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The ventral pallidum (VP) contains GABA and glutamate neurons projecting to ventral tegmental area (VTA) whose stimulation drives approach and avoidance, respectively. Yet little is known about the mechanisms by which VP cell types shape VTA activity and drive behavior. Here, we found that both VP GABA and glutamate neurons were activated during approach to reward or by delivery of an aversive stimulus. Stimulation of VP GABA neurons inhibited VTA GABA, but activated dopamine and glutamate neurons. Remarkably, stimulation-evoked activation was behavior-contingent such that VTA recruitment was inhibited when evoked by the subjects own action. Conversely, VP glutamate neurons activated VTA GABA, as well as dopamine and glutamate neurons, despite driving aversion. However, VP glutamate neurons evoked dopamine in aversion-associated ventromedial nucleus accumbens (NAc), but reduced dopamine release in reward-associated dorsomedial NAc. These findings show how heterogeneous VP projections to VTA can be engaged to shape approach and avoidance behaviors.

This study investigates the interaction between semantic relatedness and goals or task on memory retrieval. We used varied tasks and concepts to explore how task influences how different kinds of semantic relatedness influences semantic processing. Our findings reveal a task-dependent interaction with semantic relatedness. Specifically, in similarity judgement tasks (experiments 1a and 1b), participants' ratings closely aligned with taxonomic relatedness, influenced by abstract visual and linguistic similarity dimensions. In discrimination tasks (experiments 2a and 2b), where participants distinguished a target from a semantically related distractor, visual characteristics explained a greater amount of variance. These results suggest semantic memory representations are dynamic and task-dependent, supporting theories of a distributed semantic memory system.

The structure of semantic memory has often been investigated by using studies that manipulate the semantic relatedness of stimulus items, and use facilitation and inhibition effects to make inferences about semantic memory's structure. In the current work, we present two experiments using the visual world paradigm where we systematically manipulate the semantic relatedness of the distractor item when a participant is asked to look at (Experiment 1) or click on (Experiment 2) a target image. Both experiments yielded consistent patterns of results such that there was more competition from the distractor image the more semantically related it was to the target. The graded effects observed provide additional evidence for a graded and feature-based representational structure in semantic memory.

IntroductionPrior research has found that experiences with violence in the U.S. differ across individual demographic characteristics, including race, gender, and sexual orientation. However, peer reviewed studies have yet to examine the relationship between the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation, victimization risk, and characteristics of victimization.MethodsWe use data from three years (2017-2019) of the National Crime Victimization Survey, the primary source of information on criminal victimization in the United States, to examine victimization at the intersection of sexual orientation, gender, and race/ethnicity. We test whether non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White sexual and gender minority (SGM) persons aged 16 or over are victimized at greater rates than their non-SGM counterparts and assess whether there are differences between sexual minority females and males of each racial group. We further document characteristics of victimization such as reporting to the police by SGM status and race or ethnicity.ResultsWe find that SGMs are disproportionately more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-SGM people, and these disparities are present across the assessed racial and ethnic groups (non-Hispanic Black odds ratio [OR] = 3.3, 90% CI [CI] = 1.36, 5.16; Hispanic OR = 4.5, CI = 2.25, 6.71; non-Hispanic White OR = 4.8, CI = 2.25, 6.71). However, sexual orientation disparities are statistically distinguishable for lesbian or bisexual (LB) non-Hispanic White and Hispanic females but not for non-Hispanic Black LB females. Among LB females, the overall differences in victimization were primarily driven by bisexual respondents. We further find racial and ethnic differences among SGM victims in the likelihood of having the victimization reported to the police, in the utilization of community (non-police) resources, and in other aspects of victimization experiences, such as whether arrests occurred or in the suspicion that the violent incident was a hate crime.ConclusionsOur findings raise indicate a complex picture of how sexual orientation, gender identity, sex, and race and ethnicity interact in victimizations and their characteristics that should be further explored.

We estimate the prevalence and characteristics of violent hate crime victimization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the United States, and we compare them to non-LGBT hate crime victims and to LGBT victims of violent non-hate crime. We analyze pooled 2017-2019 data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (n persons = 553, 925;n incidents = 32, 470), the first nationally representative and comprehensive survey on crime that allows identification of LGBT persons aged 16 or older. Descriptive and bivariate analysis show that LGBT people experienced 6.6 violent hate crime victimizations per 1,000 persons compared with non-LGBT people's 0.6 per 1,000 persons (odds ratio = 8.30, 95% confidence interval = 1.94, 14.65). LGBT people were more likely to be hate crime victims of sexual orientation or gender bias crime and less likely to be victims of race or ethnicity bias crimes compared to non-LGBT hate crime victims. Compared to non-LGBT victims, LGBT victims of hate crime were more likely to be younger, have a relationship with their assailant, and have an assailant who is white. Compared to LGBT victims of non-hate violence, more LGBT hate crime victims reported experiencing problems in their social lives, negative emotional responses, and physical symptoms of distress. Our findings affirm claims that hate crimes have adverse physical and psychological effects on victims and highlight the need to ensure that LGBT persons who experience hate crime get necessary support and services in the aftermath of the crime.

Do sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) in the United States encounter disproportionate rates of victimization as compared with their cisgender, heterosexual counterparts? Answering this question has proved elusive because nationally representative victimization data have not included victims' sexual orientation or gender identity. The National Crime Victimization Survey, the nation's primary source of representative information on criminal victimization, began documenting sexual orientation and gender identity in 2016 and released data publicly for the first time in 2019. We find SGMs disproportionately are victims across a variety of crimes. The rate of violent victimization for SGMs is 71.1 victimizations per 1000 people compared with 19.2 victimizations per 1000 people for those who are not SGMs. SGMs are 2.7 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than non-SGMs. These findings raise the importance of further considering sexual orientation and gender identity in victimization and interventions.

Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variabilityacross words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-basedvariability in vocabulary development using lexical properties of distributional statistics derived from a large corpus ofchild-directed speech. Unlike previous analyses, we predicted word trajectories cross-sectionally, shedding light on trendsin vocabulary development that may not have been evident at a single time point. We also show that whether one looksat a single age group or across ages as a whole, the best distributional predictor is whether a child knows a word is thenumber of other known words with which that that word tends to co-occur.

With a nationally representative, repeated cross‐sectional sample of over 250,000 Americans from 2016 to 2019, we investigate the role that religious and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) identities play in influencing Americans' political attitudes, centering the narratives of religious LGBT Americans. We find that nearly half of LGBT Americans affiliate religiously. Logistic regressions show that identifying as religious is related to more conservative views on LGBT rights and abortion while identifying as LGBT is related to more liberal views on both of these issues. We failed to observe interaction effects, suggesting that religious affiliation influences LGBT individuals' political views in a manner similar to the way it influences cisgender, heterosexual individuals' views. Comparisons of the variation accounted for by religious or LGBT identities show that religious affiliation more frequently accounted for more variation in political views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: The thermotolerant yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus shows promise as an industrial host for the biochemical production of fuels and chemicals. Wild-type strains are known to ferment high titers of ethanol and can effectively convert a wide range of C5, C6, and C12 sugars into the volatile short-chain ester ethyl acetate. Strain engineering, however, has been limited due to a lack of advanced genome-editing tools and an incomplete understanding of ester and ethanol biosynthesis. RESULTS: Enabled by the design of hybrid RNA polymerase III promoters, this work adapts the CRISPR-Cas9 system from Streptococcus pyogenes for use in K. marxianus. The system was used to rapidly create functional disruptions to alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and alcohol-O-acetyltransferase (ATF) genes with putative function in ethyl acetate and ethanol biosynthesis. Screening of the KmATF disrupted strain revealed that Atf activity contributes to ethyl acetate biosynthesis, but the knockout reduced ethyl acetate titers by only ~15%. Overexpression experiments revealed that KmAdh7 can catalyze the oxidation of hemiacetal to ethyl acetate. Finally, analysis of the KmADH2 disrupted strain showed that the knockout almost completely eliminated ethanol production and resulted in the accumulation of acetaldehyde. CONCLUSIONS: Newly designed RNA polymerase III promoters for sgRNA expression in K. marxianus enable a CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing system for the thermotolerant yeast. This system was used to disrupt genes involved in ethyl acetate biosynthesis, specifically KmADH1-7 and KmATF. KmAdh2 was found to be critical for aerobic and anaerobic ethanol production. Aerobically produced ethanol supplies the biosynthesis of ethyl acetate catalyzed by KmAtf. KmAdh7 was found to exhibit activity toward the oxidation of hemiacetal, a possible alternative route for the synthesis of ethyl acetate.