which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Editorial The neonatal period is the time when a human being is most vulnerable to bacterial infections such as Staphylococcus au-reus, which is a major pathogen causing neonatal morbidity and mortality. Staphylococci, aerobic or facultative anaerobic gram-p...

Abstract Smiles are universal but nuanced facial expressions that most frequently used in face-to-face communications, typically indicating amusement sometimes conveying negative emotions such as embarrassment and pain. Although previous studies have suggested spatial temporal properties could differ among these various types of smiles, no study has thoroughly analyzed properties. This aimed to...

A smile may communicate different meanings depending on subtle characteristics of the facial expression. In this article, we have studied the morphological and dynamic characteristics of amused, polite, and embarrassed smiles displayed by a virtual agent. A web application has been developed to collect virtual agent’s smile descriptions corpus directly constructed by users. Based on the corpora...

Although individuals experience embarrassment as an unpleasant, negative emotion, the authors argue that expressions of embarrassment serve vital social functions, signaling the embarrassed individual's prosociality and fostering trust. Extending past research on embarrassment as a nonverbal apology and appeasement gesture, the authors demonstrate that observers recognize the expression of emba...

Cellular mechanisms of plasticity must be linked to circuit mechanisms of behavior to understand learning and memory. Studies of how learning occurs in cerebellar circuits for classical conditioning of eyeblinks are meeting this challenge admirably. Several recent papers have added to the richness of our understanding of cerebellar learning by correlating complex aspects of learned behaviors wi...

Medical robots are expected to help with providing care in an aging society. The degree to which patients experience embarrassment in a medical examination might be influenced by the robots’ level of anthropomorphism. The results of our preliminary study show that young, healthy, Dutch university students were less embarrassed when interacting with a technical box than with a robot. Highly huma...