Cardiac afferent activity modulates the expression of racial stereotypes

Negative racial stereotypes tend to associate Black people with threat. This often leads to the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons held by a Black individual. Yet, little is known about how bodily states impact the expression of racial stereotyping. By tapping into the phasic activation of arterial baroreceptors, known to be associated with changes in the neural processing of fearful stimuli, we show activation of race-threat stereotypes synchronized with the cardiovascular cycle. Across two established tasks, stimuli depicting Black or White individuals were presented to coincide with either the cardiac systole or diastole. Results show increased race-driven misidentification of weapons during systole, when baroreceptor afferent firing is maximal, relative to diastole. Importantly, a third study examining the positive Black-athletic stereotypical association fails to demonstrate similar modulations by cardiac cycle. We identify a body–brain interaction wherein interoceptive cues can modulate threat appraisal and racially biased behaviour in context-dependent ways

Cerebellar Zones: A Personal History

Cerebellar zones were there, of course, before anyone noticed them. Their history is that of young people, unhindered by preconceived ideas, who followed up their observations with available or new techniques. In the 1960s of the last century, the circumstances were fortunate because three groups, in Leiden, Lund, and Bristol, using different approaches, stumbled on the same zonal pattern in the cerebellum of the cat. In Leiden, the Häggqvist myelin stain divulged the compartments in the cerebellar white matter that channel the afferent and efferent connections of the zones. In Lund, the spino-olivocerebellar pathways activated from individual spinal funiculi revealed the zonal pattern. In Bristol, charting the axon reflex of olivocerebellar climbing fibers on the surface of the cerebellum resulted in a very similar zonal map. The history of the zones is one of accidents and purposeful pursuit. The technicians, librarians, animal caretakers, students, secretaries, and medical illustrators who made it possible remain unnamed, but their contributions certainly should be acknowledged

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) Precentral Corticospinal System Asymmetry and Handedness: A Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Most humans are right handed, and most humans exhibit left-right asymmetries of the precentral corticospinal system. Recent studies indicate that chimpanzees also show a population-level right-handed bias, although it is less strong than in humans.We used in vivo diffusion-weighted and T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the relationship between the corticospinal tract (CST) and handedness in 36 adult female chimpanzees. Chimpanzees exhibited a hemispheric bias in fractional anisotropy (FA, left>right) and mean diffusivity (MD, right>left) of the CST, and the left CST was centered more posteriorly than the right. Handedness correlated with central sulcus depth, but not with FA or MD.These anatomical results are qualitatively similar to those reported in humans, despite the differences in handedness. The existence of a left>right FA, right>left MD bias in the corticospinal tract that does not correlate with handedness, a result also reported in some human studies, suggests that at least some of the structural asymmetries of the corticospinal system are not exclusively related to laterality of hand preference

Evidence for electronic phase separation between orbital orderings in SmVO3

We report evidence for phase coexistence of orbital orderings of different symmetry in SmVO3 by high resolution x-ray powder diffraction. The phase coexistence is triggered by an antiferromagnetic ordering of the vanadium spins near 130 K, below an initial orbital ordering near 200 K. The phase coexistence is the result of the intermediate ionic size of samarium coupled to exchange striction at the vanadium spin ordering

Muon-spin-rotation studies of HoNi2B2C

Muon-spin-rotation and relaxation studies on single-crystalline HoNi2B2C show two magnetic phase transitions at T-N1=6.0 K and at T-N2=5.0 K. While the low-temperature phase displays a commensurate antiferromagnetic structure, the higher-temperature phase exhibits an incommensurately sinusoidal modulation of the spin amplitude. The nature of the incommensurate state, along with the causes of the reentrant superconductivity near 5 K, are discussed.This article is published as Le, L. P., R. H. Heffner, J. D. Thompson, D. E. MacLaughlin, G. J. Nieuwenhuys, A. Amato, R. Feyerherm et al. "Muon-spin-rotation studies of Ho Ni 2 B 2 C." Physical Review B 53, no. 2 (1996): R510. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.53.R510. Copyright 1996 American Physical Society. Posted with permission

Magnetism and superconductivity in heavy fermion superconductor CeCo (In0.97 Cd0.03)5

Zero field (ZF) and transverse field (TF) muon spin relaxation and rotation (μ SR) experiments have been carried out in the Cd-doped heavy fermion superconductor CeCoIn5 to investigate its superconducting state. The ZF-μ SR results in CeCo (In0.97 Cd0.03)5 revealed that no spontaneous magnetic field was induced below its superconducting transition temperature (Tc), indicating no evidence for time reversal symmetry breaking. The muon Knight shifts obtained from TF-μ SR measurements decrease significantly below Tc, consistent with a spin-singlet state as in the parent compound CeCoIn5, which is a d-wave superconductor. © 2008 Elsevier B.V

Nonlocal effect and dimensions of Cooper pairs measured by low-energy muons and polarized neutrons in type-I superconductors

status: publishe