Building in Hongkong. Field Excursion of the Department of Civil Engineering of the HTWG Konstanz 2012

Hongkong steht als Welthandelsmetropole auch für Superlative des Bauens. Dies gilt für die in britischer Zeit errichteten Bauten, aber auch für die nach der Übergabe an China entstandenen Hochhäuser und Brückenbauwerke. Der Exkursionsbericht der Fakultät Bauingenieurwesen der HTWG Konstanz gibt einen Eindruck von diesen Aktivitäten. Er schildert Brücken- und Hochhausbauten, Tunnelbaustellen und die Baustelle eines Klärschlammverbrennungswerks, die während einer Exkursionswoche im September 2012 besichtigt wurden. Darüber hinaus gibt er einen Einblick in die wirtschaftliche Dynamik der Stadt.As a global metropolis Hongkong also stands for outstanding building activities. The report depicts the impressions during a student field excursion of the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the University of Applied Sciences Konstanz, Germany, to construction sites in Hongkong in September 2012

Corona Monitoring Nationwide (RKI-SOEP-2): Seroepidemiological Study on the Spread of SARS-CoV-2 Across Germany

SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus, spread across Germany within just a short period of time. Seroepidemiological studies are able to estimate the proportion of the population with antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 infection (seroprevalence) as well as the level of undetected infections, which are not captured in official figures. In the seroepidemiological study Corona Monitoring Nationwide (RKI-SOEP-2), biospecimens and interview data were collected in a nationwide population-based subsample of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). By using laboratory-analyzed blood samples to detect antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we were able to identify a history of vaccination or infection in study participants. By combining these results with survey data, we were able to identify groups within the population that are at increased risk of infection. By linking the RKI-SOEP-2 survey data with data from other waves of the SOEP survey, we will be able to examine the medium- to long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including effects of long COVID, in diverse areas of life. Furthermore, the data provide insight into the population’s willingness to be vaccinated as well as related attitudes and conditions. In sum, the RKI-SOEP-2 survey data offer a better understanding of the scope of the epidemic in Germany and can help in identifying target groups for infection control in the present and future pandemics.Peer Reviewe

Age-Related Response Bias in the Decoding of Sad Facial Expressions

Fölster M, Hess U, Hühnel I, Werheid K. Age-Related Response Bias in the Decoding of Sad Facial Expressions. Behavioral Sciences. 2015;5(4):443-460.Recent studies have found that age is negatively associated with the accuracy of decoding emotional facial expressions; this effect of age was found for actors as well as for raters. Given that motivational differences and stereotypes may bias the attribution of emotion, the aim of the present study was to explore whether these age effects are due to response bias, that is, the unbalanced use of response categories. Thirty younger raters (19-30 years) and thirty older raters (65-81 years) viewed video clips of younger and older actors representing the same age ranges, and decoded their facial expressions. We computed both raw hit rates and bias-corrected hit rates to assess the influence of potential age-related response bias on decoding accuracy. Whereas raw hit rates indicated significant effects of both the actors' and the raters' ages on decoding accuracy for sadness, these age effects were no longer significant when response bias was corrected. Our results suggest that age effects on the accuracy of decoding facial expressions may be due, at least in part, to age-related response bias

Empathic reactions of younger and older adults: No age related decline in affective responding

Hühnel I, Fölster M, Werheid K, Hess U. Empathic reactions of younger and older adults: No age related decline in affective responding. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2014;50:136-143.Empathy is an important skill in all stages of life. However, previous research suggests that cognitive empathy, i.e. the ability to accurately infer another person's feelings, is reduced for older adults. Here, we suggested that investigating affective empathy in addition to cognitive empathy could provide a more complete picture of how older adults differ from younger adults in their ability to empathize with others. For this, we presented videos of spontaneous facial expressions portraying happiness, anger, sadness and disgust to 39 younger and 39 older adults. Affective responding was measured via facial mimicry and cognitive empathy was measured via decoding accuracy. We did not expect and did not find evidence for impaired affective responding to emotion- al expressions in old age; however, cognitive empathy was reduced for happiness and sadness. Thus, empathic reactions of older adults might not be as affected as findings based only on decoding accuracy may suggest

The words of the regulatory code are arranged in a variable manner in highly conserved enhancers.

International audienceThe cis-regulatory regions of many developmental regulators and transcription factors are believed to be highly conserved in the genomes of vertebrate species, suggesting specific regulatory mechanisms for these gene classes. We functionally characterized five notochord enhancers, whose sequence is highly conserved, and systematically mutated two of them. Two subregions were identified to be essential for expression in the notochord of the zebrafish embryo. Synthetic enhancers containing the two essential regions in front of a TATA-box drive expression in the notochord while concatemerization of the subregions alone is not sufficient, indicating that the combination of the two sequence elements is required for notochord expression. Both regions are present in the five functionally characterized notochord enhancers. However, the position, the distance and relative orientation of the two sequence motifs can vary substantially within the enhancer sequences. This suggests that the regulatory grammar itself does not dictate the high evolutionary conservation between these orthologous cis-regulatory sequences. Rather, it represents a less well-conserved layer of sequence organization within these sequences