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This paper reports the fabrication of a silk fibroin nanofiber air filter via a green electrospinning method.

Previous research showed that the processing of overt threat cues formed by evolutionary experience such as snake or angry face induced automatic increased responses of the emotion-related system consisting of the amygdala, the anterior cingulate, and the orbitofrontal cortex. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain circuits involved in perception of threat cues that lack obvious emotion contents but are potentially dangerous in a particular social situation. Subjects were scanned while watching images showing a person in either a safe or a potentially dangerous situation and being asked to detect threat signals or to evaluate the degree of threat. We found that, in contrast with gender identification, threat detection and evaluation were underpinned by a neural network, shared by both male and female subjects, consisting of the medial and lateral frontal cortex, superior parietal lobes, posterior middle temporal cortex, and cerebellum. In addition, detection of threat cues was associated with stronger posterior parietal activation for males than females. Our findings suggest that neural processing of evolutionary unprepared threat cues in social environments does not necessarily involve the emotion-related neural system and is influence by evolutionary pressure on sex differences.

By combining binocular suppression technique and a probe detection paradigm, we investigated attentional bias to invisible stimuli and its gender difference in both high trait anxiety (HTA) and low trait anxiety (LTA) individuals. As an attentional cue, happy or fearful face pictures were presented to HTAs and LTAs for 800 ms either consciously or unconsciously (through binocular suppression). Participants were asked to judge the orientation of a gabor patch following the face pictures. Their performance was used to measure attentional effect induced by the cue. We found gender differences of attentional effect only in the unconscious condition with HTAs. Female HTAs exhibited difficulty in disengaging attention from the location where fearful faces were presented, while male HTAs showed attentional avoidance of it. Our results suggested that the failure to find attentional avoidance of threatening stimuli in many previous studies might be attributed to consciously presented stimuli and data analysis regardless of participants' gender. These findings also contributed to our understanding of gender difference in anxiety disorder.