Additive effects of emotional expression and stimulus size on the perception of genuine and artificial facial expressions: an ERP study.

Seeing an angry individual in close physical proximity can not only result in a larger retinal representation of that individual and an enhanced resolution of emotional cues, but may also increase motivation for rapid visual processing and action preparation. The present study investigated the effects of stimulus size and emotional expression on the perception of happy, angry, non-expressive, and scrambled faces. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses of N = 40 participants who performed a naturalness classification task on real and artificially created facial expressions.

Does the interplay of emotion-related personality traits and reproductive hormones predict individual variation in emotion recognition?

Person-related variation has been identified in many socio-cognitive domains, and there is evidence for links between certain personality traits and individual emotion recognition. Some studies, utilizing the menstrual cycle as a hormonal model, attempted to demonstrate that hormonal fluctuations could predict variations in emotion recognition, but with merely inconsistent findings. Remarkably, the interplay between hormone fluctuations and other person-related factors that could potentially influence emotion recognition remains understudied.

[By any Other Name …-Soviet Construction of Schizophrenia in the 1970-1980s and its Integration into the International Classification of Diseases].

The article reconstructs attempts to create scientifically coherent, internationally agreed-upon diagnostics for mild forms of schizophrenia throughout the 20th century. A particular focus here lies on what became known as bland-or sluggish-schizophrenia, a particular term coined in the USSR, which became known for its frequent use in internationally contested diagnoses of human rights activists. The argument follows the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia from its inception in a highly productive and equally international psychiatric community of the early 20th century pioneered by prominent Soviet scholar Andrey Snezhnevsky and through its epistemic detachment and content-related transformation in the highly isolated Soviet psychiatric community since the interwar period.

Validation of scrambling methods for vocal affect bursts.

Studies on perception and cognition require sound methods allowing us to disentangle the basic sensory processing of physical stimulus properties from the cognitive processing of stimulus meaning. Similar to the scrambling of images, the scrambling of auditory signals is aimed at creating stimulus instances that are unrecognizable but have comparable low-level features. In the present study, we generated scrambled stimuli of short vocalizations taken from the Montreal Affective Voices database (Belin et al.

Leading beyond regulatory approval: Opportunities for statisticians to optimize evidence generation and impact clinical practice.

The role and value of statistical contributions in drug development up to the point of health authority approval are well understood. But health authority approval is only a true 'win' if the evidence enables access and adoption into clinical practice. In today's complex and evolving healthcare environment, there is additional strategic evidence generation, communication, and decision support that can benefit from statistical contributions.

Functional glycoproteomics by integrated network assembly and partitioning.

The post-translational modification (PTM) of proteins by O-linked β--acetyl-D-glucosamine (O-GlcNAcylation) is widespread across the proteome during the lifespan of all multicellular organisms. However, nearly all functional studies have focused on individual protein modifications, overlooking the multitude of simultaneous O-GlcNAcylation events that work together to coordinate cellular activities. Here, we describe etworking of nteractors and ubstrats (NISE), a novel, systems-level approach to rapidly and comprehensively monitor O-GlcNAcylation across the proteome.

Differential effects of intra-modal and cross-modal reward value on perception: ERP evidence.

In natural environments objects comprise multiple features from the same or different sensory modalities but it is not known how perception of an object is affected by the value associations of its constituent parts. The present study compares intra- and cross-modal value-driven effects on behavioral and electrophysiological correlates of perception. Human participants first learned the reward associations of visual and auditory cues.

Gender congruence and emotion effects in cross-modal associative learning: Insights from ERPs and pupillary responses.

Social and emotional cues from faces and voices are highly relevant and have been reliably demonstrated to attract attention involuntarily. However, there are mixed findings as to which degree associating emotional valence to faces occurs automatically. In the present study, we tested whether inherently neutral faces gain additional relevance by being conditioned with either positive, negative, or neutral vocal affect bursts.

Motivated attention and task relevance in the processing of cross-modally associated faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

It has repeatedly been shown that visually presented stimuli can gain additional relevance by their association with affective stimuli. Studies have shown effects of associated affect in event-related potentials (ERP) like the early posterior negativity (EPN), late positive complex (LPC), and even earlier components as the P1 or N170. However, findings are mixed as to the extent associated affect requires directed attention to the emotional quality of a stimulus and which ERP components are sensitive to task instructions during retrieval.

Sex differences in emotion recognition: investigating the moderating effects of stimulus features.

Emotion recognition - a prerequisite for social interactions - varies among individuals. Sex differences have been proposed as a central source of individual differences, although the existing evidence is rather heterogeneous. In the current study ( = 426), we investigated the potential moderating effects of stimulus features, including modality, emotion specificity, and the sex of the encoder (referring to the sex of the actor) on the magnitude of sex differences in emotion recognition.

On the dynamics of gain and loss: Electrophysiological evidence from associative learning.

Associated relevance affects the sensory encoding of low-level visual features of symbolic stimuli. It is unclear, however, which dimension of low-level visual features benefits from prioritized processing, and how these effects develop throughout the course of relevance acquisition. Moreover, previous evidence is inconclusive regarding the preservation of processing advantage once the association is no longer relevant, as well as its generalization to perceptually similar but novel stimuli.

Structural basis of DNA binding by the WhiB-like transcription factor WhiB3 in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) WhiB3 is an iron-sulfur cluster-containing transcription factor belonging to a subclass of the WhiB-Like (Wbl) family that is widely distributed in the phylum Actinobacteria. WhiB3 plays a crucial role in the survival and pathogenesis of Mtb. It binds to the conserved region 4 of the principal sigma factor (σ) in the RNA polymerase holoenzyme to regulate gene expression like other known Wbl proteins in Mtb.

Parahydrogen-Induced Polarization of a Labeled, Cancer-Targeting DNA Aptamer.

Enhancing NMR signals of biomacromolecules by hyperpolarization offers exciting opportunities for diagnostic applications. However, their hyperpolarization via parahydrogen remains challenging as specific catalytic interactions are required, which are difficult to tune due to the large size of the biomolecule and its insolubility in organic solvents. Herein, we show the unprecedented hyperpolarization of the cancer-targeting DNA aptamer AS1411.

Does emotion recognition change across phases of the ovulatory cycle?

Recognizing emotions is an essential ability for successful interpersonal interaction. Prior research indicates some links between the endocrine system and emotion recognition ability, but only a few studies focused on within-subject differences across distinct ovulatory cycle phases and this ability. These studies have demonstrated mixed results that might be potentially due to heterogeneity in experimental tasks, methodologies, and lacking ecological validity.

How German and Italian Laypeople Reason about Distributive Shortages during COVID-19.

(1) Background: The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to investigate how moral reasoning is influenced by individuals' exposure to a crisis and by personal, societal and temporal proximity. We examined how Italians and Germans judged different behaviors that arose because of the pandemic, which affected health and societal matters. (2) Methods: Over the course of four months and three assessment periods, we used an observational online survey to assess participants' judgments regarding seven scenarios that addressed distributive shortages during the pandemic.

Healthy brain aging assessed with [F]FDG and [C]UCB-J PET.

Background: The average human lifespan has increased dramatically over the past century. However, molecular and physiological alterations of the healthy brain during aging remain incompletely understood. Generalized synaptic restructuring may contribute to healthy aging and the reduced metabolism observed in the aged brain.

Spontaneous partial recovery of striatal dopaminergic uptake despite nigral cell loss in asymptomatic MPTP-lesioned female minipigs.

The Göttingen minipig is a large animal with a gyrencephalic brain that expresses -complex behavior, making it an attractive model for Parkinson's disease research. Here, we investigate the temporal evolution of presynaptic dopaminergic function for 14 months after injections of 1-Methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) into the minipig using a multi-tracer longitudinal positron emission tomography (PET) design. We injected seven sedated minipigs with 1-2 mg/kg of MPTP, and two with saline, three times a week over four weeks.

Visual competition attenuates emotion effects during overt attention shifts.

Numerous different objects are simultaneously visible in a person's visual field, competing for attention. This competition has been shown to affect eye-movements and early neural responses toward stimuli, while the role of a stimulus' emotional meaning for mechanisms of overt attention shifts under competition is unclear. The current study combined EEG and eye-tracking to investigate effects of competition and emotional content on overt shifts of attention to human face stimuli.

Exposure, hazard, and vulnerability all contribute to Schistosoma haematobium re-infection in northern Senegal.

Background: Infectious disease risk is driven by three interrelated components: exposure, hazard, and vulnerability. For schistosomiasis, exposure occurs through contact with water, which is often tied to daily activities. Water contact, however, does not imply risk unless the environmental hazard of snails and parasites is also present in the water.

Power in psychiatry. Soviet peer and lay hierarchies in the context of political abuse of psychiatry.

Soviet political abuse of psychiatry in the Brezhnevite era offers a rich case study of entanglement between various layers, impact spaces, and actors of power. This article discusses two types of discursive power in Soviet psychiatry. One sprang from the madness-affirmative cultural canon, in which dissidents sought their self-legitimation.

Overt and covert attention shifts to emotional faces: Combining EEG, eye tracking, and a go/no-go paradigm.

In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion-driven attention by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye movements towards stimuli. It remains, however, unclear how shifts of attention to emotional faces with and without eye movements differ from each other.

Reduced Synaptic Density in Patients with Lewy Body Dementia: An [ C]UCB-J PET Imaging Study.

Background: Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) often develop dementia, but the underlying substrate is incompletely understood. Generalized synaptic degeneration may contribute to dysfunction and cognitive decline in Lewy body dementias, but in vivo evidence is lacking.

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the density of synapses in non-demented PD (nPD) subjects (N = 21), patients with PD-dementia or Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) (N = 13), and age-matched healthy controls (N = 15).