New Directions for the Consideration of HIV: Heterogeneity and the Cognition of Time

Abstract

It has been almost 40 years since HIV emerged in the human population with an alarming impact in 1981, quickly reaching pandemic proportions. Reaching the goal of eradication, or at least ending the pandemic, however, has not been as easy as hoped. To better understand and therefore better address the persistence and often devastating effects of this now chronic disease, the heterogeneity of HIV—in the virus‐human and human–human relationships it engages—is parsed in discussions of the groups affected and the multiple factors that drive the diverse effects of the disease, both of which make treatment and prevention of the disease highly challenging. The construct of time cognition is then considered as a heretofore unexplored factor that may inform our understanding of HIV‐relevant behaviors.

Culture and human development: Where did it go? And where is it going?

“…Although the study of minorities within a single society necessarily engages additional issues, many of the concerns in this literature are similar to those found in more traditional cross‐cultural work, including researchers’ typical reliance on “etic” measures developed in other settings that fail to capture local meanings. In a recent issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development , Grigorenko (2020a) and her colleagues tackle the problem of underrepresentation of diverse groups in the research literature from a broader point of view, by including children raised in orphanages (e.g., An, Zhukova, Ovchinnikova, & Grigorenko, 2020), American Indians and Alaska Natives (Garcia, 2020), HIV‐affected children (Tan, 2020), and “twice exceptional” children who are both talented and have behavioral disorders (Grigorenko, 2020b). In her commentary, Linda Jarvin proposes that understanding individual differences—within a wide range of sociocultural contexts—is “the necessary starting point to understand human development and functioning” (p. 159).…”