Models of hemispheric specialization in facial emotion perception - a reevaluation

A considerable amount of research on functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) for facial emotion perception has shown conflicting support for three competing models: (i) the Right Hemisphere Hypothesis, (ii) the Valence-Specific Hypothesis, and (iii) the Approach/Withdrawal model. However, the majority of studies evaluating the Right Hemisphere or the Valence-Specific Hypotheses are rather limited by the small number of emotional expressions used. In addition, it is difficult to evaluate the Approach/Withdrawal Hypothesis due to insufficient data on anger and FCAs. The aim of the present study was (a) to review visual half field (VHF) studies of hemispheric specialization in facial emotion perception and (b) to reevaluate empirical evidence with respect to all three partly conflicting hypotheses. Results from the present study revealed a left visual field (LVF)/right hemisphere advantage for the perception of angry, fearful, and sad facial expressions and a right visual field (RVF)/left hemisphere advantage for the perception of happy expressions. Thus, FCAs for the perception of specific facial emotions do not fully support the Right Hemisphere Hypothesis, the Valence-Specific Hypothesis, or the Approach/Withdrawal model. A systematic literature review, together with the results of the present study, indicate a consistent LVF/right hemisphere advantage only for a subset of negative emotions including anger, fear and sadness, rather suggesting a “negative (only) valence model.

A New Facility for the Experimental Investigation on Nano Heat Transfer between Gas Molecules and Ceramic Surfaces

Since the last decade, the interest has risen in nanoscaled technological products, which have advantages through their size effect. The size effect also plays a significant role in the area of micro- and nanoscale heat transfers. Many applications were developed using this effect, such as nanostructured porous media, e.g. Aerogels or ceramics. This experimental work is focused on the determination of thermal accommodation coefficients (TAC) on ceramic surfaces considering several influencing factors. TAC is influenced by temperature, kind of gas, kind of wall material, roughness, and contamination with adsorbed gas layers. To determine TAC, a parallel plate apparatus is used, although most of the measurements in the past have been arranged with the hot wire method. Using the parallel plates apparatus is advantageous due to its simpler machining of specimens and to analyze the effect of roughness. The apparatus is build similar to the well-known guarded hot-plate method using an unidirectional heat flux through the gas layer due to a small temperature gradient, which is provided by two different heat foils. The measurements take place between 30 and 100°C, 10−4, and 1 mbar

Android Malware Clustering through Malicious Payload Mining

Clustering has been well studied for desktop malware analysis as an effective triage method. Conventional similarity-based clustering techniques, however, cannot be immediately applied to Android malware analysis due to the excessive use of third-party libraries in Android application development and the widespread use of repackaging in malware development. We design and implement an Android malware clustering system through iterative mining of malicious payload and checking whether malware samples share the same version of malicious payload. Our system utilizes a hierarchical clustering technique and an efficient bit-vector format to represent Android apps. Experimental results demonstrate that our clustering approach achieves precision of 0.90 and recall of 0.75 for Android Genome malware dataset, and average precision of 0.98 and recall of 0.96 with respect to manually verified ground-truth.Comment: Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2017

A Quark Transport Theory to describe Nucleon--Nucleon Collisions

On the basis of the Friedberg-Lee model we formulate a semiclassical transport theory to describe the phase-space evolution of nucleon-nucleon collisions on the quark level. The time evolution is given by a Vlasov-equation for the quark phase-space distribution and a Klein-Gordon equation for the mean-field describing the nucleon as a soliton bag. The Vlasov equation is solved numerically using an extended testparticle method. We test the confinement mechanism and mean-field effects in 1+1 dimensional simulations.Comment: 23 pages, LaTeX (figures available from the authors), UGI-93-

Optical excitations of a self assembled artificial ion

By use of magneto-photoluminescence spectroscopy we demonstrate bias controlled single-electron charging of a single quantum dot. Neutral, single, and double charged excitons are identified in the optical spectra. At high magnetic fields one Zeeman component of the single charged exciton is found to be quenched, which is attributed to the competing effects of tunneling and spin-flip processes. Our experimental data are in good agreement with theoretical model calculations for situations where the spatial extent of the hole wave functions is smaller as compared to the electron wave functions.Comment: to be published in Physical Review B (rapid communication

A game of common-pool resource management: Effects of communication, risky environment and worldviews

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ has been investigated for several decades. At its centre is the question whether a common resource will collapse under over-exploitation. The isolated analysis of one resource has many conceptual benefits, yet in reality resources and welfare are intertwined. In this paper, we investigate a situation where a resource which is exploited for profit has the additional feature of protecting against risk. Our main question is whether participants in an experimental game will prioritize such additional feature over maximizing profit and, if so, to what extent. Therefore, we designed a forest-harvesting game: Participants can harvest trees to generate income, and at the same time the forest serves as a protection against floods. Communication has been shown to play a vital role in managing commons. Our second aim is to test the importance of communication when the resource functions as a device of protecting against external risk. Lastly, we introduce a new perspective to the tragedy of the commons literature. Specifically, we investigate how the anthropologically motivated theory of risk perception (often called Cultural Theory) correlates with behaviour in our economic game. We believe that there is much potential in combining insights from these separate disciplines