Problems with Facial Mimicry Might Contribute to Emotion Recognition Impairment in Parkinson\u27s Disease

Difficulty with emotion recognition is increasingly being recognized as a symptom of Parkinson\u27s disease. Most research into this area contends that progressive cognitive decline accompanying the disease is to be blamed. However, facial mimicry (i.e., the involuntary congruent activation of facial expression muscles upon viewing a particular facial expression) might also play a role and has been relatively understudied in this clinical population. In healthy participants, facial mimicry has been shown to improve recognition of observed emotions, a phenomenon described by embodied simulation theory. Due to motor disturbances, Parkinson\u27s disease patients frequently show reduced emotional expressiveness, which translates into reduced mimicry. Therefore, it is likely that facial mimicry problems in Parkinson\u27s disease contribute at least partly to the emotional recognition deficits that these patients experience and might greatly influence their social cognition abilities and quality of life. The present review aims to highlight the need for further inquiry into the motor mechanisms behind emotional recognition in Parkinson\u27s disease by synthesizing behavioural, physiological, and neuroanatomical evidence

A Fredholm Determinant Representation in ASEP

In previous work the authors found integral formulas for probabilities in the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) on the integer lattice. The dynamics are uniquely determined once the initial state is specified. In this note we restrict our attention to the case of step initial condition with particles at the positive integers, and consider the distribution function for the m'th particle from the left. In the previous work an infinite series of multiple integrals was derived for this distribution. In this note we show that the series can be summed to give a single integral whose integrand involves a Fredholm determinant. We use this determinant representation to derive (non-rigorously, at this writing) a scaling limit.Comment: 12 Pages. Version 3 includes a scaling conjectur

Formulas for ASEP with Two-Sided Bernoulli Initial Condition

For the asymmetric simple exclusion process on the integer lattice with two-sided Bernoulli initial condition, we derive exact formulas for the following quantities: (1) the probability that site x is occupied at time t; (2) a correlation function, the probability that site 0 is occupied at time 0 and site x is occupied at time t; (3) the distribution function for the total flux across 0 at time t and its exponential generating function.Comment: 18 page

Beetroot Juice Does Not Enhance Altitude Running Performance in Well-Trained Athletes

We hypothesized that acute dietary nitrate (NO3-) provided as concentrated beetroot juice supplement would improve endurance running performance of well-trained runners in normobaric hypoxia. Ten male runners (mean (SD): sea level V�O2max 66 (7) mL.kg^-1.min^-1, 10 km personal best 36 (2) min) completed incremental exercise to exhaustion at 4000 m and a 10 km treadmill time trial at 2500 m simulated altitude on separate days, after supplementation with ~7 mmol NO3- and a placebo, 2.5 h before exercise. Oxygen cost, arterial oxygen saturation, heart rate and ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) were determined during the incremental exercise test. Differences between treatments were determined using means [95% confidence intervals], paired sample t-tests and a probability of individual response analysis. NO3- supplementation increased plasma [nitrite] (NO3-, 473 (226) nM vs. placebo, 61 (37) nM, P < 0.001) but did not alter time to exhaustion during the incremental test (NO3-, 402 (80) s vs. placebo 393 (62) s, P = 0.5) or time to complete the 10 km time trial (NO3-, 2862 (233) s vs. placebo, 2874 (265) s, P = 0.6). Further, no practically meaningful beneficial effect on time trial performance was observed as the 11 [-60 to 38] s improvement was less than the a priori determined minimum important difference (51 s), and only three runners experienced a ´likely, probable´ performance improvement. NO3- also did not alter oxygen cost, arterial oxygen saturation, heart rate or RPE. Acute dietary NO3- supplementation did not consistently enhance running performance of well-trained athletes in normobaric hypoxia

Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations near the metal-insulator transition in a two-dimensional electron system in silicon

We have studied Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in a two-dimensional electron system in silicon at low electron densities. Near the metal-insulator transition, only "spin" minima of the resistance at Landau-level filling factors 2, 6, 10, and 14 are seen, while the "cyclotron" minima at filling factors 4, 8, and 12 disappear. A simple explanation of the observed behavior requires a giant enhancement of the spin splitting near the metal-insulator transition.Comment: 4 pages, postscript figures include

Social Symptoms of Parkinson\u27s Disease

© 2020 Margaret T. M. Prenger et al. Parkinson\u27s disease (PD) is typically well recognized by its characteristic motor symptoms (e.g., bradykinesia, rigidity, and tremor). The cognitive symptoms of PD are increasingly being acknowledged by clinicians and researchers alike. However, PD also involves a host of emotional and communicative changes which can cause major disruptions to social functioning. These incude problems producing emotional facial expressions (i.e., facial masking) and emotional speech (i.e., dysarthria), as well as difficulties recognizing the verbal and nonverbal emotional cues of others. These social symptoms of PD can result in severe negative social consequences, including stigma, dehumanization, and loneliness, which might affect quality of life to an even greater extent than more well-recognized motor or cognitive symptoms. It is, therefore, imperative that researchers and clinicans become aware of these potential social symptoms and their negative effects, in order to properly investigate and manage the socioemotional aspects of PD. This narrative review provides an examination of the current research surrounding some of the most common social symptoms of PD and their related social consequences and argues that proactively and adequately addressing these issues might improve disease outcomes

A new class of integrable diffusion-reaction processes

We consider a process in which there are two types of particles, A and B, on an infinite one-dimensional lattice. The particles hop to their adjacent sites, like the totally asymmetric exclusion process (ASEP), and have also the following interactions: A+B -> B+B and B+A -> B+B, all occur with equal rate. We study this process by imposing four boundary conditions on ASEP master equation. It is shown that this model is integrable, in the sense that its N-particle S-matrix is factorized into a product of two-particle S-matrices and, more importantly, the two-particle S-matrix satisfy quantum Yang-Baxter equation. Using coordinate Bethe-ansatz, the N-particle wavefunctions and the two-particle conditional probabilities are found exactly. Further, by imposing four reasonable physical conditions on two-species diffusion-reaction processes (where the most important ones are the equality of the reaction rates and the conservation of the number of particles in each reaction), we show that among the 4096 types of the interactions which have these properties and can be modeled by a master equation and an appropriate set of boundary conditions, there are only 28 independent interactions which are integrable. We find all these interactions and also their corresponding wave functions. Some of these may be new solutions of quantum Yang-Baxter equation.Comment: LaTex,16 pages, some typos are corrected, will be appeared in Phys. Rev. E (2000

Rising minimum daily flows in northern Eurasian rivers: A growing influence of groundwater in the high-latitude hydrologic cycle

A first analysis of new daily discharge data for 111 northern rivers from 1936-1999 and 1958-1989 fmds an overall pattern of increasing minimum daily flows (or "low flows") throughout Russia. These increases are generally more abundant than are increases in mean flow and appear to drive much of the overall rise in mean flow observed here and in previous studies. Minimum flow decreases have also occurred but are less abundant. The minimum flow increases are found in summer as well as winter and in nonpermafrost as well as permafrost terrain. No robust spatial contrasts are found between the European Russia, Ob', Yenisey, and Lena/eastern Siberia sectors. A subset of 12 unusually long discharge records from 1935-2002, concentrated in south central Russia, suggests that recent minimum flow increases since ∼1985 are largely unprecedented in the instrumental record, at least for this small group of stations. If minimum flows are presumed sensitive to groundwater and unsaturated zone inputs to river discharge, then the data suggest a broad-scale mobilization of such water sources in the late 20th century. We speculate that reduced intensity of seasonal ground freezing, together with precipitation increases, might drive much of the well documented but poorly understood increases in river discharge to the Arctic Ocean

Thermodynamic magnetization of a strongly correlated two-dimensional electron system

We measure thermodynamic magnetization of a low-disordered, strongly correlated two-dimensional electron system in silicon. Pauli spin susceptibility is observed to grow critically at low electron densities - behavior that is characteristic of the existence of a phase transition. A new, parameter-free method is used to directly determine the spectrum characteristics (Lande g-factor and the cyclotron mass) when the Fermi level lies outside the spectral gaps and the inter-level interactions between quasiparticles are avoided. It turns out that, unlike in the Stoner scenario, the critical growth of the spin susceptibility originates from the dramatic enhancement of the effective mass, while the enhancement of the g-factor is weak and practically independent of the electron density.Comment: As publishe

Generalized Green Functions and current correlations in the TASEP

We study correlation functions of the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) in discrete time with backward sequential update. We prove a determinantal formula for the generalized Green function which describes transitions between positions of particles at different individual time moments. In particular, the generalized Green function defines a probability measure at staircase lines on the space-time plane. The marginals of this measure are the TASEP correlation functions in the space-time region not covered by the standard Green function approach. As an example, we calculate the current correlation function that is the joint probability distribution of times taken by selected particles to travel given distance. An asymptotic analysis shows that current fluctuations converge to the ${Airy}_2$ process.Comment: 46 pages, 3 figure