Facial expressions are deeply tied to empathy, which plays an important role during social communication. The eye region is effective at conveying facial expressions, especially fear and sadness emotions. Further, it was proved that subliminal stimuli could impact human behavior. This research aimed to explore the effect of subliminal sad, fearful and neutral emotions conveyed by the eye region on a viewer’s empathy for pain using event-related potentials (ERP). The experiment used an emotional priming paradigm of 3 (prime: subliminal neutral, sad, fear eye region information) × 2 (target: painful, nonpainful pictures) within-subject design. Participants were told to judge whether the targets were in pain or not. Results showed that the subliminal sad eye stimulus elicited a larger P2 amplitude than the subliminal fearful eye stimulus when assessing pain. For P3 and late positive component (LPC), the amplitude elicited by the painful pictures was larger than the amplitude elicited by the nonpainful pictures. The behavioral results demonstrated that people reacted to targets depicting pain more slowly after the sad emotion priming. Moreover, the subjective ratings of Personal Distress (PD) (one of the dimensions in Chinese version of Interpersonal Reactivity Index scale) predicted the pain effect in empathic neural responses in the N1 and N2 time window. The current study showed that subliminal eye emotion affected the viewer’s empathy for pain. Compared with the subliminal fearful eye stimulus, the subliminal sad eye stimulus had a greater impact on empathy for pain. The perceptual level of pain was deeper in the late controlled processing stage.

The treatment paradigm for malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) has changed little in the last 18 years. Radical intent treatment, consisting of surgical resection, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, has been offered to a highly select few; however, there is little randomised evidence to validate this approach. Prior to 2020 chemotherapy with platinum and an anti-folate was the only intervention with randomised evidence to demonstrate improved overall survival (OS) in MPM. No systemic therapy had been demonstrated to improve OS in the second line setting until 2020. The publication of the Checkmate 743 trial in 2021 demonstrated a survival benefit of combination immunotherapy over standard chemotherapy in newly diagnosed patients with MPM. This finding was shortly followed by the CONFIRM trial which demonstrates a modest but significant survival benefit of second line nivolumab versus placebo in patients having previously received standard chemotherapy. The results of these trials, recent biomarker directed therapy and chemotherapy adjuncts are discussed within this review. The integration of immunotherapy for the few patients in whom radical surgical therapy is intended is currently the subject of clinical trials and offers the prospect of improving outcomes in this rare but devastating disease.

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English and Mandarin Chinese differ in the voice onset times (VOTs) of /b/ and /p/. Hence the way bilinguals perceive these sounds may show ‘tuning’ to the language-specific acoustic structure of a bilingual’s languages (a discrete model), or a shared representation across languages (a unitary model). We investigated whether an individual’s early childhood exposure influences their model of phoneme perception across languages, in a large sample of early English-Mandarin bilingual adults in Singapore (N = 66). As preregistered, we mapped identification functions on a /b/-/p/ VOT continuum in each language. Bilingual balance was estimated using principal components analysis and entered into GLMMs of phoneme boundary and slope. VOT boundaries were earlier for English than Mandarin, and bilingual balance predicted the slope of the transition between categories across both languages: Those who heard more English from an earlier age showed steeper category boundaries than those who heard more Mandarin, suggesting early bilinguals may transfer their model for how phonemes differ from their earlier/stronger languages to later/weaker languages. We describe the transfer model of discrete phoneme representations and its implications for use of the phoneme identification task in diverse populations.

Phoneme perception is critically involved in alphabetic reading, however current findings may not hold for bilinguals. In the CROWN Game, children hear tokens of familiar words across a voice-onset time continuum (-60ms to 90ms). We measured individual VOT threshold and the slope of the transition between categories in 138 English/Chinese speaking bilinguals in Singapore kindergartens. The task showed a wide spread of scores and good split-half reliability. In a preregistered analysis, we examined whether bilingual balance or order of acquisition influenced categorical perception of English phonemes /b/ and /p/. GLMMs revealed categorical perception was independent from language exposure. This suggests the CROWN Game is valid for use with bilingual children, including as a possible screening tool for future reading difficulties.

Body movements provide a rich source of emotional information during social interactions. Although the ability to perceive biological-motion cues related to those movements begins to develop in infancy, processing those cues to identify emotions likely continues to develop into childhood. Previous studies use posed or exaggerated body movements, which may not reflect the kind of body expressions children experience. The present study used an event-related potential (ERP) priming paradigm to investigate the development of emotion recognition from more naturalistic body movements. Point-light displays of human adult bodies spontaneously expressing happy or angry emotional movements were used as prime stimuli, while audio recordings of the words “happy” and “angry” spoken with an emotionally neutral prosody were used as targets. We recorded the ERPs time-locked to the onset of the auditory target from 3- and 6-year-old children, and compared amplitude and latency of the N300 and N400 responses between the two age groups in the different prime-target conditions. Three-year-old children showed an interaction between the prime and target for the N400 amplitude, suggesting that they were sensitive to the emotional congruency between body movements and words. Six-year-old children did not show this congruency effect; however, they had earlier N300 and N400 latency than the younger children, suggesting that older children may process the stimuli more quickly. Overall, our results suggest that both age groups can use naturalistic body movements to identify emotions, with developmental changes in how quickly emotional information from such body expressions are processed.

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