Biased Saccadic Responses to Emotional Stimuli in Anxiety: An Antisaccade Study.

Research suggests that anxiety is maintained by an attentional bias to threat, and a growing base of evidence suggests that anxiety may additionally be associated with the deficient attentional processing of positive stimuli. The present study sought to examine whether such anxiety-linked attentional biases were associated with either stimulus driven or attentional control mechanisms of attentional selectivity. High and low trait anxious participants completed an emotional variant of an antisaccade task, in which they were required to prosaccade towards, or antisaccade away from a positive, neutral or threat stimulus, while eye movements were recorded. While low anxious participants were found to be slower to saccade in response to positive stimuli, irrespectively of whether a pro- or antisaccade was required, such a bias was absent in high anxious individuals. Analysis of erroneous antisaccades further revealed at trend level, that anxiety was associated with reduced peak velocity in response to threat. The findings suggest that anxiety is associated with the aberrant processing of positive stimuli, and greater compensatory efforts in the inhibition of threat. The findings further highlight the relevance of considering saccade peak velocity in the assessment of anxiety-linked attentional processing

Gaze-Based Assessments of Vigilance and Avoidance in Social Anxiety: a Review

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. Purpose of Review: A broad base of research has sought to identify the biases in selective attention which characterize social anxiety, with the emergent use of eye tracking-based methods. This article seeks to provide a review of eye tracking studies examining selective attention biases in social anxiety. Recent Findings: Across a number of contexts, social anxiety may be associated with a mix of both vigilant and avoidant patterns of attention with respect to the processing of emotional social stimuli. Socially anxious individuals may additionally avoid maintaining eye contact and may exhibit a generalized vigilance via hyperscanning of their environment. Summary: The findings highlight the utility of eye tracking methods for increasing understanding of the gaze-based biases which characterize social anxiety disorder, with promising avenues for future research

Web-Accessible Database of hsp65 Sequences from Mycobacterium Reference Strains▿†

Mycobacteria include a large number of pathogens. Identification to species level is important for diagnoses and treatments. Here, we report the development of a Web-accessible database of the hsp65 locus sequences (http://msis.mycobacteria.info) from 149 out of 150 Mycobacterium species/subspecies. This database can serve as a reference for identifying Mycobacterium species

Two-magnon scattering in the 5d all-in-all-out pyrochlore magnet Cd2Os2O7

5d pyrochlore oxides with all-in-all-out magnetic order are prime candidates for realizing strongly correlated, topological phases of matter. Despite significant effort, a full understanding of all-in-all-out magnetism remains elusive as the associated magnetic excitations have proven difficult to access with conventional techniques. Here we report a Raman spectroscopy study of spin dynamics in the all-in-all-out magnetic state of the 5d pyrochlore Cd2Os2O7. Through a comparison between the two-magnon scattering and spin-wave theory, we confirm the large single ion anisotropy in this material and show that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya and exchange interactions play a significant role in the spin-wave dispersions. The Raman data also reveal complex spin-charge-lattice coupling and indicate that the metal-insulator transition in Cd2Os2O7 is Lifshitz-type. Our work establishes Raman scattering as a simple and powerful method for exploring the spin dynamics in 5d pyrochlore magnets