Now, a new report by UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers assesses the values emphasized by television programs popular with tweens over each decade from 1967 to 2017, charting how 16 values have waxed and waned in importance during that 50-year span.

Among the key findings is that fame, after nearly 40 years of ranking near the bottom (it was 15th in 1967, 1987 and 1997), rose to become the No. 1 value in 2007, then dropped to sixth in importance in 2017.

Achievement — being very successful — was ranked first in 2017, with self-acceptance, image, popularity and being part of a community rounding out the top five.

The report, “The Rise and Fall of Fame: Tracking the Landscape of Values Portrayed on Television from 1967 to 2017”, evaluated two programs per decade (and four in 2017), from “The Andy Griffith Show” in 1967 and “Happy Days” in 1977 to “American Idol” and “Hannah Montana” in 2007 and “America’s Got Talent” and “Girl Meets World” in 2017.

Like fame, values such as community feeling and benevolence have also seen dramatic rises and falls over the past half-century, with their rankings typically echoing changes in the larger culture, the researchers found.

Being part of community, for instance, which ranked No. 1 in 1967, 1977 and 1997 (and No. 2 in 1987), plummeted to the 11th spot in 2007 — 10 spots below fame — before rising again to fifth in 2017. Likewise, being kind and helping others, the No. 2 value in 1967 and 1997, fell to the 12th spot in 2007. It is now ranked eighth.

“I believe that television reflects the culture, and this half-century of data shows that American culture has changed drastically,” said report author Yalda Uhls, founder and executive director of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers and an adjunct assistant professor of psychology. “Media plays an important role as young people are developing a concept of the social world outside of their immediate environment.”

The concepts children develop can also vary widely based on what types of programs they’re watching, according to the authors, who found a stark divergence between the values conveyed in reality shows — first evaluated in 2007 — and those of scripted fictional shows.

Values in reality TV vs. fictional programs

The most popular tween reality shows in 2017, based on Nielsen ratings, were “America’s Got Talent” and “American Ninja Warrior,” while the top two scripted shows were “Thundermans” and “Girl Meets World.” In the scripted shows, the top values conveyed were self-acceptance, benevolence and being part of a community. In contrast, the top values conveyed in reality shows were fame, image and self-centeredness.

Reality shows, created for a broad audience and watched frequently by tweens, often highlight competition and the importance of being No. 1 and include bullying, cheating and a winning-at-all-costs value system, the authors note.

“If tweens watch, admire and identify with people who mostly care about fame and winning, these values may become even more important in our culture,” said the report’s lead author, Agnes Varghese, a fellow of the center and a UC Riverside graduate student. “Reality television shows continued to reflect the same trend we saw in 2007, with self-focused values such as fame ranking highest.”

The authors recommend that parents help children understand that reality shows do not depict the experience of the average person and that fictional shows do not adequately depict the hard work and struggles associated with achieving fame.

TV values and the rise of social media

Uhls believes the explosive growth and popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, launched in 2004, and YouTube, launched in 2005, may have influenced television content creators in the first decade of the 2000s to make fame-focused tween shows. Other research has shown that social media growth was accompanied by a rise in narcissism and a decrease in empathy among college students in the U.S., she notes.

“I don’t think this is a coincidence,” said Uhls, who was formerly a movie studio executive. “The growth of social media gives children access to an audience beyond the school grounds.”

By 2017, the social media landscape had expanded to include platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, and the access they provided to an ever-widening audience made popularity seem more easily attainable. For that reason, Uhls believes, achieving fame may have become less desirable and unique. In addition, the severe recession of 2007-09 may have shifted the culture away from self-focused values such as fame and getting rich.

Research conducted by UCLA distinguished professor of psychology Patricia Greenfield and colleagues has shown that society tends to become more community-focused in times of collective distress, Uhls noted.

Because children, particularly in their tween years, are forming a belief system that integrates the many messages about desirable future aspirations they receive from parents, school, peers and media, it is crucial to understand the role television plays in promoting values — both positive and negative, the researchers say.

The report draws on research, both published and unpublished, by Uhls, Greenfield and former UCLA graduate students Jill Giardino and Caroline Fung.

“These two neighborhoods are very similar in terms of vegetation cover, human population and density of households. One of the main differences is blight. One neighborhood has a lot of blight in the form of abandoned residences, empty lots and mismanaged waste, and the other neighborhood does not. It was the perfect set of conditions for addressing this question,” said Rebeca de Jesús Crespo, lead author and an assistant professor in LSU’s College of the Coast & Environment.

In recent years, the Old South neighborhood has been the focus of revitalization plans by multiple stakeholder groups. The researchers recommended that these blight reduction efforts continue for the benefit of public health.

“This is an area at high risk of these mosquito-borne diseases,” said Madison Harrison, co-author of the publication. “All that it takes for these diseases to spread is for the right vector to be infected with the pathogen and to bite humans at the right point of incubation of said pathogen.”

So far, Zika and dengue are not currently present in the state. However, Louisiana’s climate is ideal for these diseases to spread once introduced.

According to de Jesús Crespo, Harrison was an invaluable addition to the team. Currently, she is a public health master’s student at LSU Health New Orleans.

“In the College of the Coast & Environment, for almost every project that we do, we are integrated and interdisciplinary. We take a broad approach to doing research that is important for solving problems in real time. For this project, it was important to me to include Madison from LSU Health Sciences as well as community stakeholders who could provide their expertise and unique perspectives,” de Jesús Crespo said.

The researchers examined the prevalence of two container-breeding species of mosquitoes that are known to spread disease, the Asian tiger mosquito and the southern house mosquito (a carrier of West Nile virus). They inspected potential larvae habitats (such as discarded tires, discarded Styrofoam cups and snack bags, plant pots and water baths) in publicly accessible locations and calculated the percentage of those that contained larvae. Additionally, they placed adult mosquito traps around the perimeter of some private homes with the permission from the homeowner, in an abandoned house and in an empty lot with trash accumulation in the higher income neighborhood.

They found that the adult population of the southern house mosquito was fairly diffuse, but the lower income neighborhood had significantly higher numbers of Asian tiger mosquito (adults and larvae) and higher numbers of total mosquito larvae. This shows that the presence of discarded container habitats due to neglect provides more breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes, disproportionately affecting low-income groups.

“I think everybody can agree that urban blight is a problem we need to solve here in Baton Rouge. Mosquito risk is one of those factors that could impact human health and that adds another level of importance with that,” de Jesús Crespo said.

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Materials provided by Louisiana State University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Sugar has been called “evil,” “toxic,” and “poison.” But the body needs sugars, too. Sugar molecules help cells recognize and fight viruses and bacteria, shuttle proteins from cell to cell, and make sure those proteins function. Too much or too little can contribute to a range of maladies, including neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, inflammation, diabetes, and even cancer.

About 85 percent of proteins, including those associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are beyond the reach of current drugs. One critical and abundant sugar (O-GlcNAc, pronounced o-glick-nack) is found on over 5,000 proteins, often those considered “undruggable.” But now, researchers at Harvard University have designed a new highly-selective O-GlcNAc pencil and eraser — tools that can add or remove the sugar from a protein with no off-target effects — to examine exactly what these sugars are doing and, eventually, engineer them into new treatments for the “undruggable.”

“We can now start studying particular proteins and see what happens when you add or remove the sugar,” said Daniel Ramirez, a co-author on the paper published in Nature Chemical Biology and a Ph.D. candidate in biological and biomedical sciences in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “This is turning out to be very important for a lot of chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer’s.”

Ramirez designed the original O-GlcNAc pencil, which was reported in ACS Chemical Biology.

All cells carry a multitude of sugars (called glycans), but they’re notoriously hard to study. Current tools either provide a wide-lens view (turning on or off all the O-GlcNAc in a cell) or an ultra-zoomed in view (turning on or off a single sugar on one amino acid on one protein). Neither of these perspectives can show what O-GlcNAc molecules are doing to a protein as a whole, the crucial insight that would enable researchers to connect the dots from O-GlcNAc to disease.

“With the protein-level approach, we’re filling in an important piece that was missing,” said Christina Woo, an associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, who led the study. Her lab’s tool is like Goldilocks’ lukewarm bowl of porridge: Not too broad, not too specific. Just right.

“Once you have any protein of interest,” said first-author and postdoctoral scholar Yun Ge, “you can apply this tool on that protein and look at the outcomes directly.” Ge engineered the O-GlcNAc eraser, which, like the pencil, uses a nanobody as a protein homing device. The tool is adaptable, too; as long as a nanobody exists for a protein of choice, the tool can be modified to target any protein for which a homing nanobody exists.

The nanobody is a crucial component, but it has limitations: Whether or not it remains stuck to the target protein is still in question, and the molecule could alter the function or structure of the protein once stuck. If cellular changes can’t be definitively linked to the sugar on the protein, that muddies the data.

To skirt these potential limitations, the team engineered their pencils and erasers to be “catalytically dead,” said Woo. The neutered enzymes won’t make unwanted changes along the way to their target protein. And, they can both add and remove sugars, unlike previous tools, which cause permanent changes. Of course, once they connect a specific protein function to O-GlcNAc, they can then use those tools to zoom in and locate exactly where those sugars are latching onto and modifying the protein.

Already, a few of the Woo lab’s collaborators are using the pencil/eraser combo to study O-GlcNAc in live animals. One, for example, is using fruit flies to study how the sugar impacts a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The sugar is also associated with Parkinson’s disease progression: “If you’re taking in less glucose,” said co-author Ramirez, “then you’re not able to produce this sugar inside the cells.” That means the body can’t attach the sugars to the proteins, which causes wide-reaching changes to the cells, aggravating the disease. In diabetes, excess sugars cause similar global disruption; and cancer cells tend to eat lots of sugars. Now, with the Woo lab’s pencil/eraser pair, researchers can identify exactly how these sugars impact various proteins and start to design drugs to reverse negative effects.

Next, the team plans to tweak their tool to achieve even greater control. With optogenetics, for example, they could switch sugars on or off with just a flash of light. Swapping out nanobodies for small molecules (used in traditional drug design), they could edge closer to new treatments. They’re also designing an eraser for the eraser — a tool with a kill switch — and plan to incorporate nanobodies that can target a naturally-occurring protein (for this study, they tagged proteins so the nanobody could find them). “We’re basically trying to make the system more natural and function the way the cell does,” said Ramirez.

Woo also plans to investigate how O-GlcNAc may influence traditionally “undruggable” proteins called transcription factors, which turn genes on and off. If O-GlcNAc plays a role in that process, the sugars could be engineered to study and regulate gene function, too.

“We really don’t know what people are going to find once we give them these tools,” said Ramirez. The tool may be new, but the potential is great: “We’re on the iPhone one, basically,” he continued, “but we’re already working on the next couple generations.”

“Vital exhaustion refers to excessive fatigue, feelings of demoralisation and increased irritability,” said study author Dr. Dmitriy Panov of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation. “It is thought to be a response to intractable problems in people’s lives, particularly when they are unable to adapt to prolonged exposure to psychological stressors.”

This study examined the relationship between vital exhaustion and the risk of myocardial infarction in men with no history of cardiovascular disease. The study used data from the World Health Organization (WHO) MONICA Project.2 A representative sample of 657 men aged 25 to 64 years in Novosibirsk was enrolled in 1994.

Symptoms of vital exhaustion were assessed at baseline using the Maastricht Vital Exhaustion Questionnaire adopted by the MONICA protocol. Participants were classified according to their level of vital exhaustion: none, moderate, or high. Participants were followed-up for 14 years for the incidence of heart attack.

Overall, two-thirds (67%) of the men had vital exhaustion (15% had a high level and 52% had a moderate level) while 33% were unaffected. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of men with high blood pressure had vital exhaustion — high in 58% and moderate in 16%.

In the overall group of men, the researchers analysed the association between vital exhaustion at baseline and the risk of having a heart attack. Compared to those without vital exhaustion, men with moderate or high levels had a 2.7-fold greater risk of a heart attack within five years, a 2.25 higher risk within 10 years, and a 2.1 raised risk within 14 years (p for all <0.05).

When the analysis was controlled for social factors (education, occupation, and marital status) and age, the influence of vital exhaustion on heart attack risk decreased but remained statistically significant. For example, compared to those without vital exhaustion, men with moderate or high levels were 16% more likely to have a myocardial infarction over 14 years of follow-up compared to those without after adjusting for social factors and age (p <0.05).

In the adjusted analysis, the risk of a heart attack linked with exhaustion was higher in never married, divorced, and widowed men compared to married men — with hazard ratios of 3.7, 4.7, 7.0, respectively. The risk of a heart attack related to exhaustion was 2.2-fold higher in those with an elementary school education compared to men with a university degree. Middle-aged men were more affected than younger men: compared to 24-34-year-olds, the risk of a heart attack connected with exhaustion was 3.8-fold higher in 45-54-year-olds and 5.9-fold higher in 55-64-year-olds.

Regarding the influence of marital status on the relationship between exhaustion and heart attack, Dr. Panov said: “Living alone indicates less social support, which we know from our prior studies is an independent risk factor for myocardial infarction and stroke.”

He noted that the findings indicate a pattern whereby social disadvantage relates to vital exhaustion, which is associated with a greater risk of heart disease. “The relationship of exhaustion with threatening cardiovascular events should be taken into account when assessing risk,” he said.

Dr. Panov concluded: “Efforts to improve well-being and reduce stress at home and at work can help reduce vital exhaustion. Involvement in community groups is one way to increase social support and become less vulnerable to stress. Together with a healthy lifestyle, these measures should be beneficial for heart health.”

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Materials provided by European Society of Cardiology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.