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The adenohypophysis is composed of the anterior and intermediate lobes (AL and IL, respectively), and secretes hormones that play an important role in reproduction. CD9- and SOX2-double (CD9/SOX2) positive cells located in the marginal cell layer (MCL) facing the Rathke’s cleft in the AL and IL form the primary stem cell niche in the adult adenohypophysis of rats. In this study, we successfully obtained 3-dimensional (3D) cell aggregates that closely resembled the primary niche of MCL in vivo. After incubation in a Matrigel containing several growth factors, approximately 20% of the cells in the CD9/SOX2-positive cell aggregates were differentiated into hormone-producing cells. The cell aggregates generated in this study may provide insight into the regulation of the pituitary stem/progenitor cell niche and the turnover of hormone-producing cells.

Abstract This study investigated whether the facial expressions of chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with corporate performance. A photograph of the CEO or president of each company that appeared on the Fortune Global 500 list for 2018 was taken from the company’s official website. The smile intensity and action unit activation in each face were calculated using a pre-trained machine learning algorithm, FACET. The results revealed a positive association between smile intensity and company profit, even when controlling for the company’s geographic location (Western culture versus others) and the CEO’s gender. Furthermore, when the type of smile was examined with the activation of each action unit, this significant positive association was identified in the dominant smile but not in the reward and affiliative smiles. Relationships among the leader’s smile intensity, group strategy, and group performance are discussed.

IntroductionIn recent decades, interpersonal coordination and synchrony have been extensively examined in the field of psychology and cognitive science. Studies suggest that perceptual information enables interpersonal coordination and that perceptual noise may even enhance coordination. However, how these perceptual factors influence interpersonal coordination dynamics between head and body movements remains unclear. This study investigated the effect of visual information on the interpersonal coordination of head and body movements during dyadic conversations.MethodsThe availability of visual information was manipulated by positioning a partition halfway between a pair of participants, and the conversations were recorded using a video camera. A video-based human pose estimation software (OpenPose) was used to quantify each interlocutor’s head and body movements, which were submitted for cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA), to assess the degree of coordination between the interlocutors.ResultsThe results showed different effects between head- and body-movement coordination (i.e., a CRQA measure, maximum line length). The occlusion of visual information increased head-movement coordination, whereas it decreased body-movement coordination.DiscussionThe results suggest that a distinct mechanism may be present at the head- and body-movement coordination level and this study observed differing appearances of compensatory behaviors. Further studies should be conducted to investigate the complex relationships between interpersonal coordination dynamics and various kinds of communication constraints, such as long-term or short-term, and lower-order (perceptual-motor) or higher-order (cognitive-social) level constraints.

Abstract In recent years, multi-person meeting formats such as brainstorming sessions and hackathons have become prevalent in numerous workplaces. Despite the introduction of several effective methods and guidelines for these meeting formats, optimal performance is not always attained, even when utilizing such methods and guidelines. There has been active research to support intellectual production activities, and there is a demand to establish a quantitative index to assess the intellectual productivity of a group. In this study, we employed a method for evaluating the intellectual productivity of a group by analyzing the physical movements of conversationalists during discussions. With our main focus on the synchrony of conversationalists, we examined the correlation between synchrony and intellectual productivity and delved further into our analysis, specifically exploring the relationship between pairwise synchrony and various factors such as the number of ideas generated, the number of idea categories, and the originality of ideas produced during a discussion. Our analysis revealed a marginally significant positive correlation between the mean value of pairwise synchrony and the number of ideas generated by the team during the discussion. Our findings indicate that, as more pairs synchronize their body movements during a discussion, a greater number of ideas are generated by the team. Additionally, we suggest that analyzing local pairwise synchrony, focusing on pairs of participants rather than all participants in the discussion could provide further insights into the correlation with the intellectual productivity of the group as a whole.