Introduction: Anxiety disorders are prevalent mental conditions characterized by exaggerated anxious arousal and threat reactivity. Animal and human studies suggest an anxiolytic potential of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT), yet, while a clinical application will require chronic administration protocols, previous human studies have exclusively focused on single-dose (acute) intranasal OT effects. Objective: To facilitate the translation of the potential anxiolytic mechanism of OT into clinical application, we determined whether the anxiolytic effects of OT are maintained with repeated (chronic) administration or are influenced by dose frequency and trait anxiety. Methods: In a pre-registered double-blind randomized placebo-controlled pharmaco-fMRI trial the acute (single dose) as well as chronic effects of two different dose frequencies of OT (OT administered daily for 5 days or every other day) on emotional reactivity were assessed in n = 147 individuals with high versus low trait anxiety (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03085654). Results: OT produced valence, dose frequency, and trait anxiety-specific effects, such that the low-frequency (intermittent) chronic dosage specifically attenuated a neural reactivity increase in amygdala-insula-prefrontal circuits observed in the high anxious placebo-treated subjects in response to threatening but not positive stimuli. Conclusions: The present trial provides the first evidence that low-dose frequency chronic intranasal OT has the potential to alleviate exaggerated neural threat reactivity in subjects with elevated anxiety levels, suggesting a treatment potential for anxiety disorders.
Right hemispheric dominance in tonal bilingualism is still controversial. In this study, we investigated hemispheric dominance in 30 simultaneous Bai‐Mandarin tonal bilinguals and 28 Mandarin monolinguals using multimodal neuroimaging. Resting‐state functional connectivity (RSFC) analysis was first performed to reveal the changes of functional connections within the language‐related network. Voxel‐based morphology (VBM) and tract‐based spatial statistics (TBSS) analyses were then used to identify bilinguals' alterations in gray matter volume (GMV) and fractional anisotropy (FA) of white matter, respectively. RSFC analyses revealed significantly increased functional connections of the right pars‐orbital part of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) with right caudate, right pars‐opercular part of IFG, and left inferior temporal gyrus in Bai‐Mandarin bilinguals compared to monolinguals. VBM and TBSS analyses further identified significantly greater GMV in right pars‐triangular IFG and increased FA in right superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) in bilinguals than in monolinguals. Taken together, these results demonstrate the integrative role of the right IFG in tonal language processing of bilinguals. Our findings suggest that the intrinsic language network in simultaneous tonal bilinguals differs from that of monolinguals in terms of both function and structure.
Studies focusing on risk factors for negative emotions related to the COVID-19 pandemic remain limited. We examined the underlying mechanism of resilience and emotion regulation on the association between parental psychological control and COVID-19 pandemic-related negative emotions. A total of 400 Chinese college students (207 males; Mage = 19.78 ± 1.72 years) completed a cross-sectional survey including Parental Psychological Control Scale, Profile of Mood States Scale, Brief Resilience Scale, and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire during the pandemic. Using PROCESS macro, results indicated that resilience partially mediated the association between parental psychological control and COVID-19 pandemic-related negative emotions. Expressive suppression, but not cognitive reappraisal, moderated the mediating path. Specifically, parental psychological control was a stronger predictor of resilience among those who rarely used expressive suppression. Correcting maladaptive parenting would be beneficial for college students' mental health during COVID-19 as well as for the improvement of coping capacity and adaptation outcomes to stress.
The accuracy of PV array model directly affects the output characteristics of the PV system. In this paper, a simplified engineering model for PV array is established and the influence on the output characteristics of PV array is analyzed when Rs, Rsh and α, β, γ change. According to the actual data of a PV power station, the shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) is adopted to identify the parameters in the model. The results show that the identification curve and the measured curve are in a better consistency. Then, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is adopted to identify the same parameters and the identification results are compared with the identification results of SFLA. It shows that the output of PV array model based on the identification results of SFLA has a higher fitting degree with the actual output of PV power station which further verifies the superiority of SFLA.