Factors affecting the production of sugarcane yield and sucrose accumulation: suggested potential biological solutions

Environmental stresses are the main constraints on agricultural productivity and food security worldwide. This issue is worsened by abrupt and severe changes in global climate. The formation of sugarcane yield and the accumulation of sucrose are significantly influenced by biotic and abiotic stresses. Understanding the biochemical, physiological, and environmental phenomena associated with these stresses is essential to increase crop production. This review explores the effect of environmental factors on sucrose content and sugarcane yield and highlights the negative effects of insufficient water supply, temperature fluctuations, insect pests, and diseases. This article also explains the mechanism of reactive oxygen species (ROS), the role of different metabolites under environmental stresses, and highlights the function of environmental stress-related resistance genes in sugarcane. This review further discusses sugarcane crop improvement approaches, with a focus on endophytic mechanism and consortium endophyte application in sugarcane plants. Endophytes are vital in plant defense; they produce bioactive molecules that act as biocontrol agents to enhance plant immune systems and modify environmental responses through interaction with plants. This review provides an overview of internal mechanisms to enhance sugarcane plant growth and environmental resistance and offers new ideas for improving sugarcane plant fitness and crop productivity

The Contribution of Sound Intensity in Vocal Emotion Perception: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Although its role is frequently stressed in acoustic profile for vocal emotion, sound intensity is frequently regarded as a control parameter in neurocognitive studies of vocal emotion, leaving its role and neural underpinnings unclear. To investigate these issues, we asked participants to rate the angry level of neutral and angry prosodies before and after sound intensity modification in Experiment 1, and recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) for mismatching emotional prosodies with and without sound intensity modification and for matching emotional prosodies while participants performed emotional feature or sound intensity congruity judgment in Experiment 2. It was found that sound intensity modification had significant effect on the rating of angry level for angry prosodies, but not for neutral ones. Moreover, mismatching emotional prosodies, relative to matching ones, induced enhanced N2/P3 complex and theta band synchronization irrespective of sound intensity modification and task demands. However, mismatching emotional prosodies with reduced sound intensity showed prolonged peak latency and decreased amplitude in N2/P3 complex and smaller theta band synchronization. These findings suggest that though it cannot categorically affect emotionality conveyed in emotional prosodies, sound intensity contributes to emotional significance quantitatively, implying that sound intensity should not simply be taken as a control parameter and its unique role needs to be specified in vocal emotion studies

The emotion regulation effect of cognitive control is related to depressive state through the mediation of rumination: An ERP study

Deficits in cognitive control have been found in depression, but how they contribute to depressive symptoms remains unknown. The present study investigated whether the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control on negative emotion varies with depression level and whether the regulatory efficacy affects depressive symptoms via the mediation of rumination. Fifty participants screened by the Zung Self-Rating Depressive Scale (SDS) with high and low depression levels were selected. They were instructed to controlled-process different semantic representations of aversive pictures, and the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) evoked by the pictures was used as the measure of electrocortical response. We found that controlled-processing neutral representations of aversive pictures significantly decreased the amplitude of LPP relative to that under controlled-processing unpleasant ones in an early window in the low depression group and that this regulatory effect was impaired in the high depression group. Furthermore, a mediation analyses indicated that the regulatory efficacy of controlled-processing different semantic representations was associated with SDS score via the mediation of rumination. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the association between the function of cognitive control in emotion generation and depressive symptoms and indicated a pathway from the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control to depression via rumination

Working Memory Capacity Predicts Human Emotion Evaluation: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Working memory is widely considered to be a necessary component of various cognitive operations. Many human cognitive abilities can be predicted by working memory capacity. However, it is still unclear whether it can predict the ability of evaluating emotional information. Here we investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and emotion evaluation using the measurement of event-related potentials. Two groups of college students with high and low working memory capacity were picked out using a 2-back task. They were asked to evaluate negative pictures preceded by negative or neutral meanings. We found that high working memory capacity group was more successful in adopting a neutral meaning to evaluate negative picture and showed decreased amplitude of electrocortical response. The finding supported that working memory capacity can predict the ability of emotion evaluation.</p

The electrocortical modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies

The current event-related potential study investigated the modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies on electrocortical responses. When watching negative or neutral pictures, participants were instructed to perform three tasks: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression and passive viewing. We found that negative pictures elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than neutral pictures. Moreover, processes involved in strategy also had an effect on LPP amplitude, which was indicated by a larger LPP in reappraisal compared with suppression and viewing tasks when neutral pictures were presented. After the influence of processes on LPP was excluded, results showed that reappraisal effectively decreased the emotion-enhanced LPP than suppression and viewing. The difference in regulatory effect may be determined by the underlying processing mechanism. A larger frontal-central component, N2, was observed in suppression than reappraisal and viewing, which suggested that it involved the processes focusing on behavioral response. While the larger LPP found in reappraisal implicated that it recruited cognitive processes focusing on the picture meaning

High working memory load impairs the effect of cognitive reappraisal on emotional response: Evidence from an event-related potential study

This study investigates how the working memory (WM) load influenced the efficacy of cognitive reappraisal, a frequently used strategy for emotion regulation. In a dual-task paradigm, the participants were required to perform a high-load or a low-load memory task and simultaneously reappraise aversive pictures with a negative or a neutral meaning. In the low-load condition, we found that the amplitude of emotion-enhanced late positive potential (LPP) was significantly decreased by neutral reappraisal compared to negative reappraisal. In the high-load condition, this regulatory effect of reappraisal disappeared. These results suggest that successful reappraisal relies on cognitive resources and WM processes. If the necessary resources involved in reappraisal are over-depleted by a concurrent memory task, the reappraisal effect will be impaired. Moreover, we found that emotion-enhanced LPP was significant in both of the high-load and low-load tasks, which suggests that emotional electrocortical response may not be susceptible to the available resources. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.</p

Behavioral results of Experiment 2.

<p>Error rates (A, M±se) and Reaction times (B) for three types of critical prosodies under two task conditions (left: emotion task; right: intensity task). Error rates (C) and Reaction times (D) for fillers and “AA” baseline prosodies under two task conditions.</p

The average oscillatory activities for various critical prosodies and task conditions.

<p>The time–frequency map shows oscillatory activities at Cz electrodes the over time (x-axis; 0 is onset of splicing point) and frequency (y-axis). Red colors indicate more power increase and blue colors indicate more power decrease relative to baseline. Topographical map show data taken from a 100- to 600-ms, 4- to 6-Hz window.</p

Illustration of the splicing procedure and acoustic feature of three types of prosody used in Experiment 2.

<p>As in Experiment 1, the dataset consists of oscillogram (up) and voice spectrographs (down) with uncorrected pitch contours (blue line) and intensity contours (yellow line) superimposed. (Abbr.: AA—all Angry; NA—Neutral-to-Angry; NAL—Neutral-to-low Angry). The correct response was “no-change” for AA and “change” for both NA and NAL under emotion task, whereas under sound intensity task, the correct responses were “no-change” for both AA and NAL but “change” for NA. Moreover, the fillers provided the counterbalance responses under both tasks.</p

Grand-average ERP waveforms and average oscillatory activities for for fillers and “AA” baseline prosodies under two task conditions.

<p>(Up): ERPs elicited by fillers and “AA” prosodies and difference waves at CZ and Topographies of difference curves. (Below): The time-frequency map shows oscillatory activities at Cz electrodes over the selected time window and frequency band.</p