York University

About: York University is a education organization based out in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 18899 authors who have published 43357 publications receiving 1568560 citations.

Threat and defense: From anxiety to approach

Abstract: The social psychological literature on threat and defense is fragmented. Groups of researchers have focused on distinct threats, such as mortality, uncertainty, uncontrollability, or meaninglessness, and have developed separate theoretical frameworks for explaining the observed reactions. In the current chapter, we attempt to integrate old and new research, proposing both a taxonomy of variation and a common motivational process underlying people’s reactions to threats. Following various kinds of threats, people often turn to abstract conceptions of reality—they invest more extremely in belief systems and worldviews, social identities, goals, and ideals. We suggest that there are common motivational processes that underlie the similar reactions to all of these diverse kinds of threats. We propose that (1) all of the threats present people with discrepancies that immediately activate basic neural processes related to anxiety. (2) Some categories of defenses are more proximal and symptom-focused, and result directly from anxious arousal and heightened attentional vigilance associated with anxious states. (3) Other kinds of defenses operate more distally and mute anxiety by activating approach-oriented states. (4) Depending on the salient dispositional and situational affordances, these distal, approach-oriented reactions vary in the extent to which they (a) resolve the original discrepancy or are merely palliative; (b) are concrete or abstract; (c) are personal or social. We present results from social neuroscience and standard social psychological experiments that converge on a general process model of threat and defense.

The GALAH Survey: Second Data Release

Abstract: The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey is a large-scale stellar spectroscopic survey of theMilkyWay, designed to deliver complementary chemical information to a large number of stars covered by the Gaia mission. We present the GALAH second public data release (GALAH DR2) containing 342 682 stars. For these stars, the GALAH collaboration provides stellar parameters and abundances for up to 23 elements to the community. Here we present the target selection, observation, data reduction, and detailed explanation of how the spectra were analysed to estimate stellar parameters and element abundances. For the stellar analysis, we have used a multistep approach. We use the physics-driven spectrum synthesis of Spectroscopy Made Easy (SME) to derive stellar labels (T eff , logg, [Fe/H], [X/Fe], v mic , vsin i, AK S ) for a representative training set of stars. This information is then propagated to the whole sample with the data-driven method of The Cannon. Special care has been exercised in the spectral synthesis to only consider spectral lines that have reliable atomic input data and are little affected by blending lines. Departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) are considered for several key elements, including Li, O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, and Fe, using 1D MARCS stellar atmosphere models. Validation tests including repeat observations, Gaia benchmark stars, open and globular clusters, and K2 asteroseismic targets lend confidence to our methods and results. Combining the GALAH DR2 catalogue with the kinematic information from Gaia will enable a wide range of Galactic Archaeology studies, with unprecedented detail, dimensionality, and scope.

The functional anatomy of humor: segregating cognitive and affective components

Abstract: Humor, a unique human characteristic, is critical in thought, communication and social interaction Successful jokes involve a cognitive juxtaposition of mental sets, followed by an affective feeling of amusement; we isolated these two components of humor by using event-related fMRI on subjects who listened to auditorily presented semantic and phonological jokes (puns) and indicated whether or not they found the items amusing Our findings suggest that whereas there are modality-specific pathways for processing the juxtaposition of mental sets necessary for the appreciation of jokes, a common component of humor is expressed in activity in medial ventral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in reward processing

The Primacy of Cognition in Schizophrenia.

Abstract: Cognitive tasks and concepts are used increasingly in schizophrenia science and treatment. Recent meta-analyses show that across a spectrum of research domains only cognitive measures distinguish a majority of schizophrenia patients from healthy people. Average effect sizes derived from common clinical tests of attention, memory, language, and reasoning are twice as large as those obtained in structural magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography studies. Chronic stress, genes, brain disturbances, task structure, gender, and sociocultural background may all enhance the sensitivity of cognitive performance to schizophrenia. At the same time, disease heterogeneity and the presence of endophenotypes and subtypes within the patient population may place upper limits on the strength of any specific cognitive finding. Schizophrenia is a complex biobehavioral disorder that manifests itself primarily in cognition.