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Embodied cognition is a theory that emphasizes the importance of sensorimotor experiences for cognition. Therefore,the present study focused on how the facial expression manipulation influences the property judgments toward Chineseemotional words. 41 college students were divided into “biting the pen with smile” group and control group to rate the same 26Chinese emotional words chosen from a Chinese Emotions Corpora (Cho, Chen, and Cheng, 2013). After having the instructedexpression, subjects evaluated several semantic dimensions of emotional words immediately. The findings show that the “bitingthe pen with smile” group has higher rating values for dimension ‘valence’, ‘frequency’ and ‘continuance’ for the ‘disgust’words, and the dimension ‘valence’ for the ‘angry’ words. The study found that positive facial expression indeed influencedthe semantic properties of negative words, not the positive emotional words. The results are useful for investigating how wordmeaning is built in children and clinical applications.

Previous studies found that humor and empathy are associated with interpersonal relationships. Particularly, Hampes(2001) reported that humor styles and empathy had a positive correlation in adults. The purpose of the study is to explore thelink between empathy and humor use in teenagers and to investigate if gender differences exist as well. 115 adolescents between11-12 years old participated the study and filled out The Empathy Quotient and Taiwanese Adolescent Humor Instruments. Wefound that empathy and the sense of humor had a significant correlation both in boys and girls. However, the scenarios of humorusing and the purposes of humor using only had a positive correlation with empathy in girls. The findings offer a supplementaryevidence for the developmental link between empathy and humor. The implications of the study shed light on the developmentaldiscrepancies between genders in adolescents.

Previous studies have investigated the differences between concrete concepts and abstract concepts. Neverthelessthere’s still no research probing emotional words to that font. The concepts behind emotional words have both affective andcognitive components, hence emotional concepts might have unique pattern of semantic properties. The present study thenstrives to compare the semantic properties of the three kinds of concepts. Concrete, abstract, and emotional words wereselected, and participants had to report the property freely. Collected properties were categorized according to the semanticframe proposed by Wu and Barsalou (2009), and distributions of properties across three kinds of concepts were examined.It was found that the introspective types of word property reveal most dominant for emotional words. In contrast, concreteconcepts were reported with more entity properties. Further research can explore different semantic properties within categoryin order to delineate the semantic continuity and boundaries of human concept structure.

Most of Chinese corpus were created for single-character words with indexes, such as frequency, stroke number,and phonetic information, for the purposes of basic research. However, multi-character Chinese words are recognized ofreferring alterations of meaning and more useful for investigating reading processes and comprehension. Therefore, for studyingcomplete relations between words and lexicons of Chinese, a corpus requires statistics based on more than single-characterwords with valid and reliable indexes. In this study, we illustrate a corpus of Traditional Chinese providing five word indexes,including word sound, word position, word form, semantics, and competence of forming multi-character words by integratingcurrent credible corpus. The integration approach of the present study is beneficial not only for minimizing inconsistenciesof word entities between corpus, but also for calculating quantitative properties of character-to-character relationship. Theutilization of the present corpus will significantly impact the studies of Chinese words and reading comprehension.

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) for human and autonomous self-driving aims to achieve active safe driving that avoids vehicle accidents or traffic jam by exchanging the road traffic information (e.g., traffic flow, traffic density, velocity variation, etc.) among neighbor vehicles. However, in CACC, the butterfly effect is encountered while exhibiting asynchronous brakes that easily lead to backward shock-waves and are difficult to remove. Several critical issues should be addressed in CACC, including (i) difficulties with adaptive steering of the inter-vehicle distances among neighbor vehicles and the vehicle speed, (ii) the butterfly effect, (iii) unstable vehicle traffic flow, etc. To address the above issues in CACC, this paper proposes the mobile edge computing-based vehicular cloud of the cooperative adaptive driving (CAD) approach to avoid shock-waves efficiently in platoon driving. Numerical results demonstrate that the CAD approach outperforms the compared techniques in the number of shock-waves, average vehicle velocity, average travel time and time to collision (TTC). Additionally, the adaptive platoon length is determined according to the traffic information gathered from the global and local clouds.

This study investigated several visualizations, including enhancing relevant information and impairing distracting information, that harnessed the visual salience effect with augmented reality (AR) to assist people in searching for targets. The experiment used a scenario of shopping for food products where participants searched for the target product wearing an AR head-mounted display that presented the visualizations. In addition, the field-dependent (FD) and field-independent (FI) cognitive styles of users were investigated. First, FI participants completed the product selection tasks more quickly than FD participants when using the visualizations of enhancing relevant information but not the visualizations of impairing distracting information. Second, the visualizations of impairing irrelevant information improved the search speed but not the accuracy of FD participants compared to the visualizations of enhancing relevant information. Third, participants perceived a higher clarity of the highlighted items when they were highlighted with a frame rather than an overlay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SETX (senataxin) is an RNA/DNA helicase that has been implicated in transcriptional regulation and the DNA damage response through resolution of R-loop structures. Mutations in SETX result in either of two distinct neurodegenerative disorders. SETX dominant mutations result in a juvenile form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) called ALS4, whereas recessive mutations are responsible for ataxia called ataxia with oculomotor apraxia type 2 (AOA2). How mutations in the same protein can lead to different phenotypes is still unclear. To elucidate AOA2 disease mechanisms, we first examined gene expression changes following SETX depletion. We observed the effects on both transcription and RNA processing, but surprisingly observed decreased R-loop accumulation in SETX-depleted cells. Importantly, we discovered a strong connection between SETX and the macroautophagy/autophagy pathway, reflecting a direct effect on transcription of autophagy genes. We show that SETX depletion inhibits the progression of autophagy, leading to an accumulation of ubiquitinated proteins, decreased ability to clear protein aggregates, as well as mitochondrial defects. Analysis of AOA2 patient fibroblasts also revealed a perturbation of the autophagy pathway. Our work has thus identified a novel function for SETX in the regulation of autophagy, whose modulation may have a therapeutic impact for AOA2. Abbreviations: 3ʹREADS: 3ʹ region extraction and deep sequencing; ACTB: actin beta; ALS4: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis type 4; AOA2: ataxia with oculomotor apraxia type 2; APA: alternative polyadenylation; AS: alternative splicing; ATG7: autophagy-related 7; ATP6V0D2: ATPase H+ transporting V0 subunit D2; BAF: bafilomycin A1; BECN1: beclin 1; ChIP: chromatin IP; Chloro: chloroquine; CPT: camptothecin; DDR: DNA damage response; DNMT1: DNA methyltransferase 1; DRIP: DNA/RNA IP; DSBs: double strand breaks; EBs: embryoid bodies; FTD: frontotemporal dementia; GABARAP: GABA type A receptor-associated protein; GO: gene ontology; HR: homologous recombination; HTT: huntingtin; IF: immunofluorescence; IP: immunoprecipitation; iPSCs: induced pluripotent stem cells; KD: knockdown; MAP1LC3/LC3: microtubule associated protein 1 light chain 3; MN: motor neuron; MTORC1: mechanistic target of rapamycin kinase complex 1; PASS: PolyA Site Supporting; PFA: paraformaldehyde; RNAPII: RNA polymerase II; SCA: spinocerebellar ataxia; SETX: senataxin; SMA: spinal muscular atrophy; SMN1: survival of motor neuron 1, telomeric; SQSTM1/p62: sequestosome 1; TFEB: transcription factor EB; TSS: transcription start site; TTS: transcription termination site; ULK1: unc-51 like autophagy activating kinase 1; WB: western blot; WIPI2: WD repeat domain, phosphoinositide interacting 2; XRN2: 5ʹ-3ʹ exoribonuclease 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ribosome structure and activity are challenged at high temperatures, often demanding modifications to ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs) to retain translation fidelity. LC-MS/MS, bisulfite-sequencing, and high-resolution cryo-EM structures of the archaeal ribosome identified an RNA modification, N 4, N 4-dimethylcytidine (m 4 2 C), at the universally conserved C918 in the 16S rRNA helix 31 loop. Here, we characterize and structurally resolve a class of RNA methyltransferase that generates m 4 2 C whose function is critical for hyperthermophilic growth. m 4 2 C is synthesized by the activity of a unique family of RNA methyltransferase containing a Rossman-fold that targets only intact ribosomes. The phylogenetic distribution of the newly identified m 4 2 C synthase family implies that m 4 2 C is biologically relevant in each domain. Resistance of m 4 2 C to bisulfite-driven deamination suggests that efforts to capture m 5 C profiles via bisulfite sequencing are also capturing m 4 2 C., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:K.A.F., P.S.H., V.T., L.E., J.S., H.P.F., R.C., and T.J.S. do not have any competing financial interests nor conflicts of interest to report. N.D., E.J.W., R.T.F., Y.-L.T., G.B.R., and I.R.C. are employed and funded by New England Biolabs, Inc., a manufacturer and vendor of molecular biology reagents, including nucleic acid modifying and synthesis enzymes. The authors state that this affiliation does not affect their impartiality, objectivity of data generation or interpretation, adherence to journal standards and policies, or availability of data.