The Effect of Priming on Perceptions of Dog Breed Traits

ABSTRACT

This study examined whether priming cues embedded in mediastyle presentations shaped people's perceptions of specific dog breeds, and in particular, the German shepherd dog (GSD). Two hundred and four adult females were exposed to one of two types of media-style presentation (stories or pictures). Half of the participants in each condition were exposed to versions designed to portray the GSD in a positive light; the remainder to stimuli developed to present the same breed in a negative light. Participants subsequently rated six individual breeds of dog, including the target breed, on a number of traits (e.g., “friendliness,” “aggression”). Analysis revealed a significant effect of priming on people's perceptions of the GSD. Participants exposed to the negative stimuli perceived this breed as significantly less approachable, and more dangerous and aggressive, than those exposed to the positive stimuli. Priming did not influence the participants' perceptions of other breeds, even those often regarded in a negative light, although there was some evidence of breed-related category-based stereotyping. Overall, results suggest that people's perceptions of dog breeds can be influenced by verbal and visual representations. The results have implications for how dogs are portrayed in the media and other publically available sources of information.     

Dog Breed Stereotype and Exposure to Negative Behavior: Effects on Perceptions of Adoptability

The purpose of the study was to determine if brief exposure to a dog behaving badly or in a friendly manner affects subsequent perceptions of the target dog's and other dogs' adoptability. Participants viewed a videotape of an adoptable German shepherd behaving either aggressively or prosocially and were then asked to rate the characteristics and adoptability of the same and different dogs. The results showed that people who saw the aggressive behavioral schema perceived only the target dog and a dog of the same breed to be significantly less adoptable than dogs of other breeds (p < .01). Results of a principal components analysis showed participants perceived the adoptability of dogs to be related to “sociability”: Adoptable dogs were more approachable, friendly, intelligent, and less dangerous and aggressive (p < .01). Brief exposure to a misbehaving dog prior to making a decision to adopt may unfairly penalize other dogs perceived to be similar to the misbehaving dog.     

The Genetics of Canine Skull Shape Variation

A dog’s craniofacial diversity is the result of continual human intervention in natural selection, a process that began tens of thousands of years ago. To date, we know little of the genetic underpinnings and developmental mechanisms that make dog skulls so morphologically plastic. In this Perspectives, we discuss the origins of dog skull shapes in terms of history and biology and highlight recent advances in understanding the genetics of canine skull shapes. Of particular interest are those molecular genetic changes that are associated with the development of distinct breeds.     

Dominance Genetic Variation Contributes Little to the Missing Heritability for Human Complex Traits

For human complex traits, non-additive genetic variation has been invoked to explain “missing heritability,” but its discovery is often neglected in genome-wide association studies. Here we propose a method of using SNP data to partition and estimate the proportion of phenotypic variance attributed to additive and dominance genetic variation at all SNPs (hSNP2 and δSNP2) in unrelated individuals based on an orthogonal model where the estimate of hSNP2 is independent of that of δSNP2. With this method, we analyzed 79 quantitative traits in 6,715 unrelated European Americans. The estimate of δSNP2 averaged across all the 79 quantitative traits was 0.03, approximately a fifth of that for additive variation (average hSNP2 = 0.15). There were a few traits that showed substantial estimates of δSNP2, none of which were replicated in a larger sample of 11,965 individuals. We further performed genome-wide association analyses of the 79 quantitative traits and detected SNPs with genome-wide significant dominance effects only at the ABO locus for factor VIII and von Willebrand factor. All these results suggest that dominance variation at common SNPs explains only a small fraction of phenotypic variation for human complex traits and contributes little to the missing narrow-sense heritability problem.     

Introgression of Neandertal- and Denisovan-like Haplotypes Contributes to Adaptive Variation in Human Toll-like Receptors

Pathogens and the diseases they cause have been among the most important selective forces experienced by humans during their evolutionary history. Although adaptive alleles generally arise by mutation, introgression can also be a valuable source of beneficial alleles. Archaic humans, who lived in Europe and Western Asia for more than 200,000 years, were probably well adapted to this environment and its local pathogens. It is therefore conceivable that modern humans entering Europe and Western Asia who admixed with them obtained a substantial immune advantage from the introgression of archaic alleles. Here we document a cluster of three Toll-like receptors (TLR6-TLR1-TLR10) in modern humans that carries three distinct archaic haplotypes, indicating repeated introgression from archaic humans. Two of these haplotypes are most similar to the Neandertal genome, and the third haplotype is most similar to the Denisovan genome. The Toll-like receptors are key components of innate immunity and provide an important first line of immune defense against bacteria, fungi, and parasites. The unusually high allele frequencies and unexpected levels of population differentiation indicate that there has been local positive selection on multiple haplotypes at this locus. We show that the introgressed alleles have clear functional effects in modern humans; archaic-like alleles underlie differences in the expression of the TLR genes and are associated with reduced microbial resistance and increased allergic disease in large cohorts. This provides strong evidence for recurrent adaptive introgression at the TLR6-TLR1-TLR10 locus, resulting in differences in disease phenotypes in modern humans.     

Clinal and Allometric Variation in the Skull of Sexually Dimorphic Opossums

Journal of Mammalian Evolution - Three species of sexually-dimorphic opossums are broadly distributed across South America: the habitat generalist Didelphis albiventris, the Atlantic forest-dweller...     

Variation in Photosynthetic Characteristics and Leaf Area Contributes to Spathiphyllum Cultivar Differences in Biomass Production

Three genetically related Spathiphyllum cultivars, Claudia, Double Take, and Petite with similar initial sizes and biomass, were grown in a shaded greenhouse and fertilized with a constant supply of nitrogen at 200 g m^–3 using an ebb-and-flow fertigation system. Seven months later, Claudia and Double Take had plant sizes and biomasses significantly greater than Petite. Stomatal conductances of Claudia and Double Take were 30 % greater, thus net photosynthetic rates (P _N) were significantly higher than in Petite. In addition, the leaf areas (LA) of Claudia and Double Take were 60 % larger than of Petite. Since P _N was expressed per leaf surface area, the greater the LA was, the more CO₂ was fixed. Thus, the differences in plant size and biomass production of Claudia and Double Take compared to Petite are attributed to high P _N and increased LA.     

Natural Variation of the RICE FLOWERING LOCUS T 1 Contributes to Flowering Time Divergence in Rice

In rice (Oryza sativa L.), there is a diversity in flowering time that is strictly genetically regulated. Some indica cultivars show extremely late flowering under long-day conditions, but little is known about the gene(s) involved. Here, we demonstrate that functional defects in the florigen gene RFT1 are the main cause of late flowering in an indica cultivar, Nona Bokra. Mapping and complementation studies revealed that sequence polymorphisms in the RFT1 regulatory and coding regions are likely to cause late flowering under long-day conditions. We detected polymorphisms in the promoter region that lead to reduced expression levels of RFT1. We also identified an amino acid substitution (E105K) that leads to a functional defect in Nona Bokra RFT1. Sequencing of the RFT1 region in rice accessions from a global collection showed that the E105K mutation is found only in indica, and indicated a strong association between the RFT1 haplotype and extremely late flowering in a functional Hd1 background. Furthermore, SNPs in the regulatory region of RFT1 and the E105K substitution in 1,397 accessions show strong linkage disequilibrium with a flowering time–associated SNP. Although the defective E105K allele of RFT1 (but not of another florigen gene, Hd3a) is found in many cultivars, relative rate tests revealed no evidence for differential rate of evolution of these genes. The ratios of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitutions suggest that the E105K mutation resulting in the defect in RFT1 occurred relatively recently. These findings indicate that natural mutations in RFT1 provide flowering time divergence under long-day conditions.     

Maternal Lineage of Warmblood Mares Contributes to Variation of Gestation Length and Bias of Foal Sex Ratio

Maternal lineage influences performance traits in horses. This is probably caused by differences in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) transferred to the offspring via the oocyte. In the present study, we investigated if reproductive traits with high variability—gestation length and fetal sex ratio—are influenced by maternal lineage. Data from 142 Warmblood mares from the Brandenburg State Stud at Neustadt (Dosse), Germany, were available for the study. Mares were grouped according to their maternal lineage. Influences on the reproduction parameters gestation length and sex ratio of offspring were analyzed by simple and multiple analyses of variance. A total of 786 cases were included. From the 142 mares, 119 were assigned to six maternal lineages with n≥10 mares per lineage, and 23 mares belonged to smaller maternal lineages. The mean number of live foals produced per mare was 4.6±3.6 (±SD). Live foal rate was 83.5%. Mean gestation length was 338.5±8.9 days (±SD) with a range of 313 to 370 days. Gestation length was affected by maternal lineage (p<0.001). Gestation length was also significantly influenced by the individual mare, age of the mare, year of breeding, month of breeding and sex of the foal (p<0.05). Of the 640 foals born alive at term, 48% were male and 52% female. Mare age group and maternal lineage significantly influenced the sex ratio of the foals (p<0.05). It is concluded that maternal lineage influences reproductive parameters with high variation such as gestation length and foal sex ratio in horses. In young primiparous and aged mares, the percentage of female offspring is higher than the expected 1:1 ratio.     

Dietary Variation and Evolution of Gene Copy Number among Dog Breeds

Prolonged human interactions and artificial selection have influenced the genotypic and phenotypic diversity among dog breeds. Because humans and dogs occupy diverse habitats, ecological contexts have likely contributed to breed-specific positive selection. Prior to the advent of modern dog-feeding practices, there was likely substantial variation in dietary landscapes among disparate dog breeds. As such, we investigated one type of genetic variant, copy number variation, in three metabolic genes: glucokinase regulatory protein (GCKR), phytanol-CoA 2-hydroxylase (PHYH), and pancreatic α-amylase 2B (AMY2B). These genes code for proteins that are responsible for metabolizing dietary products that originate from distinctly different food types: sugar, meat, and starch, respectively. After surveying copy number variation among dogs with diverse dietary histories, we found no correlation between diet and positive selection in either GCKR or PHYH. Although it has been previously demonstrated that dogs experienced a copy number increase in AMY2B relative to wolves during or after the dog domestication process, we demonstrate that positive selection continued to act on amylase copy number in dog breeds that consumed starch-rich diets in time periods after domestication. Furthermore, we found that introgression with wolves is not responsible for deterioration of positive selection on AMY2B among diverse dog breeds. Together, this supports the hypothesis that the amylase copy number expansion is found universally in dogs.     

Effective Population Size,Extended Linkage Disequilibrium and Signatures of Selection in the Rare Dog Breed Lundehund

The Lundehund is an old dog breed with remarkable anatomical features including polydactyly in all four limbs and extraordinary flexibility of the spine. We genotyped 28 Lundehund using the canine Illumina high density beadchip to estimate the effective population size (N_e) and inbreeding coefficients as well as to identify potential regions of positive selection. The decay of linkage disequilibrium was slow with r² = 0.95 in 50 kb distance. The last 7-200 generations ago, Ne was at 10-13. An increase of N_e was noted in the very recent generations with a peak value of 19 for N_e at generation 4. The FROH estimated for 50-, 65- and 358-SNP windows were 0.87, 087 and 0.81, respectively. The most likely estimates for F_ROH after removing identical-by-state segments due to linkage disequilibria were at 0.80-0.81. The extreme loss of heterozygosity has been accumulated through continued inbreeding over 200 generations within a probably closed population with a small effective population size. The mean inbreeding coefficient based on pedigree data for the last 11 generations (F_Ped = 0.10) was strongly biased downwards due to the unknown coancestry of the founders in this pedigree data. The long-range haplotype test identified regions with genes involved in processes of immunity, olfaction, woundhealing and neuronal development as potential targets of selection. The genes QSOX2, BMPR1B and PRRX2 as well as MYOM1 are candidates for selection on the Lundehund characteristics small body size, increased number of digits per paw and extraordinary mobility, respectively.     

Age-Dependent TLR3 Expression of the Intestinal Epithelium Contributes to Rotavirus Susceptibility

Rotavirus is a major cause of diarrhea worldwide and exhibits a pronounced small intestinal epithelial cell (IEC) tropism. Both human infants and neonatal mice are highly susceptible, whereas adult individuals remain asymptomatic and shed only low numbers of viral particles. Here we investigated age-dependent mechanisms of the intestinal epithelial innate immune response to rotavirus infection in an oral mouse infection model. Expression of the innate immune receptor for viral dsRNA, Toll-like receptor (Tlr) 3 was low in the epithelium of suckling mice but strongly increased during the postnatal period inversely correlating with rotavirus susceptibility, viral shedding and histological damage. Adult mice deficient in Tlr3 (Tlr3^−/−) or the adaptor molecule Trif (Trif^Lps2/Lps2) exerted significantly higher viral shedding and decreased epithelial expression of proinflammatory and antiviral genes as compared to wild-type animals. In contrast, neonatal mice deficient in Tlr3 or Trif did not display impaired cell stimulation or enhanced rotavirus susceptibility. Using chimeric mice, a major contribution of the non-hematopoietic cell compartment in the Trif-mediated antiviral host response was detected in adult animals. Finally, a significant age-dependent increase of TLR3 expression was also detected in human small intestinal biopsies. Thus, upregulation of epithelial TLR3 expression during infancy might contribute to the age-dependent susceptibility to rotavirus infection.     

Disruption of Axonal Transport Perturbs Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP) - Signaling and Contributes to Synaptic Abnormalities in Two Neurodegenerative Diseases

Formation of new synapses or maintenance of existing synapses requires the delivery of synaptic components from the soma to the nerve termini via axonal transport. One pathway that is important in synapse formation, maintenance and function of the Drosophila neuromuscular junction (NMJ) is the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP)-signaling pathway. Here we show that perturbations in axonal transport directly disrupt BMP signaling, as measured by its downstream signal, phospho Mad (p-Mad). We found that components of the BMP pathway genetically interact with both kinesin-1 and dynein motor proteins. Thick vein (TKV) vesicle motility was also perturbed by reductions in kinesin-1 or dynein motors. Interestingly, dynein mutations severely disrupted p-Mad signaling while kinesin-1 mutants showed a mild reduction in p-Mad signal intensity. Similar to mutants in components of the BMP pathway, both kinesin-1 and dynein motor protein mutants also showed synaptic morphological defects. Strikingly TKV motility and p-Mad signaling were disrupted in larvae expressing two human disease proteins; expansions of glutamine repeats (polyQ77) and human amyloid precursor protein (APP) with a familial Alzheimer''s disease (AD) mutation (APPswe). Consistent with axonal transport defects, larvae expressing these disease proteins showed accumulations of synaptic proteins along axons and synaptic abnormalities. Taken together our results suggest that similar to the NGF-TrkA signaling endosome, a BMP signaling endosome that directly interacts with molecular motors likely exist. Thus problems in axonal transport occurs early, perturbs BMP signaling, and likely contributes to the synaptic abnormalities observed in these two diseases.