The Effect of Mood-Context on Visual Recognition and Recall Memory

Although it is widely known that memory is enhanced when encoding and retrieval occur in the same state, the impact of elevated stress/arousal is less understood. This study explores mood-dependent memory's effects on visual recognition and recall of material memorized either in a neutral mood or under higher stress/arousal levels. Participants’ (N = 60) recognition and recall were assessed while they experienced either the same or a mismatched mood at retrieval. The results suggested that both visual recognition and recall memory were higher when participants experienced the same mood at encoding and retrieval compared with those who experienced a mismatch in mood context between encoding and retrieval. These findings offer support for a mood dependency effect on both the recognition and recall of visual information

CBT for difficult-to-treat depression: self-regulation model

Background:Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for depression but a significant minority of clients do not complete therapy, do not respond to it, or subsequently relapse. Non-responders, and those at risk of relapse, are more likely to have adverse childhood experiences, early-onset depression, co-morbidities, interpersonal problems and heightened risk. This is a heterogeneous group of clients who are currently difficult to treat.Aim:The aim was to develop a CBT model of depression that will be effective for difficult-to-treat clients who have not responded to standard CBT.Method:The method was to unify theory, evidence and clinical strategies within the field of CBT to develop an integrated CBT model. Single case methods were used to develop the treatment components.Results:A self-regulation model of depression has been developed. It proposes that depression is maintained by repeated interactions of self-identity disruption, impaired motivation, disengagement, rumination, intrusive memories and passive life goals. Depression is more difficult to treat when these processes become interlocked. Treatment based on the model builds self-regulation skills and restructures self-identity, rather than target negative beliefs. A bespoke therapy plan is formed out of ten treatment components, based on an individual case formulation.Conclusions:A self-regulation model of depression is proposed that integrates theory, evidence and practice within the field of CBT. It has been developed with difficult-to-treat cases as its primary purpose. A case example is described in a concurrent article (Barton et al., 2022) and further empirical tests are on-going

Disorders of Sex Development: Management of Gender Assignment in a Preterm Infant with Intrauterine Growth Restriction

We describe how a gender specialist team managed the case of a disorder of sex development in a preterm infant where definitive diagnosis and gender assignment were delayed due to complications of prematurity, anemia, and severe intrauterine growth restriction

The impact of target frequency on intra-individual variability in euthymic bipolar disorder: a comparison of two sustained attention tasks.

Greater intra-individual variability (IIV) in reaction time (RT) on a sustained attention task has been reported in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) compared with healthy controls. However, it is unclear whether IIV is task specific, or whether it represents general crosstask impairment in BD. This study aimed to investigate whether IIV occurs in sustained attention tasks with different parameters. Twenty-two patients with BD (currently euthymic) and 17 controls completed two sustained attention tasks on different occasions: a low target frequency (~20%) Vigil continuous performance test (CPT) and a high target frequency (~70%) CPT version A-X (CPT-AX). Variability measures (individual standard deviation and coefficient of variation) were calculated per participant, and ex-Gaussian modeling was also applied. This was supplemented by Vincentile analysis to characterize RT distributions. Results indicated that participants (patients and controls) were generally slower and more variable when completing the Vigil CPT compared with CPT-AX. Significant group differences were also observed in the Vigil CPT, with euthymic BD patients being more variable than controls. This result suggests that IIV in BD demonstrates some degree of task specificity. Further research should incorporate analysis of additional RT distributional models (drift diffusion and fast Fourier transform) to fully characterize the pattern of IIV in BD, as well as its relationship to cognitive processes

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Kartoffelausgabe im Hof des städtischen Ernährungamte

A Hot Gap Around Jupiter's Orbit in the Solar Nebula

The Sun was an order of magnitude more luminous during the first few hundred thousand years of its existence, due in part to the gravitational energy released by material accreting from the Solar nebula. If Jupiter was already near its present mass, the planet's tides opened an optically-thin gap in the nebula. We show using Monte Carlo radiative transfer calculations that sunlight absorbed by the nebula and re-radiated into the gap raised temperatures well above the sublimation threshold for water ice, with potentially drastic consequences for the icy bodies in Jupiter's feeding zone. Bodies up to a meter in size were vaporized within a single orbit if the planet was near its present location during this early epoch. Dust particles lost their ice mantles, and planetesimals were partially to fully devolatilized, depending on their size. Scenarios in which Jupiter formed promptly, such as those involving a gravitational instability of the massive early nebula, must cope with the high temperatures. Enriching Jupiter in the noble gases through delivery trapped in clathrate hydrates will be more difficult, but might be achieved by either forming the planet much further from the star, or capturing planetesimals at later epochs. The hot gap resulting from an early origin for Jupiter also would affect the surface compositions of any primordial Trojan asteroids.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures. ApJ in press. Discussion of Jupiter's volatile enrichment revised in sec. 4.

Properties and nature of Be stars: 29. Orbital and long-term spectral variations of \gamma\ Cassiopei\ae

A detailed analysis of more than 800 electronic high-resolution spectra of gamma Cas, which were obtained during a time interval of over 6000 days (16.84 yrs) at several observatories, documents the smooth variations in the density and/or extend of its circumstellar envelope. We found a clear anticorrelation between the peak intensity and FWHM of the H alpha emission, which seems to agree with recent models of such emission lines. The main result of this study is a confirmation of the binary nature of the object, determination of a reliable linear ephemeris T_{min.RV} = HJD (2452081.9$\pm$0.6) + (203.52$\pm$0.08)*E, and a rather definitive set of orbital elements. We clearly demonstrated that the orbit is circular within the limits of accuracy of our measurements and has a semi-amplitude of radial-velocity curve of 4.30$\pm$0.09 (km/s). No trace of the low-mass secondary was found. The time distribution of our spectra does not allow a reliable investigation of rapid spectral variations, which are undoubtedly present in the spectra. We postpone this investigation for a future study, based on series of dedicated whole-night spectral observations

Nitrous oxide emissions from a peatbog after 13 years of experimental nitrogen deposition

Nitrogen deposition was experimentally increased on a Scottish peatbog over a period of 13 years (2002–2015). Nitrogen was applied in three forms, NH3 gas, NH4Cl solution, and NaNO3 solution, at rates ranging from 8 (ambient) to 64 kg N ha−1 yr−1, and higher near the NH3 fumigation source. An automated system was used to apply the nitrogen, such that the deposition was realistic in terms of rates and high frequency of deposition events. We measured the response of nitrous oxide (N2O) flux to the increased nitrogen input. Prior expectations, based on the IPCC default emission factor, were that 1 % of the added nitrogen would be emitted as N2O. In the plots treated with NH4+ and NO3− solution, no response was seen, and there was a tendency for N2O fluxes to be reduced by additional nitrogen, though this was not significant. Areas subjected to high NH3 emitted more N2O than expected, up to 8.5 % of the added nitrogen. Differences in the response are related to the impact of the nitrogen treatments on the vegetation. In the NH4+ and NO3− treatments, all the additional nitrogen is effectively immobilised in the vegetation and top 10 cm of peat. In the NH3 treatment, much of the vegetation was killed off by high doses of NH3, and the nitrogen was presumably more available to denitrifying bacteria. The design of the wet and dry experimental treatments meant that they differed in statistical power, and we are less likely to detect an effect of the NH4+ and NO3− treatments, though they avoid issues of pseudo-replication

Determinants of the dynamic cerebral critical closing pressure response to changes in mean arterial pressure

Objective. Cerebral critical closing pressure (CrCP) represents the value of arterial blood pressure (BP) where cerebral blood flow (CBF) becomes zero. Its dynamic response to a step change in mean BP (MAP) has been shown to reflect CBF autoregulation, but robust methods for its estimation are lacking. We aim to improve the quality of estimates of the CrCP dynamic response. Approach. Retrospective analysis of 437 healthy subjects (aged 18–87 years, 218 males) baseline recordings with measurements of cerebral blood velocity in the middle cerebral artery (MCAv, transcranial Doppler), non-invasive arterial BP (Finometer) and end-tidal CO2 (EtCO2, capnography). For each cardiac cycle CrCP was estimated from the instantaneous MCAv-BP relationship. Transfer function analysis of the MAP and MCAv (MAP-MCAv) and CrCP (MAP-CrCP) allowed estimation of the corresponding step responses (SR) to changes in MAP, with the output in MCAv (SRVMCAv) representing the autoregulation index (ARI), ranging from 0 to 9. Four main parameters were considered as potential determinants of the SRVCrCP temporal pattern, including the coherence function, MAP spectral power and the reconstruction error for SRVMAP, from the other three separate SRs. Main results. The reconstruction error for SRVMAP was the main determinant of SRVCrCP signal quality, by removing the largest number of outliers (Grubbs test) compared to the other three parameters. SRVCrCP showed highly significant (p < 0.001) changes with time, but its amplitude or temporal pattern was not influenced by sex or age. The main physiological determinants of SRVCrCP were the ARI and the mean CrCP for the entire 5 min baseline period. The early phase (2–3 s) of SRVCrCP response was influenced by heart rate whereas the late phase (10–14 s) was influenced by diastolic BP. Significance. These results should allow better planning and quality of future research and clinical trials of novel metrics of CBF regulation