Homozygosity for a four-missense single-nucleotide polymorphism haplotype of the human BPIFB4 gene is enriched in long-living individuals. Delivery of this longevity-associated variant (LAV) improved revascularisation and reduced endothelial dysfunction and atherosclerosis in mice through a mechanism involving the stromal cell-derived factor-1 (SDF-1). Here, we investigated if delivery of the LAV-BPIFB4 gene may attenuate the progression of diabetic cardiomyopathy.

The temporal-focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space-time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space-time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' cospeech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past-in-front/future-at-back (besides future-in-front/past-at-back) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past-infront/future-at-back space-time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space-time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space-time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space-time mappings, but a cross-cultural comparison of space-time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal-focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space-time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding Correspondence should be sent to Yan Gu, Faculty of Brain Sciences, Psychology and Language Sciences,This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space-time mappings and the relationship between language and thought.

The linguistic metaphors of time appear to influence how people gesture about time. This study finds that Chinese English bilinguals produce more vertical gestures when talking about Chinese time references with vertical spatial metaphors than (1) when talking about time conceptions in the English translations, and (2) when talking about Chinese time references with no spatial metaphors. Additionally, Chinese English bilinguals prefer vertical gestures to lateral gestures when perceiving Chinese time references with vertical spatial metaphors and the corresponding English translations, whereas there is no such preference when perceiving time references without spatial metaphors. Furthermore, this vertical tendency is not due to the fact that vertical gestures are generally less ambiguous than lateral gestures for addressees. In conclusion, the vertical gesturing about time by Chinese English bilinguals is shaped by both the stable language-specific conceptualisations, and the online changes in linguistic choices. ARTICLE HISTORY

The temporal focus hypothesis (TFH) proposes that whether the past or the future is conceptualized as being located in front depends on temporal focus: the balance of attention paid to the past (tradition) and the future (progress). How general is the TFH, and to what extent can cultures and subcultures be placed on a single line relating time spatialization and temporal focus in spite of stark differences in language, religion, history, and economic development? Data from 10 Western (sub)cultural groups (N = 1198,) were used to derive a linear model relating aggregated temporal focus and proportion of future-in-front responses. This model then successfully fitted 10 independently collected (sub)cultural groups in China and Vietnam (N = 899). Further analysis of the whole data set (N = 2,097) showed that the group-level relation arose at the individual level and allowed precise quantification of its influence. Finally, in an effort to apply the model to all relevant published data sets, we included recent data from Britain and South Africa: The former, but not the latter, fitted the model well. Temporal focus is a central factor that shapes how people around the world think of time in spatial terms.Keywords Cross-cultural differences . Time . Space . Temporal focus Cronos, a popular personification of time during the Low Roman Empire, was sometimes represented with a four-eyed head, two in the front and two in the back, two looking to the future and two looking to the past (Cirlot, 1992). Why does it make sense to symbolize the past and future as being in front and behind a person? Moreover, why do we intuitively assume that the front eyes look to the future and the back eyes look to the past?Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT;Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) proposes that to understand abstract concepts, we borrow structure from other concepts that we have more direct experience with, and therefore understand better. The idea that such conceptual metaphors ground our cognition has become a central part of the theoretical apparatus of embodied approaches to the mind (Barsalou, 2008(Barsalou, , 2010, sparking a research boom in linguistics (Grady, 2010) and cognitive and social psychology (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010;Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009).Understanding time is strongly related to our experience of space. As we move forward, we reach our destination in front Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

Background: In this study, we focused on whether volume overload plays a role in the development of arterial stiffness. Methods: Seventy-three prevalent hemodialysis patients were enrolled in a cross-sectional study. Arterial stiffness was assessed by carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV), and volume overload was assessed by bioimpedance analysis. Results: Patients were divided into a high PWV group and a low PWV group based on the median of PWV. Age, systolic blood pressure, pulse pressure (PP), extracellular water/total body water ratio (ECW/TBW), diabetic status (all p < 0.01), and history of cardiac events (p < 0.05) were significantly higher in the high PWV group (n = 37) than in the low PWV group. In the correlation analysis, PWV was positively associated with PP, systolic blood pressure, ECW/TBW, age, history of cardiac events, and diabetes (all p < 0.01). Multiple regression analysis showed that PWV was independently related to PP and ECW/TBW (p < 0.01). Conclusion: Volume overload plays an important role in the development of arterial stiffness in hemodialysis patients.

Background: Overall, the proportion of deaths due to cardiovascular disease (CVD) reached 40–50% in dialysis patients. Pulse wave velocity (PWV) reflects arterial stiffness and may provide an integrated index of vascular status and CVD risk. Individual components of the metabolic syndrome (MetS) are well-established cardiovascular risk factors. Thus we conducted a cross-sectional study in continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) patients to explore the association of MetS components with PWV. Methods: Prevalent CAPD patients (n = 148, 63 M/85 F) were categorized according to the number of traits of the MetS into one of three groups (No MetS, Risk of MetS, MetS). Due to the effect of peritoneal dialysis (PD), waist circumference was not assessed. Aortic stiffness was assessed by carotid-femoral PWV (C-F PWV). Results: Patients’ MetS trait numbers were positively associated with C-F PWV (r = 0.301, p < 0.01), pulse pressure (r = 0.256, p < 0.01), systolic blood pressure (r = 0.233, p < 0.01), and serum albumin (r = 0.205, p < 0.05). In a multivariate regression analysis, PWV was independently determined by age (p < 0.01) and MetS score (p = 0.01). Adjusted R² of the model was 0.24. Conclusion: MetS traits were closely associated with an increased C-F PWV, even after adjustment for confounders. This suggests that commonly recognized MetS criteria are useful also when predicting CVD in CAPD patients.

The ability to successfully regulate negative emotions such as fear and anxiety is vital for mental health.The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) acts as important modulator of emotion regulation, as reflected by reduced amygdala responses but increased amygdala-prefrontal cortex (PFC) functional connectivity in response to threatening stimuli. The present randomized, between-subject, placebo (PLC)controlled pharmacological study combined intranasal administration of OXT with functional MRI during an explicit (cognitive) emotion regulation (i.e. distancing reappraisal) paradigm in 65 healthy male participants to investigate the modulatory effects of OXT on both bottom-up and top-down emotion regulation. OXT attenuated the activation in posterior insular cortex and amygdala during anticipation of top-down regulation of predictable threat stimuli in participants with high trait anxiety, providing evidence to support the anxiolytic action of OXT. In contrast, OXT enhanced amygdala activity during bottom-up anticipation of an unpredictable threat stimulus in participants with low trait anxiety. OXT may thus facilitate top-down goal-directed attention by attenuating amygdala activity in high anxiety individuals, while promote bottom-up attention/vigilance to unexpected threat by enhancing anticipatory amygdala activity in low anxiety individuals. The opposite effects of OXT on anticipatory amygdala activation in high versus low anxiety individuals may suggest a baseline anxiety level dependent mechanism via which OXT promotes optimal levels of amygdala activation during the anticipation of an imminent threat. OXT may thus have the potential to promote an adaptive balance between bottom-up and top-down attention systems depending on individual levels of pre-treatment trait anxiety levels. 2017; Zilverstand et al., 2017). Behavioral interventions (Campbell-Sills and Barlow, 2007; Gross et al., 2006; Jazaieri et al., 2015), neurofeedback targeting the amygdala-prefrontal circuits (Cohen Kadosh et al., 2016; Zhao et al., 2019) and pharmacological agents primarily targeting serotonergic and GABAergic neurotransmission (Farach et al., 2012; Singewald et al., 2015) can facilitate the regulation of negative emotions, including anxiety and fear. However, not all patients respond adequately to the currently available treatment strategies and the pharmacological interventions may induce negative side-effects which often limit compliance with the treatment protocols, thus novel strategies to improve emotion regulation are urgently needed.Emotion generation and regulation involves the interaction of intrinsic/automatic bottom-up processes and controlled/deliberately top-down processes (Ochsner and Gross, 2005;Ochsner and Gross, 2007;Suri et al., 2013). Bottom-up processes are stimulus-driven and initiated by salient stimuli in the environment. In contrast, top-down processes are goal-driven and context-dependent (Beck and Kastner, 2009;Desimone and Duncan, 1995;Sussman et al., 2016a). During both the (pre-stimulus) anticipation and adven...

The ability to successfully regulate negative emotions such as fear and anxiety is vital for mental health. Intranasal administration of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) has been shown to reduce amygdala activity but to increase amygdala-prefrontal cortex connectivity during exposure to threatening stimuli suggesting that it may act as an important modulator of emotion regulation. The present randomized, between-subject, placebo-controlled pharmacological study combines the intranasal administration of OXT with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an explicit emotion regulation paradigm in 65 healthy male participants to investigate the modulatory effects of OXT on both bottom-up and top-down emotion regulation. OXT attenuates the activation in the posterior insular cortex and amygdala during anticipation of top-down regulation of predictable threat stimuli in participants with high trait anxiety. In contrast, OXT enhances amygdala activity during the bottom-up anticipation of unpredictable threat stimuli in participants with low trait anxiety. OXT may facilitate top-down goal-directed attention by attenuating amygdala activity in high anxiety individuals, while promoting bottom-up attention/vigilance to unexpected threats by enhancing amygdala activity in low anxiety individuals. OXT may thus have the potential to promote an adaptive balance between bottom-up and top-down attention systems depending on an individual's trait anxiety level.