Hymenoplasty in India: A Comprehensive Review of Contemporary Trends and Impact on Young Adults

Hymenoplasty is a reconstructive surgical procedure aimed at repairing the hymen, and it has gained significant attention in the Indian context due to cultural and societal factors associated with virginity. This review article aims to investigate contemporary patterns of hymenoplasty in India and assess their influence on young adults. The review employed a systematic approach to gather and analyze relevant literature from various academic databases. Selection criteria were established to ensure the inclusion of high-quality studies focusing on hymenoplasty in India. The review provides an overview of the historical context of hymenoplasty, highlighting cultural and societal factors that influence the practice. It also examines the evolution of attitudes and perceptions regarding virginity and the hymen in India. Contemporary trends in hymenoplasty are analyzed, including the prevalence and frequency of procedures, demographic factors, patient profiles, popular motivations, and variations in surgical techniques. The socio-cultural impact on young adults is explored, emphasizing the psychological and emotional implications, the influence of societal norms and family expectations, gender dynamics, and the stigma and societal judgment that individuals face. The article concludes with recommendations for future research, including evaluating long-term outcomes and psychological well-being, exploring cultural and regional variations, assessing counseling services, and further examining ethical considerations and professional guidelines. Furthermore, the importance of comprehensive sex education, open dialogue, and discussions regarding virginity and sexual health are highlighted as crucial steps toward creating a more informed and empathetic society.

Cosmetic Surgery and the Diversity of Cultural and Ethnic Perceptions of Facial, Breast, and Gluteal Aesthetics in Women: A Comprehensive Review

An increasing number of people are opting for cosmetic surgeries. For many years, the physical and aesthetic appearance of Caucasians has been considered to be ideal. However, it is now commonly acknowledged that attractiveness and aesthetic standards vary among cultural backgrounds and ethnic groups and that Western attractiveness criteria no longer apply to all. Herein, we conducted a comprehensive review of studies that examined cultural and ethnic variations in preferences for facial, breast, and gluteal aesthetics, as well as reviewed studies that investigated ethnic disparities in attitudes and motivations for cosmetic surgery. A total of 4532 references were identified, 66 of which met the inclusion criteria. Several studies have reported that facial golden ratios are invalid for representing perceived attractiveness standards among different ethnicities. The majority of studies also indicated that facial aesthetic interventions should not aim to Westernize but to optimize ethnic traits. Significant ethnic differences in preferences for upper- and lower-pole breast proportions have been reported. The size of the buttocks and waist-to-hip ratio were identified as the main factors of buttock aesthetics, with buttock size preferences having a high ethnic diversity. Interest in cosmetic surgical procedures while maintaining ethnic identity continues to grow among young women worldwide. This comprehensive review strongly suggests that accommodating cultural and ethnic differences in aesthetic standards in cosmetic surgery planning can lead to more acceptable cosmetic outcomes.

Evaluation of a Low-Cost Commercial Actigraph and Its Potential Use in Detecting Cultural Variations in Physical Activity and Sleep

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the performance of a low-cost commercial smartwatch, the Xiaomi Mi Band (MB), in extracting physical activity and sleep-related measures and show its potential use in addressing questions that require large-scale real-time data and/or intercultural data including low-income countries. We evaluated physical activity and sleep-related measures and discussed the potential application of such devices for large-scale step and sleep data acquisition. To that end, we conducted two separate studies. In Study 1, we evaluated the performance of MB by comparing it to the GT3X (ActiGraph, wGT3X-BT), a scientific actigraph used in research, as well as subjective sleep reports. In Study 2, we distributed the MB across four countries (Austria, Germany, Cuba, and Ukraine) and investigated physical activity and sleep among these countries. The results of Study 1 indicated that MB step counts correlated highly with the scientific GT3X device, but did display biases. In addition, the MB-derived wake-up and total-sleep-times showed high agreement with subjective reports, but partly deviated from GT3X predictions. Study 2 revealed similar MB step counts across countries, but significant later wake-up and bedtimes for Ukraine than the other countries. We hope that our studies will stimulate future large-scale sensor-based physical activity and sleep research studies, including various cultures.

A cross-cultural examination on global orientations and moral foundations

Although there is a flourishing literature on the psychology of globalization and the psychology of morality, respectively, the moral dimension has been largely absent in the discourse of globalization psychology. Our current work attempts to fill this gap by establishing a conceptual and empirical link between global orientations and moral foundations. Our results indicated that (1) multicultural acquisition was positively linked with both individualizing and binding values; (2) ethnic protection was positively linked with only binding values; and (3) the relation patterns between global orientations and moral foundations were essentially congruent across cultures albeit with some cultural variations. Our findings provide direct evidence to map out the relation patterns between how people mentally cope with globalization and their explicit moral matrices.

Subtitle-based word frequencies as the best estimate of reading behavior: the case of greek

Previous evidence has shown that word frequencies calculated from corpora based on film and television subtitles can readily account for reading performance, since the language used in subtitles greatly approximates everyday language. The present study examines this issue in a society with increased exposure to subtitle reading. We compiled SUBTLEX-GR, a subtitled-based corpus consisting of more than 27 million Modern Greek words, and tested to what extent subtitle-based frequency estimates and those taken from a written corpus of Modern Greek account for the lexical decision performance of young Greek adults who are exposed to subtitle reading on a daily basis. Results showed that SUBTLEX-GR frequency estimates effectively accounted for participants’ reading performance in two different visual word recognition experiments. More importantly, different analyses showed that frequencies estimated from a subtitle corpus explained the obtained results significantly better than traditional frequencies derived from written corpora.