we know that companies are spending a lot of money on applications but they aren’t necessarily working.”

She said now that they were armed with the knowledge of what motivated people to use and recommend applications, companies could better tap into the social networking market.

Queensland University of Technology

UC Riverside evolutionary biologists find majority of studies focus on why same-sex behavior in animals exists, but not what its consequences are.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Same-sex behavior is a nearly universal phenomenon in the animal kingdom, common across species, from worms to frogs to birds, concludes a new review of existing research.

A female-female pair of Laysan Albatross. Females cooperatively build nests and rear young when males are scarce. Photo credit: Eric VanderWerf.

“It’s clear that same-sex sexual behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies,” said Nathan Bailey, the first author of the review paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at UC Riverside.

There is a caveat, however. The review also reports that same-sex behaviors are not the same across species, and that researchers may be calling qualitatively different phenomena by the same name.

“For example, male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between the sexes,” Bailey said. “But that is very different from male bottlenose dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young.”

Published June 16 in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, the review by Bailey and Marlene Zuk, a professor of biology at UCR, also finds that although many studies are performed in the context of understanding the evolutionary origins of same-sex sexual behavior, almost none have considered its evolutionary consequences.

“Same-sex behaviors—courtship, mounting or parenting—are traits that may have been shaped by natural selection, a basic mechanism of evolution that occurs over successive generations,” Bailey said. “But our review of studies also suggests that these same-sex behaviors might act as selective forces in and of themselves.”

A selective force, which is a sudden or gradual stress placed on a population, affects the reproductive success of individuals in the population.

“When we think of selective forces, we tend to think of things like weather, temperature, or geographic features, but we can think of the social circumstances in a population of animals as a selective force, too,” Bailey said. “Same-sex behavior radically changes those social circumstances, for example, by removing some individuals from the pool of animals available for mating.”

Bailey, who works in Zuk’s lab, noted that researchers in the field have made significant strides in the past two and a half decades studying the genetic and neural mechanisms that produce same-sex behaviors in individuals, and the ultimate reasons for their existence in populations.

“But like any other behavior that doesn’t lead directly to reproduction—such as aggression or altruism—same-sex behavior can have evolutionary consequences that are just now beginning to be considered,” he said. “For example, male-male copulations in locusts can be costly for the mounted male, and this cost may in turn increase selection pressure for males’ tendency to release a chemical called panacetylnitrile, which dissuades other males from mounting them.”

The review paper:

• - Examines work done to test hypotheses about the origins of same-sex behavior in animals.
• - Provides a framework for categorizing same-sex behavior, for example, is it adaptive, not adaptive, occurs often, infrequently?
• - Discusses what has been discovered about the genetics of same-sex behavior, especially in the model organism, the fruit fly Drosophila, and in human beings.
• - Examines connections between human sexual orientation research, and research on non-human animals, and highlights promising avenues of research in non-human systems.

The reviewers expected the research papers they read for their article would give them a better understanding of the degree to which same-sex behaviors are heritable in animals.

“How important are genes to the expression of these behaviors, compared to environmental factors?” Bailey said. “This is still unknown. Knowing this information would help us better understand how the behaviors evolve, and how they affect the evolution of other traits. It could also help us understand whether they are something that all individuals of a species are capable of, but only some actually express.”

Bailey recommends that fellow evolutionary biologists studying same-sex behavior in animals adopt some of the research approaches that have been successful in human studies.

“We have estimates, for example, of the heritability of sexual orientation in humans, but none that I know of in other animals,” he said. “Scientists have also targeted locations on the human genome that may contribute to sexual orientation, but aside from the fruit fly, we have no such detailed knowledge of the genetic architecture of same-sex behavior in other animals.”

Next in their research, Bailey and Zuk plan to begin experimentally addressing some of the many issues raised in their review.

Said Bailey, “We want to get at this question: what are the evolutionary consequences of these behaviors? Are they important in the evolution of mating behavior, or do they just add extra ‘background noise’? We are pursuing work on the Laysan Albatross, in which females form same-sex pairs and rear young together. Same-sex behavior in this species may not be aberrant, but instead can arise as an alternative reproductive strategy.”

The UCR Academic Senate funded the one-year study.

University of California, Riverside

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—In places where young women outnumber young men, research shows the hemlines rise but the marriage rates don’t because the young men feel less pressure to settle down as more women compete for their affections.

But when those men reach their 30s, the reverse is true and proportionately more older men are married in areas where women outnumber men.

Daniel Kruger, a University of Michigan researcher who studies evolution and how it relates to contemporary behavior, looked at the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States to test his hypothesis on how the balance between women and men affects marital patterns. Results showed that men aged 20-24 are more likely to cruise than to commit if they live in an area with more women than men.

One would think that rationally, fewer young men than women would naturally lead to proportionately more young men getting married, but that’s not the case.

“Marriage patterns aren’t rational because men and women have somewhat different reproductive strategies,” Kruger said. “Men have a greater reproductive benefit than women from having a greater quantity of relationships. If they can leverage their scarcity into attracting multiple short-term partners, they will not have as much of an incentive to settle down.”

There are about nine unmarried men for every 10 unmarried women in Birmingham, Memphis, New Orleans, and Richmond-Petersburg, Virginia, Kruger says. Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and New York metropolitan areas are tied for the next region where women are relatively most plentiful. In these areas, about 84 percent of the men aged 20-24 are unmarried. In Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Austin, and Phoenix, there are about nine unmarried women for every 10 unmarried men. In these areas, about 77 percent of the men aged 20-24 are unmarried.

Once those young men hit their 30s, they tend to shift from seeking short-term relationships to entering into committed relationships. That’s because when women evaluate partners for short-term relationships they value physical features signaling the kind of genes that would be passed on to potential offspring, which may be the only legacy of men who don’t stick around for child rearing. These physical features decline as men age, making it more difficult to lure women into uncommitted relationships.

“You see a complete reversal in the pattern,” Kruger said, and thus, proportionately more older men are married when women outnumber men.

So, does this mean that middle aged women in these cities get a break? Not really, Kruger says. The higher marital rates for older men likely benefit women who are substantially younger than their husbands, because older men still prefer partners with higher reproductive potential.

The ratio of men to women has other aspects, as well. For instance, studies have shown that when women outnumber men, hemlines actually rise, overall, as women to do more to physically attract men. Also, the rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births are higher, and interests in women’s rights increases. Surpluses of men tend to be associated with more conservative social norms and restricted roles for women.

The paper “When Men are Scarce, Good Men are Even Harder to Find: Life History, the Sex Ratio, and the Proportion of Men Married,” appears in the current issue of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology (http://jsecjournal.com/krugerproof.pdf) and the paper “Male scarcity is differentially related to male marital likelihood across the life course” appears in the current issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology (http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07280287.pdf). Kruger is a researcher in the U-M School of Public Health.

University of Michigan

Bans on same-sex marriage can be tied to a rise in the rate of HIV infection, a new study by two Emory economists has found.

In the first study of the impact of social tolerance levels toward gays in the United States on the HIV transmission rate, the researchers estimated that a constitutional ban on gay marriage raises the rate by four cases per 100,000 people.

“We found the effects of tolerance for gays on HIV to be statistically significant and robust – they hold up under a range of empirical models,” says Hugo Mialon, an assistant professor of economics.

“Laws on gay marriage are in flux and under debate,” added Andrew Francis, also an assistant professor of economics, citing the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to uphold a ban on same-sex marriage. “It’s a hot issue, and we are hoping that policymakers will take our findings into account.”

The study used data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which has tracked the attitudes of Americans during the past four decades. The economists calculated that a rise in tolerance from the 1970s to the 1990s reduced HIV cases by one per 100,000 people, and that laws against same-sex marriage boosted cases by 4 per 100,000.

“Intolerance is deadly,” Mialon said. “Bans on gay marriage codify intolerance, causing more gay people to shift to underground sexual behaviors that carry more risk.”

Outstanding law and economics paper of the year

Francis and Mialon previously did an analysis of the optimal penalty for sexually transmitting HIV. Published in March of 2008, the study was recently named outstanding paper of the year by the editors of the American Law and Economics Review.

The two researchers developed a game theory model for sexual behavior, which demonstrated that laws in some states regarding the sexual transmission of HIV are generally inefficient at slowing the spread of the disease.

In Georgia, for instance, failing to inform a partner that you are HIV positive prior to having sex is a felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison. The same penalty can apply even if the person who is HIV positive uses precautions such as a condom during sex, and even if the sexual partner does not contract HIV. The law does not apply, however, to people who do not know that they are HIV positive and transmit the virus.