Special Characteristics of the Resilience of Russian Families in the Face of Modern Challenges (A Preliminary Study)

Background

A challenge is considered a "wake-up call" for family resilience, requiring a proper response (willingness to evaluate, understand an event and its signals, and also give an adequate response). Family resilience is defined as an adequate response to challenges, that is, the ability to cope with them based on the cultural-historical context and family resources, such as clear and open family communication and connectedness, the use of social resources, a broad system of values and senses, the ability to derive meaning from adversity, acceptance, and flexibility.

Objective

This article reports on a study which aimed to analyze components of the resilience of Russian families in response to life circumstances that have become challenges for them.

Design

The study was conducted from March 20 to May 7, 2022. Participants took an online survey on Yandex-forms; the link to the survey was distributed through social networks on public pages and in private messages. Two hundred seventy-four (274) representatives of Russian families responded, including 234 women and 40 men (14.6%) ranging from age 17 to 65 (cf. 34.1+12.5). After removing the data of 15 participants who did not report a negative event in their families, the final sample consisted of 259 people.

Results

Challenges for modern Russian families can be categorized as loss challenges, relationship challenges, global challenges, challenges of illness, and challenges of financial well-being. The challenges of loss stimulate flexibility of response, acceptance, and overcoming suffering through mutual understanding. Global challenges and the challenges of illness awaken family spirituality. The ability to discuss problems together and share decision making becomes a resource to meet the challenge of families' financial well-being. Confidence in solving problems and a positive outlook become resources to face relationship challenges. The intensity of events is a signal for a family to evoke communication and connectedness, acceptance, and flexibility, as well as family resilience as a whole.

Conclusion

There is a connection between the difficulties that respondents regard as challenges and the characteristics of their family resilience; the most adequate response to challenges is to increase family resilience.

Topological edge states of interacting photon pairs emulated in a topolectrical circuit

Topological physics opens up a plethora of exciting phenomena allowing to engineer disorder-robust unidirectional flows of light. Recent advances in topological protection of electromagnetic waves suggest that even richer functionalities can be achieved by realizing topological states of quantum light. This area, however, remains largely uncharted due to the number of experimental challenges. Here, we take an alternative route and design a classical structure based on topolectrical circuits which serves as a simulator of a quantum-optical one-dimensional system featuring the topological state of two photons induced by the effective photon-photon interaction. Employing the correspondence between the eigenstates of the original problem and circuit modes, we use the designed simulator to extract the frequencies of bulk and edge two-photon bound states and evaluate the topological invariant directly from the measurements. Furthermore, we perform a reconstruction of the two-photon probability distribution for the topological state associated with one of the circuit eigenmodes.

Yeast red pigment modifies cloned human α-synuclein pathogenesis in Parkinson disease models in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster

Recently, we identified the yeast red pigment (RP), a polymer of 1-(5'-Phosphoribosyl)-5-aminoimidazole, as a novel potential anti-amyloid agent for the therapy of neurodegenerative diseases. The purpose of this study was to further validate RP for treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD) and to clarify molecular mechanisms involved in the reduction of amyloid cytotoxicity. We investigated RP effects in vivo using Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster PD models. Western blot analysis revealed reduction in the levels of insoluble α-synuclein in both models, while soluble α-synuclein decreased only in Drosophila. In both models RP significantly reduced α-synuclein cytotoxicity, as was revealed by immunohistochemistry in Drosophila (p < 0.001, n = 27 flies per genotype/assay) and by flow cytometry in yeast (p < 0.05). Data obtained from the yeast PD model suggests that RP antitoxic effects are associated with a drop in ROS accumulation, and slower cellular transition from the early to late apoptotic stage. Using Drosophila brain tissue sections, we have demonstrated that RP helps to compensate for an α-synuclein-mediated reduction in the number of dopaminergic neurons and leads to better performance in animal climbing tests (p < 0.001, n = 120-150 flies per genotype/assay). Taken together, these results demonstrate the potential of RP for the treatment of PD, at least in model systems.