Affective states contribute to trait reports of affective well-being

Asking people to provide global judgments, or trait reports, of their affective experience is a standard method for assessing trait affective well-being, with countless applications in the social sciences. Trait reports reflect numerous influences that generally go unnoticed. Although state affect is a highly plausible candidate for such influences, this source of unwanted variance does not receive much attention and is usually not controlled for in empirical studies. Using 100-day data from the COGITO study, we provide direct and strong evidence that trait reports of affect depend on how people feel at the time they provide the evaluations (i.e., their affective state). For example, participants experiencing more positive affect on a specific day relative to their individual mean also provide more positive ratings of their global affective experience. Furthermore, we found that current affect influences trait ratings in a surprisingly differentiated way—those particular facets of affect that are more/less prevalent at a certain moment are believed to occur more/less often in general. We stress the need for repeated observations within individuals to estimate state contributions to standard assessments of trait affect, to distinguish between state and trait in psychological assessment, and to achieve good indicators of affective experiences in the social and medical sciences

Toward a unified framework for the study of between-person and within-person structures : Building a bridge between two research paradigms

The vast majority of empirical research in the behavioral sciences is based on the analysis of between-person variation. In contrast, much of applied psychology is concerned with the analysis of variation within individuals. Furthermore, the mechanisms specified by psychological theories generally operate within, rather than across, individuals. This disconnect between research practice, applied demands, and psychological theories constitutes a major threat to the conceptual integrity of the field. Following groundbreaking earlier work, we propose a conceptual framework that distinguishes within-person (WP) and between-person (BP) sources of variation in psychological constructs. By simultaneously considering both sources of variation, it is shown how to identify possible reasons for nonequivalence of BP and WP structures as well as establishing areas of convergence. For this purpose, we first introduce the concept of conditional equivalence as a way to study partial structural equivalence of BP and WP structures in the presence of unconditional nonequivalence. Second, we demonstrate the construction of likelihood planes to explore the causes of structural nonequivalence. Third, we examine 4 common causes for unconditional nonequivalence autoregression, subgroup differences, linear trends, and cyclic trends-and demonstrate how to account for them. Fourth, we provide an empirical example on BP and WP differences in attentiveness

Regulation of releasable vesicle pool sizes by protein kinase A-dependent phosphorylation of SNAP-25

AbstractProtein kinase A (PKA) is a key regulator of neurosecretion, but the molecular targets remain elusive. We combined pharmacological manipulations of kinase and phosphatase activities with mutational studies on the exocytotic machinery driving fusion of catecholamine-containing vesicles from chromaffin cells. We found that constitutive PKA activity was necessary to maintain a large number of vesicles in the release-ready, so-called primed, state, whereas calcineurin (protein phosphatase 2B) activity antagonized this effect. Overexpression of the SNARE protein SNAP-25a mutated in a PKA phosphorylation site (Thr-138) eliminated the effect of PKA inhibitors on the vesicle priming process. Another, unidentified, PKA target regulated the relative size of two different primed vesicle pools that are distinguished by their release kinetics. Overexpression of the SNAP-25b isoform increased the size of both primed vesicle pools by a factor of two, and mutations in the conserved Thr-138 site had similar effects as in the a isoform

Photoswitchable diacylglycerols enable optical control of protein kinase C.

Increased levels of the second messenger lipid diacylglycerol (DAG) induce downstream signaling events including the translocation of C1-domain-containing proteins toward the plasma membrane. Here, we introduce three light-sensitive DAGs, termed PhoDAGs, which feature a photoswitchable acyl chain. The PhoDAGs are inactive in the dark and promote the translocation of proteins that feature C1 domains toward the plasma membrane upon a flash of UV-A light. This effect is quickly reversed after the termination of photostimulation or by irradiation with blue light, permitting the generation of oscillation patterns. Both protein kinase C and Munc13 can thus be put under optical control. PhoDAGs control vesicle release in excitable cells, such as mouse pancreatic islets and hippocampal neurons, and modulate synaptic transmission in Caenorhabditis elegans. As such, the PhoDAGs afford an unprecedented degree of spatiotemporal control and are broadly applicable tools to study DAG signaling

BACE1 inhibition more effectively suppresses initiationthan progression of β-amyloid pathology

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