Publications by authors named "Sams M"

Kelp forests serve as the foundation for shallow marine ecosystems in many temperate areas of the world but are under threat from various stressors, including climate change. To better manage these ecosystems now and into the future, understanding the impacts of climate change and identifying potential refuges will help to prioritize management actions. In this study, we use a long-term dataset of observations of kelp percentage cover for two dominant canopy-forming species off the coast of Victoria, Australia: Ecklonia radiata and Phyllospora comosa.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Emotions are associated with subjective emotion-specific bodily sensations. Here, we utilized this relationship and computational linguistic methods to map a representation of emotions in ancient texts. We analyzed Neo-Assyrian texts from 934-612 BCE to discern consistent relationships between linguistic expressions related to both emotions and bodily sensations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID, encoded by Aicda) plays a key role in somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination in germinal center B cells. However, off-target effects of AID are implicated in human leukemia and lymphoma. A mouse model of precursor B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia driven by deletion of the related transcription factors PU.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Feelings of love are among the most significant human phenomena. Love informs the formation and maintenance of pair bonds, parent-offspring attachments, and influences relationships with others and even nature. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms of love beyond romantic and maternal types.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Relationships between humans are essential for how we see the world. Using fMRI, we explored the neural basis of homophily, a sociological concept that describes the tendency to bond with similar others. Our comparison of brain activity between sisters, friends and acquaintances while they watched a movie, indicate that sisters' brain activity is more similar than that of friends and friends' activity is more similar than that of acquaintances.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study presents a finite difference model for analyzing ground stability and settlement of twin circular culverts in undrained clay. The model is verified through simulations of soil movement and relaxation around a tunnel-boring machine's shield. Stability numbers and ground settlement are evaluated across various culvert geometries and soil ratios and compared to rigorous solutions and previous models.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) is the most prevalent type of cancer in young children and is associated with high levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS). The antioxidant N-acetylcysteine (NAC) was tested for its ability to alter disease progression in a mouse model of B-ALL. Mb1-CreΔPB mice have deletions in genes encoding PU.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent. We addressed these questions in a cross-cultural study with Western (European and North American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Precursor B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (Pre-B-ALL) arises from developing B cells and frequently involves mutations in genes encoding transcription factors. In this study, we investigated the function of mutations in the transcription factor IKZF3 (Aiolos), R137* and H195Y, discovered in a mouse model of pre-B-ALL. R137* IKZF3 mutation resulted in a truncated protein, while electrophoretic mobility shift assay showed that H195Y IKZF3 mutation resulted in a protein with altered DNA binding.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have reported widespread brain functional connectivity alterations in patients with psychosis. These studies have mostly used either resting-state or simple-task paradigms, thereby compromising experimental control or ecological validity, respectively. Additionally, in a conventional functional magnetic resonance imaging intrasubject functional connectivity analysis, it is difficult to identify which connections relate to extrinsic (stimulus-induced) and which connections relate to intrinsic (non-stimulus-related) neural processes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Several studies in political psychology reported higher levels of empathy among political leftists (i.e. liberals) as compared to political rightists (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Laughter and crying are universal signals of prosociality and distress, respectively. Here we investigated the functional brain basis of perceiving laughter and crying using naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) approach. We measured haemodynamic brain activity evoked by laughter and crying in three experiments with 100 subjects in each.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Few of us are skilled lipreaders while most struggle with the task. Neural substrates that enable comprehension of connected natural speech via lipreading are not yet well understood.

Methods: We used a data-driven approach to identify brain areas underlying the lipreading of an 8-min narrative with participants whose lipreading skills varied extensively (range 6-100%, mean = 50.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Prior research has demonstrated the widespread presence of racial disparities in emergency department (ED) care and analgesia. We hypothesized that racial disparities continue to exist in ED analgesic prescribing patterns, time to analgesia, and time to provider in the treatment of headache.

Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study of patients presenting to a large tertiary academic ED with chief complaint of headache.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Music performance anxiety (MPA) affects musicians at various stages of a performance, from its preparation until the aftermath of its delivery. Given the commonality and potentially grave consequences of MPA, it is understandable that much attention has been paid to the musician experiencing it. Consequently, we have learned a great deal about the intrapersonal level of MPA: how to measure it, treatments, experimental manipulations, and subjective experiences.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Perception of the same narrative can vary between individuals depending on a listener's previous experiences. We studied whether and how cultural family background may shape the processing of an audiobook in the human brain. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 48 healthy volunteers from two different cultural family backgrounds listened to an audiobook depicting the intercultural social life of young adults with the respective cultural backgrounds.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Neurophysiological and psychological models posit that emotions depend on connections across wide-spread corticolimbic circuits. While previous studies using pattern recognition on neuroimaging data have shown differences between various discrete emotions in brain activity patterns, less is known about the differences in functional connectivity. Thus, we employed multivariate pattern analysis on functional magnetic resonance imaging data (i) to develop a pipeline for applying pattern recognition in functional connectivity data, and (ii) to test whether connectivity patterns differ across emotion categories.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - AusTraits is a comprehensive database that compiles data on 448 traits from 28,640 taxa in Australian flora, integrating information from various sources like field studies and published literature.
  • - The database includes a wide range of traits, from physiological performance measures (like photosynthesis) to morphological features (such as leaf size and plant height), linking these traits to ecological variations.
  • - The latest version, 3.0.2, presents 997,808 trait-by-taxon combinations and aims to facilitate collaboration in archiving and sharing plant trait data, serving as a model for similar initiatives worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Empathy is often split into an affective facet for embodied simulation or sometimes sensorial processing, and a cognitive facet for mentalizing and perspective-taking. However, a recent neurophenomenological framework proposes a graded view on empathy (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Using movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in human neuroimaging studies has yielded significant advances in understanding of cognitive and emotional functions. The relevant literature was reviewed, with emphasis on how the use of naturalistic stimuli has helped advance scientific understanding of human memory, attention, language, emotions, and social cognition in ways that would have been difficult otherwise. These advances include discovering a cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows, which supports processing of dynamic information that accumulates over several time scales, such as immediate reactions vs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sams, ML, Wagle, JP, Sato, K, DeWeese, BH, Sayers, AL, and Stone, MH. Using the session rating of perceived exertion to quantify training load in a men's college soccer team. J Strength Cond Res 34(10): 2793-2799, 2020-The purpose of this study was to examine the training load (TL) programming of 3 training groups of a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I men's college soccer team across a season.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Human behavior is inherently multimodal and relies on sensorimotor integration. This is evident when pianists exhibit activity in motor and premotor cortices, as part of a dorsal pathway, while listening to a familiar piece of music, or when naïve participants learn to play simple patterns on the piano. Here we investigated the interaction between multimodal learning and dorsal-stream activity over the course of four weeks in ten skilled pianists by adopting a naturalistic data-driven analysis approach.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Human speech production requires the ability to couple motor actions with their auditory consequences. Nonhuman primates might not have speech because they lack this ability. To address this question, we trained macaques to perform an auditory-motor task producing sound sequences via hand presses on a newly designed device ("monkey piano").

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Putting oneself into the shoes of others is an important aspect of social cognition. We measured brain hemodynamic activity and eye-gaze patterns while participants were viewing a shortened version of the movie 'My Sister's Keeper' from two perspectives: that of a potential organ donor, who violates moral norms by refusing to donate her kidney, and that of a potential organ recipient, who suffers in pain. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) of brain activity was significantly higher during the potential organ donor's perspective in dorsolateral and inferior prefrontal, lateral and inferior occipital, and inferior-anterior temporal areas.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF