No abstract

No abstract

BackgroundGeneralized social anxiety disorder (gSAD) is associated with a heightened neural sensitivity to signals that convey threat, as evidenced by exaggerated amygdala and/or insula activation when processing face stimuli that express negative emotions. Less clear in the brain pathophysiology of gSAD are cortical top down control mechanisms that moderate reactivity in these subcortical emotion processing regions. This study evaluated amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity in gSAD with a novel “Emotional Faces Shifting Attention Task” (EFSAT), an adaptation of perceptual assessment tasks well-known to elicit amygdala response. In healthy volunteers, the task has been shown to engage the amygdala when attention is directed to emotional faces and the ACC when attention is directed to shapes, away from emotional faces.MethodsDuring functional MRI, 29 participants with gSAD and 27 healthy controls viewed images comprising a trio of faces (angry, fear, or happy) alongside a trio of geometric shapes (circles, rectangles, or triangles) within the same field of view. Participants were instructed to match faces or match shapes, effectively directing attention towards or away from emotional information, respectively.ResultsParticipants with gSAD exhibited greater insula, but not amygdala, activation compared to controls when attending to emotional faces. In contrast, when attention was directed away from faces, controls exhibited ACC recruitment, which was not evident in gSAD. Across participants, greater ACC activation was associated with less insula activation.ConclusionsEvidence that individuals with gSAD exhibited exaggerated insula reactivity when attending to emotional faces in EFSAT is consistent with other studies suggesting that the neural basis of gSAD may involve insula hyper-reactivity. Furthermore, greater ACC response in controls than gSAD when sustained goal-directed attention is required to shift attention away from social signals, together with a negative relationship between ACC and bilateral insula activity, indicate the ACC may have served a regulatory role when the focus of attention was directed to shapes amidst emotional faces.

Background Individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (gSAD) exhibit attentional bias to salient stimuli, which is reduced in patients whose symptoms improve after treatment, indicating that mechanisms of bias mediate treatment success. Therefore, pre-treatment activity in regions implicated in attentional control over socio-emotional signals (e.g. anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) may predict response to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), evidence-based psychotherapy for gSAD. Method During functional magnetic resonance imaging, 21 participants with gSAD viewed images comprising a trio of geometric shapes (circles, rectangles or triangles) alongside a trio of faces (angry, fearful or happy) within the same field of view. Attentional control was evaluated with the instruction to ‘match shapes’, directing attention away from faces, which was contrasted with ‘match faces’, whereby attention was directed to emotional faces. Results Whole-brain voxel-wise analyses showed that symptom improvement was predicted by enhanced pre-treatment activity in the presence of emotional face distractors in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsal medial pre-frontal cortex. Additionally, CBT success was foretold by less activity in the amygdala and/or increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal gyrus during emotion processing. Conclusions CBT response was predicted by pre-treatment activity in prefrontal regions and the amygdala. The direction of activity suggests that individuals with intact attentional control in the presence of emotional distractors, regulatory capacity over emotional faces and/or less reactivity to such faces are more likely to benefit from CBT. Findings indicate that baseline neural activity in the context of attentional control and emotion processing may serve as a step towards delineating mechanisms by which CBT exerts its effects.

The photoelastic constants and their dispersion for visible light were determined for two samples of vitreous silica, Corning and Herasil No. 1. The results for the mercury green line, 546 mμ, are quoted here. The photoelastic constants were 4.22×10−13 (d/cm2)−1 (ordinary ray) and 3.56×10−13 (d/cm2)−1 (extraordinary ray). From the ratio of Poisson's ratio to Young's modulus 0.216×10−12 (d/cm2)−1 and Young's modulus 0.76×1012 (d/cm2), which were also determined, there were calculated the pressure coefficient of refractive index 0.909×10−12 (d/cm2)−1 and the elasticity volume coefficient of refractive index V dN/dV=0.34. Comparison of these results with those reported for other glasses indicates that the oxygen ions of vitreous silica are more deformable then the oxygen ions of other siliceous glasses. In vitreous silica about ⅓ of the volume change accompanying an elastic dilatation arises from the dilatation of the oxygen ions. A comparison is also made with the results reported for corresponding thermally induced effects. It indicates that (a) during a thermal dilatation of a siliceous glass, the oxygen ion undergoes a dilatation which in the case of most siliceous glasses causes an equivalent dilatation of the body, but which in the case of vitreous occurs internally instead, and (b) in crystal quartz no appreciable dilatation of the oxygen ion occurs during a thermal dilatation. The thermal dilatation of the oxygen ion in the glasses would thus seem related to its strained bond configuration.

A field application of behavior modification studied the relative effectiveness of different prompting procedures for increasing the probability that customers entering a grocery store would select their soft drinks in returnable rather than nonreturnable containers. Six different 2-hr experimental conditions during which bottle purchases were recorded were (1) No Prompt (i.e., control), (2) one student gave incoming customers a handbill urging the purchase of soft drinks in returnable bottles, (3) distribution of the handbill by one student and public charting of each customer's bottle purchases by another student, (4) handbill distribution and charting by a five-member group, (5) handbills distributed and purchases charted by three females. The variant prompting techniques were equally effective, and in general increased the percentage of returnable-bottle customers by an average of 25%.

In the past decade, the optical method called moiré interferometry has matured rapidly to emerge as an invaluable tool, proved by many industrial and scientific applications. It has been applied to numerous problems in engineering mechanics. It measures in-plane displacement fields with high sensitivity and high spatial resolution. This paper reviews current practices of moiré interferometry and its extensions. Applications in diverse fields are addressed to demonstrate the wide applicability of the method, especially the recent applications for thermal deformation analyses of microelectronics devices. Speculation on future developments and practices is presented.

No abstract