Schema-driven construction of future autobiographical traumatic events: the future is much more troubling than the past.

Research on future episodic thought has produced compelling theories and results in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical psychology. In experiments aimed to integrate these with basic concepts and methods from autobiographical memory research, 76 undergraduates remembered past and imagined future positive and negative events that had or would have a major impact on them. Correlations of the online ratings of visual and auditory imagery, emotion, and other measures demonstrated that individuals used the same processes to the same extent to remember past and construct future events. These measures predicted the theoretically important metacognitive judgment of past reliving and future "preliving" in similar ways. On standardized tests of reactions to traumatic events, scores for future negative events were much higher than scores for past negative events. The scores for future negative events were in the range that would qualify for a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); the test was replicated (n = 52) to check for order effects. Consistent with earlier work, future events had less sensory vividness. Thus, the imagined symptoms of future events were unlikely to be caused by sensory vividness. In a second experiment, to confirm this, 63 undergraduates produced numerous added details between 2 constructions of the same negative future events; deficits in rated vividness were removed with no increase in the standardized tests of reactions to traumatic events. Neuroticism predicted individuals' reactions to negative past events but did not predict imagined reactions to future events. This set of novel methods and findings is interpreted in the contexts of the literatures of episodic future thought, autobiographical memory, PTSD, and classic schema theory.

Rare hereditary COL4A3/COL4A4 variants may be mistaken for familial focal segmental glomerulosclerosis.

Focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) is a histological lesion with many causes, including inherited genetic defects, with significant proteinuria being the predominant clinical finding at presentation. Mutations in COL4A3 and COL4A4 are known to cause Alport syndrome (AS), thin basement membrane nephropathy, and to result in pathognomonic glomerular basement membrane (GBM) findings. Secondary FSGS is known to develop in classic AS at later stages of the disease. Here, we present seven families with rare or novel variants in COL4A3 or COL4A4 (six with single and one with two heterozygous variants) from a cohort of 70 families with a diagnosis of hereditary FSGS. The predominant clinical finding at diagnosis was proteinuria associated with hematuria. In all seven families, there were individuals with nephrotic-range proteinuria with histologic features of FSGS by light microscopy. In one family, electron microscopy showed thin GBM, but four other families had variable findings inconsistent with classical Alport nephritis. There was no recurrence of disease after kidney transplantation. Families with COL4A3 and COL4A4 variants that segregated with disease represent 10% of our cohort. Thus, COL4A3 and COL4A4 variants should be considered in the interpretation of next-generation sequencing data from such patients. Furthermore, this study illustrates the power of molecular genetic diagnostics in the clarification of renal phenotypes.

Wave transformation and wave-driven flow across a steep coral reef

Observations of waves, setup, and wave-driven mean flows were made on a steep coral forereef and its associated lagoonal system on the north shore of Moorea, French Polynesia. Despite the steep and complex geometry of the forereef, and wave amplitudes that are nearly equal to the mean water depth, linear wave theory showed very good agreement with data. Measurements across the reef illustrate the importance of including both wave transport (owing to Stokes drift), as well as the Eulerian mean transport when computing the fluxes over the reef. Finally, the observed setup closely follows the theoretical relationship derived from classic radiation stress theory, although the two parameters that appear in the model-one reflecting wave breaking, the other the effective depth over the reef crest-must be chosen to match theory to data. © 2013 American Meteorological Society.

The Origin and Diversification of Birds.

Birds are one of the most recognizable and diverse groups of modern vertebrates. Over the past two decades, a wealth of new fossil discoveries and phylogenetic and macroevolutionary studies has transformed our understanding of how birds originated and became so successful. Birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Jurassic (around 165-150 million years ago) and their classic small, lightweight, feathered, and winged body plan was pieced together gradually over tens of millions of years of evolution rather than in one burst of innovation. Early birds diversified throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous, becoming capable fliers with supercharged growth rates, but were decimated at the end-Cretaceous extinction alongside their close dinosaurian relatives. After the mass extinction, modern birds (members of the avian crown group) explosively diversified, culminating in more than 10,000 species distributed worldwide today.

A Comparative Study of the Chinese Trickster Hero Sun Wukong

Sun Wukong is a fictional hero from the Chinese classic The Journey to the West. As a well-known trickster, Wukong has a lot of similarities with several other tricksters around the world. In order to analyze him, I try to explain both his similarities with, and differences from, other tricksters, especially in the Ancient Greek folklore and myth traditions. The first half of the paper focuses on the general characteristics of tricksters. As a very distinctive group in global mythology, tricksters have particular features. The definition and symbolization of tricksters are illustrated by comparing Wukong and major Greek tricksters, such as Hermes, Odysseus, and Prometheus. The second part of the paper is concentrated on the heroic features of tricksters and the cultural values reflected in the Wukong narrative. How tricksters become cultural heroes is the main theme of Chapter Three. I explain their evolution by elaborating on the change in their nature mentioned in the second chapter. The fourth chapter illustrates the reason why Wukong is an East Asian cultural hero.I explore the personalities of Wukong and see how they fit the dominant philosophy and cultural values of the region. The last chapter briefly shows how popular Wukong is in Chinese and the entire East Asian culture.

The neural dynamics of stimulus and response conflict processing as a function of response complexity and task demands.

Both stimulus and response conflict can disrupt behavior by slowing response times and decreasing accuracy. Although several neural activations have been associated with conflict processing, it is unclear how specific any of these are to the type of stimulus conflict or the amount of response conflict. Here, we recorded electrical brain activity, while manipulating the type of stimulus conflict in the task (spatial [Flanker] versus semantic [Stroop]) and the amount of response conflict (two versus four response choices). Behaviorally, responses were slower to incongruent versus congruent stimuli across all task and response types, along with overall slowing for higher response-mapping complexity. The earliest incongruency-related neural effect was a short-duration frontally-distributed negativity at ~200 ms that was only present in the Flanker spatial-conflict task. At longer latencies, the classic fronto-central incongruency-related negativity 'N(inc)' was observed for all conditions, but was larger and ~100 ms longer in duration with more response options. Further, the onset of the motor-related lateralized readiness potential (LRP) was earlier for the two vs. four response sets, indicating that smaller response sets enabled faster motor-response preparation. The late positive complex (LPC) was present in all conditions except the two-response Stroop task, suggesting this late conflict-related activity is not specifically related to task type or response-mapping complexity. Importantly, across tasks and conditions, the LRP onset at or before the conflict-related N(inc), indicating that motor preparation is a rapid, automatic process that interacts with the conflict-detection processes after it has begun. Together, these data highlight how different conflict-related processes operate in parallel and depend on both the cognitive demands of the task and the number of response options.