The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how Canadians access health care. Although it is undeniable that the rapid adoption of virtual care has played a critical role in reducing viral transmission, the gap in equitable access to virtual care remains pervasive for Canada’s aging and ethnocultural minority communities. Existing virtual care solutions are designed for the English-speaking, health-literate, and tech-savvy patient population, excluding older ethnic adults who often do not see themselves reflected in these identities. In acknowledging the permanency of virtual care brought on by the pandemic, we have a collective responsibility to co-design new models that serve our older ethnic patients who have been historically marginalized by the status quo. Building on existing foundations of caregiving within ethnocultural minority communities, one viable strategy to realize culturally equitable virtual care may be to engage the highly motivated and skilled family caregivers of older ethnic adults as partners in the technology-mediated management of their chronic disease. The time is now to build a model of shared virtual care that embraces Canada’s diverse cultures, while also providing its older ethnic adults with access to health innovations in partnership with equally invested family caregivers who have their health at heart.

The asymmetry hypothesis of counteractive control theory suggests that—at least for successful self-regulators—exposure to temptations facilitates the accessibility of goal-related cognitive constructs, whereas exposure to goals inhibits the accessibility of temptation-related cognitive constructs. Using a lexical decision task, Fishbach et al., 2003 (Study 3) found that this asymmetry existed even at an automatic level of processing. In this attempted replication, 221 students completed a lexical decision task that included goal-related and temptation-related stimuli words preceded by either a goal-related prime, a temptation-related prime, or an irrelevant prime. Unlike the original study, we found only significant priming effects, where temptation-primes facilitated the recognition of goal-related words and goal-primes likewise facilitated the recognition of temptation-related words. We did not replicate the previously reported asymmetry. Additionally, we found no significant moderation of the hypothesized priming asymmetry by any of the traits of self-regulatory success, construal level, temptation strength, or self-control, again failing to replicate prior findings. The same priming patterns were found among participants who completed the study in-lab and those who completed the study online. This replication study suggests that the cognitive associations between goals and temptations are relatively symmetric and faciliatory, at least during the initial, automatic level of cognitive processing.

UNSTRUCTURED The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how Canadians access healthcare. Although it is undeniable that the rapid adoption of virtual care has played a critical role in reducing viral transmission, the gap in equitable access to virtual care remains pervasive for Canada’s aging and ethnocultural minority communities. Existing virtual care solutions are designed for the English-speaking, health-literate, and tech-savvy patient population, excluding older ethnic adults who often do not see themselves reflected in these identities. In acknowledging the permanency of virtual care brought on by the pandemic, we have a collective responsibility to co-design new models that serve our older ethnic patients who have been historically marginalized by the status quo. Building on existing foundations of caregiving within ethnocultural minority communities, one viable strategy to realize culturally equitable virtual care may be to engage the highly motivated and skilled family caregivers of older ethnic adults as partners in the technology-mediated management of their chronic disease. The time is now to build a model of shared virtual care that embraces Canada’s diverse cultures, while also providing its older ethnic adults with access to health innovations in partnership with equally invested family caregivers who have their health at heart.