Sex differences in own and other body perception

Own body perception, and differentiating and comparing one's body to another person's body, are common cognitive functions that have relevance for self-identity and social interactions. In several psychiatric conditions, including anorexia nervosa, body dysmorphic disorder, gender dysphoria, and autism spectrum disorder, self and own body perception, as well as aspects of social communication are disturbed. Despite most of these conditions having skewed prevalence sex ratios, little is known about whether the neural basis of own body perception differs between the sexes. We addressed this question by investigating brain activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a Body Perception task in 15 male and 15 female healthy participants. Participants viewed their own body, bodies of same-sex, or opposite-sex other people, and rated the degree that they appeared like themselves. We found that men and women did not differ in the pattern of brain activation during own body perception compared to a scrambled control image. However, when viewing images of other bodies of same-sex or opposite-sex, men showed significantly stronger activations in attention-related and reward-related brain regions, whereas women engaged stronger activations in striatal, medial-prefrontal, and insular cortices, when viewing the own body compared to other images of the opposite sex. It is possible that other body images, particularly of the opposite sex, may be of greater salience for men, whereas images of own bodies may be more salient for women. These observations provide tentative neurobiological correlates to why women may be more vulnerable than men to conditions involving own body perception.Pathways through Adolescenc

Neural correlates of individual differences in multimodal emotion recognition ability

Studies have reported substantial variability in emotion recognition ability (ERA) - an important social skill - but possible neural underpinnings for such individual differences are not well understood. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated neural responses during emotion recognition in young adults (N 1/4 49) who were selected for inclusion based on their performance (high or low) during previous testing of ERA. Participants were asked to judge brief video recordings in a forced-choice emotion recognition task, wherein stimuli were presented in visual, auditory and multimodal (audiovisual) blocks. Emotion recognition rates during brain scanning confirmed that individuals with high (vs low) ERA received higher accuracy for all presentation blocks. fMRIanalyses focused on key regions of interest (ROIs) involved in the processing of multimodal emotion expressions, based on previous meta-analyses. In neural response to emotional stimuli contrasted with neutral stimuli, individuals with high (vs low) ERA showed higher activation in the following ROIs during the multimodal condition: right middle superior temporal gyrus (mSTG), right posterior superior temporal sulcus (PSTS), and right inferior frontal cortex (IFC). Overall, results suggest that individual variability in ERA may be reflected across several stages of decisional processing, including extraction (mSTG), integration (PSTS) and evaluation (IFC) of emotional information. (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the C

Responses of Masonry Infill Walls Retrofitted with CFRP, Steel Wire Mesh and Laminated Bars to Blast Loadings

Many materials are available for retrofitting masonry infill walls to resist explosion loads. Selection of the most suitable material is essential for optimal performance and cost. In this study, a series of trials were conducted in a specially designed test setup to determine and compare the performances of 1/2-scale masonry infill walls retrofitted with carbon fibre-reinforced polymer strips, steel wire mesh and laminated steel bars, respectively, as well as an unreinforced masonry wall, subjected to blast loads. High fidelity FE models with detail modelling of brick, mortar and retrofitting materials are also developed in LS-DYNA to simulate the blast tests. The accuracy of the FE models in predicting the field blast tests is verified with the test data. The calibrated FE models are used to perform intensive numerical simulations to investigate the effectiveness of various retrofitting measures. The displacement response, failure mode, level of damage and fragmentation from both the field blasting tests and numerical simulations are compared and used to assess the effectiveness of the retrofitting measures. The results demonstrate that the URM retrofitted with steel mesh performed the best among the three retrofitting measures in blast loading resistance, the wall retrofitted with closely spaced CFRP strips performed slightly better than that with steel bars