Does prediction error during exposure relate to clinical outcomes in cognitive behavior therapy for social anxiety disorder? A study protocol.

Facing your fears, or exposure therapy, is an effective psychological intervention for anxiety disorders that is often thought to work through fear extinction learning. Fear extinction learning is a type of associative learning where fear reduces through repeated encounters with a feared situation or stimulus in the absence of aversive outcomes. Laboratory research suggests fear extinction learning is driven by threat prediction errors, defined as when fearful predictions do not eventuate.

3D Printing Latex: A Route to Complex Geometries of High Molecular Weight Polymers.

Vat photopolymerization (VP) additive manufacturing fabricates intricate geometries with excellent resolution; however, high molecular weight polymers are not amenable to VP due to concomitant high solution and melt viscosities. Thus, a challenging paradox arises between printability and mechanical performance. This report describes concurrent photopolymer and VP system design to navigate this paradox with the unprecedented use of polymeric colloids (latexes) that effectively decouple the dependency of viscosity on molecular weight.

Sewage spills are a major source of titanium dioxide engineered (nano)-particles into the environment.

Sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) are a common problem across the United States. An estimated 23,000-75,000 SSOs occurred annually in 2004 discharging between 11 and 38 billion liters of untreated wastewater to receiving waters. SSOs release many contaminants, including engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), to receiving water bodies.

Enhanced release of palladium and platinum from catalytic converter materials exposed to ammonia and chloride bearing solutions.

The environmental levels of platinum group elements (PGEs) are steadily rising, primarily due to exhaust emissions of vehicle catalytic converter (VCC) materials containing solid PGEs. Once these VCC materials reach soil and water, the PGEs may be transported in the form of nanoparticles (dimensions 1-100 nm) or they may be mobilized by forming coordination complexes with ligands in the environment. Chloride (Cl-) and ammonia (NH3) are two ligands of particular concern due to their ubiquity as well as their potential to form the chemotherapy drug cisplatin (Pt(NH3)2Cl2) or other potentially bioactive complexes.

Manganese Oxides Resembling Microbial Fabrics and Their Implications for Recognizing Inorganically Preserved Microfossils.

In the search for microfossils of early life on Earth, the demonstration of biogenicity is paramount. Traditionally, only syngenetic structures with cellular elaboration, hollow sheaths/cell walls, and indigenous kerogen have been considered bona fide fossils. Recent reports of inorganically preserved microfossils represent a shift from this practice.

Discovery and ramifications of incidental Magnéli phase generation and release from industrial coal-burning.

Coal, as one of the most economic and abundant energy sources, remains the leading fuel for producing electricity worldwide. Yet, burning coal produces more global warming CO relative to all other fossil fuels, and it is a major contributor to atmospheric particulate matter known to have a deleterious respiratory and cardiovascular impact in humans, especially in China and India. Here we have discovered that burning coal also produces large quantities of otherwise rare Magnéli phases (Ti O with 4 ≤ x ≤ 9) from TiO minerals naturally present in coal.

Asymmetric Response of Ferroelastic Domain-Wall Motion under Applied Bias.

The switching of domains in ferroelectric and multiferroic materials plays a central role in their application to next-generation computer systems, sensing applications, and memory storage. A detailed understanding of the response to electric fields and the switching behavior in the presence of complex domain structures and extrinsic effects (e.g.

Speciation Matters: Bioavailability of Silver and Silver Sulfide Nanoparticles to Alfalfa (Medicago sativa).

Terrestrial crops are directly exposed to silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) and their environmentally transformed analog silver sulfide nanoparticles (Ag2S-NPs) when wastewater treatment biosolids are applied as fertilizer to agricultural soils. This leads to a need to understand their bioavailability to plants. In the present study, the mechanisms of uptake and distribution of silver in alfalfa (Medicago sativa) were quantified and visualized upon hydroponic exposure to Ag-NPs, Ag2S-NPs, and AgNO3 at 3 mg total Ag/L.

Real-time observation of local strain effects on nonvolatile ferroelectric memory storage mechanisms.

We use in situ transmission electron microscopy to directly observe, at high temporal and spatial resolution, the interaction of ferroelectric domains and dislocation networks within BiFeO3 thin films. The experimental observations are compared with a phase field model constructed to simulate the dynamics of domains in the presence of dislocations and their resulting strain fields. We demonstrate that a global network of misfit dislocations at the film-substrate interface can act as nucleation sites and slow down domain propagation in the vicinity of the dislocations.

Microstructural changes in CdSe-coated ZnO nanowires evaluated by in situ annealing in transmission electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction.

We report on the crystallite growth and phase change of electrodeposited CdSe coatings on ZnO nanowires during annealing. Both in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and x-ray diffraction (XRD) reveal that the nanocrystal size increases from ∼3 to ∼10 nm upon annealing at 350 °C for 1 h and then to more than 30 nm during another 1 h at 400 °C, exhibiting two distinct growth regimes. Nanocrystal growth occurs together with a structural change from zinc blende to wurtzite.

QTL linkage analysis of connected populations using ancestral marker and pedigree information.

The common assumption in quantitative trait locus (QTL) linkage mapping studies that parents of multiple connected populations are unrelated is unrealistic for many plant breeding programs. We remove this assumption and propose a Bayesian approach that clusters the alleles of the parents of the current mapping populations from locus-specific identity by descent (IBD) matrices that capture ancestral marker and pedigree information. Moreover, we demonstrate how the parental IBD data can be incorporated into a QTL linkage analysis framework by using two approaches: a Threshold IBD model (TIBD) and a Latent Ancestral Allele Model (LAAM).

Identity-by-descent matrix decomposition using latent ancestral allele models.

Genetic linkage and association studies are empowered by proper modeling of relatedness among individuals. Such relatedness can be inferred from marker and/or pedigree information. In this study, the genetic relatedness among n inbred individuals at a particular locus is expressed as an n x n square matrix Q.

Mixed model approaches for the identification of QTLs within a maize hybrid breeding program.

Two outlines for mixed model based approaches to quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in existing maize hybrid selection programs are presented: a restricted maximum likelihood (REML) and a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach. The methods use the in-silico-mapping procedure developed by Parisseaux and Bernardo (2004) as a starting point. The original single-point approach is extended to a multi-point approach that facilitates interval mapping procedures.

Speaker overestimation of communication effectiveness and fear of negative evaluation: being realistic is unrealistic.

Speakers systematically overestimate their communication effectiveness (Keysar & Henly, 2002). We argue that doing so is adaptive, reducing the risk of social anxiety and withdrawal from social situations. This hypothesis was tested by having speakers who scored low and high for fear of negative evaluation (FNE), a hallmark of social phobia, attempt to convey a specific meaning of ambiguous statements to a listener and then estimate their communication effectiveness.

Expert face coding: configural and component coding of own-race and other-race faces.

Configural and holistic coding are hallmarks of face perception. Although recent studies have shown that own-race faces are coded more holistically than other-race faces, the evidence for better configural coding of own-race faces is equivocal. We directly measured configural and component coding of own- and other-race male faces in Caucasian and Chinese participants.

Perceptual adaptation affects attractiveness of female bodies.

We investigated whether short durations (5 minutes) of exposure to distorted bodies can change subsequent perceptions of attractiveness and normality. Participants rated 110 female bodies, varying in width, on either their attractiveness or normality before and after exposure to either extremely narrow (-50% of original width in Experiments 1 and 2) or extremely wide bodies (+50% of original width in Experiment 1, and +70% of original width in Experiment 2). In both experiments, the most attractive and most normal looking bodies became significantly and substantially narrower after exposure to narrow bodies.

On the determination of recombination rates in intermated recombinant inbred populations.

The recurrent intermating of F(2) individuals for some number of generations followed by several generations of inbreeding produces an intermated recombinant inbred (IRI) population. Such populations are currently being developed in the plant-breeding community because linkage associations present in an F(2) population are broken down and a population of fixed inbred lines is also created. The increased levels of recombination enable higher-resolution mapping in IRI populations relative to F(2) populations.