557 research outputs found
The Effects of Body Posture on Emotion Perception: A Developmental and Theoretical Analysis
Previously, studies investigating emotional face perception - regardless of
whether they involved adults or children - presented participants with static photos of
faces in isolation. In the natural world, faces are rarely encountered in isolation. In the
few studies that have presented faces in context, the perception of emotional facial
expressions is altered when paired with an incongruent context. For both adults and 8-
year-old children, reaction times increase and accuracy decreases when facial expressions are presented in an incongruent context depicting a similar emotion (e.g., sad face on a fear body) compared to when presented in a congruent context (e.g., sad face on a sad body; Meeren, van Heijnsbergen, & de Gelder, 2005; Mondloch, 2012). This effect is called a congruency effect and does not exist for dissimilar emotions (e.g., happy and sad; Mondloch, 2012). Two models characterize similarity between emotional
expressions differently; the emotional seed model bases similarity on physical features,
whereas the dimensional model bases similarity on underlying dimensions of valence an .
arousal. Study 1 investigated the emergence of an adult-like pattern of congruency effects
in pre-school aged children. Using a child-friendly sorting task, we identified the
youngest age at which children could accurately sort isolated facial expressions and body
postures and then measured whether an incongruent context disrupted the perception of
emotional facial expressions. Six-year-old children showed congruency effects for
sad/fear but 4-year-old children did not for sad/happy. This pattern of congruency effects
is consistent with both models and indicates that an adult-like pattern exists at the
youngest age children can reliably sort emotional expressions in isolation. In Study 2, we compared the two models to determine their predictive abilities. The two models make different predictions about the size of congruency effects for three emotions: sad, anger, and fear. The emotional seed model predicts larger congruency effects when sad is paired with either anger or fear compared to when anger and fear are paired with each other. The dimensional model predicts larger congruency effects when anger and fear are paired together compared to when either is paired with sad. In both a speeded and unspeeded task the results failed to support either model, but the pattern of results indicated fearful bodies have a special effect. Fearful bodies reduced accuracy, increased reaction times more than any other posture, and shifted the pattern of errors. To determine whether the results were specific to bodies, we ran the reverse task to determine if faces could disrupt the perception of body postures. This experiment did not
produce congruency effects, meaning faces do not influence the perception of body
postures. In the final experiment, participants performed a flanker task to determine
whether the effect of fearful bodies was specific to faces or whether fearful bodies would
also produce a larger effect in an unrelated task in which faces were absent. Reaction
times did not differ across trials, meaning fearful bodies' large effect is specific to
situations with faces.
Collectively, these studies provide novel insights, both developmentally and
theoretically, into how emotional faces are perceived in context
The environmental security debate and its significance for climate change
Policymakers, military strategists and academics all increasingly hail climate change as a security issue. This article revisits the (comparatively) long-standing âenvironmental security debateâ and asks what lessons that earlier debate holds for the push towards making climate change a security issue. Two important claims are made. First, the emerging climate security debate is in many ways a re-run of the earlier dispute. It features many of the same proponents and many of the same disagreements. These disagreements concern, amongst other things, the nature of the threat, the referent object of security and the appropriate policy responses. Second, given its many different interpretations, from an environmentalist perspective, securitisation of the climate is not necessarily a positive development
Grid-Enabling a Vibroacoustic Analysis Application
This paper describes the process of grid-enabling a vibroacoustic analysis application using the Globus Toolkit 3.2.1. This is the first step in a project intended to grid-enable a suite of tools being developed as a service-oriented architecture for spacecraft telemetry analysis. Many of the applications in the suite are compute intensive and would benefit from significantly improved performance. In this paper we show the advantage of using Globus to grid-enable a single tool in a vibroacoustic analysis flow, with the result that using as few as eleven nodes, that toolâs runtime improved by a factor of eight. While communication overhead does affect performance, these results also indicate that coordinated communication and execution scheduling as part of workflow management would be able to significantly improve overall efficiency. In the larger context, our experience also shows that the service-oriented architecture approach, using grid computing tools, can provide a more flexible system design, in addition to improved performance and increased utilization of resources. We also provide some lessons learned in using the Globus Toolkit
Factors associated with family planning status and voluntary childlessness in women of childbearing age with inflammatory bowel diseases
© 2023 The Authors. Published by MDPI. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisherâs website: https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm12134267Background: Women with Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) have fewer children and stay childless more often. The decision-making process around family planning choices remains incompletely understood. Methods: We examined family status in women who at recruitment to the UK IBD Bioresource had not had children yet via an electronic survey. The primary outcome was the proportion of women with voluntary childlessness. Secondary outcomes were factors associated with family planning status. Results: Of 326 responders, 10.7% had either given birth, were currently pregnant or were currently trying to conceive; 12.6% were planning to conceive within 12 months; 54.4% were contemplating conception in the distant future (vague plans); and 22.3% were voluntarily childless. Factors associated with family planning status fell into three areas: general background (age, household income, perceived support to raise a child), relationship status (sexual orientation, being single, not cohabiting, perception of being âin the right relationship to raise a childâ, perception of a good sex life) and the expression of having a child as a goal in life. On binary logistics regression analysis with voluntary childlessness versus vague family plans as the outcomes of choice, having a household income of <ÂŁ30,000 (p = 0.046), not seeing a child as a life goal (p < 0.0001) and identifying as lesbian or bisexual (p = 0.047) were independent predictors of voluntary childlessness. Conclusions: Clinicians should consider sexual orientation, income, younger age, current relationship and lack of expression of having a child as a life goal as important factors for family planning when providing care. Pre-pregnancy advice should be made widely available for women with IBD
Variation in performance on common content items at UK medical schools
Background: Due to differing assessment systems across UK medical schools, making meaningful cross-school comparisons on undergraduate studentsâ performance in knowledge tests is difficult. Ahead of the introduction of a national licensing assessment in the UK, we evaluate schoolsâ performances on a shared pool of âcommon contentâ knowledge test items to compare candidates at different schools and evaluate whether they would pass under different standard setting regimes. Such information can then help develop a cross-school consensus on standard setting shared content. Methods: We undertook a cross-sectional study in the academic sessions 2016-17 and 2017-18. Sixty âbest of fiveâ multiple choice âcommon contentâ items were delivered each year, with five used in both years. In 2016-17 30 (of 31 eligible) medical schools undertook a mean of 52.6 items with 7,177 participants. In 2017-18 the same 30 medical schools undertook a mean of 52.8 items with 7,165 participants, creating a full sample of 14,342 medical students sitting common content prior to graduation. Using mean scores, we compared performance across items and carried out a âlike-for-likeâ comparison of schools who used the same set of items then modelled the impact of different passing standards on these schools. Results: Schools varied substantially on candidate total score. Schools differed in their performance with large (Cohenâs d around 1) effects. A passing standard that would see 5 % of candidates at high scoring schools fail left low-scoring schools with fail rates of up to 40 %, whereas a passing standard that would see 5 % of candidates at low scoring schools fail would see virtually no candidates from high scoring schools fail. Conclusions: Candidates at different schools exhibited significant differences in scores in two separate sittings. Performance varied by enough that standards that produce realistic fail rates in one medical school may produce substantially different pass rates in other medical schools â despite identical content and the candidates being governed by the same regulator. Regardless of which hypothetical standards are âcorrectâ as judged by experts, large institutional differences in pass rates must be explored and understood by medical educators before shared standards are applied. The study results can assist cross-school groups in developing a consensus on standard setting future licensing assessment
Environmental changes and violent conflict
This letter reviews the scientific literature on whether and how environmental changes affect the risk of violent conflict. The available evidence from qualitative case studies indicates that environmental stress can contribute to violent conflict in some specific cases. Results from quantitative large-N studies, however, strongly suggest that we should be careful in drawing general conclusions. Those large-N studies that we regard as the most sophisticated ones obtain results that are not robust to alternative model specifications and, thus, have been debated. This suggests that environmental changes may, under specific circumstances, increase the risk of violent conflict, but not necessarily in a systematic way and unconditionally. Hence there is, to date, no scientific consensus on the impact of environmental changes on violent conflict. This letter also highlights the most important challenges for further research on the subject. One of the key issues is that the effects of environmental changes on violent conflict are likely to be contingent on a set of economic and political conditions that determine adaptation capacity. In the authors' view, the most important indirect effects are likely to lead from environmental changes via economic performance and migration to violent conflict. © 2012 IOP Publishing Ltd
A Large, Uniform Sample of X-ray Emitting AGN from the ROSAT All-Sky and Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: the Data Release 5 Sample
We describe further results of a program aimed to yield ~10^4 fully
characterized optical identifications of ROSAT X-ray sources. Our program
employs X-ray data from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS), and both optical
imaging and spectroscopic data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
RASS/SDSS data from 5740 deg^2 of sky spectroscopically covered in SDSS Data
Release 5 (DR5) provide an expanded catalog of 7000 confirmed quasars and other
AGN that are probable RASS identifications. Again in our expanded catalog, the
identifications as X-ray sources are statistically secure, with only a few
percent of the SDSS AGN likely to be randomly superposed on unrelated RASS
X-ray sources. Most identifications continue to be quasars and Seyfert 1s with
15<m<21 and 0.01<z<4; but the total sample size has grown to include very
substantial numbers of even quite rare AGN, e.g., now including several
hundreds of candidate X-ray emitting BL Lacs and narrow-line Seyfert 1
galaxies. In addition to exploring rare subpopulations, such a large total
sample may be useful when considering correlations between the X-ray and the
optical, and may also serve as a resource list from which to select the "best"
object (e.g., X-ray brightest AGN of a certain subclass, at a preferred
redshift or luminosity) for follow-on X-ray spectral or alternate detailed
studies.Comment: Accepted for publication in AJ; 32 pages, including 11 figures, and 6
example table
TREBUCHET: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Accelerator for Deep Computation
Secure computation is of critical importance to not only the DoD, but across
financial institutions, healthcare, and anywhere personally identifiable
information (PII) is accessed. Traditional security techniques require data to
be decrypted before performing any computation. When processed on untrusted
systems the decrypted data is vulnerable to attacks to extract the sensitive
information. To address these vulnerabilities Fully Homomorphic Encryption
(FHE) keeps the data encrypted during computation and secures the results, even
in these untrusted environments. However, FHE requires a significant amount of
computation to perform equivalent unencrypted operations. To be useful, FHE
must significantly close the computation gap (within 10x) to make encrypted
processing practical. To accomplish this ambitious goal the TREBUCHET project
is leading research and development in FHE processing hardware to accelerate
deep computations on encrypted data, as part of the DARPA MTO Data Privacy for
Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program. We accelerate the major secure
standardized FHE schemes (BGV, BFV, CKKS, FHEW, etc.) at >=128-bit security
while integrating with the open-source PALISADE and OpenFHE libraries currently
used in the DoD and in industry. We utilize a novel tile-based chip design with
highly parallel ALUs optimized for vectorized 128b modulo arithmetic. The
TREBUCHET coprocessor design provides a highly modular, flexible, and
extensible FHE accelerator for easy reconfiguration, deployment, integration
and application on other hardware form factors, such as System-on-Chip or
alternate chip areas.Comment: 6 pages, 5figures, 2 table
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