To Fear is to Gain? The Role of Fear Recognition in Risky Decision Making in TBI Patients and Healthy Controls

Fear is an important emotional reaction that guides decision making in situations of ambiguity or uncertainty. Both recognition of facial expressions of fear and decision making ability can be impaired after traumatic brain injury (TBI), in particular when the frontal lobe is damaged. So far, it has not been investigated how recognition of fear influences risk behavior in healthy subjects and TBI patients. The ability to recognize fear is thought to be related to the ability to experience fear and to use it as a warning signal to guide decision making. We hypothesized that a better ability to recognize fear would be related to a better regulation of risk behavior, with healthy controls outperforming TBI patients. To investigate this, 59 healthy subjects and 49 TBI patients were assessed with a test for emotion recognition (Facial Expression of Emotion: Stimuli and Tests) and a gambling task (Iowa Gambling Task (IGT)). The results showed that, regardless of post traumatic amnesia duration or the presence of frontal lesions, patients were more impaired than healthy controls on both fear recognition and decision making. In both groups, a significant relationship was found between better fear recognition, the development of an advantageous strategy across the IGT and less risk behavior in the last blocks of the IGT. Educational level moderated this relationship in the final block of the IGT. This study has important clinical implications, indicating that impaired decision making and risk behavior after TBI can be preceded by deficits in the processing of fear

A genome-wide meta-analysis yields 46 new loci associating with biomarkers of iron homeostasis

Iron is essential for many biological functions and iron deficiency and overload have major health implications. We performed a meta-analysis of three genome-wide association studies from Iceland, the UK and Denmark of blood levels of ferritin (N = 246,139), total iron binding capacity (N = 135,430), iron (N = 163,511) and transferrin saturation (N = 131,471). We found 62 independent sequence variants associating with iron homeostasis parameters at 56 loci, including 46 novel loci. Variants at DUOX2, F5, SLC11A2 and TMPRSS6 associate with iron deficiency anemia, while variants at TF, HFE, TFR2 and TMPRSS6 associate with iron overload. A HBS1L-MYB intergenic region variant associates both with increased risk of iron overload and reduced risk of iron deficiency anemia. The DUOX2 missense variant is present in 14% of the population, associates with all iron homeostasis biomarkers, and increases the risk of iron deficiency anemia by 29%. The associations implicate proteins contributing to the main physiological processes involved in iron homeostasis: iron sensing and storage, inflammation, absorption of iron from the gut, iron recycling, erythropoiesis and bleeding/menstruation

Dimension intertrial and cueing effects in localization: support for pre-attentively weighted one-route models of saliency

There are several alternative accounts of dimensional intertrial and cueing effects in singleton feature search tasks. Some accounts assume that these effects arise at post-selective processing stages; dual-route accounts assume them to be perceptual in nature, but coming into play only in non-spatial tasks (e.g., detection but not localization). By contrast, the Dimension Weighting Account (DWA) assumes dimensional effects to arise at pre-attentive processing stages of spatial as well as non-spatial tasks. The data available are ambiguous, permitting no clear-cut choice among these accounts. Therefore, the present study examined for early effects of dimensional weighting in a spatial task, the presence of which is only predicted by the DWA and not by post-selective or dual-route accounts. Salience is known to saturate for high feature contrast and long presentation times. Consequently, with lower bottom-up salience that still permits efficient search, dimensional weights would produce a greater modulation-if present at all. Thus, we examined localization accuracy under brief-presentation conditions in Experiment 1, and localization speed under conditions of low versus high feature contrast in Experiment 2. Both experiments revealed significant dimension intertrial and cueing effects. This strongly argues against dual-route accounts and strengthens evidence for a pre-attentive origin of these effects