Human Robot Collaboration for Enhancing Work Activities.

Objective: Trade-offs between productivity, physical workload (PWL), and mental workload (MWL) were studied when integrating collaborative robots (cobots) into existing manual work by optimizing the allocation of tasks.

Background: As cobots become more widely introduced in the workplace and their capabilities greatly improved, there is a need to consider how they can best help their human partners.

Methods: A theoretical data-driven analysis was conducted using the O*NET Content Model to evaluate 16 selected jobs for associated work context, skills, and constraints.

Elevated perceived threat is associated with reduced hippocampal volume in combat veterans.

Reduced hippocampal volume is frequently observed in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but the psychological processes associated with these alterations remain unclear. Given hippocampal involvement in memory and contextual representations of threat, we investigated relationships between retrospectively reported combat exposure, perceived threat, and hippocampal volume in trauma-exposed veterans. T1-weighted anatomical MRI scans were obtained from 56 veterans (4 women, 52 men; 39 with elevated PTSD symptoms, "PTSS" group) and hippocampal volume was estimated using automatic segmentation tools in FreeSurfer.

Behavioral and neural indices of affective coloring for neutral social stimuli.

Emotional processing often continues beyond the presentation of emotionally evocative stimuli, which can result in affective biasing or coloring of subsequently encountered events. Here, we describe neural correlates of affective coloring and examine how individual differences in affective style impact the magnitude of affective coloring. We conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging in 117 adults who passively viewed negative, neutral and positive pictures presented 2 s prior to neutral faces.

Gut microbiome populations are associated with structure-specific changes in white matter architecture.

Altered gut microbiome populations are associated with a broad range of neurodevelopmental disorders including autism spectrum disorder and mood disorders. In animal models, modulation of gut microbiome populations via dietary manipulation influences brain function and behavior and has been shown to ameliorate behavioral symptoms. With striking differences in microbiome-driven behavior, we explored whether these behavioral changes are also accompanied by corresponding changes in neural tissue microstructure.

Anxiety-related experience-dependent white matter structural differences in adolescence: A monozygotic twin difference approach.

Anxiety is linked to deficits in structural and functional connectivity between limbic structures and pre-frontal cortices. We employed a monozygotic (MZ) twin difference design to examine the relationship between structural characteristics of the uncinate fasciculus (UF) measured by Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and anxiety symptoms in a sample of N = 100 monozygotic (genetically identical), adolescent twins. The MZ difference design allowed us focus on environmental factors that vary within twin pairs while controlling for genetic and environmental factors shared by twin pairs.