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El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar y describir los factores que determinan el poder y competencia de mercado agroindustrial en el Ecuador, tomando como guía la Ley Orgánica de Regulación y Control de Poder de Mercado en la cual se busca garantizar una competencia justa entre empresas evitando así el abuso del poder del mercado estableciendo reglas claras y transparentes para que de esta manera exista una competencia justa y así mermar las prácticas desleales. Además, con la implementación de esta ley de Regulación y Control del Poder se busca proteger a los consumidores que también forman parte importante de la economía y a los pequeños y medianos productores, de los abusos de la alta concentración económica y las prácticas monopólicas. Mediante la obtención de los datos obtenidos se pudo establecer una comparativa mediante varios autores de diversas publicaciones de revistar donde se puede destacar del equilibrio de la competencia que se tendría que dar para que exista una amplia gama de productos destacados, sobre todo para que el poder que existe en el mercado no explote demasiado a pequeños y grandes productores que se abastecen con pequeños recursos y sus productos que salen desde sus propiedades. Para ello se recopiló información en relación con la economía y la agroindustria mediante una revisión de bibliografía extensa, tomando en cuenta los 3 principales factores del poder de competencia siendo: barreras a la entrada, diferenciación y economías de escala. Estas barreras son todas aquellas vallas que complican o impiden que nuevos competidores participen en una industria.

Fear extinction is not permanent but is instead more vulnerable than the original fear memory, as traditionally shown by the return of fear phenomena. Because of this, techniques to mitigate the return of fear are needed in the clinical treatment of related psychological conditions. One promising strategy is the occasional reinforced extinction treatment, introducing a gradual and sparse number of conditioned stimulus–unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) pairings within the extinction treatment. We present the results of three experiments in which we used a threat conditioning procedure in humans. Our main aim was to evaluate whether occasional reinforced extinction could reduce two different forms of relapse: spontaneous recovery (Experiments 1 and 2) and reinstatement (Experiment 3). Contrary to our predictions and previous literature, the results indicate that an occasional reinforcement treatment did not mitigate relapse compared with standard extinction. From a theoretical standpoint, these results are more consistent with the idea that extinction entails the acquisition of new knowledge than with the idea that there are conditions in which extinction leads to a weakening of the original fear memory. These findings also question the generality of the potential benefits of using occasional reinforced extinction in clinical settings.

As more Latinx students enroll at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), it is important for institutions of higher education to intentionally engage in strategic planning that aligns their mission,...

A criptococose é uma micose sistêmica de distribuição cosmopolita causada por um fungo do gênero Cryptococcus, que acomete principalmente felinos. Embora seja considerada em felinos, é descrita raramente. Um felino, macho, SRD foi atendido no Hospital Veterinário do Unibave – HVU com histórico de dificuldade respiratória, nódulo ulcerado e deformidade na região dorso nasal, apresentando descargas nasais serosanguinolentas. O diagnóstico da criptococose se deu pela anamnese, exame clínico e citológico com observação do agente Cryptoccoccus neoformans. Foi estabelecido terapia com itraconazol durante seis meses, com regressão total do quadro e sem reação ao medicamento utilizado. O objetivo do trabalho foi relatar um caso de criptococose felina onde se obteve sucesso na terapêutica empregada.

Fifty-five to two hundred CGG repeats (called a premutation, or PM) in the 5′-UTR of the FMR1 gene are generally unstable, often expanding to a full mutation (&gt, 200) in one generation through maternal inheritance, leading to fragile X syndrome, a condition associated with autism and other intellectual disabilities. To uncover the early mechanisms of pathogenesis, we performed metabolomics and proteomics on amniotic fluids from PM carriers, pregnant with male fetuses, who had undergone amniocentesis for fragile X prenatal diagnosis. The prenatal metabolic footprint identified mitochondrial deficits, which were further validated by using internal and external cohorts. Deficits in the anaplerosis of the Krebs cycle were noted at the level of serine biosynthesis, which was confirmed by rescuing the mitochondrial dysfunction in the carriers’ umbilical cord fibroblasts using alpha-ketoglutarate precursors. Maternal administration of serine and its precursors has the potential to decrease the risk of developing energy shortages associated with mitochondrial dysfunction and linked comorbidities.

According to prediction-based accounts of language comprehension, incoming contextual information is constantly used to guide the pre-activation of the most probable continuations to the unfolding sentences. However, there is still scarce evidence of the build-up of these predictions during sentence comprehension. Using event-related brain potentials, we investigated sustained processes associated to semantic prediction during online sentence comprehension. To address this, participants read sentences with varying levels of contextual constraint one word at a time. A 1000 ms interval preceded the final word, which could be congruent or incongruent. A slow sustained negativity developed gradually over the course of sentences, showing differences across conditions, with increasingly larger amplitudes for high than low levels of constraint. The effect was maximal in the interval preceding the closing word. This interval elicited a left-dominant slow negative potential with a graded amplitude modulation to contextual constraint, replicating previous results in speech comprehension. We argue that these slow potentials index the engagement of cognitive operations associated to semantic prediction. In addition, we replicated the finding of an earlier onset of the N400 effect (incongruent minus congruent) for high relative to low contextual constraint, suggesting facilitated processing for contextually-supported and highly expected words. Altogether, these results are consistent with prediction-based models of language comprehension and they also strengthen the value of investigating slow components as potential indices of mechanisms linked to language prediction.

Aunque aprender a evitar ciertas situaciones puede resultarnos adaptativo y ventajoso, ya que con ello reducimos el contacto con amenazas, en ocasiones estas conductas pueden alterar nuestra vida llegando a ser difíciles de controlar o eliminar. De hecho, la evitación excesiva e inflexible es un síntoma frecuente en gran variedad de trastornos psicológicos relacionados con ansiedad. En nuestro laboratorio nos preguntamos si ciertas variables de personalidad podrían predisponer a la adquisición de este tipo de conductas. Nuestro estudio sugiere que el rasgo de intolerancia a la incertidumbre, presente en numerosos trastornos de ansiedad, está relacionado con una evitación poco adaptativa.

Recent studies have shown that avoidance behavior may become excessive and inflexible (i.e., detached from its incentive value and resistant to extinction). On the other hand, prospective intolerance of uncertainty (P-IU) has been defined as a factor leading to excessive responding in uncertain situations. Thus, uncertain avoidance situations may be taken as a relevant scenario to examine the role of intolerance of uncertainty as a factor that facilitates excessive and inflexible avoidance behavior. In our experiment, we tested the hypothesis that P-IU is associated with excessive and inflexible avoidance in an outcome devaluation paradigm. Specifically, healthy participants learned in a free-operant discriminative task to avoid an aversive sound, and were tested in extinction to measure the sensitivity of avoidance responses to the devaluation of the sound aversiveness. The results showed that an increase in P-IU was positively associated to an increase in insensitivity to the devaluation. Moreover, P-IU was also related to an increase in the frequency of avoidance responses during the instrumental learning phase, and to resistance to extinction. Interestingly, these associations involving P-IU were still significant when trait anxiety was controlled for. The pattern of results suggests that P-IU may be a vulnerability factor for excessive and inflexible avoidance, which, in turn, has been found to be associated with several mental disorders.

Causal knowledge has been shown to affect diagnostic decisions. It is unclear, however, how causal knowledge affects diagnosis. We hypothesized that it influences intuitive reasoning processes. More precisely, we speculated that people automatically assess the coherence between observed symptoms and an assumed causal model of a disorder, which in turn affects diagnostic classification. Intuitive causal reasoning was investigated in an experimental study. Participants were asked to read clinical reports before deciding on a diagnosis. Intuitive processing was studied by analyzing reading times. It turned out that reading times were slower when causally expected consequences of present symptoms were missing or effects of absent causes were present. This causal incoherence effect was predictive of participants’ later explicit diagnostic judgments. These and related findings suggest that diagnostic judgments rely on automatic reasoning processes based on the computation of causal coherence. Potential implications of these results for the training of clinicians are discussed.

Background and objectives Excessive maladaptive avoidance has been claimed to be one of the mechanisms through which intolerance of uncertainty (IU) may play its causal role in the development and maintenance of several anxiety and compulsive disorders. Consistently, Flores et al. (2018) found that individuals with higher Prospective IU (P-IU), a specific IU subfactor, display excessive avoidance response repetitions in a free-operant discriminative task to avoid an aversive noise. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that P-IU not only predicts the amount of avoidance responses but also how well the temporal distribution of such responses fits the temporal distribution of threats. Methods Further correlation and hierarchical regression analysis of Flores et al.‘s (2018) data served to test this hypothesis. We evaluated two aspects of the temporal distribution of responses: a) for how long participants were performing the responses; b) the behavioral discrimination between threatening and safe time periods. Results The results showed that scoring high in P-IU was positively associated with longer periods of time dedicated to avoiding and with worse behavioral discrimination between threatening and safe time periods. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that later addition of inhibitory intolerance of uncertainty and trait anxiety did not significantly improved the explained variance. Limitations Our results are exclusively based on the use of a low-cost avoidance response, and the present study does not clarify the precise mechanisms that lead high P-IU people to engage in non-optimal avoidance response distribution through time. Conclusions These results suggest that excessive avoidance is also driven by uncertainty of threat timing and highlight the relevance of P-IU as a vulnerability factor for excessive and outspread avoidance behaviors.

A pesar de que a los psicólogos clínicos se les instruye en el uso de manuales diagnósticos como el DSM, evitando así la implicación de sus propias creencias causales, las decisiones diagnósticas se ven contaminadas por tales creencias. Sin embargo, es muy poco lo que sabemos sobre la naturaleza específica de los procesos de razonamiento responsables de ese sesgo causal. A partir de dos estudios encontramos resultados que sugieren que estas creencias causales operan de forma rápida, casi inadvertida y no deliberada, llegando a contaminar la toma de decisiones en el diagnóstico de trastornos mentales.

The present study sought to test whether perceptual segregation of concurrently played sounds is impaired in schizophrenia (SZ), whether impairment in sound segregation predicts difficulties with a real-world speech-in-noise task, and whether auditory-specific or general cognitive processing accounts for sound segregation problems. Participants with SZ and healthy controls (HCs) performed a mistuned harmonic segregation task during recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants also performed a brief speech-in-noise task. Participants with SZ showed deficits in the mistuned harmonic task and the speech-in-noise task, compared to HCs. No deficit in SZ was found in the ERP component related to mistuned harmonic segregation at around 150 ms (the object-related negativity or ORN), but instead showed a deficit in processing at around 400 ms (the P4 response). However, regression analyses showed that indexes of education level and general cognitive function were the best predictors of sound segregation difficulties, suggesting non-auditory specific causes of concurrent sound segregation problems in SZ.

In an experiment that used the inconsistency paradigm, experienced clinical psychologists and psychology students performed a reading task using clinical reports and a diagnostic judgment task. The clinical reports provided information about the symptoms of hypothetical clients who had been previously diagnosed with a specific mental disorder. Reading times of inconsistent target sentences were slower than those of control sentences, demonstrating an inconsistency effect. The results also showed that experienced clinicians gave different weights to different symptoms according to their relevance when fluently reading the clinical reports provided, despite the fact that all the symptoms were of equal diagnostic value according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text rev.; American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The diagnostic judgment task yielded a similar pattern of results. In contrast to previous findings, the results of the reading task may be taken as direct evidence of the intervention of reasoning processes that occur very early, rapidly, and online. We suggest that these processes are based on the representation of mental disorders and that these representations are particularly suited to fast retrieval from memory and to making inferences. They may also be related to the clinicians' causal reasoning. The implications of these results for clinician training are also discussed.

Although it is thought that within-compound associations are necessary for the occurrence of both backward blocking and unovershadowing, it is not known whether this variable plays a similar role in mediating the two phenomena. Similarly, the roles of within-compound associations in forward blocking and in reduced overshadowing have not been tested independently. The present experiments evaluated how the strength of within-compound associations affects backward blocking, unovershadowing, forward blocking, and reduced overshadowing. Using an allergy task, the strength of within-compound associations was varied by taking advantage of the participants' prior knowledge of common and uncommon food pairings. Backward blocking and unovershadowing effects were present only when highly memorable compound cues were used. Moreover, the magnitudes of both retrospective revaluation effects were affected by the strength of within-compound associations. Forward blocking and reduced overshadowing effects were independent of within-compound associations. These results have important theoretical implications for causal learning research.

Monetary and a social incentive delay tasks were used to characterize reward anticipation and delivery with electroencephalography. During reward anticipation, N1, P2 and P3 components were modulated by both prospective reward value and incentive type (monetary or social), suggesting distinctive allocation of attentional and motivational resources depending not only on whether rewards or non-rewards were cued, but also on the monetary and social nature of the prospective outcomes. In the delivery phase, P2, FRN and P3 components were also modulated by levels of reward value and incentive type, illustrating how distinctive affective and cognitive processes were attached to the different outcomes. Our findings imply that neural processing of both reward anticipation and delivery can be specific to incentive type, which might have implications for basic as well as translational research. These results are discussed in the light of previous electrophysiological and neuroimaging work using similar tasks.

An experiment conducted with students and experienced clinicians demonstrated very fast and online causal reasoning in the diagnosis of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) mental disorders. The experiment also demonstrated that clinicians' causal reasoning is triggered by information that is directly related to the causal structure that explains the symptoms, such as their temporal sequence. The use of causal theories was measured through explicit, verbal diagnostic judgments and through the online registration of participants' reading times of clinical reports. To detect both online and offline causal reasoning, the consistency of clinical reports was manipulated. This manipulation was made by varying the temporal order in which different symptoms developed in hypothetical clients, and by providing explicit information about causal connections between symptoms. The temporal order of symptoms affected the clinicians' but not the students' reading times. However, offline diagnostic judgments in both groups were influenced by the consistency manipulation. Overall, our results suggest that clinicians engage in fast and online causal reasoning processes when dealing with diagnostic information concerning mental disorders, and that both clinicians and students engage in causal reasoning in diagnostic judgment tasks.

We studied physical properties of titanium hafnium oxide (TixHf1-xO2) alloy thin films deposited by pulsed DC reactive magnetron sputtering with AC substrate bias. Thin films of two end oxides, hafnium oxides (HfO2) and titanium oxides (TiO2), and their alloys TixHf1-xO2 with a range of compositions deposited with and without the substrate bias were compared to study the dependence of physical properties of the thin films on the substrate bias. Structural, chemical and optical properties of the thin films were analyzed to assess inter-relationship among these properties. Thin films deposited with the AC substrate bias consistently show much higher refractive index and significantly lower optical extinction coefficient than those of thin films deposited without the substrate bias suggesting that characteristic microstructures developed in these thin films are responsible for the differences in the optical properties.

Indium phosphide (InP) nanowires were grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). InP nanowires grew in the structure of three-dimensional networks in which electrical charges and heat can travel over distances much longer than the mean length of the constituent nanowires. We studied the dependence of thermoelectric properties on geometrical factors within the InP nanowire networks. The InP nanowire networks show Seebeck coefficients comparable with that of bulk InP. Rather than studying single nanowires, we chose networks of nanowires formed densely across large areas required for large scale production. We also studied the role played by intersections where multiple nanowires were fused to form the nanowire networks. Modeling based on finite-element analysis, structural analysis, and transport measurements were carried out to obtain insights of physical properties at the intersections. Understanding these physical properties of three-dimensional nanowire networks will advance the development of thermoelectric devices.

En esta serie experimental se demuestra que el diagnóstico de los trastornos mentales no se atiene de forma estricta a los criterios diagnósticos del DSM-IV, sino que está sesgado por teorías y creencias causales. Además, probamos que, en este sesgo causal, tienen una implicación importante procesos de razonamiento intuitivo, rápidos y automáticos (o semiautomáticos), atribuibles a lo que se conoce como sistema 1.