Rumination and Age: Some Things Get Better

Rumination has been defined as a mode of responding to distress that involves passively focusing one's attention on symptoms of distress without taking action. This dysfunctional response style intensifies depressed mood, impairs interpersonal problem solving, and leads to more pessimistic future perspectives and less social support. As most of these results were obtained from younger people, it remains unclear how age affects ruminative thinking. Three hundred members of the general public ranging in age from 15 to 87 years were asked about their ruminative styles using the Response Styles Questionnaire (RSQ), depression and satisfaction with life. A Mokken Scale analysis confirmed the two-factor structure of the RSQ with brooding and reflective pondering as subcomponents of rumination. Older participants (63 years and older) reported less ruminative thinking than other age groups. Life satisfaction was associated with brooding and highest for the earlier and latest life stages investigated in this study

Long exciton spin memory in coupled quantum wells

Spatially indirect excitons in a coupled quantum well structure were studied by means of polarization and time resolved photoluminescence. A strong degree of circular polarization (> 50%) in emission was achieved when the excitation energy was tuned into resonance with the direct exciton state. The indirect transition remained polarized several tens of nanoseconds after the pumping laser pulse, demonstrating directly a very long relaxation time of exciton spin. The observed spin memory effect exceeds the radiative lifetime of the indirect excitons.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Cortisol rapidly increases baroreflex sensitivity of heart rate control, but does not affect cardiac modulation of startle

Cortisol, the final product of human HPA axis activation, rapidly modulates the cortical processing of afferent signals originating from the cardiovascular system. While peripheral effects have been excluded, it remains unclear whether this effect is mediated by cortical or subcortical (e.g. brainstem) CNS mechanisms. Cardiac modulation of startle (CMS) has been proposed as a method to reflect cardio-afferent signals at subcortical (potentially brainstem-) level. Using a single blind, randomized controlled design, the cortisol group (n = 16 volunteers) received 1 mg cortisol intravenously, while the control group (n = 16) received a placebo substance. The CMS procedure involved the assessment of eye blink responses to acoustic startle stimuli elicited at six different latencies to ECG-recorded R-waves (R + 0, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 ms). CMS was assessed at four measurement points: baseline, -16 min, +0 min, and +16 min relative to substance application. Baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) of heart rate (HR) control was measured non-invasively based on spontaneous beat-to-beat HR and systolic blood pressure changes. In the cortisol group, salivary cortisol concentration increased after IV cortisol administration, indicating effective distribution of the substance throughout the body. Furthermore, BRS increased in the cortisol group after cortisol infusion. There was no effect of cortisol on the CMS effect, however. These results suggest that low doses of cortisol do not affect baro-afferent signals, but central or efferent components of the arterial baroreflex circuit presumably via rapid, non-genomic mechanisms

Water constraints on European power supply under climate change: impacts on electricity prices

Recent warm, dry summers showed the vulnerability of the European power sector to low water availability and high river temperatures. Climate change is likely to impact electricity supply, in terms of both water availability for hydropower generation and cooling water usage for thermoelectric power production. Here, we show the impacts of climate change and changes in water availability and water temperature on European electricity production and prices. Using simulations of daily river flows and water temperatures under future climate (2031–2060) in power production models, we show declines in both thermoelectric and hydropower generating potential for most parts of Europe, except for the most northern countries. Based on changes in power production potentials, we assess the cost-optimal use of power plants for each European country by taking electricity import and export constraints into account. Higher wholesale prices are projected on a mean annual basis for most European countries (except for Sweden and Norway), with strongest increases for Slovenia (12–15%), Bulgaria (21–23%) and Romania (31–32% for 2031–2060), where limitations in water availability mainly affect power plants with low production costs. Considering the long design life of power plant infrastructures, short-term adaptation strategies are highly recommended to prevent undesired distributional and allocative effects

Discourses of sexual relationships in a sample of German and British young people: a Q methodological study

Young people live in an environment which sexualises young people, particularly women, along traditional gender roles. This, in parallel with a silence about positive sexuality in policy development, means that sexual double standards prevail in young people’s lives. The aim of this study was to explore the discourses young women and men from two European countries, Germany and England, draw on when making sense of sexual relationships, and how these are steeped in the local cultural climate and messages. The study used Q methodology and included 65 German and English young people between 16 and 19 years of age. Six accounts emerged: sex as responsible, intimate and shared experience; sex as joint fun; ideal versus reality; sex has to be responsible, consensual and shared; caring relationships offer the perfect context for fulfilling sex; and equality between partners. The importance of cultural context in the availability of specific dominant and alternative discourses is discussed with a focus on how this influences young people’s sense-making with regard to sexuality and sexual relationships. Future directions for research are highlighted

Segmenting Motion Capture Data Using a Qualitative Analysis

Many interactive 3D games utilize motion capture for both character animation and user input. These applications require short, meaningful sequences of data. Manually producing these segments of motion capture data is a laborious, time-consuming process that is impractical for real-time applications. We present a method to automatically produce semantic segmentations of general motion capture data by examining the qualitative properties that are intrinsic to all motions, using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). LMA provides a good compromise between high-level semantic features, which are difficult to extract for general motions, and lowlevel kinematic features, which often yield unsophisticated segmentations. Our method finds motion sequences which exhibit high output similarity from a collection of neural networks trained with temporal variance. We show that segmentations produced using LMA features are more similar to manual segmentations, both at the frame and the segment level, than several other automatic segmentation methods