Characterization of microsatellite markers for Moricandia moricandioides (Brassicaceae) and related species

PREMISE OF THE STUDY: Polymorphic microsatellite markers were developed to study population structure and mating patterns of the monocarpic herb Moricandia moricandioides (Brassicaceae). METHODS AND RESULTS: Illumina MiSeq sequencing was used to develop a panel of 15 polymorphic microsatellite markers that were tested across 77 individuals from three populations on the Iberian Peninsula. All markers were polymorphic in at least two studied populations, and the number of alleles ranged from one to 11 per locus. The levels of observed and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.000 to 1.000 and from 0.153 to 0.865, respectively. Nine and 11 loci were successfully amplified in the congeneric species M. arvensis and M. foetida, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The 15 microsatellite markers will be useful for population genetic studies of the genus Moricandia. These markers will serve as a useful tool for exploring population structure and mating patterns of M. moricandioides.This work received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (Marie Skłodowska-Curie No. 655653), Fundación BBVA (PR17-ECO- 0021), and the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (CGL2017-86626- C2- 1- P)

Influence of emotional intelligence on performance in an emotionally Laden Cognitive Task: an ERP Study.

A higher level of emotional intelligence (EI), understood as a greater ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions, is associated with an increase in performance on emotionally laden cognitive tasks. The main objective of this research was to study the neural basis underlying the execution of an emotional cognitive control task (GoNogo) as a function of ability EI. Forty-four participants were divided into two groups depending on EI level (High EI vs. Low EI). The participants’ task consisted of an emotional face GoNogo task, in which happy, fear and neutral facial expressions were the go and no go stimulus. Results showed a larger N170 and smaller N2 amplitude for the low EI group than for the high EI one. Greater levels of cognitive control were associated to participants with high EI. Our findings show the importance of studying emotion and cognition interaction to explain our behavior and performance. This work was partially supported by the project Innovation and Development Agency of Andalusia, Spain (SEJ-07325) to Pablo Fernández-Berrocal. Alberto Megías is supported by a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish MINECO (FJCI-2015-25600).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Emotional intelligence and hot and cool working memory capacity

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage our emotions and the emotions of others. EI, measured through performance-based ability models, seems to favour performance on hot tasks. The aim of the present study is to analyse the relationship between EI, measured through its three main models, and performance on a hot (emotional) and cool (non-emotional) working memory task. 203 undergraduate students of psychology took part in the experiment. They completed an EI test for each of its three main models (performance-based ability model, self-report ability model and self-report mixed model) and a hot and cool working memory task. We found a better performance for higher EI participants, measured through the performance-based ability model instrument (but not with self-report instruments), in the hot working memory task. This result was obtained for the managing branch of the EI instrument. Similar evidence was not found when using the cool working memory task. Our study takes a step forward in the conceptualization of the EI construct within the domain of cognitive processes. They show that, at least when using hot stimuli, the managing branch of the performance-based ability model of EI is a better determinant measure for the working memory capacity than the self-report models.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in mammals

Same-sex sexual behaviour has attracted the attention of many scientists working in disparate areas, from sociology and psychology to behavioural and evolutionary biology. Since it does not contribute directly to reproduction, same-sex sexual behaviour is considered an evolutionary conundrum. Here, using phylogenetic analyses, we explore the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour inmammals. According to currently available data, this behaviour is not randomly distributed across mammal lineages, but tends to be particularly prevalent in some clades, especially primates. Ancestral reconstruction suggests that same-sex sexual behaviour may have evolvedmultiple times,with its appearance being a recent phenomenon in most mammalian lineages. Our phylogenetically informed analyses testing for associations between same-sex sexual behaviour and other species characteristics suggest that it may play an adaptive role in maintaining social relationships and mitigating conflict.Project QUAL21-011 granted by the Consejería de Universidad, Investigación e Innovación of the Junta de Andalucí

Are psychopaths emotionally intelligent?

Psychopathy is a serious personality disorder, characterized by proneness to low anxiety, egocentricity, failure to form close emotional bonds, superficial charm and dishonesty, that has very negative consequences for society as aggression, delinquency and even crime. Therefore, its control and treatment are of great importance. Psychopathy has been related to important emotional deficits as such as a lack of impulse, low empathy and deficits in moral expressions. These findings have led to a growing interest in exploring if psychopathic traits are associated with emotional intelligence (EI) or to the ability to perceive, use, understand, and regulate emotions in one’s self and others. However, the literature exploring this association has revealed conflicting results. The aim of the present study was to provide a reliable estimate of the relationship between psychopathy traits and EI (measured as performance-based ability) through meta-analysis. A quantitative and systematic review of the literature using Scopus, Medline, Pubmed, and PsicINFO and for both Spanish and English studies that included measures of EI and psychopathy, showed a total of 13 studies meeting inclusion criteria with a combined sample of 2401 participants. The meta-analysis revealed a significant negative relationship between both constructs, showing that higher psychopathic trait scores are related to lower EI levels. We propose several future research lines to clarify possible gaps and ambiguities in the current literature and a set of interesting clinical implications for the prevention, evaluation, and treatment of psychopathy by including EI factors in traditional models of psychopathy.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Fair and Private Data Preprocessing through Microaggregation

Privacy protection for personal data and fairness in automated decisions are fundamental requirements for responsible Machine Learning. Both may be enforced through data preprocessing and share a common target: data should remain useful for a task, while becoming uninformative of the sensitive information. The intrinsic connection between privacy and fairness implies that modifications performed to guarantee one of these goals, may have an effect on the other, e.g., hiding a sensitive attribute from a classification algorithm might prevent a biased decision rule having such attribute as a criterion. This work resides at the intersection of algorithmic fairness and privacy. We show how the two goals are compatible, and may be simultaneously achieved, with a small loss in predictive performance. Our results are competitive with both state-of-the-art fairness correcting algorithms and hybrid privacy-fairness methods. Experiments were performed on three widely used benchmark datasets: Adult Income, COMPAS, and German Credit

Altered rainfall patterns reduce plant fitness and disrupt interactions between below- and aboveground insect herbivores

We would like to thank Angel Caravantes Mart ınez for his help in the field and the laboratory, and Karin Djendouci for her assistance in glucosinolate extraction and identification. The authors thank Mark Lineham for revising the EnglishEvidence is accumulating of the disruptive effects of climate change on species interactions. However, little is known about how changes in climate patterns, such as temporal shifts in rainfall events, will affect multitrophic interactions. Here, we investigated the effects of changes in rainfall patterns on the interactions between root herbivores, a plant, and its associated aboveground insects in a semiarid region by experimentally manipulating in the field rainfall intensity and frequency. We found that a shift in rainfall severely constrained biomass acquisition and flowering of the plant Moricandia moricandioides, resulting in fitness reduction. Importantly, enhanced rainfall affected the interactions between below- and some aboveground herbivores, disrupting the positive effects of root herbivores on chewing insects. The shifts in precipitation had also plant-mediated consequences for planthoppers, the dominant sapsuckers in our study system. A combination of mechanisms involving biomass acquisition and plant defenses seemed to be responsible for the different responses of insects and their interactions with the plant. This study provides evidence that altered rainfall patterns due to climate change affect not only trophic groups differentially but also their interactions.Spanish Government CGL2011-24840 CGL2015-71634-P BBVA-P17_ECO_0021 BES-2012-05957

Effects of Post-Fire Deadwood Management on Soil Macroarthropod Communities

Dead wood comprises a vast amount of biological legacies that set the scene for ecological regeneration after wildfires, yet its removal is the most frequent management strategy worldwide. Soil-dwelling organisms are conspicuous, and they provide essential ecosystem functions, but their possible affection by different post-fire management strategies has so far been neglected. We analyzed the abundance, richness, and composition of belowground macroarthropod communities under two contrasting dead-wood management regimes after a large wildfire in the Sierra Nevada Natural and National Park (Southeast Spain). Two plots at different elevation were established, each containing three replicates of two experimental treatments: partial cut, where trees were cut and their branches lopped off and left over the ground, and salvage logging, where all the trees were cut, logs were piled, branches were mechanically masticated, and slash was spread on the ground. Ten years after the application of the treatments, soil cores were extracted from two types of microhabitat created by these treatments: bare-soil (in both treatments) and under-logs (in the partial cut treatment only). Soil macroarthropod assemblages were dominated by Hemiptera and Hymenoptera (mostly ants) and were more abundant and richer in the lowest plot. The differences between dead-wood treatments were most evident at the scale of management interventions: abundance and richness were lowest after salvage logging, even under similar microhabitats (bare-soil). However, there were no significant differences between microhabitat types on abundance and richness within the partial cut treatment. Higher abundance and richness in the partial cut treatment likely resulted from higher resource availability and higher plant diversity after natural regeneration.This study was supported by Project 10/2005 from the Organismo Autónomo de Parques Nacionales (Spanish Government), CGL2008–01671 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and P12-RNM-2705 from Junta de Andalucía. Programa Nacional de incentivo a investigadores (PRONII) and Programa de vinculación de científicos y tecnólogos from Comisión Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Paraguay). A.B.L. acknowledges a postdoctoral grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. C.R.M-G. had a Ph.D. grant from the National University of Asunción (Paraguay) and Carolina Foundation (Spain)

Explicit expressions for elastic constants of osteoporotic lamellar tissue and damage assessment using Hashin failure criterion

[EN] In this work, we have derived explicit expressions to estimate the orthotropic elastic constants of lamellar tissue as a function of the porosity at tissue level (microporosity) and the bone mineral density. Our results reveal that the terms of the main diagonal of the stiffness matrix fit an exponential equation, while the cross terms of the matrix fit a polynomial expression. Regarding to bone damage, failure onset assessed by Hashin criterion is mainly due to matrix elements failure. Finally, a linear relationship was found between bone mineral density (BMD) and cancellous bone stiffness at the macro scale.The authors acknowledge the Generalitat Valenciana for the financial support received through Plan FDGENT 2018. The authors also ackowledge the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacin and the ERDF-FEDER programme through the project DPI2017-89197-C2-2-R.Megías Díaz, R.; Belda González, R.; Vercher Martínez, A.; Giner Maravilla, E. (2022). Explicit expressions for elastic constants of osteoporotic lamellar tissue and damage assessment using Hashin failure criterion. En Proceedings of the YIC 2021 - VI ECCOMAS Young Investigators Conference. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 150-158. https://doi.org/10.4995/YIC2021.2021.12442OCS15015

The role of phenotypic plasticity in shaping ecological networks

Plasticity-mediated changes in interaction dynamics and structure may scale up and affect the ecological network in which the plastic species are embedded. Despite their potential relevance for understanding the effects of plasticity on ecological communities, these effects have seldom been analysed. We argue here that, by boosting the magnitude of intra-individual phenotypic variation, plasticity may have three possible direct effects on the interactions that the plastic species maintains with other species in the community: may expand the interaction niche, may cause a shift from one interaction niche to another or may even cause the colonization of a new niche. The combined action of these three factors can scale to the community level and eventually expresses itself as a modification in the topology and functionality of the entire ecological network. We propose that this causal pathway can be more widespread than previously thought and may explain how interaction niches evolve quickly in response to rapid changes in environmental conditions. The implication of this idea is not solely eco-evolutionary but may also help to understand how ecological interactions rewire and evolve in response to global changeJunta de Andalucía, Grant/Award Number: P18-FR- 3641Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and UniversitiesGrant/Award Number: PID2020-116222GB- 100PID2021-126456N