The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that ...originates in the figure of Anyone - the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.
Keywords: 5-HT.sub.1A; behavior; brain ischemia; cannabidiol; CB.sub.1; CB.sub.2; PPAR-gamma An ever-increasing body of preclinical studies has shown the multifaceted neuroprotective profile of ...cannabidiol (CBD) against impairments caused by cerebral ischemia. In this study, we have explored the neuropharmacological mechanisms of CBD action and its impact on functional recovery using a model of transient global cerebral ischemia in mice. C57BL/6J mice were subjected to bilateral common carotid artery occlusion (BCCAO) for 20 min and received vehicle or CBD (10 mg/Kg) 0.5 hr before and 3, 24, and 48 hr after reperfusion. To investigate the neuropharmacological mechanisms of CBD, the animals were injected with CB.sub.1 (AM251, 1 mg/kg), CB.sub.2 (AM630, 1 mg/kg), 5-HT.sub.1A (WAY-100635, 10 mg/kg), or PPAR-gamma (GW9662, 3 mg/kg) receptor antagonists 0.5 hr prior to each injection of CBD. The animals were evaluated using a multi-task testing battery that included the open field, elevated zero maze, Y-maze (YM), and forced swim test. CBD prevented anxiety-like behavior, memory impairments, and despair-like behaviors induced by BCCAO in mice. The anxiolytic-like effects of CBD in BCCAO mice were attenuated by CB.sub.1, CB.sub.2, 5-HT.sub.1A, and PPAR-gamma receptor antagonists. In the YM, both CBD and the CB.sub.1 receptor antagonist AM251 increased the exploration of the novel arm in ischemic animals, indicating beneficial effects of these treatments in the spatial memory performance. Together, these findings indicate the involvement of CB.sub.1, CB.sub.2, 5-HT.sub.1A, and PPAR-gamma receptors in the functional recovery induced by CBD in BCCAO mice. Article Note: Marco Aurelio Mori and Erika Meyer contributed equally to this study. Edited by Dr. Bita Moghaddam Byline: Marco Aurelio Mori, Erika Meyer, Francielly F. Silva, Humberto Milani, Francisco Silveira Guimaraes, Rubia Maria Weffort Oliveira
Impulsivity is a personality construct frequently employed to explain and predict important human behaviors. Major inconsistencies in its definition and measurement, however, have led some ...researchers to call for an outright rejection of impulsivity as a psychological construct. We address this highly unsatisfactory state with a large-scale, preregistered study (N = 1,676) in which each participant completed 48 measures of impulsivity derived from 10 self-report scales and 10 behavioral tasks and reported frequencies of seven impulsivity-related behaviors (e.g., impulsive buying and social media usage); a subsample (N = 196) then completed a retest session 3 mo later. We found that correlations between self-report measures were substantially higher than those between behavioral tasks and between self-report measures and behavioral tasks. Bifactor analysis of these measures exacted one general factor of impulsivity I, akin to the general intelligence factor g, and six specific factors. Factor I was related mainly to self-report measures, had high test–retest reliability, and could predict impulsivity-related behaviors better than existing measures. We further developed a scale named the adjustable impulsivity scale (AIMS) to measure I. AIMS possesses excellent psychometric properties that are largely retained in shorter versions and could predict impulsivity-related behaviors equally well as I. These findings collectively support impulsivity as a stable, measurable, and predictive trait, indicating that it may be too early to reject it as a valid and useful psychological construct. The bifactorial structure of impulsivity and AIMS, meanwhile, significantly advance the conceptualization and measurement of construct impulsivity.
•A new high-performing deep neural network-based approach for AudioVisual Emotion Recognition (AVER).•Learning two independent feature extractors specialised for emotion recognition.•Learning two ...independent feature extractors that could be employed for any downstream audiovisual emotion recognition task.•Applying knowledge distillation (specifically, self-distillation), alongside additional unlabeled data for FER.•Learning the spatio-temporal dynamics via a recurrent neural network for AVER.
Emotional expressions are the behaviors that communicate our emotional state or attitude to others. They are expressed through verbal and non-verbal communication. Complex human behavior can be understood by studying physical features from multiple modalities; mainly facial, vocal and physical gestures. Recently, spontaneous multi-modal emotion recognition has been extensively studied for human behavior analysis. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based approach for audio-visual emotion recognition. Our approach leverages recent advances in deep learning like knowledge distillation and high-performing deep architectures. The deep feature representations of the audio and visual modalities are fused based on a model-level fusion strategy. A recurrent neural network is then used to capture the temporal dynamics. Our proposed approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in predicting valence on the RECOLA dataset. Moreover, our proposed visual facial expression feature extraction network outperforms state-of-the-art results on the AffectNet and Google Facial Expression Comparison datasets.
The longstanding debate over human contribution to Pleistocene megafauna extinctions motivates our examination of plausible hunting behaviors that may have impacted prey populations. Prey size ...declines during the Pleistocene have been proposed as a unifying selecting agent of human evolution. Here, we identify prey selection criteria and exploitation patterns that could have increased the extinction risk for targeted species. Limited protein metabolism capacity in humans is proposed to have led to a focus on fat-rich prey, primarily large and prime adults, and selective exploitation of fatty body parts. Such behaviors may have made human-hunted species more vulnerable to population decline due to human predation alone or in combination with environmental changes. We contextualize this hypothesized mechanism within modern evolutionary theory, noting alignment with Niche Construction Theory as an explanation for the directional changes in human physiology and culture over time. The well-evidenced trend of brain expansion provides historical continuity with longer-term primate evolution, meeting recent calls for greater emphasis on ancestral connections in evolutionary models.
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•Humans contributed to prey extinction, targeting fat to mitigate a protein constraint.•Large prey was fatter but more sensitive to hunting pressure than smaller prey.•Prime adult prey, critical to population growth, was fatter than young and old.•Wasteful consumption of fatty parts at dry/snowy seasons added population pressure.•Smaller prey niche construction explains human evolution.
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