Attentional Bias to Facial Expressions of Different Emotions – A Cross-Cultural Comparison of ≠Akhoe Hai||om and German Children and Adolescents

The attentional bias to negative information enables humans to quickly identify and to respond appropriately to potentially threatening situations. Because of its adaptive function, the enhanced sensitivity to negative information is expected to represent a universal trait, shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on humans from Western industrialized societies, who are not representative for the human species. Therefore, we compare humans from two distinct cultural contexts: adolescents and children from Germany, a Western industrialized society, and from the ≠Akhoe Hai||om, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in Namibia. We predicted that both groups show an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions as compared to neutral or positive faces. We used eye-tracking to measure their fixation duration on facial expressions depicting different emotions, including negative (fear, anger), positive (happy), and neutral faces. Both Germans and the ≠Akhoe Hai||om gazed longer at fearful faces, but shorter on angry faces, challenging the notion of a general bias toward negative emotions. For happy faces, fixation durations varied between the two groups, suggesting more flexibility in the response to positive emotions. Our findings emphasize the need for placing research on emotion perception into an evolutionary, cross-cultural comparative framework that considers the adaptive significance of specific emotions, rather than differentiating between positive and negative information, and enables systematic comparisons across participants from diverse cultural backgrounds

Perception of facial expressions reveals selective affect-biased attention in humans and orangutans

Rapid detection and recognition of another individual’s emotional state plays a pivotal role for humans and, most likely, other social species. Proper reactions contribute to an individual’s survival in potentially dangerous situations; this is ensured by a preferential attention towards salient cues. The predisposition to attend to certain categories of affectively salient stimuli– also referred to as affect-biased attention - is likely shared with other species, since fast detection of and appropriate reaction to threats is crucial to survival. We compared human children and one of our close relatives, Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), and predicted that both look more attentively and longer at emotionally salient facial expressions of their own and corresponding other species, compared to neutral faces. However, in contrast to a bias towards emotions providing relevant information by indicating a threat, both species preferentially looked at the fear-related, but not the angry faces of humans and consistently preferred the silent-bared teeth espressions in orangutans. The differential attention towards certain expressions might derive from their social function and the need to detect a potential threat in the environment. Our findings are consistent with claims rooting this affect-biased attention characteristic of human perception in our evolutionary history

A Comparative Eye-Tracking Study

Objects from the Middle Paleolithic period colored with ochre and marked with incisions represent the beginning of non-utilitarian object manipulation in different species of the Homo genus. To investigate the visual effects caused by these markings, we compared humans who have different cultural backgrounds (Namibian hunter–gatherers and German city dwellers) to one species of non- human great apes (orangutans) with respect to their perceptions of markings on objects. We used eye-tracking to analyze their fixation patterns and the durations of their fixations on marked and unmarked stones and sticks. In an additional test, humans evaluated the objects regarding their aesthetic preferences. Our hypotheses were that colorful markings help an individual to structure the surrounding world by making certain features of the environment salient, and that aesthetic appreciation should be associated with this structuring. Our results showed that humans fixated on the marked objects longer and used them in the structural processing of the objects and their background, but did not consistently report finding them more beautiful. Orangutans, in contrast, did not distinguish between object and background in their visual processing and did not clearly fixate longer on the markings. Our results suggest that marking behavior is characteristic for humans and evolved as an attention-directing rather than aesthetic benefit

Towards a promoting for community cinema in Uruguay. The Western Audiovisual Program

En este trabajo propongo en primer lugar un recorrido por algunos antecedentes de cine comunitario en Uruguay en lo que va de este siglo. En segundo lugar, presento una breve reseña sobre las políticas públicas que en los últimos años han abordado (u omitido) el incentivo al desarrollo de este tipo de producción audiovisual. Por último, realizo un primer acercamiento al Programa Oeste Audiovisual creado en 2019, a través de un análisis de su proceso institucional y las características de sus diferentes líneas. Las experiencias de cine comunitario han sido escasas en Uruguay, y son muy pocos los casos que han podido sostenerse en el tiempo. Mientras que en países de la región como Argentina existen políticas públicas que han fomentado el apoyo específico a este tipo de producción, en Uruguay no se han desarrollado políticas de fomento similares, si bien algunas han apostado por la descentralización cultural. En ese contexto, resulta significativo el estudio del Programa Oeste Audiovisual, que propone desde la integralidad de sus líneas de formación, circulación y fomento a la producción comunitaria, un nuevo espacio para el impulso a este tipo de prácticas.In this paper I first propose a tour of some antecedents of community cinema in Uruguay so far this century. Second, I present a brief overview of the public policies that in recent years have addressed (or omitted) the incentive to develop this type of audiovisual production. Finally, I make a first approach to the Western Audiovisual Program created in 2019, through an analysis of its institutional process and the characteristics of its different lines. Community cinema experiences have been scarce in Uruguay, and very few cases have been able to sustain themselves over time. While in countries of the region such as Argentina there are public policies that have promoted specific support for this type of production, in Uruguay similar promotion policies have not been developed, although some have opted for cultural decentralization. In this context, the study of the Western Audiovisual Program is significant, which proposes, from the integrality of its lines of training, circulation and promotion of community production, a new space for the promotion of this type of practice.Facultad de Periodismo y Comunicación Socia

Viruslast und viral load setpoint bei HIV-1-positiven Erwachsenen aus Mbeya Region, Tansania

Background: The viral load setpoint (VLS) is an important predictor of HIV disease progression, but there is a lack of information regarding the VLS and its possible determinants in African populations. Methods: Initially HIV-negative adults from 3 distinct groups(female bar workers, females, and males from the general population) were followed for up to 4 years. The VLS was calculated for 108 seroconverters and associations of the VLS with possible risk factors were analyzed using univariate and multivariate regression. Results: The median VLS for female bar workers, females, and males from the general population were 69,850, 28,600, and 158,000 RNA copies per milliliter, respectively. Significant associations with an elevated viral load were observed for male gender [risk ratio (RR) = 1.83, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 1.14 to 2.93], the expression of harmful HLA I alleles (RR = 1.73, 95% CI = 1.13 to 2.66) and multiple infection with different HIV-1 subtypes (RR = 1.65, 95% CI = 1.03 to 2.66). Bar workers were considerably more often infected with different HIV-1 subtypes than participants from the general population. Conclusions: Our study confirms that gender and the expression of different HLA class I alleles are important determinants of the viremia at VLS, and it also corroborates an earlier finding that multiple infection with different HIV-1 subtypes is associated with a higher VLS