Seeing the world through non rose-colored glasses: anxiety and the amygdala response to blended expressions

Anxious individuals have a greater tendency to categorize faces with ambiguous emotional expressions as fearful (Richards et al., 2002). These behavioral findings might reflect anxiety-related biases in stimulus representation within the human amygdala. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with a continuous adaptation design to investigate the representation of faces from three expression continua (surprise-fear, sadness-fear, and surprise-sadness) within the amygdala and other brain regions implicated in face processing. Fifty-four healthy adult participants completed a face expression categorization task. Nineteen of these participants also viewed the same expressions presented using type 1 index 1 sequences while fMRI data were acquired. Behavioral analyses revealed an anxiety-related categorization bias in the surprise-fear continuum alone. Here, elevated anxiety was associated with a more rapid transition from surprise to fear responses as a function of percentage fear in the face presented, leading to increased fear categorizations for faces with a mid-way blend of surprise and fear. fMRI analyses revealed that high trait anxious participants also showed greater representational similarity, as indexed by greater adaptation of the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signal, between 50/50 surprise/fear expression blends and faces from the fear end of the surprise-fear continuum in both the right amygdala and right fusiform face area (FFA). No equivalent biases were observed for the other expression continua. These findings suggest that anxiety-related biases in the processing of expressions intermediate between surprise and fear may be linked to differential representation of these stimuli in the amygdala and FFA. The absence of anxiety-related biases for the sad-fear continuum might reflect intermediate expressions from the surprise-fear continuum being most ambiguous in threat-relevance

Evidence of the spin Seebeck effect in Ni-Zn ferrites polycrystalline slabs

We report on the observation of the spin Seebeck effect in Ni-Zn ferrites slabs with different Zn concentration. All samples have a spinel structure confirmed by XRD and TEM. We fully characterize the magnetic properties by VSM and Mössbauer spectroscopy. Samples exhibit a nonmonotonic magnetization behavior depending on the structural inversion parameter, however we found a spin Seebeck response voltage of about 25.5 nV/K independent of the magnetization and the inversion degree

Escape from the vicinity of fractal basin boundaries of a star cluster

The dissolution process of star clusters is rather intricate for theory. We investigate it in the context of chaotic dynamics. We use the simple Plummer model for the gravitational field of a star cluster and treat the tidal field of the Galaxy within the tidal approximation. That is, a linear approximation of tidal forces from the Galaxy based on epicyclic theory in a rotating reference frame. The Poincar\'e surfaces of section reveal the effect of a Coriolis asymmetry. The system is non-hyperbolic which has important consequences for the dynamics. We calculated the basins of escape with respect to the Lagrangian points $L_1$ and $L_2$. The longest escape times have been measured for initial conditions in the vicinity of the fractal basin boundaries. Furthermore, we computed the chaotic saddle for the system and its stable and unstable manifolds. The chaotic saddle is a fractal structure in phase space which has the form of a Cantor set and introduces chaos into the system.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS, Figures have lower qualit

Evaluation of the nutritional quality of Chaetoceros muelleri Schütt (Chaetocerotales: Chaetocerotaceae) and Isochrysis sp. (Isochrysidales: isochrysidaceae) grown outdoors for the larval development of Litopenaeus vannamei (Boone, 1931) (Decapoda: Penaeidae)

The biomass, proximal composition and fatty acid profile of Isochrysis sp., Chaetoceros muelleri and their mixture, grown under greenhouse conditions, were evaluated. The nutritional value of both species supplied as the monoalgal (Chaetoceros muelleri: Diet I, and Isochrysis sp. Diet II) and mixed diet (Diet III) for larval Litopenaeus vannamei was also assessed on the basis of the development and biochemical composition of the larvae. The highest protein levels were obtained in Diets I and II (40% and 35%, respectively). No significant differences in larval survival were found among the diets; however, larvae fed on Diet II had the lowest mean larval length

Animal modelling for inherited central vision loss.

Disease-causing variants of a large number of genes trigger inherited retinal degeneration leading to photoreceptor loss. Because cones are essential for daylight and central vision such as reading, mobility, and face recognition, this review focuses on a variety of animal models for cone diseases. The pertinence of using these models to reveal genotype/phenotype correlations and to evaluate new therapeutic strategies is discussed. Interestingly, several large animal models recapitulate human diseases and can serve as a strong base from which to study the biology of disease and to assess the scale-up of new therapies. Examples of innovative approaches will be presented such as lentiviral-based transgenesis in pigs and adeno-associated virus (AAV)-gene transfer into the monkey eye to investigate the neural circuitry plasticity of the visual system. The models reported herein permit the exploration of common mechanisms that exist between different species and the identification and highlighting of pathways that may be specific to primates, including humans

On the synthesis of metadata tags for HTML files

RDFa, JSON-LD, Microdata, and Microformats allow to endow the data in HTML files with metadata tags that help software agents understand them. Unluckily, there are many HTML files that do not have any metadata tags, which has motivated many authors to work on proposals to synthesize them. But they have some problems: the authors either provide an overall picture of their designs without too many details on the techniques behind the scenes or focus on the techniques but do not describe the design of the software systems that support them; many of them cannot deal with data that are encoded using semistructured formats like forms, listings, or tables; and the few proposals that can work on tables can deal with horizontal listings only. In this article, we describe the design of a system that overcomes the previous limitations using a novel embedding approach that has proven to outperform four state-of-the-art techniques on a repository with randomly selected HTML files from 40 differ ent sites. According to our experimental analysis, our proposal can achieve an F1 score that outperforms the others by 10.14%; this difference was confirmed to be statistically significant at the standard confidence level.Junta de Andalucía P18-RT-1060Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-40848-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-75394-

Bases para la departamentalización

Se interpretan teóricamente las bases para departamentalizar. El artículo incluye: bases orientadas a recursos, a resultados y a procesos; y reglas para unir, asignar y separar actividades. Se ha estado departamentalizando sobre 13 bases, fundamentos a partir de los cuales los directivos deciden acerca del diseño y rediseño de los puestos de trabajo u órganos en cada nivel organizativo. La literatura de administración las ha registrado, pero sin lograr una explicación sistematizada. El autor la propone, mediante un enfoque sistémico de los sistemas organizacionales. En bases orientadas a recursos, se explican: la numérica simple, por calificación del ejecutor, equipo y turno; en bases orientadas a resultados, aquellas por objetivo, producto, proyecto, objeto, territorio, cliente y canales de marketing; en bases orientadas a procesos, las de por función y tecnología. Estas bases se complementan con siete reglas para unir actividades; cinco para asignarlas y otras cinco en aras de separarlas. Se sugiere usar este trabajo en la enseñanza de los fundamentos teóricos y metodológicos del diseño de sistemas organizacionales, y para el trabajo práctico de dirigentes y técnicos en organización