This Info Note summarizes findings of the research project, “Using Climate-Smart Financial Diaries for Up-scaling in Nyando, Western Kenya,” led by the Amsterdam Center for World Food Studies (ACWFS) with participation of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) in East Africa, the University of Nairobi’s ...
When listening to natural speech, our brain activity tracks the slow amplitude modulations of speech, also called the speech envelope. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated that this neural envelope tracking can be affected by top-down processes. The present study was designed to examine if neural envelope tracking is modulated by the effort t...
Background: Cortical entrainment to speech correlates with speech intelligibility and attention to a speech stream in noisy environments. However, there is a lack of data on whether cortical entrainment can help in evaluating hearing aid fittings for subjects with mild to moderate hearing loss. One particular problem that may arise is that hearing ...
Interoceptive fears and biased interoception are important characteristics of somatic symptom disorders. Categorization of interoceptive sensations impacts perception of their intensity and unpleasantness. In this study we investigated whether making interoceptive categories threat-relevant further biases interoception of individual sensations comp...
The phytohormone auxin controls plant growth and development via TIR1-dependent protein degradation of canonical AUX/IAA proteins, which normally repress the activity of auxin response transcription factors (ARFs). IAA33 is a non-canonical AUX/IAA protein lacking a TIR1-binding domain, and its role in auxin signaling and plant development is not we...
Exclosures are established with the objective of rehabilitating degraded lands and restoring of woody vegetation. Various studies have been conducted to evaluate the success of exclosure on restoring woody species diversity. However, works focusing on the effect of topographic factors on woody species diversity are scarce. Understanding the factors...
Published in Pain
While the contribution of social processes to pain perception is well documented, surprisingly little is known about the influence of pain on social perception. In particular, an important question is how pain modulates the processing of other people's actions. To address this question, the current study tests, using automatic imitation, the hypoth...
Published in Emotion (Washington, D.C.)
The concept of pupillary contagion refers to the automatic imitation of observed pupil size and reflects shared autonomic arousal. Previous studies have linked the experience of sadness to changes in pupil size. Accordingly, in a 2006 Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience article, Harrison, Singer, Rotshtein, Dolan, and Critchley found eviden...
In the size-weight illusion, the smaller object from two equally weighted objects is typically judged as being heavier. One explanation is that the mismatch between the weight expectation based on object size and actual sensory feedback influences heaviness perception. In most studies, the size of an object is perceived before its weight. We invest...
Respiratory sensations such as breathlessness are prevalent in many diseases and are amplified by increased levels of anxiety. Cortical activation in response to inspiratory occlusions in high- and low-anxious individuals was found different in previous studies using the respiratory-related evoked potential method. However, specific brain areas sho...
