The role of oxytocin in distress-motivated social support seeking

Oxytocin is a hormone and neuropeptide that is traditionally known for its role in parturition and lactation in women. In the last few decades, researchers have theorized that oxytocin is involved in the human stress response. This theory, known as tend-and-befriend, posits that oxytocin promotes social support seeking in humans during stressful situations by inhibiting the traditional fight-or-flight response, promoting attention to socio-emotional stimuli, and enhancing feelings of trust. This theoretical framework, however, has received little attention by way of supporting evidence in human experimental research. In this dissertation, four studies are presented that investigate the role of oxytocin in (1) regulating the cortisol response to stress, (2) enhancing the perception of emotion in human faces, and (3) promoting trust and social-support seeking in distressed people, particularly women. Across these studies, oxytocin is experimentally manipulated using a nasal spray to examine its effects in humans in a double blind, placebo-controlled fashion. In the first study, a 24IU dose of intranasal oxytocin was shown to inhibit cortisol rise during physical stress. In the second study, oxytocin enhanced the perception of emotion in human faces. In the third study, oxytocin selectively improved dispositional trust in distressed participants following a stress induction, but not in those whose mood was euthymic in response to stress. In the final study, oxytocin increased perceived support in women during negative memory recall in the company of an experimenter, and decreased perceived support while recalling such memories in social isolation. Taken together, the results of this thesis support the role of oxytocin in stress-regulation and social cognition in humans. These results also suggest that the effect of oxytocin on social bonding (i.e. trust) may be dependent on the experience of distress, and that oxytocin-motivated social support seeking may have positive and negative consequences in both sexes, particularly in women, depending on the availability of social contact. This oxytocin-induced facilitation of social support seeking might explain why humans, particularly women, are more susceptible to stress-related mental illnesses such as major depressive disorder in the face of social conflict or in the absence of supportive social relationships

Specmine: an R package for metabolomics and spectral data analysis and mining

Book of Abstracts of CEB Annual Meeting 2017info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Stokes at 200: A celebration of the remarkable achievements of Sir George Gabriel Stokes two hundred years after his birth

Sir George Gabriel Stokes PRS was for 30 years an inimitable Secretary of the Royal Society and its President from 1885 to 1890. Two hundred years after his birth, Stokes is a towering figure in physics and applied mathematics; fluids, asymptotics, optics, acoustics among many other fields. At the Stokes200 meeting, held at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 15-18th September 2019, an invited audience of about 100 discussed the state of the art in all the modern research fields that have sprung from his work in physics and mathematics, along with the history of how we have got from Stokes' contributions to where we are now. This theme issue is based on work presented at the Stokes200 meeting. In bringing together people whose work today is based upon Stokes' own, we aim to emphasize his influence and legacy at 200 to the community as a whole. This article is part of the theme issue 'Stokes at 200 (Part 1)'

Stokes at 200 (part 2)

We present the second half of the papers from the Stokes200 symposium celebrating the bicentenary of George Gabriel Stokes. This article is part of the theme issue 'Stokes at 200 (part 2)'

Directed Scattering for Knowledge Graph-based Cellular Signaling Analysis

Directed graphs are a natural model for many phenomena, in particular scientific knowledge graphs such as molecular interaction or chemical reaction networks that define cellular signaling relationships. In these situations, source nodes typically have distinct biophysical properties from sinks. Due to their ordered and unidirectional relationships, many such networks also have hierarchical and multiscale structure. However, the majority of methods performing node- and edge-level tasks in machine learning do not take these properties into account, and thus have not been leveraged effectively for scientific tasks such as cellular signaling network inference. We propose a new framework called Directed Scattering Autoencoder (DSAE) which uses a directed version of a geometric scattering transform, combined with the non-linear dimensionality reduction properties of an autoencoder and the geometric properties of the hyperbolic space to learn latent hierarchies. We show this method outperforms numerous others on tasks such as embedding directed graphs and learning cellular signaling networks.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

High blood pressure predicts hippocampal atrophy rate in cognitively impaired elders.

INTRODUCTION: Understanding relationships among blood pressure (BP), cognition, and brain volume could inform Alzheimer's disease (AD) management. METHODS: We investigated Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) participants: 200 controls, 346 mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 154 AD. National Alzheimer's Co-ordinating Center (NACC) participants were separately analyzed: 1098 controls, 2297 MCI, and 4845 AD. Relationships between cognition and BP were assessed in both cohorts and BP and atrophy rates in ADNI. Multivariate mixed linear-regression models were fitted with joint outcomes of BP (systolic, diastolic, and pulse pressure), cognition (Mini-Mental State Examination, Logical Memory, and Digit Symbol) and atrophy rate (whole-brain, hippocampus). RESULTS: ADNI MCI and AD patients with greater baseline systolic BP had higher hippocampal atrophy rates ([r, P value]; 0.2, 0.005 and 0.2, 0.04, respectively). NACC AD patients with lower systolic BP had lower cognitive scores (0.1, 0.0003). DISCUSSION: Higher late-life BP may be associated with faster decline in cognitively impaired elders