Bringing Radiation Exposures and Associated Health Risks into Perspective-Development of an App.

The NATO HFM 291 research task group (RTG) on "Ionizing Radiation Bioeffects and Countermeasures" represents a group of scientists from military and civilian academic and scientific institutions primarily working in the field of radiobiology. Among other tasks, the RTG intends to extend their work on risk estimation and communication to bridge the gap in appropriate judgment of health risks given a certain radiation exposure. The group has no explicit psychological background but an expertise in radiobiology and risk assessment. The group believes that, as one of the essential first steps in risk communication, it is required to put radiation risk into perspective. Radiation risk requires a weight in comparison to already-known risks. What we envision is to Compare Radiation exposure-associated health Risks (CRRis App) with daily life health risks caused by other common exposures such as cigarette smoking, driving a car, etc. Within this paper, we provide (1) an overview of health risks after radiation exposure, (2) an explanation of the task and concept of an envisioned CRRis App, (3) an overview of existing software tools related to this issue, (4) a summary of inputs and discussions with experts in the field of radiation protection and risk communication during the ConRad conference, and finally, (5) identification of the next steps in the development of the App.

Author Correction: Overcoming Bias: Cognitive Control Reduces Susceptibility to Framing Effects in Evaluating Musical Performance.

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Overcoming Bias: Cognitive Control Reduces Susceptibility to Framing Effects in Evaluating Musical Performance.

Prior expectations can bias evaluative judgments of sensory information. We show that information about a performer's status can bias the evaluation of musical stimuli, reflected by differential activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Moreover, we demonstrate that decreased susceptibility to this confirmation bias is (a) accompanied by the recruitment of and (b) correlated with the white-matter structure of the executive control network, particularly related to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). By using long-duration musical stimuli, we were able to track the initial biasing, subsequent perception, and ultimate evaluation of the stimuli, examining the full evolution of these biases over time. Our findings confirm the persistence of confirmation bias effects even when ample opportunity exists to gather information about true stimulus quality, and underline the importance of executive control in reducing bias.

Dynamic musical communication of core affect.

Is there something special about the way music communicates feelings? Theorists since Meyer (1956) have attempted to explain how music could stimulate varied and subtle affective experiences by violating learned expectancies, or by mimicking other forms of social interaction. Our proposal is that music speaks to the brain in its own language; it need not imitate any other form of communication. We review recent theoretical and empirical literature, which suggests that all conscious processes consist of dynamic neural events, produced by spatially dispersed processes in the physical brain. Intentional thought and affective experience arise as dynamical aspects of neural events taking place in multiple brain areas simultaneously. At any given moment, this content comprises a unified "scene" that is integrated into a dynamic core through synchrony of neuronal oscillations. We propose that (1) neurodynamic synchrony with musical stimuli gives rise to musical qualia including tonal and temporal expectancies, and that (2) music-synchronous responses couple into core neurodynamics, enabling music to directly modulate core affect. Expressive music performance, for example, may recruit rhythm-synchronous neural responses to support affective communication. We suggest that the dynamic relationship between musical expression and the experience of affect presents a unique opportunity for the study of emotional experience. This may help elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying arousal and valence, and offer a new approach to exploring the complex dynamics of the how and why of emotional experience.