EEG Theta/Beta ratio neurofeedback training in healthy females

Stress and Psychopatholog

Acute effects of caffeine on threat-selective attention: Moderation by anxiety and EEG theta/beta ratio

BackgroundSpontaneous EEG theta/beta ratio (TBR) probably marks prefrontal cortical (PFC) executive control, and its regulation of attentional threat-bias. Caffeine at moderate doses may strengthen executive control through increased PFC catecholamine action, dependent on basal PFC function.GoalTo test if caffeine affects threat-bias, moderated by baseline frontal TBR and trait-anxiety.MethodsA pictorial emotional Stroop task was used to assess threat-bias in forty female participants in a cross-over, double-blind study after placebo and 200 mg caffeine.ResultsAt baseline and after placebo, comparable relations were observed for negative pictures: high TBR was related to low threat-bias in low trait-anxious people. Caffeine had opposite effects on threat-bias in low trait-anxious people with low and high TBR.ConclusionsThis further supports TBR as a marker of executive control and highlights the importance of taking baseline executive function into consideration when studying effects of caffeine on executive functions.FSW - Self-regulation models for health behavior and psychopathology - ou

The spatial distribution of aeolian dust and terrigenous fluxes in the tropical Atlantic Ocean since the Last Glacial Maximum

© 2021. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. The flux of terrestrial material from the continents to the oceans links the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere through physical and biogeochemical processes, with important implications for Earth's climate. Quantitative estimates of terrigenous fluxes from sources such as rivers, aeolian dust, and resuspended shelf sediments are required to understand how the processes delivering terrigenous material respond to and are influenced by climate. We compile thorium-230 normalized 232Th flux records in the tropical Atlantic to provide an improved understanding of aeolian fluxes since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). By identifying and isolating sites dominated by aeolian terrigenous inputs, we show that there was a persistent meridional gradient in dust fluxes in the eastern equatorial Atlantic at the LGM, arguing against a large southward shift of the intertropical convergence zone during LGM boreal winter. The ratio of LGM to late-Holocene 232Th fluxes highlights a meridional difference in the magnitude of variations in dust deposition, with sites 700 km away, characterized by 232Th fluxes approximately twice as large as aeolian-dominated sites in the east

Tryptophan depletion in SSRI-recovered depressed outpatients

De samenhang tussen somatische en psychische (dys)functie

A common and functional mineralocorticoid receptor haplotype enhances optimism and protects against depression in females

Mineralocorticoid (MR) and glucocorticoid receptors (GR) are abundantly expressed in the limbic brain and mediate cortisol effects on the stress-response and behavioral adaptation. Dysregulation of the stress response impairs adaptation and is a risk factor for depression, which is twice as abundant in women than in men. Because of the importance of MR for appraisal processes underlying the initial phase of the stress response we investigated whether specific MR haplotypes were associated with personality traits that predict the risk of depression. We discovered a common gene variant (haplotype 2, frequency ∼0.38) resulting in enhanced MR activity. Haplotype 2 was associated with heightened dispositional optimism in study 1 and with less hopelessness and rumination in study 2. Using data from a large genome-wide association study we then established that haplotype 2 was associated with a lower risk of depression. Interestingly, all effects were restricted to women. We propose that common functional MR haplotypes are important determinants of inter-individual variability in resilience to depression in women by differentially mediating cortisol effects on the stress system

Association of treatment satisfaction and psychopathological sub-syndromes among involuntary patients with psychotic disorders

Publisher's version: http://www.springerlink.com/content/rx24036274667t10

Early career members at the ers international congress 2017: Highlights from the assemblies

The 2017 ERS International Congress was, as always, well organised, providing participants with a good mixture of translational and clinical science. Early career members were very well represented in thematic poster, poster discussion and oral presentation sessions and were also actively involved in chairing sessions. The efforts of the Early Career Members Committee (ECMC) to increase the number of early career members included in the competence list (the list of early career members with an interest in being more actively involved in the society) paid off immensely, because the number of early career members registered improved hugely across all assemblies after the Congress. Several newly registered early career members have collated some highlights of the Congress for their assemblies, which should be of interest to all members. As assemblies 12 and 13 are new, there is no report from assembly 12 as there is not yet, at the time of writing, an early career member representative for this newly created assembly

Affective regulation of cognitive-control adjustments in remitted depressive patients after acute tryptophan depletion

Negative affect in healthy populations regulates the appraisal of demanding situations, which tunes subsequent effort mobilization and adjustments in cognitive control. In the present study, we hypothesized that dysphoria in depressed individuals similarly modulates this adaptation, possibly through a neural mechanism involving serotonergic regulation. We tested the effect of dysphoria induced by acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) in remitted depressed patients on conflict adaptation in a Simon task. ATD temporarily lowers the availability of the serotonin precursor L-Tryptophan and is known to increase depressive symptoms in approximately half of remitted depressed participants. We found that depressive symptoms induced by ATD were associated with increased conflict adaptation. Our finding extends recent observations implying an important role of affect in regulating conflict-driven cognitive control

The association between depressive symptoms and executive control impairments in response to emotional and non-emotional information

Depression has been linked with impaired executive control and specific impairments in inhibition of negative material. To date, only a few studies have examined the relationship between depressive symptoms and executive functions in response to emotional information. Using a new paradigm, the Affective Shift Task (AST), the present study examined whether depressive symptoms in general, and rumination specifically, are related to impairments in inhibition and set shifting in response to emotional and non-emotional material. The main finding was that depressive symptoms in general were not related to inhibition. Set-shifting impairments were only observed in moderate to severely depressed individuals. Interestingly, rumination was related to inhibition impairments, specifically when processing negative information, as well as impaired set shifting as reflected in a larger shift cost. These results are discussed in relation to cognitive views on vulnerability for depression