Mindfulness reduces reactivity to food cues: underlying mechanisms and applications in daily life

Purpose of Review: Mindfulness-based interventions are becoming increasingly popular as a means to facilitate healthy eating. We suggest that the decentering component of mindfulness, which is the metacognitive insight that all experiences are impermanent, plays an especially important role in such interventions. To facilitate the application of decentering, we address its psychological mechanism to reduce reactivity to food cues, proposing that it makes thoughts and simulations in response to food cues less compelling. We discuss supporting evidence, applications, and challenges for future research. Recent Findings: Experimental and correlational studies consistently find that the adoption of a decentering perspective reduces subjective cravings, physiological reactivity such as salivation, and unhealthy eating. Summary: We suggest that the decentering perspective can be adopted in any situation to reduce reactivity to food cues. Considering people’s high exposure to food temptations in daily life, this makes it a powerful tool to empower people to eat healthily

Feel the difference! The influence of ease experiences on the direction of social comparisons

"The present work investigates if ease/difficulty experiences associated with social comparison information shape the direction of the comparison. In particular, we test the hypothesis that standards of comparison associated with experiences of ease lead to assimilation whereas standards processed under experiences of difficulty result in comparative contrast. In line with this hypothesis, we found in Experiment 1 that the easy processing of a standard led to assimilation whereas difficult processing of the same standard led to contrast. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, even though the ease/difficulty experiences were this time introduced independently of the standard. Finally, Experiment 3 tested the boundary conditions of the influence of experiences by showing their flexible use in judgmental processes." [author's abstract

Effect of Ultrashort Pulse Laser Structuring of Stainless Steel on Laser-based Heat Conduction Joining of Polyamide Steel Hybrids

AbstractThe objective of this paper is to investigate how microstructures generated by ultrashort pulse laser structuring of stainless steel affect the laser-based joining of thermoplastic metal hybrids. For structuring experiments a picosecond laser (λ = 064 nm) is used. The machined surfaces are topographically analyzed by optical microscopy. The experimental setup for the joining process consists of a disk laser (λ = 1030nm), a scanner optic and a clamping device for lap joint. The joined specimens are mechanically analyzed by tensile shear tests and the influence of ultrashort pulse laser structuring on the mechanical properties of the dissimilar joints is evaluated. Besides, a fracture analysis of the mechanically tested specimens using scanning electron microscope (SEM) images and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) mapping is done

Dimerization of human 5-lipoxygenase

Human 5-lipoxygenase (5-LO) can form dimers as shown here via native gel electrophoresis, gel filtration chromatography and LILBID (laser induced liquid bead ion desorption) mass spectrometry. After glutathionylation of 5-LO by diamide/glutathione treatment, dimeric 5-LO was no longer detectable and 5-LO almost exclusively exists in the monomeric form which showed full catalytic activity. Incubation of 5-LO with diamide alone led to a disulfide-bridged dimer and to oligomer formation which displays a strongly reduced catalytic activity. The bioinformatic analysis of the 5-LO surface for putative protein-protein interaction domains and molecular modeling of the dimer interface suggests a head to tail orientation of the dimer which also explains the localization of previously reported ATP binding sites. This interface domain was confirmed by the observation that 5-LO dimer formation and inhibition of activity by diamide was largely prevented when four cysteines (C159S, C300S, C416S, C418S) in this domain were mutated to serine

Modification of titanium implants surface by microarc oxidation in presence of polymeric solutions. The study of immune response

In the present study, we performed the in vitro evaluation of titanium samples with four types of coatings obtained by microarc oxidation (MAO): pure calcium phosphate (CaP), CaP- chitosan, CaP- hyaluronic acid, CaP - polyvinylpyrrolidone coatings. AlamarBlue test and TNFα secretion analysis (ELISA) were performed to investigate the immune response. It was shown that formation of MAO hybrid calciumphosphate coatings increases the biocompatibility of samples. Adding of polyvinylpyrrolidone and hyaluronic acid to the electrolyte solution presumably makes it possible to obtain hybrid coatings with anti-inflammatory properties

Novel Schizophrenia Risk Gene TCF4 Influences Verbal Learning and Memory Functioning in Schizophrenia Patients

Background: Recently, a role of the transcription factor 4 (TCF4) gene in schizophrenia has been reported in a large genome-wide association study. It has been hypothesized that TCF4 affects normal brain development and TCF4 has been related to different forms of neurodevelopmental disorders. Schizophrenia patients exhibit strong impairments of verbal declarative memory (VDM) functions. Thus, we hypothesized that the disease-associated C allele of the rs9960767 polymorphism of the TCF4 gene led to impaired VDM functioning in schizophrenia patients. Method: The TCF4 variant was genotyped in 401 schizophrenia patients. VDM functioning was measured using the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). Results: Carriers of the C allele were less impaired in recognition compared to those carrying the AA genotype (13.76 vs. 13.06; p = 0.049). Moreover, a trend toward higher scores in patients with the risk allele was found for delayed recall (10.24 vs. 9.41; p = 0.088). The TCF4 genotype did not influence intelligence or RAVLT immediate recall or total verbal learning. Conclusion: VDM function is influenced by the TCF4 gene in schizophrenia patients. However, the elevated risk for schizophrenia is not conferred by TCF4-mediated VDM impairment. Copyright (C) 2011 S. Karger AG, Base

Fisher encoding of convolutional neural network features for endoscopic image classification

We propose an approach for the automated diagnosis of celiac disease (CD) and colonic polyps (CP) based on applying Fisher encoding to the activations of convolutional layers. In our experiments, three different convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures (AlexNet, VGG-f, and VGG-16) are applied to three endoscopic image databases (one CD database and two CP databases). For each network architecture, we perform experiments using a version of the net that is pretrained on the ImageNet database, as well as a version of the net that is trained on a specific endoscopic image database. The Fisher representations of convolutional layer activations are classified using support vector machines. Additionally, experiments are performed by concatenating the Fisher representations of several layers to combine the information of these layers. We will show that our proposed CNN-Fisher approach clearly outperforms other CNN- and non-CNN-based approaches and that our approach requires no training on the target dataset, which results in substantial time savings compared with other CNN-based approaches.(VLID)295911