scholarly journals Anxiety-related frontocortical activity is associated with dampened stressor reactivity in the real world

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juyoen Hur ◽  
Manuel Kuhn ◽  
Shannon E. Grogans ◽  
Allegra S. Anderson ◽  
Samiha Islam ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTNegative affect is a fundamental dimension of human emotion. When extreme, it contributes to a variety of adverse outcomes—from physical and mental illness to divorce and premature death. Mechanistic work in animals and neuroimaging research in humans has begun to reveal the broad contours of the neural circuits governing negative affect, but the relevance of these discoveries to everyday distress remains incompletely understood. Here we used a combination of approaches—including neuroimaging assays of threat anticipation and perception, >10,000 momentary assessments of emotional experience, and large-scale automated analyses of regional connectivity and co-activation—to demonstrate that individuals showing greater activation in a cingulo-opercular circuit during an anxiety-eliciting laboratory paradigm experience lower levels of stressor-dependent distress in their daily lives. Subcortical activation was not significantly related to momentary negative affect. These observations provide a framework for understanding the neurobiology of negative affect in the laboratory and in the real world.STATEMENT OF RELEVANCEAnxiety, sadness, and other negative emotions are hallmarks of the human condition. When extreme, they contribute to a variety of adverse outcomes—from physical and mental illness to divorce and premature death—pointing to the need to develop a better understanding of the underlying brain circuitry. Recent work has begun to reveal the neural systems governing negative affect, but the relevance of these tantalizing laboratory discoveries to the real world has remained unclear. Here we used a combination of brain imaging and smartphone-based survey techniques to demonstrate that individuals evincing greater activation in a cingulo-opercular circuit during an anxiety-promoting laboratory task experienced reduced distress in the moments following exposure to daily stressors. These observations provide new insights into the brain systems most relevant to negative emotion in everyday life, underscoring the importance of more recently evolved cortical association areas.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Sun ◽  
Disa Sauter

Getting old is generally seen as unappealing, yet aging confers considerable advantages in several psychological domains (North & Fiske, 2015). In particular, older adults are better off emotionally than younger adults, with aging associated with the so-called “age advantages,” that is, more positive and less negative emotional experiences (Carstensen et al., 2011). Although the age advantages are well established, it is less clear whether they occur under conditions of prolonged stress. In a recent study, Carstensen et al (2020) demonstrated that the age advantages persist during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that older adults are able to utilise cognitive and behavioural strategies to ameliorate even sustained stress. Here, we build on Carstensen and colleagues’ work with two studies. In Study 1, we provide a large-scale test of the robustness of Carstensen and colleagues’ finding that older individuals experience more positive and less negative emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measured positive and negative emotions along with age information in 23,629 participants in 63 countries in April-May 2020. In Study 2, we provide a comparison of the age advantages using representative samples collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that older people experience less negative emotion than younger people during the prolonged stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the advantage of older adults was diminished during the pandemic, pointing to a likely role of older adults use of situation selection strategies (Charles, 2010).


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianfeng Zhang ◽  
Xian‐Sheng Hua ◽  
Jianqiang Huang ◽  
Xu Shen ◽  
Jingyuan Chen ◽  
...  

Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 369 (6500) ◽  
pp. 194-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Harten ◽  
Amitay Katz ◽  
Aya Goldshtein ◽  
Michal Handel ◽  
Yossi Yovel

How animals navigate over large-scale environments remains a riddle. Specifically, it is debated whether animals have cognitive maps. The hallmark of map-based navigation is the ability to perform shortcuts, i.e., to move in direct but novel routes. When tracking an animal in the wild, it is extremely difficult to determine whether a movement is truly novel because the animal’s past movement is unknown. We overcame this difficulty by continuously tracking wild fruit bat pups from their very first flight outdoors and over the first months of their lives. Bats performed truly original shortcuts, supporting the hypothesis that they can perform large-scale map-based navigation. We documented how young pups developed their visual-based map, exemplifying the importance of exploration and demonstrating interindividual differences.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 6194-6201
Author(s):  
Jing Wang ◽  
Weiqing Min ◽  
Sujuan Hou ◽  
Shengnan Ma ◽  
Yuanjie Zheng ◽  
...  

Logo classification has gained increasing attention for its various applications, such as copyright infringement detection, product recommendation and contextual advertising. Compared with other types of object images, the real-world logo images have larger variety in logo appearance and more complexity in their background. Therefore, recognizing the logo from images is challenging. To support efforts towards scalable logo classification task, we have curated a dataset, Logo-2K+, a new large-scale publicly available real-world logo dataset with 2,341 categories and 167,140 images. Compared with existing popular logo datasets, such as FlickrLogos-32 and LOGO-Net, Logo-2K+ has more comprehensive coverage of logo categories and larger quantity of logo images. Moreover, we propose a Discriminative Region Navigation and Augmentation Network (DRNA-Net), which is capable of discovering more informative logo regions and augmenting these image regions for logo classification. DRNA-Net consists of four sub-networks: the navigator sub-network first selected informative logo-relevant regions guided by the teacher sub-network, which can evaluate its confidence belonging to the ground-truth logo class. The data augmentation sub-network then augments the selected regions via both region cropping and region dropping. Finally, the scrutinizer sub-network fuses features from augmented regions and the whole image for logo classification. Comprehensive experiments on Logo-2K+ and other three existing benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method. Logo-2K+ and the proposed strong baseline DRNA-Net are expected to further the development of scalable logo image recognition, and the Logo-2K+ dataset can be found at https://github.com/msn199959/Logo-2k-plus-Dataset.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Chao

This article explores how indigenous Marind of West Papua conceptualize the radical socio-environmental transformations wrought by large-scale deforestation and oil palm expansion on their customary lands and forests. Within the ecology of the Marind lifeworld, oil palm constitutes a particular kind of person, endowed with particular agencies and affects. Its unwillingness to participate in symbiotic socialities with other species jeopardizes the well-being of the life forms populating a dynamic multispecies cosmology, including humans. Drawing from ontological theories and the multispecies approach, I show how people in a remote place engage with adverse environmental transformations enacted by an other-than-human actor. Assumptions of human exceptionalism come under question in the context of a vegetal being that is exceptional in its own particular and destructive ways. Arguing for greater attention to other-than-human species that are unloving rather than unloved, I explore the epistemological frictions that arise from combining the anthropology of ontology with multispecies ethnography. I also attend to the implications of these theoretical positions in the real world of advocacy for those struggling in and against growing social and ecological precariousness.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Alysha A. Walter, MS, CTRS ◽  
Bryan P. McCormick, PhD, CTRS

This study examined the relationship of aquatic activity to positive and negative emotion in individuals with a severe mental illness (SMI). Individuals with SMI have been found to experience decreased positive emotions and higher negative emotions as compared to controls. It was hypothesized that aquatic activity participation would be associated with greater positive emotion and lower negative emotion post participation. Eighteen participants with a severe mental illness were recruited from a community mental health center. The study employed a pre-post design with a structured aquatic activity designed for moderate physical exertion. Participants demonstrated statistically significant increase in positive emotion and decrease in negative emotion pre to post activity. The findings of this study provide support for the potential effect of aquatic activities in psychiatric rehabilitation.


2018 ◽  
Vol Volume 10 ◽  
pp. 573-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Shafrin ◽  
Katalin Bognar ◽  
Katie Everson ◽  
Michelle Brauer ◽  
Darius N Lakdawalla ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. s218-s218 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Pascucci ◽  
E. Stella ◽  
M. La Montagna ◽  
A. De Angelis ◽  
P. Parente ◽  
...  

IntroductionStigma towards psychiatry and mental illness significantly worsens the quality of life of psychiatric patients. Negative prejudices in medical students make it difficult for future doctors to send patients to mental health services and promote an increased risk of premature death.AimsOur aim is to assess stigma towards mental illness and psychiatry in medical students, and to study the influence of real-world experiences, such as having visited a psychiatric ward, having personally met a psychiatric patient or having friends and/or family members who suffer from a mental illness.MethodsOne hundred and thirteen Italian medical students completed the following tests:– Attitudes Towards Psychiatry (ATP-30);– Community Attitudes Towards Mental Ill (CAMI);– Perceived Discrimination Devaluation Scale (PDD);– Baron-Cohen's Empathy Quotient (EQ).ResultsHaving visited a psychiatric ward correlates with a better attitude towards psychiatry (P = 0.008), rather than towards the mentally ill. Having personally known someone with mental disorders correlates with less stigmatizing scores in CAMI: total score (P = 0.002), authoritarianism (P < 0.001), benevolence (P = 0.047) and social restriction (P = 0.001). Similar results emerged in those who have close relationships with a psychiatric patient. There is no statistical significance as to empathy.ConclusionsThe students who have visited a psychiatric ward have a less stigmatizing vision of psychiatry, while having personally known psychiatric patients favors a less stigmatizing attitude towards them. Those who have not had this experience, have a more hostile and intolerant vision of mental illness, and consider psychiatric patients as inferior subjects that require coercive attitudes and that would be better to avoid because socially dangerous.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.


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