Dynamic Facial Expressions Prime the Processing of Emotional Prosody

Evidence suggests that emotion is represented supramodally in the human brain. Emotional facial expressions, which often precede vocally expressed emotion in real life, can modulate event-related potentials (N100 and P200) during emotional prosody processing. To investigate these cross-modal emotional interactions, two lines of research have been put forward: cross-modal integration and cross-modal priming. In cross-modal integration studies, visual and auditory channels are temporally aligned, while in priming studies they are presented consecutively. Here we used cross-modal emotional priming to study the interaction of dynamic visual and auditory emotional information. Specifically, we presented dynamic facial expressions (angry, happy, neutral) as primes and emotionally-intoned pseudo-speech sentences (angry, happy) as targets. We were interested in how prime-target congruency would affect early auditory event-related potentials, i.e., N100 and P200, in order to shed more light on how dynamic facial information is used in cross-modal emotional prediction. Results showed enhanced N100 amplitudes for incongruently primed compared to congruently and neutrally primed emotional prosody, while the latter two conditions did not significantly differ. However, N100 peak latency was significantly delayed in the neutral condition compared to the other two conditions. Source reconstruction revealed that the right parahippocampal gyrus was activated in incongruent compared to congruent trials in the N100 time window. No significant ERP effects were observed in the P200 range. Our results indicate that dynamic facial expressions influence vocal emotion processing at an early point in time, and that an emotional mismatch between a facial expression and its ensuing vocal emotional signal induces additional processing costs in the brain, potentially because the cross-modal emotional prediction mechanism is violated in case of emotional prime-target incongruency

Data from an international multi-centre study of statistics and mathematics anxieties and related variables in university students (the smarvus dataset)

This large, international dataset contains survey responses from N = 12,570 students from 100 universities in 35 countries, collected in 21 languages. We measured anxieties (statistics, mathematics, test, trait, social interaction, performance, creativity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation), self-efficacy, persistence, and the cognitive reflection test, and collected demographics, previous mathematics grades, self-reported and official statistics grades, and statistics module details. Data reuse potential is broad, including testing links between anxieties and statistics/mathematics education factors, and examining instruments’ psychometric properties across different languages and contexts.2-s2.0-85176239315Mayı

Impaired neural processing of dynamic faces in left-onset Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) affects patients beyond the motor domain. According to previous evidence, one mechanism that may be impaired in the disease is face processing. However, few studies have investigated this process at the neural level in PD. Moreover, research using dynamic facial displays rather than static pictures is scarce, but highly warranted due to the higher ecological validity of dynamic stimuli. In the present study we aimed to investigate how PD patients process emotional and non-emotional dynamic face stimuli at the neural level using event-related potentials. Since the literature has revealed a predominantly right-lateralized network for dynamic face processing, we divided the group into patients with left (LPD) and right (RPD) motor symptom onset (right versus left cerebral hemisphere predominantly affected, respectively). Participants watched short video clips of happy, angry, and neutral expressions and engaged in a shallow gender decision task in order to avoid confounds of task difficulty in the data. In line with our expectations, the LPD group showed significant face processing deficits compared to controls. While there were no group differences in early, sensory-driven processing (fronto-central N1 and posterior P1), the vertex positive potential, which is considered the fronto-central counterpart of the face-specific posterior N170 component, had a reduced amplitude and delayed latency in the LPD group. This may indicate disturbances of structural face processing in LPD. Furthermore, the effect was independent of the emotional content of the videos. In contrast, static facial identity recognition performance in LPD was not significantly different from controls, and comprehensive testing of cognitive functions did not reveal any deficits in this group. We therefore conclude that PD, and more specifically the predominant right-hemispheric affection in left-onset PD, is associated with impaired processing of dynamic facial expressions, which could be one of the mechanisms behind the often reported problems of PD patients in their social lives

Exploratory Monitoring of the Quality and Authenticity of Commercial Honey in Ecuador

Honey is one of the oldest sweetening foods and has economic importance, making this product attractive to adulteration with cheap sugars. This can cause a critical problem in the honey industry and a possible health risk. The present work has the aim of evaluating the authenticity of honey commercialized in two different provinces of Ecuador (Pichincha and Loja) by performing physicochemical and spectroscopic analyses. For this study 25 samples were collected from different places and markets and characterized by water, sucrose, reducing sugars and electric conductivity measurement. Also, their Raman and Infrared (IR) spectra were recorded and analysed using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in order to verify the quality of the honeys. In addition, a screening of several pesticides was performed in order to verify possible chemical threats to human health and honey bees. It was found that 8 samples have a deviation from the Standard established parameters. Two of them have a high difference in the content of sucrose and reducing sugars, which are located deviated from all the other samples in the PCA of the applied vibrational spectroscopy (IR/Raman), shaping two clear clusters. The results show that Raman and IR spectroscopy is appropriate techniques for the quality control of honey and correlates well with the physicochemical analyses.Centro de Química Inorgánic

Two Sides of Workplace Interactions: How Appreciation and Social Stressors Shape the Relationship Between Job Insecurity and Well-Being

Job insecurity has frequently been shown to have a dysfunctional impact on well-being. Based on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, the aim of this study was to investigate how the experience of appreciation at the workplace and the occurrence of social stressors shape the relationship between job insecurity and three indicators of well-being: (a) job satisfaction, (b) (emotional) irritation, and (c) engagement (dedication to the job). In an online study with 117 psychologists, we found that appreciation buffered the relationship between job insecurity and irritation. Social stressors further qualified the moderating effect of appreciation on job satisfaction and dedication, but not fully in the proposed direction. Theoretical implications about the role of more or less social contacts at work (reflected in the experience of appreciation as well as social stressors) when dealing with job insecurity will be discussed

Modulation of visual attention by object affordance

Some objects in our environment are strongly tied to motor actions, a phenomenon called object affordance. A cup, for example, affords us to reach out to it and grasp it by its handle. Studies indicate that merely viewing an affording object triggers motor activations in the brain. The present study investigated whether object affordance would also result in an attention bias, that is, whether observers would rather attend to graspable objects within reach compared to non-graspable but reachable objects or to graspable objects out of reach. To this end, we conducted a combined reaction time and motion tracking study with a table in a virtual three-dimensional space. Two objects were positioned on the table, one near, the other one far from the observer. In each trial, two graspable objects, two non-graspable objects, or a combination of both was presented. Participants were instructed to detect a probe appearing on one of the objects as quickly as possible. Detection times served as indirect measure of attention allocation. The motor association with the graspable object was additionally enhanced by having participants grasp a real object in some of the trials. We hypothesized that visual attention would be preferentially allocated to the near graspable object, which should be reflected in reduced reaction times in this condition. Our results confirm this assumption: probe detection was fastest at the graspable object at the near position compared to the far position or to a non-graspable object. A follow-up experiment revealed that in addition to object affordance per se, immediate graspability of an affording object may also influence this near-space advantage. Our results suggest that visuospatial attention is preferentially allocated to affording objects which are immediately graspable, and thus establish a strong link between an object’ s motor affordance and visual attention

Exploratory monitoring of the quality and authenticity of commercial honey in Ecuador

Honey is one of the oldest sweetening foods and has economic importance, making this product attractive to adulteration with cheap sugars. This can cause a critical problem in the honey industry and a possible health risk. The present work has the aim of evaluating the authenticity of honey commercialized in two different provinces of Ecuador (Pichincha and Loja) by performing physicochemical and spectroscopic analyses. For this study 25 samples were collected from different places and markets and characterized by water, sucrose, reducing sugars and electric conductivity measurement. Also, their Raman and Infrared (IR) spectra were recorded and analysed using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in order to verify the quality of the honeys. In addition, a screening of several pesticides was performed in order to verify possible chemical threats to human health and honey bees. It was found that 8 samples have a deviation from the Standard established parameters. Two of them have a high difference in the content of sucrose and reducing sugars, which are located deviated from all the other samples in the PCA of the applied vibrational spectroscopy (IR/Raman), shaping two clear clusters. The results show that Raman and IR spectroscopy is appropriate techniques for the quality control of honey and correlates well with the physicochemical analyses.</p