Association of Alcohol Consumption with Perception of Attractiveness in a Naturalistic Environment

AIMS: To investigate the relationship between objectively-assessed alcohol consumption and perception of attractiveness in naturalistic drinking environments, and to determine the feasibility and acceptability of conducting a large-scale study in these environments. METHODS: Observational study conducted simultaneously across three public houses in Bristol, UK. Participants were required to rate the attractiveness of male and female face stimuli and landscape stimuli administered via an Android tablet computer application, after which their expired breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) was measured. RESULTS: Linear regression revealed no clear evidence for relationships between alcohol consumption and either overall perception of attractiveness for stimuli, for faces specifically, or for opposite-sex faces. The naturalistic research methodology was feasible, with high levels of participant engagement and enjoyment. CONCLUSIONS: We found no evidence for a relationship between alcohol consumption and perception of attractiveness in our large-scale naturalistic study. Our study is important given the large sample size, the successful translation of an experimental, laboratory-based paradigm to a naturalistic drinking environment and the high level of public engagement with the study. Future studies should use similarly ecologically-valid methodologies to further explore the conditions under which this effect may be observed and identify the mechanisms underlying any relationships

Designing an Exascale Interconnect using Multi-objective Optimization

Exascale performance will be delivered by systems composed of millions of interconnected computing cores. The way these computing elements are connected with each other (network topology) has a strong impact on many performance characteristics. In this work we propose a multi-objective optimizationbased framework to explore possible network topologies to be implemented in the EU-funded ExaNeSt project. The modular design of this system’s interconnect provides great flexibility to design topologies optimized for specific performance targets such as communications locality, fault tolerance or energyconsumption. The generation procedure of the topologies is formulated as a three-objective optimization problem (minimizing some topological characteristics) where solutions are searched using evolutionary techniques. The analysis of the results, carried out using simulation, shows that the topologies meet the required performance objectives. In addition, a comparison with a well-known topology reveals that the generated solutions can provide better topological characteristics and also higher performance for parallel applications

Enabling Shared Memory Communication in Networks of MPSoCs

Ongoing transistor scaling and the growing complexity of embedded system designs has led to the rise of MPSoCs (Multi‐Processor System‐on‐Chip), combining multiple hard‐core CPUs and accelerators (FPGA, GPU) on the same physical die. These devices are of great interest to the supercomputing community, who are increasingly reliant on heterogeneity to achieve power and performance goals in these closing stages of the race to exascale. In this paper, we present a network interface architecture and networking infrastructure, designed to sit inside the FPGA fabric of a cutting‐edge MPSoC device, enabling networks of these devices to communicate within both a distributed and shared memory context, with reduced need for costly software networking system calls. We will present our implementation and prototype system and discuss the main design decisions relevant to the use of the Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+, a state‐of‐the‐art MPSoC, and the challenges to be overcome given the device's limitations and constraints. We demonstrate the working prototype system connecting two MPSoCs, with communication between processor and remote memory region and accelerator. We then discuss the limitations of the current implementation and highlight areas of improvement to make this solution production‐ready

Effects of acute alcohol consumption on emotion recognition in high and low trait aggressive drinkers

Background: Research suggests that acute alcohol consumption impairs processing of emotional faces. As emotion processing plays a key role in effective social interaction, these impairments may be one mechanism by which alcohol changes social behaviour. This study investigated the effect of individual differences on this relationship by comparing emotion recognition performance after acute alcohol consumption in individuals with high and low trait aggression. Methods: Regular non-dependent drinkers, either high or low in trait aggression participated in a double-blind placebo-controlled experiment (N = 88, 50% high trait aggressive). Participants attended two sessions. In one they consumed an alcoholic drink (0.4 g/kg) and in the other they consumed a matched placebo. They then completed two computer-based tasks: one measured global and emotion-specific recognition performance across six primary emotions (anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, fear, surprise), the other measured processing bias of two ambiguously expressive faces (happy–angry/happy–sad). Results: There was evidence of poorer global emotion recognition after alcohol. In addition, there was evidence of poorer sensitivity to sadness and fear after alcohol. There was also evidence for a reduced bias towards happiness following alcohol and weak evidence for an increased bias towards sadness. Conclusions: These findings suggest that alcohol impairs global emotion recognition. They also highlight a reduced ability to detect sadness and fearful facial expressions. As sadness and fear are cues of submission and distress (i.e. function to curtail aggression), failure to successfully detect these emotions when intoxicated may increase the likelihood of aggressive responding. This coupled with a reduced bias towards seeing happiness may collectively contribute to aggressive behaviour

Diagnosis and staging of laryngopharyngeal tumours with flexible endoscopy: A prospective study

Background: Many suspected laryngopharyngeal neoplasms are examination under general anaesthesia (EUA). Office-based endoscopy is already routinely performed on all patients presenting with a suspected laryngopharyngeal neoplasm. Accurate clinical staging and tissue sampling using flexible endoscopy may eliminate the need for EUA. Aim: To compare the use of flexible endoscopy to EUA as primary diagnostic tool of laryngopharyngeal lesions to EUA, using accuracy of tissue samples obtained and clinical staging as primary outcome measures. Duration, patient tolerance and cost implications were also assessed. Setting: The study was performed in the outpatient department and surgical theatres of Tygerberg Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa. Methods: A prospective study compared staging and tissue sampling accuracy with flexible endoscopy to EUA in 54 patients. Duration, tolerance and cost implications were also assessed. Results: Flexible endoscopic biopsy had a 77.1% sensitivity, 100% specificity and 82.2% diagnostic accuracy. Liquid-based cytology had 97.3% sensitivity, 100% specificity and 97.9% diagnostic accuracy in differentiating high-grade lesions from low-grade lesions. Local staging agreement occurred in 88.6% (n = 31/35) of malignant cases. The mean duration was 15 ± 7 min; 86% of patients perceived the procedure as tolerable. Flexible endoscopy as a primary diagnostic tool would have avoided EUA in 68.6% (n = 24/35) of squamous cell carcinoma cases, with a R128 232 cost savings. Conclusion: Office-based endoscopy is an accurate, well-tolerated, time- and cost-effective primary diagnostic tool of laryngopharyngeal lesions. It reduces the number of patients requiring EUA. Further evaluation is empirical when the histopathology does not confirm the clinical suspicion of malignancy

Extinction of cue-evoked drug-seeking relies on degrading hierarchical instrumental expectancies

There has long been need for a behavioural intervention that attenuates cue-evoked drug-seeking, but the optimal method remains obscure. To address this, we report three approaches to extinguish cue-evoked drug-seeking measured in a Pavlovian to instrumental transfer design, in non-treatment seeking adult smokers and alcohol drinkers. The results showed that the ability of a drug stimulus to transfer control over a separately trained drug-seeking response was not affected by the stimulus undergoing Pavlovian extinction training in experiment 1, but was abolished by the stimulus undergoing discriminative extinction training in experiment 2, and was abolished by explicit verbal instructions stating that the stimulus did not signal a more effective response-drug contingency in experiment 3. These data suggest that cue-evoked drug-seeking is mediated by a propositional hierarchical instrumental expectancy that the drug-seeking response is more likely to be rewarded in that stimulus. Methods which degraded this hierarchical expectancy were effective in the laboratory, and so may have therapeutic potential

Assignment of epidemiological lineages in an emerging pandemic using the pangolin tool.

Funder: Oxford Martin School, University of OxfordThe response of the global virus genomics community to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has been unprecedented, with significant advances made towards the 'real-time' generation and sharing of SARS-CoV-2 genomic data. The rapid growth in virus genome data production has necessitated the development of new analytical methods that can deal with orders of magnitude of more genomes than previously available. Here, we present and describe Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak Lineages (pangolin), a computational tool that has been developed to assign the most likely lineage to a given SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence according to the Pango dynamic lineage nomenclature scheme. To date, nearly two million virus genomes have been submitted to the web-application implementation of pangolin, which has facilitated the SARS-CoV-2 genomic epidemiology and provided researchers with access to actionable information about the pandemic's transmission lineages

State anxiety and emotional face recognition in healthy volunteers

High trait anxiety has been associated with detriments in emotional face processing. By contrast, relatively little is known about the effects of state anxiety on emotional face processing. We investigated the effects of state anxiety on recognition of emotional expressions (anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and happiness) experimentally, using the 7.5% carbon dioxide (CO2) model to induce state anxiety, and in a large observational study. The experimental studies indicated reduced global (rather than emotion-specific) emotion recognition accuracy and increased interpretation bias (a tendency to perceive anger over happiness) when state anxiety was heightened. The observational study confirmed that higher state anxiety is associated with poorer emotion recognition, and indicated that negative effects of trait anxiety are negated when controlling for state anxiety, suggesting a mediating effect of state anxiety. These findings may have implications for anxiety disorders, which are characterized by increased frequency, intensity or duration of state anxious episodes