Anxiety and curiosity in hierarchical models of neural emotion processing-A mini review.

Traditionally, two fundamentally different theoretical approaches have been used in emotion research to model (human) emotions: discrete emotion theories and dimensional approaches. More recent neurophysiological models like the hierarchical emotion theory suggest that both should be integrated. The aim of this review is to provide neurocognitive evidence for this perspective with a particular focus on experimental studies manipulating anxiety and/or curiosity.

Neuropsychological differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia: a systematic review with meta-regressions.

Introduction: Diagnostic classification systems and guidelines posit distinguishing patterns of impairment in Alzheimer's (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD). In our study, we aim to identify which diagnostic instruments distinguish them.

Methods: We searched PubMed and PsychInfo for empirical studies published until December 2020, which investigated differences in cognitive, behavioral, psychiatric, and functional measures in patients older than 64 years and reported information on VaD subtype, age, education, dementia severity, and proportion of women.

Genome diversity of Borrelia garinii in marine transmission cycles does not match host associations but reflects the strains evolutionary history.

Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato is a species complex of spirochetal bacteria that occupy different ecological niches which is reflected in their reservoir host- and vector-associations. Borrelia genomes possess numerous linear and circular plasmids. Proteins encoded by plasmid genes play a major role in host- and vector-interaction and are important for Borrelia niche adaptation.

Comparison of somatostatin receptor expression in patients with neuroendocrine tumours with and without somatostatin analogue treatment imaged with [F]SiTATE.

Purpose: Somatostatin analogues (SSA) are frequently used in the treatment of neuroendocrine tumours. Recently, [F]SiTATE entered the field of somatostatin receptor (SSR) positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) imaging. The purpose of this study was to compare the SSR-expression of differentiated gastroentero-pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours (GEP-NET) measured by [18F]SiTATE-PET/CT in patients with and without previous treatment with long-acting SSAs to evaluate if SSA treatment needs to be paused prior to [18F]SiTATE-PET/CT.

Dependencies of the indoor climate on the course of the seasons and derivation of regressions from long-term measurements.

A building's indoor climate is an essential input variable for a variety of building physics computational models, simulations, and analyses. Precise knowledge of the indoor climate is necessary to minimize the risk of mold or moisture damage and is required to ensure minimum heat insulation standards in buildings. Detailed data are especially necessary for the progressive application of transient calculations, for example, concerning thermal comfort or energy consumption.

Semantic feature activation takes time: longer SOA elicits earlier priming effects during reading.

While most previous studies of "semantic" priming confound associative and semantic relations, here we use a simple co-occurrence-based approach to examine "pure" semantic priming, while experimentally controlling for associative relations. We define associative relations by the co-occurrence of words in the sentences of a large text corpus. Contextual-semantic feature overlap, in contrast, is defined by the number of common associates that the prime shares with the target.

Language Models Explain Word Reading Times Better Than Empirical Predictability.

Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and semantic factors. The traditional approach in cognitive reading research assumes that word predictability from sentence context is best captured by cloze completion probability (CCP) derived from human performance data. We review recent research suggesting that probabilistic language models provide deeper explanations for syntactic and semantic effects than CCP.

Automated extraction of genes associated with antibiotic resistance from the biomedical literature.

The detection of bacterial antibiotic resistance phenotypes is important when carrying out clinical decisions for patient treatment. Conventional phenotypic testing involves culturing bacteria which requires a significant amount of time and work. Whole-genome sequencing is emerging as a fast alternative to resistance prediction, by considering the presence/absence of certain genes.

Meditation affects word recognition of meditation novices.

This work represents one of the first attempts to examine the effects of meditation on the processing of written single words. In the present longitudinal study, participants conducted a lexical decision task and rated the affective valence of nouns before and after a 7-week class in mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness meditation, or a control intervention. Both meditation groups rated the emotional valence of nouns more neutral after the interventions, suggesting a general down-regulation of emotions.

Predictive Modeling of Critical Temperatures in Superconducting Materials.

In this study, we have investigated quantitative relationships between critical temperatures of superconductive inorganic materials and the basic physicochemical attributes of these materials (also called quantitative structure-property relationships). We demonstrated that one of the most recent studies (titled "A data-driven statistical model for predicting the critical temperature of a superconductor" and published in Computational Materials Science by K. Hamidieh in 2018) reports on models that were based on the dataset that contains 27% of duplicate entries.

Feigning memory impairment in a forced-choice task: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Strategies of malingering detection have brought about a wealth of neuropsychological studies in the last decades. However, the investigation of physiological measures to reliably differentiate between authentic and manipulated symptom presentations is still in its infancy. The present study examined event-related potentials (ERP) to identify feigned memory impairment.

Functional connectivity of the left inferior frontal gyrus during semantic priming.

Recent applications of computationally calculated word co-occurrences allowed the prediction of left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) activation during semantic word processing. Hence, an interactive activation model, the associative read-out model (AROM), utilizes co-occurrences in its semantic processing layer and proposes connectivity from the LIFG along the ventral visual stream. Direct empirical evidence for its connectivity assumptions is so far missing, however.

Fixation-related NIRS indexes retinotopic occipital processing of parafoveal preview during natural reading.

While word frequency and predictability effects have been examined extensively, any evidence on interactive effects as well as parafoveal influences during whole sentence reading remains inconsistent and elusive. Novel neuroimaging methods utilize eye movement data to account for the hemodynamic responses of very short events such as fixations during natural reading. In this study, we used the rapid sampling frequency of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to investigate neural responses in the occipital and orbitofrontal cortex to word frequency and predictability.

It is more than Interference: Examining the neurohemodynamic correlates of the flanker task with functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

Previous functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies using the Eriksen flanker task, in contrast to functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, revealed the quite puzzling finding of an inverted conflict effect, that is, greater middle and superior frontal activation in response compatible than in response incompatible trials. However, since neither prior functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies nor most previous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies separated between an identical and a compatible condition, it is hard to pinpoint whether this discrepancy occurs on the level of stimulus processing or response generation. By assigning two letters to both left (D, F) and right (J, K) hand reactions, we were able to separate identical (e.

Zen meditation neutralizes emotional evaluation, but not implicit affective processing of words.

There is ample evidence that meditation can regulate emotions. It is questionable, however, whether meditation can down-regulate sensitivity to emotional experience in high-level cognitive representations such as words. The present study shows that adept Zen meditators rated the emotional valence of (low-arousal) positive and (high- and low-arousal) negative nouns significantly more neutral after a meditation session, while there was no change of valence ratings after a comparison intervention in the comparison group.

Simple Co-Occurrence Statistics Reproducibly Predict Association Ratings.

What determines human ratings of association? We planned this paper as a test for association strength (AS) that is derived from the log likelihood that two words co-occur significantly more often together in sentences than is expected from their single word frequencies. We also investigated the moderately correlated interactions of word frequency, emotional valence, arousal, and imageability of both words (r's ≤ .3).

If You Don't Have Valence, Ask Your Neighbor: Evaluation of Neutral Words as a Function of Affective Semantic Associates.

How do humans perform difficult forced-choice evaluations, e.g., of words that have been previously rated as being neutral? Here we tested the hypothesis that in this case, the valence of semantic associates is of significant influence.

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or negative . Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review research on such ) that entail no direct overt reward with a special focus on and discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity.

Differences in the dynamics of affective and cognitive processing - An ERP study.

A controversy in emotion research concerns the question of whether affective or cognitive primacy are evident in processing affective stimuli and the factors contributing to each alternative. Using electrophysiological recordings in an adapted visual oddball paradigm allowed tracking the dynamics of affective and cognitive effects. Stimuli consisted of face pictures displaying affective expressions with rare oddballs differing from frequent stimuli in either affective expression, structure (while frequent stimuli were shown frontally these deviants were turned sideways) or they differed on both dimensions, i.

Mixing positive and negative valence: Affective-semantic integration of bivalent words.

Single words have affective and aesthetic properties that influence their processing. Here we investigated the processing of a special case of word stimuli that are extremely difficult to evaluate, bivalent noun-noun-compounds (NNCs), i.e.

No one way ticket from orthography to semantics in recognition memory: N400 and P200 effects of associations.

Computational models of word recognition already successfully used associative spreading from orthographic to semantic levels to account for false memories. But can they also account for semantic effects on event-related potentials in a recognition memory task? To address this question, target words in the present study had either many or few semantic associates in the stimulus set. We found larger P200 amplitudes and smaller N400 amplitudes for old words in comparison to new words.

Slower Perception Followed by Faster Lexical Decision in Longer Words: A Diffusion Model Analysis.

Effects of stimulus length on reaction times (RTs) in the lexical decision task are the topic of extensive research. While slower RTs are consistently found for longer pseudo-words, a finding coined the word length effect (WLE), some studies found no effects for words, and yet others reported faster RTs for longer words. Moreover, the WLE depends on the orthographic transparency of a language, with larger effects in more transparent orthographies.

Avoid violence, rioting, and outrage; approach celebration, delight, and strength: Using large text corpora to compute valence, arousal, and the basic emotions.

Ever since Aristotle discussed the issue in Book II of his Rhetoric, humans have attempted to identify a set of "basic emotion labels". In this paper we propose an algorithmic method for evaluating sets of basic emotion labels that relies upon computed co-occurrence distances between words in a 12.7-billion-word corpus of unselected text from USENET discussion groups.