Institute of Psychology,Chinese Academy Of Sciences
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A genome-wide association study in Han Chinese identifies a susceptibility locus for primary Sjogren's syndrome at 7q11.23
No full textPrimary Sjogren's syndrome is one of the most common autoimmune diseases. So far, genetic studies of Sjogren's syndrome have relied mostly on candidate gene approaches. To identify new genetic susceptibility loci for primary Sjogren's syndrome, we performed a three-stage genome-wide association study in Han Chinese. In the discovery stage, we analyzed 556,134 autosomal SNPs in 542 cases and 1,050 controls. We then validated promising associations in 2 replication stages comprising 1,303 cases and 2,727 controls. The combined analysis identified GTF2I at 7q11.23 (rs117026326: P-combined = 1.31 x 10(-53), combined odds ratio (ORcombined) = 2.20) as a new susceptibility locus for primary Sjogren's syndrome. Our analysis also confirmed previously reported associations in Europeans in the regions of STAT4, TNFAIP3 and the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). Fine mapping of the region around GTF2I showed that rs117026326 in GTF2I had the most significant association, with associated SNPs extending from GTF2I to GTF2IRD1-GTF2I
Who Learns More? Cultural Differences in Implicit Sequence Learning
No full textBackground: It is well documented that East Asians differ from Westerners in conscious perception and attention. However, few studies have explored cultural differences in unconscious processes such as implicit learning. Methodology/Principal Findings: The global-local Navon letters were adopted in the serial reaction time (SRT) task, during which Chinese and British participants were instructed to respond to global or local letters, to investigate whether culture influences what people acquire in implicit sequence learning. Our results showed that from the beginning British expressed a greater local bias in perception than Chinese, confirming a cultural difference in perception. Further, over extended exposure, the Chinese learned the target regularity better than the British when the targets were global, indicating a global advantage for Chinese in implicit learning. Moreover, Chinese participants acquired greater unconscious knowledge of an irrelevant regularity than British participants, indicating that the Chinese were more sensitive to contextual regularities than the British. Conclusions/Significance: The results suggest that cultural biases can profoundly influence both what people consciously perceive and unconsciously learn
PREVALENCE AND PREDICTORS OF POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AMONG CHINESE YOUTHS AFTER AN EARTHQUAKE
No full textIn the current study we investigated the prevalence and predictors of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Chinese youths after an earthquake. A total of 753 middle school students participated in the survey and 99.5% of them were of Tibetan ethnicity. The University of California, Los Angeles PTSD Reaction Index was used to assess PTSD symptoms and a total of 101 participants were identified as probable PTSD cases. Independent predictors of PTSD included female sex, being injured, witnessing death, and derealization during the earthquake. Our results add to extant understanding of the impact of disasters on youth mental health, and carry implications for revising the current Criterion A2 of PTSD in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
An ecologically valid performance-based social functioning assessment battery for schizophrenia
No full textPsychiatrists pay more attention to the social functioning outcome of schizophrenia nowadays. How to evaluate the real world function among schizophrenia is a challenging task due to culture difference, there is no such kind of instrument in terms of the Chinese setting. This study aimed to report the validation of an ecologically valid performance-based everyday functioning assessment for schizophrenia, namely the Beijing Performance-based Functional Ecological Test (BJ-PERFECT). Fifty community-dwelling adults with schizophrenia and 37 healthy controls were recruited. Fifteen of the healthy controls were re-tested one week later. All participants were administered the University of California, San Diego, Performance-based Skill Assessment-Brief version (UPSA-B) and the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB). The finalized assessment included three subdomains: transportation, financial management and work ability. The test-retest and inter-rater reliabilities were good. The total score significantly correlated with the UPSA-B. The performance of individuals with schizophrenia was significantly more impaired than healthy controls, especially in the domain of work ability. Among individuals with schizophrenia, functional outcome was influenced by premorbid functioning, negative symptoms and neurocognition such as processing speed, visual learning and attention/vigilance. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved
Genetic and Environmental Influences on Adolescent Rumination and its Association with Depressive Symptoms
No full textRumination is an important cognitive vulnerability for adolescent and adult depression. However, little is known about the aetiological origins of rumination, as well as its association with depression. Adolescent rumination (self-report) and depressive symptoms (self- and parent-report) were assessed in 674 pairs of same-gender Chinese adolescent twins (11-17 years of age). Females accounted for 53.7 % of the sample. There were significant correlations between self-reported rumination and self-reported depression (r = 0.41), as well as parent-reported adolescent depression (r = 0.22). Genetic influences were significant and modest on all three measures, ranging from 24 % to 42 %. The three measures were also significantly influenced by shared environment, ranging from 20 % to 28 %, and non-shared environmental factors, ranging from 30 % to 56 %. Moreover, the genetic correlations between rumination and depression were significant (within-rater: r (g) = 0.99; cross-rater: r (g) = 0.59) and largely accounted for the phenotypic correlations (within-rater: 68 %; cross-rater: 77 %), while non-shared environmental correlations were also significant (within-rater: r (e) = 0.26; cross-rater: r (e) = 0.12) and accounted for the remainder of the phenotypic correlations (within-rater: 32 %; cross-rater: 23 %). The shared environmental correlations were non-significant. No significant gender and age differences were found in aetiological models. These findings suggest that rumination may be an endophenotype reflecting genetic risk for depression
The role of static scene information on locomotion distance estimation
No full textJudgement of travelled distance is important for many spatial learning and navigation tasks, including path integration. Research on visual information for locomotion distance estimation has traditionally focused on the effect of motion cues. However, static visual information is also generally available during real world navigation. This study investigated the contribution of static visual information on the estimation of travelled distance using a static-frame paradigm. Participants viewed successive static snapshots of simulated self-locomotion along a tunnel containing either random texture or geometric shapes, and then reproduced the travelled distance in a different environment. The results showed that when the motion information was removed, the use of actual distance information was eliminated in the texture condition but remained when perceptual landmarks were present, suggesting that static scene information from identifiable objects can support locomotion distance judgements. Moreover, travel duration was also used in conjunction with the spatial information. These findings suggest that studies involving locomotion distance estimation need to consider the potential contributions of the static scene mechanism and the temporal information in addition to the motion-based mechanism
Cognitive gravitation model for classification on small noisy data
No full textWhen performing the classification on the high dimensional, the sparse, or the noisy data, many approaches easily lead to the dramatic performance degradation. To deal with this issue from the different perspective, this paper proposes a cognitive gravitation model (CGM) based on both the law of gravitation in physics and the cognitive laws, where the self-information of each sample instead of mass is applied. Subsequently, a new classifier is designed which utilizes CGM to find k nearest neighbors from each class for the query sample and then classifies this query sample to the class whose cognitive gravitation is largest. The cognitive gravitation of the class is defined as the sum of the cognitive gravitation between its each nearest neighbor and the query sample. The advantage of our approach is that it has a firm and simple mathematical basis while it has good classification performance. The conducted experiments on challenging benchmark data sets validate the proposed model and the classification approach. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
The Interface Between Language and Attention: Prosodic Focus Marking Recruits a General Attention Network in Spoken Language Comprehension
No full textIn spoken language, pitch accent can mark certain information as focus, whereby more attentional resources are allocated to the focused information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, this study examined whether pitch accent, used for marking focus, recruited general attention networks during sentence comprehension. In a language task, we independently manipulated the prosody and semantic/pragmatic congruence of sentences. We found that semantic/pragmatic processing affected bilateral inferior and middle frontal gyrus. The prosody manipulation showed bilateral involvement of the superior/inferior parietal cortex, superior and middle temporal cortex, as well as inferior, middle, and posterior parts of the frontal cortex. We compared these regions with attention networks localized in an auditory spatial attention task. Both tasks activated bilateral superior/inferior parietal cortex, superior temporal cortex, and left precentral cortex. Furthermore, an interaction between prosody and congruence was observed in bilateral inferior parietal regions: for incongruent sentences, but not for congruent ones, there was a larger activation if the incongruent word carried a pitch accent, than if it did not. The common activations between the language task and the spatial attention task demonstrate that pitch accent activates a domain general attention network, which is sensitive to semantic/pragmatic aspects of language. Therefore, attention and language comprehension are highly interactive
Cultural influences on oculomotor inhibition of remote distractors: Evidence from saccade trajectories
No full textThis study investigated whether low-level attentional processes as indicated by saccade trajectories are modulated by higher-order factors as indicated by participants' cultural background. We hypothesized that if the East Asian participants engage in context-dependent attentional processing to a greater extent than the Western participants, then the magnitude of the distractor effect on saccade trajectories (Doyle & Walker, 2001) should be larger with the East Asian participants than with the Western participants. Participants executed vertical saccades towards targets presented on the vertical meridian above or below fixation. Simultaneously with the target, a distractor appeared in one of the screen quadrants. Consistently with our hypothesis, we found evidence that the saccades of the Chinese participants tended to curve away from the distractors more strongly than the saccades of the German participants. However, this effect was restricted to the upper distractors and the lower targets. The findings are discussed in terms of cross-cultural differences in distractor-related activation and inhibition and functional specialization of hemifields. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
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