This post serves as a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the relationship between trauma exposure and neuroinflammation. This review article comes from Frontiers in Neuroendocrine Science. This is from the abstract: Inflammasomes activate pro-inflammatory caspases 1 and 5, which then cleave the precursor forms of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β, IL-18, and IL-33 into their active forms. … Read more
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, working in Richard Davidson’s lab, have found that Sudarshan Kriya Yoga can help reduce the symptoms of PTSD and allow them to better manage the condition. The original article is paywalled at the Journal of Traumatic Stress, so here is a summary from the British Psychological Society, followed the … Read more
The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) signaled a major and controversial shift in the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) research model and funding policy. It was designed to carry out “Strategy 1.4” of the NIMH Strategic Plan: “Develop, for research purposes, new ways of classifying mental disorders based on dimensions of observable behaviour and neurobiological … Read more
This is a meta-study looking at a large collection of previous on the impact of nature on well-being. The upshot, as the title might suggest, is that there is a connection between nature and happiness. The more we can include nature in our lives, the more likely we are to feel vital, have positive affect, … Read more
In this new mini review from Frontiers in Cognition, Lippelt, Hommel, and Colzato compare three meditation types (focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness) in terms of their effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity. The three research areas the authors covered in this review (attentional control, performance monitoring, and creativity or thinking style) seem … Read more
In this brief article from the PLOS Neuroscience Community blog, Vaughan Bell looks at the experience of hallucinated voices and how the hearer responds to them. Most who experience voices conceptualize them as distinct entities in some way, often as people they knew or know. This piece looks at the why of experiencing these voices … Read more
From PLoS ONE, this is an interesting article on how emotional numbing in those experiencing PTSD reduces neural activity in exposure to happy faces. This study provides initial evidence that individuals with PTSD have lower reactivity to happy facial expressions, and that lower activation in ventral striatal-limbic reward networks may be associated with symptoms of … Read more
From Frontiers in Neuroscience, this interesting article looks at the body of research investigating associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and brain development in children. Previous studies have found significant links between low SES and changes (deficits) in brain structure, especially in areas related to memory, executive control, and emotion. Brito and Noble review the studies … Read more
How interesting to see Forbes run a story on the way Big Pharma is manipulating research to support their drugs, but every effort to expose this dangerous and possibly criminal behavior on the part of these mega-companies is welcome. How Manufacturer-Funded Research Compromises Patient Care Robert Pearl, M.D.7/24/2014 To improve patient care, doctors rely on … Read more
Via Scientific American Mind. Dr. Pace studies biological mechanisms linking psychological stress to illness, and novel ways to combat stress to promote optimal health. He is Assistant Professor in the Colleges of Nursing and Medicine (Department of Psychiatry) at the University of Arizona, and also the director of the Arizona Stress and Health Collaboratory (based … Read more