Behavioral Neuroscience – News and Features

The sudden loss of a loved one can trigger a variety of psychiatric disorders in people with no history of mental illness, according to researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and colleagues at Columbia's School of Social Work and Harvard Medical School.

NMDA receptor malfunction is implicated in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, schizophrenia, autism, and stroke Biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) report today that they have succeeded in obtaining an unprecedented view of a type of brain-cell receptor that is implicated in a range of neurological illnesses, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, autism, and ischemic injuries associated with stroke.

When electrical pulses are applied to the ventral tegmental area of their brain, macaques presented with two images change their preference from one image to the other. The study by researchers Wim Vanduffel and John Arsenault (KU Leuven and Massachusetts General Hospital) is the first to confirm a causal link between activity in the ventral tegmental area and choice behaviour in primates.

People affected by binge eating, substance abuse and obsessive compulsive disorder all share a common pattern of decision making and similarities in brain structure, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers show for the first time how the brain re-wires and fine-tunes its connections differently depending on the relative timing of sensory stimuli.

People with high levels of cynical distrust may be more likely to develop dementia, according to a study published in the May 28, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Study finds brain cells survive in young who master a task Using your brain- particularly during adolescence- may help brain cells survive and could impact how the brain functions after puberty.

The overall number and nature of mutations- rather than the presence of any single mutation- influences an individual's risk of developing schizophrenia, as well as its severity, according to a discovery by Columbia University Medical Center researchers published in the May 21 issue of Neuron.

Researchers identify neurons that determine whether an individual will be depressed or resilient We all deal with stress differently.  For many of us, stress is a great motivator, spurring a renewed sense of vigor to solve life’s problems.

Puberty is the defining process of adolescent development, beginning a cascade of changes throughout the body, including the brain. Penn Medicine researchers have discovered that cerebral blood flow (CBF) levels decreased similarly in males and females before puberty, but saw them diverge sharply in puberty, with levels increasing in females while decreasing further in males, which could give hints as to developing differences in behavior in men and women and sex-specific pre-dispositions to certain psychiatric disorders.