Anger suppression is important in our daily life, as its failure can sometimes lead to the breaking down of relationships in families. Thus, effective strategies to suppress or neutralise anger have ...been examined. This study shows that physical disposal of a piece of paper containing one's written thoughts on the cause of a provocative event neutralises anger, while holding the paper did not. In this study, participants wrote brief opinions about social problems and received a handwritten, insulting comment consisting of low evaluations about their composition from a confederate. Then, the participants wrote the cause and their thoughts about the provocative event. Half of the participants (disposal group) disposed of the paper in the trash can (Experiment 1) or in the shredder (Experiment 2), while the other half (retention group) kept it in a file on the desk. All the participants showed an increased subjective rating of anger after receiving the insulting feedback. However, the subjective anger for the disposal group decreased as low as the baseline period, while that of the retention group was still higher than that in the baseline period in both experiments. We propose this method as a powerful and simple way to eliminate anger.
Abstract Food tastes better and people eat more of it when eaten with company than alone. Although several explanations have been proposed for this social facilitation of eating, they share the basic ...assumption that this phenomenon is achieved by the existence of co-eating others. Here, we demonstrate a similar “social” facilitation of eating in the absence of other individuals. Elderly participants tasted a piece of popcorn alone while in front of a mirror (which reflects the participant themselves eating popcorn) or in front of a wall-reflecting monitor, and were found to eat more popcorn and rate it better tasting in the self-reflecting condition than in the monitor condition. Similar results were found for younger adults. The results suggest that the social facilitation of eating does not necessarily require the presence of another individual. Furthermore, we observed a similar “social” facilitation of eating even when participants ate a piece of popcorn in front of a static picture of themselves eating, suggesting that static visual information of “someone” eating food is sufficient to produce the “social” facilitation of eating.
Threat detection is crucial to survival. Studies using unnatural visual scene settings (i.e. visual search tasks) have shown that humans and primates are able to identify snakes more quickly than ...they are able to identify other animals. The present study employed a flicker paradigm task to assess whether humans detect snakes more accurately and rapidly than they do other reptiles in natural scene settings. Participants watched a long series of images, consisting of pairs of complex natural scenes. A blank interval was inserted between the two versions of the scene, showing only the scene and the scene plus an added animal (snake or lizard). Participants detected scene changes featuring the snake targets more accurately and rapidly than those with lizard targets. This finding supports the view that there were evolutionary pressures for a visual system which prioritised human detection of snakes.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We report results from the X-ray and optical monitoring of the black hole candidate MAXI J1820+070 (=ASSASN-18ey) over the entire period of its outburst from 2018 March to October. In this outburst, ...the source exhibited two sets of "fast rise and slow decay"-type long-term flux variations. We found that the 1-100 keV luminosities at two peaks were almost the same, although a significant spectral softening was only seen in the second flux rise. This confirms that the state transition from the low/hard state to the high/soft state is not determined by the mass accretion rate alone. The X-ray spectrum was reproduced with the disk blackbody emission and its Comptonization, and the long-term spectral variations seen in this outburst were consistent with a disk truncation model. The Comptonization component, with a photon index of 1.5-1.9 and electron temperature of 40 keV, was dominant during the low/hard state periods, and its contribution rapidly decreased (increased) during the spectral softening (hardening). During the high/soft-state period, in which the X-ray spectrum became dominated by the disk blackbody component, the inner disk radius was almost constant, suggesting that the standard disk was present down to the innermost stable circular orbit. The long-term evolution of optical and X-ray luminosities and their correlation suggest that the jets substantially contributed to the optical emission in the low/hard state, while they are quenched and the outer disk emission dominated the optical flux in the intermediate state and the high/soft state.
Humans and non-human primates are extremely sensitive to snakes as exemplified by their ability to detect pictures of snakes more quickly than those of other animals. These findings are consistent ...with the Snake Detection Theory, which hypothesizes that as predators, snakes were a major source of evolutionary selection that favored expansion of the visual system of primates for rapid snake detection. Many snakes use camouflage to conceal themselves from both prey and their own predators, making it very challenging to detect them. If snakes have acted as a selective pressure on primate visual systems, they should be more easily detected than other animals under difficult visual conditions. Here we tested whether humans discerned images of snakes more accurately than those of non-threatening animals (e.g., birds, cats, or fish) under conditions of less perceptual information by presenting a series of degraded images with the Random Image Structure Evolution technique (interpolation of random noise). We find that participants recognize mosaic images of snakes, which were regarded as functionally equivalent to camouflage, more accurately than those of other animals under dissolved conditions. The present study supports the Snake Detection Theory by showing that humans have a visual system that accurately recognizes snakes under less discernible visual conditions.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Objectives
To evaluate the image quality and iodine concentration (IC) measurements in pancreatic protocol dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) reconstructed using deep learning image ...reconstruction (DLIR) and compare them with those of images reconstructed using hybrid iterative reconstruction (IR).
Methods
The local institutional review board approved this prospective study. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. Thirty consecutive participants with pancreatic cancer (PC) underwent pancreatic protocol DECT for initial evaluation. DECT data were reconstructed at 70 keV using 40% adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction–Veo (hybrid-IR) and DLIR at medium and high levels (DLIR-M and DLIR-H, respectively). The diagnostic acceptability and conspicuity of PC were qualitatively assessed using a 5-point scale. IC values of the abdominal aorta, pancreas, PC, liver, and portal vein; standard deviation (SD); and coefficient of variation (CV) were calculated. Qualitative and quantitative parameters were compared between the hybrid-IR, DLIR-M, and DLIR-H groups.
Results
The diagnostic acceptability and conspicuity of PC were significantly better in the DLIR-M group compared with those in the other groups (
p
< .001–.001). The IC values of the anatomical structures were almost comparable between the three groups (
p
= .001–.9). The SD of IC values was significantly lower in the DLIR-H group (
p
< .001) and resulted in the lowest CV (
p
< .001–.002) compared with those in the hybrid-IR and DLIR-M groups.
Conclusions
DLIR could significantly improve image quality and reduce the variability of IC values than could hybrid-IR.
Key Points
Image quality and conspicuity of pancreatic cancer were the best in DLIR-M.
DLIR significantly reduced background noise and improved SNR and CNR.
The variability of iodine concentration was reduced in DLIR.
The IceCube report of a excess of 13 5 neutrino events in the direction of the blazar TXS 0506+056 in 2014-2015 and the 2017 detection of a high-energy neutrino event, IceCube-170922A, during a ...gamma-ray flare from the same blazar, have revived the interest in scenarios for neutrino production in blazars. We perform comprehensive analyses on the long-term electromagnetic emission of TXS 0506+056 using optical, X-ray, and gamma-ray data from the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, and the Fermi Large Area Telescope. We also perform numerical modeling of the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) in four epochs prior to 2017 with contemporaneous gamma-ray and lower-energy (optical and/or X-ray) data. We find that the multi-epoch SEDs are consistent with a hybrid leptonic scenario, where the gamma-rays are produced in the blazar zone via external inverse Compton scattering of accelerated electrons, and high-energy neutrinos are produced via the photomeson production process of co-accelerated protons. The multi-epoch SEDs can be satisfactorily explained with the same jet parameters and variable external photon density and electron luminosity. Using the maximal neutrino flux derived for each epoch, we put an upper limit of ∼0.4-2 on the muon neutrino number in 10 years of IceCube observations. Our results are consistent with the IceCube-170922A detection, which can be explained as an upper fluctuation from the average neutrino rate expected from the source, but in strong tension with the 2014-2015 neutrino flare.
People eat more when their eating confederates eat a lot. However, it was not clear whether participants’ eating is changed by a remote-video confederate. We compared three types of silent videos: 1) ...a stranger eating potato chips, 2) the stranger calling on the phone, or 3) only objects (food and cellphone). Participants perceived popcorn to taste better only when they watched the video of others eating. Watching others eating induced the participants to eat more than when watching the other two videos. This study indicates that remote-video confederates enhance not only food intake but also the perceived taste of food.
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