Drug addiction is stigmatized, and this stigma contributes to poor outcomes for individuals with addiction. Researchers have argued that providing genetic explanations of addiction will reduce ...stigma, but there has been limited research testing this prediction.
We presented participants (N = 252) with news articles that either provided genetic or anti-genetic explanations of addiction.
There was no effect of article condition on stigma. Participants' biological essentialism correlated with stigma in the context of both opioid and methamphetamine addiction. However, participants' non-biological essentialism was a significantly stronger correlate with stigma.
This suggests that other essentialist beliefs, like belief that categories are discrete, may be more useful than biological essentialism for understanding addiction stigma.
Fixating an emotional facial expression can create afterimages, such that subsequent faces are seen as having the opposite expression of that fixated. Visual afterimages have been used to map the ...relationships among emotion categories, and this method was used here to compare ASD and matched control participants. Participants adapted to a facial expression for 45 s then saw a neutral face for 800 ms and chose a label to describe the latter. The ASD group showed evidence of afterimages, but atypical patterns of opposition: whereas fixating negative emotions uniformly evokes a positive afterimage in the control group, fixating negative emotions was more likely to evoke a negative afterimage in the ASD group. This study was the first to provide evidence of visual aftereffects in ASD and suggests a different psychological organization among emotions in those with ASD.
Understanding the development and structure of people's concepts of national groups can contribute to an understanding of their behavior in the political arena, including perhaps the recent rise in ...nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Here, we provide a developmental investigation of concepts of national groups in a sample of 5- to 8-year-old Canadian children (N = 79). Using an extensive battery of measures, we assessed the extent to which children conceive of national groups as socially constructed versus as having deeper, perhaps biological, "essences" that shape their members' physical and psychological makeup. At younger ages, Canadian children tended to essentialize national groups, including in a biological sense. At older ages, the biological conception of national groups subsided, but children continued to view these groups as meaningful and informative. A statistical comparison with 5- to 8-year-old American children's responses to the same measures (N = 70; using data from Hussak & Cimpian, 2019) revealed a great degree of overlap, despite substantial differences between the two countries in how national identity is conceived and described. These findings add an important piece to our understanding of the development of concepts of national groups.
We investigated compositional relationships between bacterial communities in the water column and those in deep-sea sediment at three environmentally distinct Pacific sites (two in the Equatorial ...Pacific and one in the North Pacific Gyre). Through pyrosequencing of the v4-v6 hypervariable regions of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, we characterized 450,104 pyrotags representing 29,814 operational taxonomic units (OTUs, 97% similarity). Hierarchical clustering and non-metric multidimensional scaling partition the samples into four broad groups, regardless of geographic location: a photic-zone community, a subphotic community, a shallow sedimentary community and a subseafloor sedimentary community (⩾1.5 meters below seafloor). Abundance-weighted community compositions of water-column samples exhibit a similar trend with depth at all sites, with successive epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathypelagic and abyssopelagic communities. Taxonomic richness is generally highest in the water-column O2 minimum zone and lowest in the subseafloor sediment. OTUs represented by abundant tags in the subseafloor sediment are often present but represented by few tags in the water column, and represented by moderately abundant tags in the shallow sediment. In contrast, OTUs represented by abundant tags in the water are generally absent from the subseafloor sediment. These results are consistent with (i) dispersal of marine sedimentary bacteria via the ocean, and (ii) selection of the subseafloor sedimentary community from within the community present in shallow sediment.
If neurotypical people rely on specialized perceptual mechanisms when perceiving biological motion, then one would not expect an association between task performance and IQ. However, if those with ...ASD recruit higher order cognitive skills when solving biological motion tasks, performance may be predicted by IQ. In a meta-analysis that included 19 articles, we found an association between biological motion perception and IQ among observers with ASD but no significant relationship among typical observers. If the task required emotion perception, then there was an even stronger association with IQ in the ASD group.
Assessments of Antarctic temperature change have emphasized the contrast between strong warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and slight cooling of the Antarctic continental interior in recent decades. ...This pattern of temperature change has been attributed to the increased strength of the circumpolar westerlies, largely in response to changes in stratospheric ozone. This picture, however, is substantially incomplete owing to the sparseness and short duration of the observations. Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 degrees C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive. Simulations using a general circulation model reproduce the essential features of the spatial pattern and the long-term trend, and we suggest that neither can be attributed directly to increases in the strength of the westerlies. Instead, regional changes in atmospheric circulation and associated changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice are required to explain the enhanced warming in West Antarctica.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Typical adults use predictable scan patterns while observing faces. Some research suggests that people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) instead attend to eyes less, and perhaps to the mouth more. ...The current experiment was designed as a direct measure of scan paths that people with and without ASD use when identifying simple and complex emotions. Participants saw photos of emotions and chose emotion labels. Scan paths were measured via infrared corneal reflectance. Both groups looked significantly longer at eyes than mouth, and neither overall looking time at eyes nor first fixations distinguished the groups. These results are contrary to suggestions that those with ASD attend preferentially to the mouth and avoid the eyes. Furthermore, there was no interaction between group and area of the face: the ratio of attention between eyes and mouth did not differ between the ASD and control groups. However, those with ASD looked at the eyes less than the control group when viewing complex emotions.
When perceiving emotional facial expressions, adults use a template-matching strategy, comparing the perceived face with a stored representation. A rejection of unnaturally exaggerated faces is ...characteristic of this strategy because the exaggerated expressions do not match the stored template. In contrast, a rule-based perceptual strategy (e.g., wide eyes indicate surprise) would be more tolerant of exaggeration. The current study uses exaggeration tolerance to test the expression perception strategies of children from 6 to 15 years of age. In Experiment 1, 62 (38 male) participants viewed pairs of happy or sad faces varying in exaggeration and selected the face that looked closest to how a happy (or sad) person really looks. With age, children became less likely to choose the more exaggerated expression. In Experiment 2, this result was replicated with each of the six basic emotions. Sixty-six children (26 male, 50 Caucasian, 10 mixed-race, four Indian, two unidentified) from 6 to 15 years of age completed the same experimental tasks as Experiment 1 for all six emotions. Again, with age children became less likely to choose the more exaggerated face. The results from both experiments suggest that the development of an adult-like template-matching strategy lasts into adolescence.
Soil acidity may severely reduce crop production. Biochar (BC) may increase soil pH and cation exchange capacity (CEC) but reported effects differ substantially. In a systematic approach, using a ...standardized protocol on a uniquely large number set of 31 acidic soils, we quantified the effect of increasing amounts (0–30%; weight:weight) of three types of field-produced BCs (from cacao (Theobroma cacao. L.) shell, oil palm (Elaeis guineensis. Jacq.) shell and rice (Oryza sativa. L.) husk) on soil pH and CEC. Soils were sampled from croplands at Java, Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia. All BCs caused a significant increase in mean soil pH with a stronger response and a greater maximum increase for the cacao shell BC addition, due to a greater acid neutralizing capacity (ANC) and larger amounts of extractable base cations. At 1% BC addition, corresponding to about 30 tons ha ⁻¹, the estimated increase in soil pH from the initial mean pH of 4.7 was about 0.5 units for the cacao shell BC, whereas this was only 0.05 and 0.04 units for the oil palm shell and rice husk BC, respectively. Besides depending on BC type, the increase in soil pH upon the addition of each of the three BCs was mainly dependent on soil CEC (low CEC resulting in stronger pH increase), and to a lesser extent on initial soil pH (higher initial pH resulting in stronger pH increase). Addition of BC also increased the amount of exchangeable base cations (cacao shell ≫ oil palm and rice husk) and CEC. Through this systematic screening of the effect of BC on pH and CEC of acidic soils, we show that a small addition of BC, in particular if made of cacao shell, to acidic agricultural soils increases soil pH and CEC. However, the response is highly dependent on the type, quality and amount of the added BC as well as on intrinsic soil properties, mainly CEC.
Some, but not all, relevant studies have revealed face processing deficits among those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In particular, deficits are revealed in face processing tasks that involve ...emotion perception. The current study examined whether either deficits in processing emotional expression or deficits in processing social cognitive complexity drive face processing deficits in ASD. We tested adults with and without ASD on a battery of face processing tasks that varied with respect to emotional expression processing and social cognitive complexity. Results revealed significant group differences on tasks involving emotional expression processing, but typical performance on a non-emotional but socially complex task. These results support an emotion processing rather than a social complexity explanation for face processing deficits in ASD.
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