Attention and memory bias for body image and health related information using an Emotional Stroop task in a non-clinical sample

It has been proposed that body image disturbance is a form of cognitive bias wherein schemas for self-relevant information guide the selective processing of appearancerelated information in the environment. This threatening information receives disproportionately more attention and memory, as measured by an Emotional Stroop and incidental recall task. The aim of this thesis was to expand the literature on cognitive processing biases in non-clinical males and females by incorporating a number of significant methodological refinements. To achieve this aim, three phases of research were conducted. The initial two phases of research provided preliminary data to inform the development of the main study. Phase One was a qualitative exploration of body image concerns amongst males and females recruited through the general community and from a university. Seventeen participants (eight male; nine female) provided information on their body image and what factors they saw as positively and negatively impacting on their self evaluations. The importance of self esteem, mood, health and fitness, and recognition of the social ideal were identified as key themes. These themes were incorporated as psycho-social measures and Stroop word stimuli in subsequent phases of the research. Phase Two involved the selection and testing of stimuli to be used in the Emotional Stroop task. Six experimental categories of words were developed that reflected a broad range of health and body image concerns for males and females. These categories were high and low calorie food words, positive and negative appearance words, negative emotion words, and physical activity words. Phase Three addressed the central aim of the project by examining cognitive biases for body image information in empirically defined sub-groups. A National sample of males (N = 55) and females (N = 144), recruited from the general community and universities, completed an Emotional Stroop task, incidental memory test, and a collection of psycho-social questionnaires. Sub-groups of body image disturbance were sought using a cluster analysis, which identified three sub-groups in males (Normal, Dissatisfied, and Athletic) and four sub-groups in females (Normal, Health Conscious, Dissatisfied, and Symptomatic). No differences were noted between the groups in selective attention, although time taken to colour name the words was associated with some of the psycho-social variables. Memory biases found across the whole sample for negative emotion, low calorie food, and negative appearance words were interpreted as reflecting the current focus on health and stigma against being unattractive. Collectively these results have expanded our understanding of processing biases in the general community by demonstrating that the processing biases are found within non-clinical samples and that not all processing biases are associated with negative functionality

Invention and business performance in the tissue-engineering industry

Tissue engineering is a young and interdisciplinary scientific discipline but it offers exciting opportunities to improve the quality of health care for hundreds of thousands of patients. Lured by its potential, several start-up companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and medical device enterprises alike are investing heavily in this sector. Invention is a key driver of competition in this sector. In this study, we aim to explain the variation in inventive output across the different firms in the sector. Our major premise is that firms that forge alliances will be able to tap into the expertise of their partners and thus improve their chances of inventive output. We further argue that alliances that enable technology acquisition or learning will enhance the inventive output of firms more than other kinds of alliances. We measure the inventive output of a company by the number of patents filed. On the basis of a preliminary analysis of seven companies, we find support for the hypotheses. We also argue that, to achieve commercial success, firms need to manage time to market (through alliances or otherwise), have a global outlook, nurture their financial resources, and attain critical mass through mergers.

Rodent Models of Conditioned Fear: Behavioral Measures of Fear and Memory

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a robust technique for examining behavioral and cellular components of fear learning and memory. In fear conditioning, the subject learns to associate a previously neutral stimulus with an inherently noxious co-stimulus. The learned association is reflected in the subjects' behavior upon subsequent re-exposure to the previously neutral stimulus or the training environment. Using fear conditioning, investigators can obtain a large amount of data that describe multiple aspects of learning and memory. In a single test, researchers can evaluate functional integrity in fear circuitry, which is both well characterized and highly conserved across species. Additionally, the availability of sensitive and reliable automated scoring software makes fear conditioning amenable to high-throughput experimentation in the rodent model; thus, this model of learning and memory is particularly useful for pharmacological and toxicological screening. Due to the conserved nature of fear circuitry across species, data from Pavlovian fear conditioning are highly translatable to human models. We describe equipment and techniques needed to perform and analyze conditioned fear data. We provide two examples of fear conditioning experiments, one in rats and one in mice, and the types of data that can be collected in a single experiment. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

The monadic environment : evoking emotion and memory in participatory performance

This practice-led research project examined the audience experience of immersive environments in participatory performance. Drawing upon the work of artist Ilya Kabakov, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (1964) and Leibniz's theory of the monad, the study investigated how an immersive space can be constructed to evoke emotion and memory recall in participants. The research consisted of two cycles of creative experimentation resulting in the presentation of a final piece entitled Dulcet. The research contributes new terminology to the discourse surrounding the participant experience in immersive environments, specifically space-as-memory, the role of ambiguity in spatial design and the construct of the monadic environment.

The role of δ-opioid receptors in learning and memory underlying the development of addiction

Opioids are important endogenous ligands that exist in both invertebrates and vertebrates and signal by activation of opioid receptors to produce analgesia and reward or pleasure. The μ-opioid receptor is the best known of the opioid receptors and mediates the acute analgesic effects of opiates, while the δ-opioid receptor (DOR) has been less well studied and has been linked to effects that follow from chronic use of opiates such as stress, inflammation and anxiety. Recently, DORs have been shown to play an essential role in emotions and increasing evidence points to a role in learning actions and outcomes. The process of learning and memory in addiction has been proposed to involve strengthening of specific brain circuits when a drug is paired with a context or environment. The DOR is highly expressed in the hippocampus, amygdala, striatum and other basal ganglia structures known to participate in learning and memory. In this review, we will focus on the role of the DOR and its potential role in learning and memory underlying the development of addiction.

Raloxifene for improving attention and memory in schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia can affect people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, and it can be as if your brain was playing tricks on you.

Cosmic Clowns : Convention, Invention, and Inversion in the Yaqui Easter Ritual

Cosmic Clowns: Convention, Invention, and Inversion in the Yaqui Easter Ritual is an ethnographic study of masked clown figures called Chapayekas. They represent Judas and the Roman soldiers in the Passion play that forms the narrative core of the Easter ritual of the Yaquis, an indigenous group in Sonora, Mexico. The study looks at how the Chapayeka is created as a ritual figure, how their performance is constructed, and what the part of the clown is in the dynamics of the ritual. The material was gathered over three periods of anthropological fieldwork in Cócorit, Sonora during Easter in 2004, 2006 and 2007. The Chapayeka masks portray foreigners, animals, mythological figures, and even figures from television and movies. They combine two kinds of performance: they perform set, conventional actions, and improvise and invent new ones. This creates dialectics of invention and convention that allow the figure to mediate between the ritual and its context and different kinds of beings within the Yaqui cosmology. The conventional side of their performance is a cycle of death and rebirth that is an inversion of the cycle of Jesus. Through invention, they separate themselves from the other performers and make themselves powerful. Alternation between the two modes enhances that power and brings it into the conventions of the ritual; ultimately the Chapayekas revitalize the entire ritual. The study finds that the clowns are extremely important to the continuity of both ritual and culture, as the combination of continuity and change, convention and invention, is what makes it possible to recreate the conventions of Yaqui culture as powerful and compelling in various contexts. Another factor is the prevalence of dialectical mediation, which relates concepts by defining them against each other as opposites, and makes it possible to cross a boundary while keeping it intact. Clowns embody and create dialectics to mediate boundaries while guarding against relativization, the disappearance of distinctions. The Chapayekas create and constitute boundaries between the self and other, microcosm and macrocosm, sacred and profane. The study argues that all clown and trickster figures are characterized by constantly alternating between invention and convention; this is what connects them to the collective and moral aspect of culture and, at the same time, makes them unpredictable and powerful. It is possible to do justice to the opposed aspects of these ambiguous and paradoxical figures by taking into account the different foundations and contextual effects of the different modes of symbolization.

Design and Implementation of a Flexible and Memory Efficient Operating System for Sensor Nodes

Sensor network nodes exhibit characteristics of both embedded systems and general-purpose systems.A sensor network operating system is a kind of embedded operating system, but unlike a typical embedded operating system, sensor network operatin g system may not be real time, and is constrained by memory and energy constraints. Most sensor network operating systems are based on event-driven approach. Event-driven approach is efficient in terms of time and space.Also this approach does not require a separate stack for each execution context. But using this model, it is difficult to implement long running tasks, like cryptographic operations. A thread based computation requires a separate stack for each execution context, and is less efficient in terms of time and space. In this paper, we propose a thread based execution model that uses only a fixed number of stacks. In this execution model, the number of stacks at each priority level are fixed. It minimizes the stack requirement for multi-threading environment and at the same time provides ease of programming. We give an implementation of this model in Contiki OS by separating thread implementation from protothread implementation completely. We have tested our OS by implementing a clock synchronization protocol using it.

Optical microscopy methods for understanding learning and memory

Structural dynamics of dendritic spines is one of the key correlative measures of synaptic plasticity for encoding short-term and long-term memory. Optical studies of structural changes in brain tissue using confocal microscopy face difficulties of scattering. This results in low signal-to-noise ratio and thus limiting the imaging depth to few tens of microns. Multiphoton microscopy (MpM) overcomes this limitation by using low-energy photons to cause localized excitation and achieve high resolution in all three dimensions. Multiple low-energy photons with longer wavelengths minimize scattering and allow access to deeper brain regions at several hundred microns. In this article, we provide a basic understanding of the physical phenomena that give MpM an edge over conventional microscopy. Further, we highlight a few of the key studies in the field of learning and memory which would not have been possible without the advent of MpM.

The Role of Fucose in Learning and Memory: The Identification of a Fucosylprotein, Synapsin I, in the Rat Brain and the Characterization of its Fucosylation

Previous studies have shown that the glycoproteins containing the fucose moiety are involved in neuronal communication phenomena such as long-term potentiation and memory formation. These results imply that fucose containing glycoproteins might play an important role in learning and memory. To understand the role of fucose in neuronal communication, and the mechanisms by which fucose may be involved in information storage, the identification of fucosylproteins is essential. This report describes the identification and characterization of fucosylproteins in the brain, which will provide new insights into the role of the fucose involved molecular interactions.

Living on the hyphen: diaspora, identity and memory in Jamaica Kincaids Annie John / Lucy and Esmeralda Santiagos When I was Puerto Rican / Almost a woman

Esta dissertação tem por objetivo investigar o desenvolvimento de identidades de sujeitos diaspóricos em formas de narrativas nas quais a memória tem um papel crucial. As autobiografias e os memoirs têm despertado a curiosidade de muitas pessoas interessadas nos processos de construção de identidade de indivíduos que vivem em realidades singulares e nos relatos que dão sobre suas próprias vidas. Assim, o crescente interesse em diásporas e nos decorrentes deslocamentos fragmentários, provocados pelo distanciamento de raízes individuais e pelo contato com diferentes códigos culturais, poderiam legitimar as narrativas autobiográficas como maneiras estratégicas de sintetizar os nichos de identificação de autores e autoras que experimentaram uma ruptura diaspórica. Desta forma, ao analisar estes tipos de narrativas, deve-se estar atento às especificidades de algumas escritoras que passaram por processos diaspóricos e a como elas recorreram as suas memórias pessoais para, em termos literários, expressar suas subjetividades. Considerando todas essas idéias, tenciono usar Annie John e Lucy, de Jamaica Kincaid e When I Was Puero Rican e Almost a Woman, de Esmeralda Santiago como fontes de análise e amostras do desenvolvimento de identidades diaspóricas em narrativas autobiográficas