► Integration of recent electrophysiological (ERP) and hemodynamic neuroimaging (fMRI) studies. ► Emotional valence and arousal affect early stages of word recognition. ► Emotional valence recruits ...higher-order, evaluative processes. ► Arousal recruits more automatic, perceptual and physiological processes. ► Discussion of theoretical and methodological issues as well as future directions.
A growing body of literature investigating the neural correlates of emotion word processing has emerged in recent years. Written words have been shown to represent a suitable means to study emotion processing and most importantly to address the distinct and interactive contributions of the two dimensions of emotion: valence and arousal. The aim of the present review is to integrate findings from electrophysiological (ERP) and hemodynamic neuroimaging (fMRI) studies in order to provide a better understanding of emotion word processing. It provides an up-to-date review of recent ERP studies since the review by Kissler et al. (2006) as well as the first review of hemodynamic brain imaging studies in the field. A discussion of theoretical and methodological issues is also presented, along with suggestions for future research.
The recent proposal by Lawson and Rainey (2015) to restrict the genus Clostridium to Clostridium butyricum and related species has ramifications for the members of the genera that fall outside this ...clade that should not be considered as Clostridium sensu stricto. One such organism of profound medical importance is C. difficile that is a major cause of hospital-acquired diarrhea and mortality in individuals. Based on 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis, the closest relative of Clostridium difficile is Clostridium mangenotii with a 94.7% similarity value and both are located within the family Peptostreptococcaceae that is phylogenetically far removed from C. butyricum and other members of Clostridium sensu stricto. Clostridium difficile and Clostridium mangenotii each produce abundant H2 gas when grown in PYG broth and also produce a range of straight and branched chain saturated and unsaturated fatty acids with C16:0 as a major product. The cell wall peptidoglycan contains meso-DAP as the diagnostic diamino acid. Based on phenotypic, chemotaxonomic and phylogenetic analyses, novel genus Clostridioides gen. nov. is proposed for Clostridium difficile as Clostridioides difficile gen. nov. comb. nov. and that Clostridium mangenotii be transferred to this genus as Clostridioides mangenotii comb. nov. The type species of Clostridioides is Clostridioides difficile.
•The proposal to restrict the genus Clostridium to C. butyricum and related species has ramifications organisms that fall outside this clade.•The closest relative of C. difficile is C. mangenotii with a 94.7% similarity value; both are located within the family Peptostreptococcaceae.•Clostridium difficile Clostridium mangenotii are transferred to the genus
Figurative expressions have been shown to play a special role in evoking affective responses, as compared to their literal counterparts. This study provides the first database of conceptual metaphors ...that includes ratings of affective properties beyond psycholinguistic properties. To allow for the investigation of natural reading processes, 64 natural stories were created, half of which contained two or three conceptual metaphors that relied on the same mapping, whereas the other half contained the metaphors’ literal counterparts. To allow for tighter control and manipulation of the different properties, 120 isolated sentences were also created, half of which contained one metaphorical word, which was replaced by its literal rendering in the other half. All stimuli were rated for emotional valence, arousal, imageability, and metaphoricity, and the pairs of metaphorical and literal stimuli were rated for their similarity in meaning. A measure of complexity was determined and computed. The stories were also rated for naturalness and understandability, and the sentences for familiarity. Differences between the metaphorical and literal stimuli and relationships between the affective and psycholinguistic variables were explored and are discussed in light of extant empirical research. In a nutshell, the metaphorical stimuli were rated as being higher in emotional arousal and easier to imagine than their literal counterparts, thus confirming a role of metaphor in evoking emotion and in activating sensorimotor representations. Affective variables showed the typical U-shaped relationship consistently found in word databases, whereby increasingly positive and negative valence is associated with higher arousal. Finally, interesting differences between the stories and sentences were observed.
We use MasterCode to perform a frequentist analysis of the constraints on a phenomenological MSSM model with 11 parameters, the pMSSM11, including constraints from
∼
36
/fb of LHC data at 13 TeV and ...PICO, XENON1T and PandaX-II searches for dark matter scattering, as well as previous accelerator and astrophysical measurements, presenting fits both with and without the
(
g
-
2
)
μ
constraint. The pMSSM11 is specified by the following parameters: 3 gaugino masses
M
1
,
2
,
3
, a common mass for the first-and second-generation squarks
m
q
~
and a distinct third-generation squark mass
m
q
~
3
, a common mass for the first-and second-generation sleptons
m
ℓ
~
and a distinct third-generation slepton mass
m
τ
~
, a common trilinear mixing parameter
A
, the Higgs mixing parameter
μ
, the pseudoscalar Higgs mass
M
A
and
tan
β
. In the fit including
(
g
-
2
)
μ
, a Bino-like
χ
~
1
0
is preferred, whereas a Higgsino-like
χ
~
1
0
is mildly favoured when the
(
g
-
2
)
μ
constraint is dropped. We identify the mechanisms that operate in different regions of the pMSSM11 parameter space to bring the relic density of the lightest neutralino,
χ
~
1
0
, into the range indicated by cosmological data. In the fit including
(
g
-
2
)
μ
, coannihilations with
χ
~
2
0
and the Wino-like
χ
~
1
±
or with nearly-degenerate first- and second-generation sleptons are active, whereas coannihilations with the
χ
~
2
0
and the Higgsino-like
χ
~
1
±
or with first- and second-generation squarks may be important when the
(
g
-
2
)
μ
constraint is dropped. In the two cases, we present
χ
2
functions in two-dimensional mass planes as well as their one-dimensional profile projections and best-fit spectra. Prospects remain for discovering strongly-interacting sparticles at the LHC, in both the scenarios with and without the
(
g
-
2
)
μ
constraint, as well as for discovering electroweakly-interacting sparticles at a future linear
e
+
e
-
collider such as the ILC or CLIC.
Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste ...(e.g., “She looked at him sweetly”) and their literal paraphrases (e.g., “She looked at him kindly”). Metaphorical and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familiarity, imageability, emotional valence, and arousal. Our findings indicate that conventional metaphorical expressions are more emotionally evocative than literal expressions, as the amygdala and the anterior portion of the hippocampus were more active in the metaphorical sentences. They also support the idea that even conventional metaphors can be grounded in sensorimotor and perceptual representations in that primary and secondary gustatory areas (lateral OFC, frontal operculum, anterior insula) were more active as well. A comparison of the individual words that distinguished the metaphorical and literal sentences revealed greater activation in the lateral OFC and the frontal operculum for the taste-related words, supporting the claim that these areas are relevant to taste.
A growing body of literature shows that the emotional content of verbal material affects reading, wherein emotional words are given processing priority compared to neutral words. Human emotions can ...be conceptualised within a two-dimensional model comprised of emotional valence and arousal (intensity). These variables are at least in part distinct, but recent studies report interactive effects during implicit emotion processing and relate these to stimulus-evoked approach-withdrawal tendencies.
The aim of the present study was to explore how valence and arousal interact at the neural level, during implicit emotion word processing. The emotional attributes of written word stimuli were orthogonally manipulated based on behavioural ratings from a corpus of emotion words. Stimuli were presented during an fMRI experiment while 16 participants performed a lexical decision task, which did not require explicit evaluation of a word′s emotional content.
Results showed greater neural activation within right insular cortex in response to stimuli evoking conflicting approach-withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive high-arousal and negative low-arousal words) compared to stimuli evoking congruent approach vs. withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive low-arousal and negative high-arousal words). Further, a significant cluster of activation in the left extra-striate cortex was found in response to emotional than neutral words, suggesting enhanced perceptual processing of emotionally salient stimuli.
These findings support an interactive two-dimensional approach to the study of emotion word recognition and suggest that the integration of valence and arousal dimensions recruits a brain region associated with interoception, emotional awareness and sympathetic functions.
•Emotional valence and arousal affect reading interactively.•Positive high-arousal and negative low-arousal words evoke conflicting reactions.•Enhanced right insula activation was found in response to conflicting stimuli.•Insula integrates viscero-sensory and cognitive/evaluative information.•Enhanced extra-striate cortex activation was found for emotional than neutral words.
Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in ...conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholinguistic idiom properties. German native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, arousal, familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, and concreteness. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom and rated how confident they were about the attributed meaning. The results showed that idioms rated high in valence were also rated high in arousal. Negative idioms were rated as more arousing than positive ones, in line with results from single words. Furthermore, arousal correlated positively with figurativeness (supporting the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions) and with concreteness and semantic transparency. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meanings of their constituting words. Arousal correlated positively with familiarity. In addition, positive idioms were rated as more familiar than negative idioms. Finally, idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced and arousing than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meanings of ambiguous idioms were less correctly defined than those of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. We also discuss the relationships between the various psycholinguistic variables characterizing idioms, with reference to the literature on idiom structure and processing.
We describe a likelihood analysis using MasterCode of variants of the MSSM in which the soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters are assumed to have universal values at some scale
M
in
below the ...supersymmetric grand unification scale
M
GUT
, as can occur in mirage mediation and other models. In addition to
M
in
, such ‘sub-GUT’ models have the 4 parameters of the CMSSM, namely a common gaugino mass
m
1
/
2
, a common soft supersymmetry-breaking scalar mass
m
0
, a common trilinear mixing parameter
A
and the ratio of MSSM Higgs vevs
tan
β
, assuming that the Higgs mixing parameter
μ
>
0
. We take into account constraints on strongly- and electroweakly-interacting sparticles from
∼
36
/fb of LHC data at 13 TeV and the LUX and 2017 PICO, XENON1T and PandaX-II searches for dark matter scattering, in addition to the previous LHC and dark matter constraints as well as full sets of flavour and electroweak constraints. We find a preference for
M
in
∼
10
5
to
10
9
GeV
, with
M
in
∼
M
GUT
disfavoured by
Δ
χ
2
∼
3
due to the
BR
(
B
s
,
d
→
μ
+
μ
-
)
constraint. The lower limits on strongly-interacting sparticles are largely determined by LHC searches, and similar to those in the CMSSM. We find a preference for the LSP to be a Bino or Higgsino with
m
χ
~
1
0
∼
1
TeV
, with annihilation via heavy Higgs bosons
H
/
A
and stop coannihilation, or chargino coannihilation, bringing the cold dark matter density into the cosmological range. We find that spin-independent dark matter scattering is likely to be within reach of the planned LUX-Zeplin and XENONnT experiments. We probe the impact of the
(
g
-
2
)
μ
constraint, finding similar results whether or not it is included.
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