It does not need two: assessing physiological linkage from videos across the valence dimension

The phenomenon of physiological linkage describes similar fluctuations of two individuals' physiology, for example, the cardiac inter- beat interval (IBI). Physiological linkage is a well- documented occurrence in research settings of interacting dyads but the literature on non- interacting dyads, that is, someone watching a video of another person, is sparse. The current study investigated whether physiological linkage, based on IBI, occurs from watching videos where strangers report about personal (neutral, positive, negative non- traumatic, and negative traumatic) experiences. Videos were produced with six individuals and then presented to observers (N=26). Time- frequency- domain cross- wavelet analyses supplemented by threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE; to account for multiple testing) showed significant physiological linkage between the IBI of observers and persons in the videos for 16 out of the 21 tested videos. Although significant physiological linkage also emerged for neutral videos and positive, negative valence videos led to such associations more reliably. This study shows that physiological linkage can be investigated in highly controlled conditions based on video stimuli paving the path for experimental manipulation in future research. Furthermore, due to the provision of information on time and frequency, the use of cross- wavelet analysis is encouraged to learn more about factors modulating physiological linkage. The current study presents the next step toward identifying psychophysiological causal and modulating factors of physiological linkage

Water–Energy Nexus: Addressing Stakeholder Preferences in Jordan

The water and energy sectors are fundamentally linked. In Jordan, especially in the face of a changing climate, the water–energy nexus holds a number of challenges but also opportunities. A key point in exploring synergies is the identification of such, as well as the communication between the water and energy sectors. This paper promotes the importance of using a co-creative approach to help resolve opposing views and assessing stakeholder preferences in the context of the water–energy nexus in Jordan. A computer-supported, co-creative approach was used to evaluate stakeholder preferences and opinions on criteria and future scenarios for the energy and water sector in Jordan, identifying common difficulties and possibilities. The criteria describe socio-ecological aspects as well as techno-economic aspects for both systems. Discussing a set of preliminary scenarios describing possible energy and water futures ranked under a set of sector relevant criteria, a consensus between both stakeholder groups is reached. The robustness of results is determined, using a second-order probabilistic approach. The results indicate that there are no fundamental conflicts between the energy and water stakeholder groups. Applying a participatory multi-stakeholder, multi-criteria framework to the energy-water nexus case in Jordan promotes a clear understanding of where different stakeholder groups stand. This understanding and agreement can form the basis of a joint water–energy nexus policy used in the continued negotiation process between and within national and international cooperation, as well as promoting and developing acceptable suggestions to solve complex problems for both sectors

Individuals with and without child maltreatment experiences are evaluated similarly and do not differ in facial affect display at zero- and first-acquaintance

Abstract: Background Individuals with a history of child maltreatment (CM) are more often disliked, rejected and victimized compared to individuals without such experiences. However, contributing factors for these negative evaluations are so far unknown. Objective: Based on previous research on adults with borderline personality disorder (BPD), this preregistered study assessed whether negative evaluations of adults with CM experiences, in comparison to unexposed controls, are mediated by more negative and less positive facial affect display. Additionally, it was explored whether level of depression, severity of CM, social anxiety, social support, and rejection sensitivity have an influence on ratings. Methods: Forty adults with CM experiences (CM +) and 40 non‑maltreated (CM‑) adults were filmed for measurement of affect display and rated in likeability, trustworthiness, and cooperativeness by 100 independent raters after zero‑acquaintance (no interaction) and 17 raters after first‑acquaintance (short conversation). Results: The CM + and the CM‑ group were neither evaluated significantly different, nor showed significant differences in affect display. Contrasting previous research, higher levels of BPD symptoms predicted higher likeability ratings (p = .046), while complex post‑traumatic stress disorder symptoms had no influence on ratings. Conclusions: The non‑significant effects could be attributed to an insufficient number of participants, as our sample size allowed us to detect effects with medium effect sizes (f2 = .16 for evaluation; f2 = .17 for affect display) with a power of .95. Moreover, aspects such as the presence of mental disorders (e.g., BPD or post‑traumatic stress disorder), might have a stronger impact than CM per se. Future research should thus further explore conditions (e.g., presence of specific mental disorders) under which individuals with CM are affected by negative evaluations as well as factors that contribute to negative evaluations and problems in social relationships. Keywords: Child maltreatment, Zero‑acquaintance, First‑acquaintance, Facial emotion expressio

Agonism Reloaded: Potentia, Renewal and Radical Democracy

This article focuses on the agonistic account of renewal and discusses its place within the broader horizon of radical democracy. It suggests that while the emphasis which agonistic theorists place on difference and popular struggles (particularly social movement politics) ensures some common ground with other theories of radical democracy, their account of renewal also displays some marked differences. The article explores these differences and discusses whether agonism is sufficient to address the limits of the current neoliberal order

Opening the black box of energy modelling: Strategies and lessons learned

The global energy system is undergoing a major transition, and in energy planning and decision-making across governments, industry and academia, models play a crucial role. Because of their policy relevance and contested nature, the transparency and open availability of energy models and data are of particular importance. Here we provide a practical how-to guide based on the collective experience of members of the Open Energy Modelling Initiative (Openmod). We discuss key steps to consider when opening code and data, including determining intellectual property ownership, choosing a licence and appropriate modelling languages, distributing code and data, and providing support and building communities. After illustrating these decisions with examples and lessons learned from the community, we conclude that even though individual researchers' choices are important, institutional changes are still also necessary for more openness and transparency in energy research

Opening the black box of energy modelling: Strategies and lessons learned

The global energy system is undergoing a major transition, and in energy planning and decision-making across governments, industry and academia, models play a crucial role. Because of their policy relevance and contested nature, the transparency and open availability of energy models and data are of particular importance. Here we provide a practical how-to guide based on the collective experience of members of the Open Energy Modelling Initiative (Openmod). We discuss key steps to consider when opening code and data, including determining intellectual property ownership, choosing a licence and appropriate modelling languages, distributing code and data, and providing support and building communities. After illustrating these decisions with examples and lessons learned from the community, we conclude that even though individual researchers' choices are important, institutional changes are still also necessary for more openness and transparency in energy research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Incongruence Between Observers’ and Observed Facial Muscle Activation Reduces Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions From Video Stimuli

According to embodied cognition accounts, viewing others’ facial emotion can elicit the respective emotion representation in observers which entails simulations of sensory, motor, and contextual experiences. In line with that, published research found viewing others’ facial emotion to elicit automatic matched facial muscle activation, which was further found to facilitate emotion recognition. Perhaps making congruent facial muscle activity explicit produces an even greater recognition advantage. If there is conflicting sensory information, i.e., incongruent facial muscle activity, this might impede recognition. The effects of actively manipulating facial muscle activity on facial emotion recognition from videos were investigated across three experimental conditions: (a) explicit imitation of viewed facial emotional expressions (stimulus-congruent condition), (b) pen-holding with the lips (stimulus-incongruent condition), and (c) passive viewing (control condition). It was hypothesised that (1) experimental condition (a) and (b) result in greater facial muscle activity than (c), (2) experimental condition (a) increases emotion recognition accuracy from others’ faces compared to (c), (3) experimental condition (b) lowers recognition accuracy for expressions with a salient facial feature in the lower, but not the upper face area, compared to (c). Participants (42 males, 42 females) underwent a facial emotion recognition experiment (ADFES-BIV) while electromyography (EMG) was recorded from five facial muscle sites. The experimental conditions’ order was counter-balanced. Pen-holding caused stimulus-incongruent facial muscle activity for expressions with facial feature saliency in the lower face region, which reduced recognition of lower face region emotions. Explicit imitation caused stimulus-congruent facial muscle activity without modulating recognition. Methodological implications are discussed