Humboldt University of Berlin

About: Humboldt University of Berlin is a education organization based out in Berlin, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 33671 authors who have published 61781 publications receiving 1908102 citations. The organization is also known as: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin & Universitas Humboldtiana Berolinensis.

Why did NMDA receptor antagonists fail clinical trials for stroke and traumatic brain injury

Abstract: Glutamate N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists (competitive receptor antagonists, ion channel blockers, and glycine antagonists)—such as selfotel, aptiganel, eliprodil, licostinel and gavestinel—failed to show efficacy in clinical trials of stroke or traumatic brain injury. This failure has been attributed to the deficient properties of the molecules that entered human trials and to inappropriate design of clinical studies. In this article we hypothesise that glutamate may be involved in the acute neurodestructive phase that occurs immediately after traumatic or ischaemic injury (excitotoxicity), but that, after this period, it assumes its normal physiological functions, which include promotion of neuronal survival. We propose that NMDA receptor antagonists failed stroke and traumatic brain injury trials in human beings because blockade of synaptic transmission mediated by NMDA receptors hinders neuronal survival.

Emotion Inferences from Vocal Expression Correlate Across Languages and Cultures

Abstract: Whereas the perception of emotion from facial expression has been extensively studied cross-culturally, little is known about judges’ ability to infer emotion from vocal cues. This article reports the results from a study conducted in nine countries in Europe, the United States, and Asia on vocal emotion portrayals of anger, sadness, fear, joy, and neutral voice as produced by professional German actors. Data show an overall accuracy of 66% across all emotions and countries. Although accuracy was substantially better than chance, there were sizable differences ranging from 74% in Germany to 52% in Indonesia. However, patterns of confusion were very similar across all countries. These data suggest the existence of similar inference rules from vocal expression across cultures. Generally, accuracy decreased with increasing language dissimilarity from German in spite of the use of language-free speech samples. It is concluded that culture- and language-specific paralinguistic patterns may influence the decodi...