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Posts Tagged ‘Emotion’

Image via Wikipedia According to the authors of  “Protective effect of CRHR1 gene variants on the development of adult depression following childhood maltreatment: replication and extension“  [PMID: 19736354], theirs is “the first instance of Genes x Environment research that stress has been ascertained by more than 1 study using the same instrument“.  The gene they [...]

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Image via Wikipedia This past friday, I attended my first meditation session at my new yoga school.  I love this school and hope – someday – to make it through the full Ashtanga series and other sequences the instructors do.  In the meantime, I found myself sitting on my folded up blanket, letting my mind [...]

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Just a pointer to a great book – The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield.  Its an in-depth treatment on the many reasons and contexts in which we – quite naturally – feel sad and depressed and the way in which diagnostic [...]

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Image by Corrie… via Flickr Coping with fear and anxiety is difficult.  At times when one’s life, livelihood or loved one’s are threatened, we naturally hightenen our senses and allocate our emotional and physical resources for conflict.  At times, when all is well, and resources, relationships and relaxation time are plentiful, we should unwind and [...]

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Image via Wikipedia If you slam your hand in the car door and experience physical pain, medical science can offer you a “pain killer!“.  Certainly morphine (via its activation of the mu opioid receptor (OPRM1)) will make you feel a whole lot better.  However, if your boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with you and you [...]

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Image by Sbrimbillina via Flickr Here’s a gene whose relationship to mental function is very straightforward.  If you hold your breath, your blood pH falls (more CO2 leads to more free H+ protons dissolved in your blood stream).  You also may become anxious, or worse if you are forced to hold your breath.  How does [...]

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*** PODCAST accompanies this post *** Nowadays, it seems that genomics is spreading beyond the rarefied realm of science and academia into the general, consumer-based popular culture.  Quelle surprise!?  Yes, the era of the personal genome is close at hand, even as present technology  provides – directly to the general consumer public – a  genome-wide [...]

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Image by juanpol via Flickr It was a great pleasure to speak with Professor Garet Lahvis from the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Oregon Health and Science University, and learn more about how the biology of empathy and social behaviors in general can be approached with animal models that are suitable for genetic studies.  [...]

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Image via Wikipedia ** podcast interview accompanies this post ** Lab mice have it pretty good I suppose.  Chow, water and mating ad libitum, fresh bedding, no predators.  Back in grad school, I usually handled my little mouse subjects gently so as not to frighten them and always followed the guidelines for humane treatment.  At [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Many thanks to Dr. Christina S. Barr from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism-Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies, National Institutes of Health Animal Center for taking the time to comment on her team’s recent publication, “Functional CRH variation increases stress-induced alcohol consumption in primates” [doi:10.1073/pnas.0902863106] which [...]

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With more and more genes being directly associated with personality or as moderators of correlations between personality and brain structure/function (here, here, here, here) it was fun to try out the latest online “big-5 personality profiler“. 10 mins of self-reflective fun.  My profile displayed at left.

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Image via Wikipedia What hurts more – a broken toe or a broken heart?  Ask a parent and their forlorn 15 year-old who was not invited to the party that everyone is going to, and you might get different answers.  In some cases, the internal anguish of social exclusion or estrangement, may even – paradoxically [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Rare mutations that knock-out the function of monoamine oxidase a gene have long been known to give rise to developmental changes that increase the propensity of males to engage in aggressive behavior.  The effects of so-called natural variants – that may slightly reduce or increase the amount of activity of the MAOA [...]

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Image via Wikipedia One of the most well-studied genetic polymorphisms in the behavioral- psychiatric- cognitive-genetics area is the 5HTT-LPR, a short repeating sequence that mediates the transcriptional efficiency of the serotonin transporter.  Given the wide-ranging effects of 5HTT on the developing and mature nervous system, it is perhaps not surprising that variation in 5HTT levels [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Shopaholics and political activists might want to take a look at Jonathan Roiser et al.‘s paper, “A Genetically Mediated Bias in Decision Making Driven by Failure of Amygdala Control” [doi:] as an early example of the nexus of “behavioral-neuro-economic-genetics” or “neuro-genetic-marketing” or “neuro-eco-geno” as it might (not) be called one day.  In [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Recently, I’ve been reading Brian Boyd’s new book, On the Origin of Stories, – a lengthy work that relates human evolution to our creative processes.  This line of inquiry is closely related to an interest in genetics and brain function, since links between genetic variation and brain function can be used as [...]

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Image by ibiscus27 via Flickr One of the difficulties in understanding mental illness is that so many aspects of mental life can go awry – and its a challenge to understand what abnormalities are directly linked to causes and what abnormalities might be consequences or later ripples in a chain reaction of neural breakdown.  Ideally, [...]

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OK, there’s not really a “coolest” part of the brain, but, some areas are pretty darn weird & wild.  Consider the cingulate cortex (shown here).  Electrical stimulation of the pACC region in humans can produce overwhelming fear – even a feeling that death is imminent – while stimulation of white matter tracts adjacent to area [...]

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Image by -kÇ- via Flickr Session 4 of our discussion group, “When Basic Neuroscience Meets Psych Rehab” will meet on Sept 25. This session will cover the topic of ‘affect labeling’ which is one strategy for managing one’s emotions. Did you know there are 3,000+ words you can choose from to describe your feelings ? [...]

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Image via Wikipedia The small neuropeptides oxytocin (OT) and arginine-vasopressin (AVP) are well known for their influence on promoting warm-and-fuzzy social behaviors in mammals. The G-protein coupled OTR and AVPR1a receptors are also the subject of much research in this area – particularly AVPR1a – since it shows differences in brain expression in polygamous vs. [...]

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