Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions.

There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The current study created a novel stimulus set called Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): a collection of 166 short magic trick video clips that aim to induce a variety of epistemic emotions. MagicCATs are freely available for research and can be used in a variety of ways to examine epistemic emotions. Rating data also support that the magic tricks elicit a variety of epistemic emotions with sufficient inter-stimulus variability, demonstrating good psychometric properties for their use in psychological experiments.

Novel Hydrophilic Camptothecin Derivatives Conjugated to Branched Glycerol Trimer Suppress Tumor Growth without Causing Diarrhea in Murine Xenograft Models of Human Lung Cancer.

Camptothecin possesses broad antitumor spectra on various cancers. In spite of its marked tumor-suppressing potency, camptothecin is too hydrophobic to be solved in water and therefore not currently in clinical use. CPT-11 (irinotecan) is one of the hydrophilic analogues of camptothecin and widely prescribed. However, its water solubility is still low and furthermore evokes severe diarrhea. Therefore, we designed and synthesized novel highly hydrophilic camptothecin derivatives by conjugating SN38 with branched glycerol trimer (SN38-BGL), which we have been developing as a unique strategy to endow hydrophobic molecule with much hydrophilicity, to maximize the benefit of CPT-11 and minimize the adverse effects. The SN38-BGLs exhibited equivalent or slightly stronger tumor-suppressing effects in murine xenograft human lung cancer models compared to CPT-11. However, neither early- nor late-onset diarrhea was observed when SN38-BGL was administered. Heights of villi in jejunum and ileum were bigger than those from CPT-11-treated mice, indicating that SN38-BGL is less harmful than CPT-11. Ex vivo digestion by liver microsome did not yield SN38 but a couple of other molecules against our expectations, which suggests the involvement of other active metabolites than SN38 and may explain the differences. Hence, SN38-BGLs can be a novel hydrophilic camptothecin derivative without causing severe diarrhea.

Nitrite Activates 5'AMP-Activated Protein Kinase-Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase Pathway in Human Glomerular Endothelial Cells.

Recent studies have shown that orally supplied nitrates, which substantially exist in our daily diets, are reduced into nitrites and become significant sources of nitric oxide (NO) especially in hypoxic tissues. However, physiological significance of nitrites in normal tissues has not been elucidated though our serum concentrations of nitrites reach as high as micromolar levels. We investigated effects of nitrite on endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) using human glomerular endothelial cells to reveal potential glomerular-protective actions of nitrites with its underlying molecular mechanism. Here we demonstrate that nitrite stimulation evokes eNOS activation which is dependent on 5'AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) activation in accordance with ATP reduction. Thus, nitrites should facilitate AMPK-eNOS pathway in an energy level-dependent manner in endothelial cells. The activation of AMPK-eNOS signals is suggested to be involved in vascular and renal protective effects of nitrites and nitrates. Nitrites may harbor beneficial effects on metabolic regulations as AMPK activators.

Spontaneously hyperactive MEK-Erk pathway mediates paradoxical facilitation of cell proliferation in mild hypoxia.

BACKGROUND: Oxygen is important for common eukaryotic cells to generate ATP. Pathophysiological conditions such as ischemic diseases cause tissue hypoxia. In addition, oxygen availability in deep tissues is supposed to be far lower than surrounding atmosphere even in healthy animals, and the oxygen partial pressures in most normal tissues are estimated to be around 40-50mmHg, so-called mild hypoxia. Recent studies have demonstrated that mild hypoxia has distinct effects on living cells from severe hypoxia. For instance, mild hypoxia was reported to promote cell reprogramming. Although severe hypoxia is known to inhibit cell proliferation, mild hypoxia has been paradoxically demonstrated to increase cell proliferation. However, it has not been clarified by which molecular mechanisms mild hypoxia evokes the discontinuous increment of cell proliferation. METHODS: We established experimental conditions showing the opposite influences of mild and severe hypoxia on cell proliferation using undifferentiated Caco2 human colon carcinoma cells in order to clarify the underlying molecular mechanism. RESULTS: The basal activity of Erk, which is a typical mediator of mitogenic signals, is spontaneously increased specifically in cells exposed to mild hypoxia, and inhibition of MEK, an upstream kinase of the Erk, completely inhibited the mild hypoxia-induced enhancement of cell proliferation. CONCLUSIONS: Spontaneous hyperactivation of the MEK-Erk pathway by mild hypoxia should be the plausible molecular mechanism of the paradoxical promotion of cell proliferation. GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE: Our findings will provide clues to the molecular basis of mild hypoxia-evoked phenomena such as cell reprogramming.

Multiple group membership and executive function in a socioeconomically diverse sample.

Belonging to multiple groups is an important feature of our social lives. However, it is largely unknown if it is related to individual differences in cognitive performance. Given that changing self-identities linked to each group requires cognitive operations on knowledge bases associated with each group, the extent to which people belong to multiple groups may be related to individual differences in cognitive performance. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to test if multiple group membership is related to executive function task performance. A socioeconomically diverse sample of 395 individuals in Indonesia participated in this study. Our results show that multiple group membership was positively related to the 3-back working memory performance. However, we also found that this relationship was significant only among participants with high (not median or low) SES. We also observed that Contact diversity was negatively related to working memory performance among participants with low SES. Our results show that the complexity of our social lives is related to individual differences in executive function performance, although this seems to be constrained by SES.

People underestimate their capability to motivate themselves without performance-based extrinsic incentives.

Research has shown that we are endowed with a remarkable capacity to motivate ourselves in the absence of extrinsic incentives (i.e. intrinsic motivation). However, little research has been conducted to investigate whether we accurately appreciate the power of intrinsic motivation. The current research aimed to examine the metacognitive accuracy of the extent to which people can motivate themselves without performance-based extrinsic incentives. Participants were presented with a relatively long and repetitive task without extrinsic incentives, and before doing the task, they were asked to predict their motivation on completion of the task. Across seven experiments using a variety of tasks with different populations from different countries, participants were consistently engaged in the task more actively than they predicted. When participants were provided with performance-based monetary rewards, however, this bias was diminished. These results indicate that we tend to underappreciate our capability to sustain our motivation without extrinsic incentives. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11031-022-09996-5.

Thinking about thinking: People underestimate how enjoyable and engaging just waiting is.

The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to enjoy this process of "just thinking." Participants (university students; total N = 259) were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anything. Across six experiments, we consistently found that participants' predicted enjoyment and engagement for the waiting task were significantly less than what they actually experienced. This underappreciation of just thinking also led participants to proactively avoid the waiting task in favor of an alternative task (i.e., Internet news checking), despite their experiences not being statistically different. These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Can Brain Waves Really Tell If a Product Will Be Purchased? Inferring Consumer Preferences From Single-Item Brain Potentials.

Recent research has shown that event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded while participants view lists of different consumer goods can be modulated by their preferences toward these products. However, it remains largely unknown whether ERP activity specific to a single consumer item can be informative about whether or not this item will be preferred in a shopping context. In this study, we examined whether single-item ERPs could reliably predict consumer preferences toward specific consumer goods. We recorded scalp EEG from 40 participants while they were viewing pictures of consumer goods and we subsequently asked them to indicate their preferences for each of these items. Replicating previous results, we found that ERP activity averaged over the six most preferred products was significantly differentiated from ERP activity averaged across the six least preferred products for three ERP components: The N200, the late positive potential (LPP) and positive slow waves (PSW). We also found that using single-item ERPs to infer behavioral preferences about specific consumer goods led to an overall predictive accuracy of 71%, although this figure varied according to which ERPs were targeted. Later positivities such as the LPP and PSW yielded relatively higher predictive accuracy rates than the frontal N200. Our results suggest that ERPs related to single consumer items can be relatively accurate predictors of behavioral preferences depending on which type of ERP effects are chosen by the researcher, and ultimately on the level of prediction errors that users choose to tolerate.

Why Verbalization of Non-Verbal Memory Reduces Recognition Accuracy: A Computational Approach to Verbal Overshadowing.

Verbal overshadowing refers to a phenomenon whereby verbalization of non-verbal stimuli (e.g., facial features) during the maintenance phase (after the target information is no longer available from the sensory inputs) impairs subsequent non-verbal recognition accuracy. Two primary mechanisms have been proposed for verbal overshadowing, namely the recoding interference hypothesis, and the transfer-inappropriate processing shift. The former assumes that verbalization renders non-verbal representations less accurate. In contrast, the latter assumes that verbalization shifts processing operations to a verbal mode and increases the chance of failing to return to non-verbal, face-specific processing operations (i.e., intact, yet inaccessible non-verbal representations). To date, certain psychological phenomena have been advocated as inconsistent with the recoding-interference hypothesis. These include a decline in non-verbal memory performance following verbalization of non-target faces, and occasional failures to detect a significant correlation between the accuracy of verbal descriptions and the non-verbal memory performance. Contrary to these arguments against the recoding interference hypothesis, however, the present computational model instantiated core processing principles of the recoding interference hypothesis to simulate face recognition, and nonetheless successfully reproduced these behavioral phenomena, as well as the standard verbal overshadowing. These results demonstrate the plausibility of the recoding interference hypothesis to account for verbal overshadowing, and suggest there is no need to implement separable mechanisms (e.g., operation-specific representations, different processing principles, etc.). In addition, detailed inspections of the internal processing of the model clarified how verbalization rendered internal representations less accurate and how such representations led to reduced recognition accuracy, thereby offering a computationally grounded explanation. Finally, the model also provided an explanation as to why some studies have failed to report verbal overshadowing. Thus, the present study suggests it is not constructive to discuss whether verbal overshadowing exists or not in an all-or-none manner, and instead suggests a better experimental paradigm to further explore this phenomenon.