Multiple Trait Bayesian Analysis of Partitioned Genetic Trends Accounting for Uncertainty in Genetic Parameters. An Example With the Pirenaica and Rubia Gallega Beef Cattle Breeds.

Genetic trends are a valuable tool for analysing the efficiency of breeding programs. They are calculated by averaging the predicted breeding values for all individuals born within a specific time period. Moreover, partitioned genetic trends allow dissecting the contributions of several selection paths to overall genetic progress.

Runs of Homozygosity Islands in Autochthonous Spanish Cattle Breeds.

Background/objectives: Understanding the genetic architecture of autochthonous European cattle breeds is important for developing effective conservation strategies and sustainable breeding programs. Spanish beef cattle, which trace their origins to ancient migrations from the Near East with later admixture from African populations, exhibit a rich genetic diversity shaped by environmental adaptation and selective breeding. Runs of Homozygosity (ROH) are extended stretches of identical genetic material inherited from both parents.

Similar, not universal: the cognitive dimensions of conceptual prototypes of basic emotions in English and in Polish.

The current study explores the differences in conceptualisation of the prototypical basic emotion lexicalisations (, , , , , ) in English and in Polish. Measures of concreteness, imageability and context availability were collected and analysed across the six semantic categories of basic emotions, across different parts of speech and between the self-determined genders of the study participants. The initial results indicate that within these cognitive dimensions the conceptualisations of basic emotions in English and in Polish are only similar on the more general but not the higher levels of conceptualisation.

Maternal genetic effects throughout the life of the dam in Pirenaica beef cattle. a random regression model approach.

In beef cattle, dams play a crucial role in shaping the pre- and postnatal environment for the growth of their offspring. Acknowledging the substantial impact of maternal influence on the early development of calves, researchers utilize maternal animal models. These models take into account both maternal genetic and permanent environmental effects, operating under the assumption that these influences remain constant throughout the productive life of the cow.

Equivalence of variance components between standard and recursive genetic models using LDL' transformations.

Background: Recursive models are a category of structural equation models that propose a causal relationship between traits. These models are more parameterized than multiple trait models, and they require imposing restrictions on the parameter space to ensure statistical identification. Nevertheless, in certain situations, the likelihood of recursive models and multiple trait models are equivalent.

Independent effects of word concreteness and word valence on immediate serial recall.

The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g.

Multiple producible cues do not aid face-name memory: A reverse production effect.

Are there effective mechanisms that can be used to remember someone's name? The production effect is a phenomenon that exemplifies memory's robust benefit for studied words or phrases that have been spoken out loud, as opposed to only hearing or seeing them. However, this robust effect has not yet been identified for face-name pairings. The present study seeks to examine the boundary conditions of the production effect in face-name pairings by incorporating the additional cue of valenced adjectives.

Divergent Thinking in Survival Processing: Did Our Ancestors Benefit From Creative Thinking?

The survival processing advantage is a robust mnemonic device in which information processed for its relevance to one's survival is subsequently better remembered. Research indicates that elaborative processing may be a key component underlying this memory effect, and that this mechanism resembles divergent thinking, whereby words with a greater number of creative uses in a given scenario are better remembered. If this particular function underpins adaptive memory, then individual differences in creativity may play a part in the degree to which people benefit from this advantage.

Paired-associate learning, animacy, and imageability effects in the survival advantage.

The current study examined animacy and paired-associate learning through a survival-processing paradigm (Nairne et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(2), 263-273, 2007; Schwartz & Brothers, 2014). English-speaking monolingual participants were asked to learn a set of new word translations to improve their chances of survival or to improve their study abroad experience.

A multivariate analysis with direct additive and inbreeding depression load effects.

Background: Inbreeding is caused by mating between related individuals and its most common consequence is inbreeding depression. Several studies have detected heterogeneity in inbreeding depression among founder individuals, and recently a procedure for predicting hidden inbreeding depression loads associated with founders and the Mendelian sampling of non-founders has been developed. The objectives of our study were to expand this model to predict the inbreeding loads for all individuals in the pedigree and to estimate the covariance between the inbreeding loads and the additive genetic effects for the trait of interest.

Mapping Recombination Rate on the Autosomal Chromosomes Based on the Persistency of Linkage Disequilibrium Phase Among Autochthonous Beef Cattle Populations in Spain.

In organisms with sexual reproduction, genetic diversity, and genome evolution are governed by meiotic recombination caused by crossing-over, which is known to vary within the genome. In this study, we propose a simple method to estimate the recombination rate that makes use of the persistency of linkage disequilibrium (LD) phase among closely related populations. The biological material comprised 171 triplets (sire/dam/offspring) from seven populations of autochthonous beef cattle in Spain (Asturiana de los Valles, Avileña-Negra Ibérica, Bruna dels Pirineus, Morucha, Pirenaica, Retinta, and Rubia Gallega), which were genotyped for 777,962 SNPs with the BovineHD BeadChip.

How do Emotion Word Type and Valence Influence Language Processing? The Case of Arabic-English Bilinguals.

The current study examines the influence of word type (i.e., emotion-label vs.

The time course of processing emotion-laden words during sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements.

While recent research has explored the effect that positive and negative emotion words (e.g., happy or sad) have on the eye-movement record during reading, the current study examined the effect of positive and negative emotion-laden words (e.

The Distinctiveness of Emotion Words: Does It Hold for Foreign Language Learners? The Case of Arab EFL Learners.

Empirical evidence has recently been provided for the distinctiveness of emotion words as compared to abstract and concrete words for monolinguals, calling for a reconsideration of the relation between emotion and language. The present study investigates whether the distinctiveness of emotion words among monolinguals holds for foreign language learners. To this end, three groups (n = 120 per group) of late Arabic-English bilinguals who learned English as a foreign language completed tasks including free recall, rating, and discrete word association.

Effects of Valence on Hemispheric Specialization for Emotion Word Processing.

The use of emotion in language is a key element of human interactions and a rich area for cognitive research. The present study examined reactions to words of five types: positive emotion (e.g.

Evaluation of the potential use of a meta-population for genomic selection in autochthonous beef cattle populations.

This study investigated the potential application of genomic selection under a multi-breed scheme in the Spanish autochthonous beef cattle populations using a simulation study that replicates the structure of linkage disequilibrium obtained from a sample of 25 triplets of sire/dam/offspring per population and using the BovineHD Beadchip. Purebred and combined reference sets were used for the genomic evaluation and several scenarios of different genetic architecture of the trait were investigated. The single-breed evaluations yielded the highest within-breed accuracies.

Genomic differentiation between Asturiana de los Valles, Avileña-Negra Ibérica, Bruna dels Pirineus, Morucha, Pirenaica, Retinta and Rubia Gallega cattle breeds.

The Spanish local beef cattle breeds have most likely common origin followed by a process of differentiation. This particular historical evolution has most probably left detectable signatures in the genome. The objective of this study was to identify genomic regions associated with differentiation processes in seven Spanish autochthonous populations (Asturiana de los Valles (AV), Avileña-Negra Ibérica (ANI), Bruna dels Pirineus (BP), Morucha (Mo), Pirenaica (Pi), Retinta (Re) and Rubia Gallega (RG)).

Performance of genomic selection under a single-step approach in autochthonous Spanish beef cattle populations.

This study evaluated different strategies for implementing a single-step genomic selection programme in two autochthonous Spanish beef cattle populations (Pirenaica-Pi and Rubia Gallega-RG). The strategies were compared in terms of accuracy attained under different scenarios by simulating genomic data over the known genealogy. Several genotyping approaches were tested, as well as, other factors like marker density, effective population size, mutation rate and heritability of the trait.

On the performance of tests for the detection of signatures of selection: a case study with the Spanish autochthonous beef cattle populations.

Background: Procedures for the detection of signatures of selection can be classified according to the source of information they use to reject the null hypothesis of absence of selection. Three main groups of tests can be identified that are based on: (1) the analysis of the site frequency spectrum, (2) the study of the extension of the linkage disequilibrium across the length of the haplotypes that surround the polymorphism, and (3) the differentiation among populations. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of a subset of these procedures by using a dataset on seven Spanish autochthonous beef cattle populations.

Emotion Word Type and Affective Valence Priming at a Long Stimulus Onset Asynchrony.

As the division between emotion and emotion-laden words has been viewed as controversial by, for example, Kousta and colleagues, the current study attempted a replication and extension of findings previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In their findings, Kazanas and Altarriba reported significant differences in response times (RTs) and priming effects between emotion and emotion-laden words, with faster RTs and larger priming effects with emotion words than with emotion-laden words. These findings were consistent across unmasked (Experiment 1) and masked (Experiment 2) versions of a lexical decision task, where participants either explicitly or implicitly processed the prime words of each prime-target word pair.

Linkage disequilibrium, persistence of phase, and effective population size in Spanish local beef cattle breeds assessed through a high-density single nucleotide polymorphism chip.

Linkage disequilibrium (LD) and persistence of phase are fundamental approaches for exploring the genetic basis of economically important traits in cattle, including the identification of QTL for genomic selection and the estimation of effective population size () to determine the size of the training populations. In this study, we have used the Illumina BovineHD chip in 168 trios of 7 Spanish beef cattle breeds to obtain an overview of the magnitude of LD and the persistence of LD phase through the physical distance between markers. Also, we estimated the time of divergence based on the persistence of the LD phase and calculated past from LD estimates using different alternatives to define the recombination rate.

Finding the positive in all of the negative: Facilitation for color-related emotion words in a negative priming paradigm.

A study conducted by Sutton and Altarriba (2008) suggested that color-related emotion words (e.g., sad, envy) produce standard Stroop interference effects.

Genetic diversity and divergence among Spanish beef cattle breeds assessed by a bovine high-density SNP chip.

The availability of SNP chips for massive genotyping has proven to be useful to genetically characterize populations of domestic cattle and to assess their degree of divergence. In this study, the Illumina BovineHD BeadChip genotyping array was used to describe the genetic variability and divergence among 7 important autochthonous Spanish beef cattle breeds. The within-breed genetic diversity, measured as the marker expected heterozygosity, was around 0.

Survival Processing and the Stroop Task : Does the Survival Advantage Depend on Deeper Processing During Encoding?

This study was designed to investigate the impact of survival processing with a novel task for this paradigm: the Stroop color-naming task. As the literature is mixed with regard to task generalizability, with survival processing promoting better memory for words, but not better memory for faces or paired associates, these types of task investigations are important to a growing field of research. Using the Stroop task provides a unique contribution, as identifying items by color is an important evolutionary adaptation and not specific to humans as is the case with word recall.