| 1. |
- Bentham, James, et al.
(author)
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A century of trends in adult human height
- 2016
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In: eLIFE. - 2050-084X. ; 5
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.522.7) and 16.5 cm (13.319.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries.
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| 2. |
- Bentham, James, et al.
(author)
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A century of trends in adult human height
- 2016
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In: eLIFE. - : eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. - 2050-084X. ; 5
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5–22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3– 19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8– 144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries.
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| 5. |
- Saldanha, Beatriz C., et al.
(author)
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Dietary tryptophan affects group behavior in a social bird
- 2024
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In: Behavioral Ecology. - 1045-2249 .- 1465-7279. ; 35:3
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The amino acid tryptophan (Trp) is a precursor of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Trp supplementation or other forms of serotonergic enhancement generally promote pro-social behavior, decreasing aggression, and also feeding in different animals. However, past research has been conducted in confined spaces, and there is little work in naturalistic conditions where animals move and associate more freely. We gave a Trp-enriched diet to a free-flying flock of common waxbills (Estrilda astrild) in semi-natural conditions and monitored group foraging, aggressions during feeding, and the social network. Contrary to expectations, aggressiveness and feeding increased during Trp supplementation. Consistent with the prediction of increased social associations, foraging groups became larger, and individuals joined more foraging groups, but these changes appear driven by increased appetite during Trp treatment. Also, the mean strength of associations in the social network did not change. Overall, Trp supplementation affected group behavior in this free-flying flock, but mostly in directions unanticipated based on research conducted in small spaces. To harmonize our results with those found in small confined spaces, we hypothesize that free-flying birds have energetic requirements not experienced in lab-housed individuals, which may impact social behavior and responses to Trp.
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| 6. |
- Tahmasian, Masoud, et al.
(author)
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ENIGMA-Sleep : Challenges, opportunities, and the road map
- 2021
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In: Journal of Sleep Research. - : Wiley. - 0962-1105 .- 1365-2869. ; 30:6
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Research review (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Neuroimaging and genetics studies have advanced our understanding of the neurobiology of sleep and its disorders. However, individual studies usually have limitations to identifying consistent and reproducible effects, including modest sample sizes, heterogeneous clinical characteristics and varied methodologies. These issues call for a large-scale multi-centre effort in sleep research, in order to increase the number of samples, and harmonize the methods of data collection, preprocessing and analysis using pre-registered well-established protocols. The Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) consortium provides a powerful collaborative framework for combining datasets across individual sites. Recently, we have launched the ENIGMA-Sleep working group with the collaboration of several institutes from 15 countries to perform large-scale worldwide neuroimaging and genetics studies for better understanding the neurobiology of impaired sleep quality in population-based healthy individuals, the neural consequences of sleep deprivation, pathophysiology of sleep disorders, as well as neural correlates of sleep disturbances across various neuropsychiatric disorders. In this introductory review, we describe the details of our currently available datasets and our ongoing projects in the ENIGMA-Sleep group, and discuss both the potential challenges and opportunities of a collaborative initiative in sleep medicine.
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| 7. |
- Mutic, Smiljana, et al.
(author)
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The scent of the other women : Body odor-induced behavioral and physiological effects on face categorization
- 2019
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In: Physiology and Behavior. - : Elsevier BV. - 0031-9384 .- 1873-507X. ; 210
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In body odor research, the interaction of female donors and receivers is scarcely investigated. With the aim to investigate effects of female body odor in a competitive context, we tested 51 women divided into two groups (i.e., a competitive and a non-competitive group, based on verbal instructions). Between groups, we explored whether female body odor exposure (vs. masker odor) modulates emotion categorization (via RT variance and distribution) and physiological reactions (via instantaneous heart rate) in a task with dynamic male and female faces as either angry or happy. Women in the competitive group reported to feel more competitive and performed more accurately. They gathered more emotional information to categorize dynamic faces and when additionally exposed to female body odor, they showed a resistance to cardiac deceleration. Lapses of attention (via RT distribution) occurred irrespective of body odor exposure. Our results support the idea that female body odors, presented in a competitive context, contrast cardiac deceleration and, by tendency, modulate emotion categorization. Data are discussed in the context of chemosignaling and social interactions among women.
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| 8. |
- Olsson, Mats J., et al.
(author)
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Odor Memory Performance and Memory Awareness : A Comparison to Word Memory Across Orienting Tasks and Retention Intervals
- 2009
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In: Chemosensory Perception. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1936-5802 .- 1936-5810. ; 2:3, s. 161-171
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Odor memory has been argued to exhibit unique characteristics in relation to memory for other types of stimuli such as visually presented words. Two experiments investigated episodic recognition performance as well as memory awareness for odors and words across manipulations of orienting task and retention interval. Orienting task mattered little to odor recognition. However, in contradiction with several previous studies, substantial forgetting of odors was found. After controlling for effects of odor identifiability, it was found that memory for identified odors exhibited greater similarities to memory for words than to memory for unidentified odors.
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| 9. |
- Soares, Sandra C., et al.
(author)
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Fear, but not fear-relevance, modulates reaction times in visual search with animal distractors
- 2009
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In: Journal of Anxiety Disorders. - : Elsevier BV. - 0887-6185 .- 1873-7897. ; 23:1, s. 136-144
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The research aimed at examining attentional selectivity in a visual search paradigm using pictures of animals that have provided a recurrent threat in an evolutionary perspective (i.e., snakes and spiders) and pictures of animals that have supposedly posed no such threat (i.e., cats and fish). Experiment 1 showed no advantage of fear-relevant stimuli over non-fear-relevant animal stimuli. However, an attentional capture seemed to emerge as a delay in the disengagement of attention, specifically when there was a massive presentation of fear-relevant stimuli in the array. The results from Experiment 2, where participants were selected based specifically on their fear of either snakes or spiders (but not both), showed a preferential processing of the congruent feared stimulus, when compared with non-fearful participants, which strengthens the notion that fear significance may be an important factor drawing attention to a particular spatial location.
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| 10. |
- Soares, Sandra C
(author)
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Fear commands attention : snakes as the archetypal fear stimulus?
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Information regarding successful solutions to environmental hazards has accumulated in the gene pools of species, as a result of evolution. Therefore, from an evolutionary viewpoint, fear has played a central role in shaping mammalian genotypes. The goal of the present research was to elucidate the role of fear in the control of attention by investigating meaningful differences in the attentional processing of evolutionary-relevant animal stimuli and different categories of neutral stimuli. In study I we used a visual search task to examine attentional selectivity to a class of fear-relevant animal stimuli (snakes and spiders), compared to a different animal category, that of non-threatening animal stimuli presumably lacking evolutionarily derived fear-relevance (cats and fish). The results showed no asymmetry in reaction time and accuracy data between fear-relevant and neutral animals when they served either as targets or distractors. Instead, there was an increased distraction effect when the fear-relevant categories were presented simultaneously in the visual displays. In studies II-IV we did not collapse snakes and spiders into the same category of evolutionarily fear-relevant stimuli, but compared these carefully matched stimuli in terms of their association with danger. The comparison was predicated on the notion that snakes carry a considerable more heavily evolutionary baggage to be feared by humans (Isbell, 2006; 2009) than do spiders (e.g., Davey, 1994). In order to avoid potential differences in variability among fear-relevant and neutral animal stimuli, we compared snakes and spiders with an ecologically valid stimulus, i.e., mushrooms, and presented these stimuli of interest against an emotionally neutral background composed by pictures of fruits. Moreover, we intended to study whether the perceptual load (e.g., increments in set size) modulated the attentional processing of such stimuli (Lavie, 1995; 2005). The results from studies II-IV consistently showed that snakes (compared to spiders and mushrooms) were preferentially processed, particularly under the most demanding perceptual conditions. Specifically, the privileged attentional processing of snake stimuli was most evident among many distractors (studies II-IV), in peripheral vision (study III Experiment 1), at brief exposure times (< 300ms) (study IV), and when unexpectedly presented among the background stimuli (study III Experiment 2). The evidence demonstrated that snakes are special and do not, like spiders, influence attention according to expectations from standard theory (Lavie, 2005). Rather this specificity of snake processing invites an evolutionary explanation, such as the one offered by Isbell s (2009) Snake Detection Theory. Finally, our set of results relating the effects of prior fear on attention showed somewhat inconsistent results. In study I, where snake and spider fearful participants were collapsed into one single group, participants were specifically sensitized to detect their feared stimulus, with the emotional ratings mirroring this effect. However, this result did not enable examination of potential differences in responses between snake and spider fearful individuals. Indeed, there are indications in the literature pointing to the relevance of such differentiation, showing that while snake fear is associated with the predatory defense system (e.g., Öhman, 2009), spider fear is more likely to be mediated by disgust (Matchett & Davey, 1991). Therefore, in studies II and IV, we examined potential differences between the two groups of participants. In study II there was a clear dissociation between the two types of animal fear, reflected in attention and emotion measures, indicating that spider fear was highly specific, whereas snake fear was associated with a more generalized enhanced evaluation of all negative stimuli. However, and given that in study IV the findings were not consistent, further research is clearly needed in order to clarify the potential moderators in the effects of prior fear on attention.
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