Fear Conditioning and Extinction: Examining the Role of GSK3β ser 389

GSK3β is a serine threonine kinase that has been shown to influence numerous biological and psychological interactions, including the regulation of cell survival and cell death, as well as influencing mood disorders such as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. Preliminary data from our lab showed an exaggerated conditioned fear response in homozygous GSK3β knock-in (GSK3β KI) mice, which lacked the ability to phosphorylate GSK3β at the ser 389 site due to a serine to alanine substitution. Based on heightened fear responses previously observed in our lab, we predicted that increased expression GSK3β would result in a prolonged and heightened fear response, as GSK3β expression would interfere with the ability to turn off fear of a conditioned stimulus. These mutants were given five tone plus shock fear conditioning trials, followed by six days of tone alone fear extinction training. In contrast to our preliminary data, GSK3β KI mice did not show exaggerated conditioned fear, and showed no significant differences to wild type mice in fear extinction. To examine if these results were influenced by the age of the mice, a second study was conducted using two different age subsets of GSK3β KI mice. The results demonstrated that there were no significant differences in fear acquisition or extinction based on age

The Profession of Law: Columbia Law School’s Use of Experiential Learning Techniques to Teach Professional Responsibility

Columbia Law School\u27s ethics course, The Profession of Law, is an interactive, experiential exploration of legal ethics. The course puts students in a role and asks them to deal, with issues that most of them are likely to encounter, and then the students are asked to reflect on what their role-playing performance has taught them about legal ethics

Dishonest Ethical Advocacy?: False Defenses in Criminal Court

This Note examines this dilemma and recent judicial approaches to it. Judges disagree about how guilty criminal defendants should be permitted to mount defenses at trial. Some have forbidden defense counsel from knowingly advancing any false exculpatory proposition. Others have permitted guilty defense attorneys to present sincere or truthful testimony in order to bolster a falsehood. And still others have signaled more general comfort with the idea that an attorney aggressively can pursue an acquittal on behalf of a guilty client. This Note seeks to resolve this issue by parsing the range of false defense tactics available to attorneys and evaluating the propriety of each under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. This Note reads the Model Rules in the context of the adversary system’s twin aims to seek truth and safeguard individual rights; it defines and categorizes specific false defense tactics; and it offers practical, context-specific recommendations to courts and attorneys evaluating knowingly false defenses as they occur in the real world

The Distributional Effects of an Investment-Based Social Security System

In this paper we study the distributional impact of a change from the existing pay-as-you-go Social Security system to one that combines both pay-as-you-go and investment-based elements. Critics of investment-based plans have been concerned that such plans might reduce the retirement income of low-paid workers or of surviving spouses relative to what they would get from Social Security, and might therefore increase the extent of poverty among the aged. Our analysis in this paper shows that this is generally not the case, even in plans that make no special effort to maintain or increase redistribution. Our principal finding is that virtually all of the demographic groups that we examine would receive higher average benefits under a mixed system with an investment-based component than the benefits that they would receive under current Social Security rules. There would also be a smaller share of individuals with benefits below the poverty line even though the total cost of funding the mixed system -- a three percent saving contribution rather than a six percent rise in the tax rate -- is substantially lower than that of funding the pay-as-you-go system. Our individual-level data permit us to go beyond comparing group means to analyze the full distribution of the benefits that individuals would receive under the two different systems. These comparisons show that the overwhelming majority of individuals would have higher benefits with the investment-based system than with the pure pay-as-you-go system. The relatively small number of individuals who would receive less from the investment-based system is further reduced when the effects of the Supplementary Security Income program is taken into account. These basic conclusions remain true even if the future rate of return in the investment-based component of the mixed system is substantially less than past experience implies.