1. Researchers discover how brain works to select what we want to locate

    February 22, 2012 by Sue

    From the Carnegie Mellon University press release:

    If you are looking for a particular object — say a yellow pencil — on a cluttered desk, how does your brain work to visually locate it?

    For the first time, a team led by Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientists has identified how different neural regions communicate to determine what to visually pay attention to and what to ignore. This finding is a major discovery for visual cognition and will guide future research into visual and attention deficit disorders.

    The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, used various brain imaging techniques to show exactly how the visual cortex and parietal cortex send direct information to each other through white matter connections in order to specifically pick out the information that you want to see.

    “We have demonstrated that attention is a process in which there is one-to-one mapping between the first place visual information comes from the eyes into the brain and beyond to other parts of the brain,” said Adam S. Greenberg, postdoctoral fellow in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Psychology and lead author of the study.

    “With so much information in the visual world, it’s dramatic to think that you have an entire system behind knowing what to pay attention to,” said Marlene Behrmann, professor of psychology at CMU and a renowned expert in using brain imaging to study the visual perception system. “The mechanisms show that you can actually drive the visual system – you are guiding your own sensory system in an intelligent and smart fashion that helps facilitate your actions in the world.”

    For the study, the research team conducted two sets of experiments with five adults. They first used several different functional brain scans to identify regions in the brain responsible for visual processing and attention. One task had the participants look at a dot in the center of the screen while six stimuli danced around the dot. The second task asked the participants to respond to the stimuli one at a time. These scans determined the regions in both the visual and parietal cortices. The researchers could then look for connectivity between these regions.

    The second part of the experiment collected anatomical data of the brain’s white matter connectivity while the participants had their brains scanned without performing any tasks. Then, the researchers combined the results with those from the functional experiments to show how white matter fibers tracked from the regions determined previously, the visual cortex and the parietal cortex. The results demonstrated that the white matter connections are mapped systematically, meaning that direct connections exist between corresponding visual field locations in visual cortex and parietal cortex. (See Figure 1.)

    The researchers used a technique called “Diffusion Spectrum Imaging,” to generate the fiber maps of the white matter connectivity. This gives researchers access to the structural characteristics of brain tissue — something previously only available in humans during autopsy. This method was combined with high-resolution tractography, a new procedure undertaken in Pittsburgh, which allows scientists an extremely detailed estimate of the hard-wired connections between brain regions; providing increased accuracy over conventional tractography methods.

    “The work done in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh researchers exploits a very new, precise and cutting edge methodology,” Behrmann said.

    “Because we know that training can alter white matter, it might be possible, through training, that the ability to filter out irrelevant or unwanted information could be improved,” Greenberg said.

    Additional researchers on this study included Timothy Verstynen, a research associate in the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center, Yu-Chin Chiu, a post-doc in University of California, San Diego’s Department of Psychology, Steven Yantis, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the Johns Hopkins University and Walter Schneider, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Greenberg, Behrmann, Verstynen and Schneider are also members of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a joint project between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh devoted to investigating neural mechanisms and their impact on human cognitive abilities.

    The National Institutes of Health funded this research.

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  2. Study identifies part of brain driving motivation during certain actions

    by Sue

    From the INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale) press release via ScienceDirect:

    A team coordinated by Mathias Pessiglione, Inserm researcher at the “Centre de recherche en neurosciences de la Pitié Salpêtrière” (Inserm/UPMC-Université Pierre and Marie Curie/CNRS) have identified the part of the brain driving motivation during actions that combine physical and mental effort: the ventral striatum.

    The results of their study were published in PLoS Biology on 21 February 2012.

    The results of an activity (physical or mental) partly depend on the efforts devoted to it, which may be incentive-motivated. For example, a sportsperson is likely to train with “increased intensity” if the result will bring social prestige or financial gain. The same can be said for students who study for their exams with the objective of succeeding in their professional career. What happens when physical and mental efforts are required to reach an objective?

    Mathias Pessiglione and his team from Inserm unit 975 “Centre de recherche en neurosciences de la Pitié-Salpêtrière” examined whether mental and physical efforts are driven by a motivation ‘centre’ or whether they are conducted by different parts of the brain. The researchers studied the neural mechanisms resulting from activities that combine both action and cognition.

    To this end, a series of 360 tests, combining mental and physical effort, were performed whilst being monitored by a scanner. The 20 voluntary participants were placed in the supine position, with their heads in a functional MRI scanner. They then had to complete a series of tasks through which they could accumulate winnings. However, in each series the winnings were limited to the first incorrect response. The tasks combined cognitive and motor actions. The participants had to find the highest number from among different-sized numbers and then select it by squeezing a handle located by their left or right hand (depending on the number’s location). At the end of the test, a winnings summary was displayed to motivate the participant.

    Using images obtained from the MRI scans taken during the test, Mathias Pessiglione and his team identified a general motivational system in the depths of the brain, i.e. a structure capable of activating any effort type, both mental (concentrating on the task in hand) or physical (lifting a load). The researchers observed that the ventral striatum was activated in proportion to the amount of money involved: the higher the degree of motivation, the higher the activation level. Furthermore, the ventral striatum is connected to the median part of the striatum (the caudate nucleus) when the task to be performed is cognitively difficult (when the physical size and the numerical value of the numbers did not correspond). This ventral region solicits the lateral part of the striatum (the putamen) when the difficulty is motor-related (when the handle had to be squeezed very tightly).

    The researchers suggest that the expectation of a reward is encoded in the ventral striatum, which can then drive either the motor or cognitive part of the striatum, depending on the task, in order to boost performance. “The ventral striatum may commute connections in accordance with the request, i.e. enhance the neuronal activity in the caudate nucleus for a cognitive operation and in the putamen for a physical action” explains Mathias Pessiglione.

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  3. Study suggests effect of phobia on perception of feared object allows fear to persist

    by Sue

    From the Ohio State University press release:

    The more afraid a person is of a spider, the bigger that individual perceives the spider to be, new research suggests.

    In the context of a fear of spiders, this warped perception doesn’t necessarily interfere with daily living. But for individuals who are afraid of needles, for example, the conviction that needles are larger than they really are could lead people who fear injections to avoid getting the health care they need.

    A better understanding of how a phobia affects the perception of feared objects can help clinicians design more effective treatments for people who seek to overcome their fears, according to the researchers.

    In this study, participants who feared spiders were asked to undergo five encounters with live spiders – tarantulas, in fact – and then provide size estimates of the spiders after those encounters ended. The more afraid the participants said they were of the spiders, the larger they estimated the spiders had been.

    “If one is afraid of spiders, and by virtue of being afraid of spiders one tends to perceive spiders as bigger than they really are, that may feed the fear, foster that fear, and make it difficult to overcome,” said Michael Vasey, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and lead author of the study.

    “When it comes to phobias, it’s all about avoidance as a primary means of keeping oneself safe. As long as you avoid, you can’t discover that you’re wrong. And you’re stuck. So to the extent that perceiving spiders as bigger than they really are fosters fear and avoidance, it then potentially is part of this cycle that feeds the phobia that leads to its persistence.

    “We’re trying to understand why phobias persist so we can better target treatments to change those reasons they persist.”

    The study is published in a recent issue of the Journal of Anxiety Disorders.

    The researchers recruited 57 people who self-identified as having a spider phobia. Each participant then interacted at specific time points over a period of eight weeks with five different varieties of tarantulas varying in size from about 1 to 6 inches long.

    The spiders were contained in an uncovered glass tank. Participants began their encounters 12 feet from the tank and were asked to approach the spider. Once they were standing next to the tank, they were asked to guide the spider around the tank by touching it with an 8-inch probe, and later with a shorter probe.

    Throughout these encounters, researchers asked participants to report how afraid they were feeling on a scale of 0-100 according to an index of subjective units of distress. After the encounters, participants completed additional self-report measures of their specific fear of spiders, any panic symptoms they experienced during the encounters with the spiders, and thoughts about fear reduction and future spider encounters.

    Finally, the research participants estimated the size of the spiders – while no longer being able to see them – by drawing a single line on an index card indicating the length of the spider from the tips of its front legs to the tips of its back legs.

    An analysis of the results showed that higher average peak ratings of distress during the spider encounters were associated with estimates that the spiders were larger than they really were. Similar positive associations were seen between over-estimates of spider size and participants’ higher average peak levels of anxiety, higher average numbers of panic symptoms and overall spider fear. These findings have been supported in later studies with broader samples of people with varying levels of fear of spiders.

    “It would appear from that result that fear is driving or altering the perception of the feared object, in this case a spider,” said Vasey, also the director of research for the psychology department’s Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic. “We already knew fear and anxiety alter thoughts about the feared thing. For example, the feared outcome is interpreted as being more likely than it really is. But this study shows that even perception is altered by fear. In this case, the feared spider is seen as being bigger. And that may serve as a maintaining factor for the fear.”

    The approach tasks with the spiders are a classic example of exposure therapy, a common treatment for people with phobias. Though this therapy is known to be effective, scientists still do not fully understand why it works. And for some, the effects don’t last – but it is difficult to predict who will have a relapse of fear, Vasey said.

    He and colleagues are studying these biased perceptions as well as attitudes with hopes that the new knowledge will enhance treatment for people with various phobias. The work suggests that fear not only alters one’s perception of the feared thing, but also can influence a person’s automatic attitude toward an object. Those who have developed an automatic negative attitude toward a feared object might have a harder time overcoming their fear.

    Though individuals with arachnophobia are unlikely to seek treatment, the use of spiders in this research was a convenient way to study the complex effects of fear on visual perception and how those effects might cause fear to persist, Vasey noted.

    “Ultimately, we are interested in identifying predictors of relapse so we can better measure when a person is done with treatment,” he said.

    This work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.

    Co-authors include Michael Vilensky, Jacqueline Heath, Casaundra Harbaugh, Adam Buffington and Vasey’s principal collaborator, Russell Fazio, all of Ohio State’s Department of Psychology.

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  4. Study links even mild traumatic brain injury to increased risk of PTSD

    by Sue

    From the Elsevier press release via AlphaGalileo:

    Mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are cardinal injuries associated with combat stress, and TBI increases the risk of PTSD development. The reasons for this correlation have been unknown, in part because physical traumas often occur in highly emotional situations.

    However, scientists at University of California at Los Angeles provide new evidence from an animal model of a mechanistic link underlying the association between TBI and PTSD-like conditions.

    Using procedures to separate the physical and emotional traumas, Dr. Maxine Reger and colleagues trained rats using fear conditioning techniques two days after the rats had a concussive brain trauma. This ensured the brain injury and experience of fear occurred on different days.

    Dr. Michael Fanselow explained their findings: “We found that the rats with the earlier TBI acquired more fear than control rats (those without TBI). Something about the brain injury rendered them more susceptible to acquiring an inappropriately strong fear. It was as if the injury primed the brain for learning to be afraid.”

    To further understand why this happened, the researchers analyzed a small piece of brain tissue, the amygdala, which is the brain’s critical hub for fear learning. They found that there were significantly more receptors for excitatory neurotransmitters that promote learning. “This suggests that brain injury leaves the amygdala in a more excitable state that readies it for acquiring potent fear,” added Fanselow.

    These findings now suggest a causal link between TBI and the increased susceptibility to PTSD, and identified an important role for the amygdala in this effect.  “The next challenge is to characterize the neural circuitry and neurobiology of this effect. These are critical steps in building from these findings to preventative or therapeutic advances,” commented Dr. John Krystal, editor of  Biological Psychiatry.

    Although this work was performed in rats, these findings also suggest that people who suffer even a mild traumatic brain injury are more likely to develop an anxiety disorder, and that proper management of stress after such an injury could be critically important to maintaining ones’ mental health.

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  5. Neuroscientist discusses possibility of learning from animals’ survival instincts about human emotion

    by Sue

    From the New York University press release via Newswise:

    Can animals’ survival instincts shed additional light on what we know about human emotion? New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux poses this question in outlining a pioneering theory, drawn from two decades of research, that could lead to a more comprehensive understanding of emotions in both humans and animals.

    In his essay, which appears in the journal Neuron, LeDoux proposes shifting scientific focus “from questions about whether emotions that humans consciously feel are also present in other animals and towards questions about the extent to which circuits and corresponding functions that are present in other animals are also present in humans.”

    The neurological common ground between humans and animals includes brain functions used for survival. It is here, LeDoux contends, that researchers may gain new insights into both humans’ and animals’ emotions.

    “Survival circuit functions are not causally related to emotional feelings, but obviously contribute to these, at least indirectly,” he writes. “The survival circuit concept integrates ideas about emotion, motivation, reinforcement, and arousal in the effort to understand how organisms survive and thrive by detecting and responding to challenges and opportunities in daily life. Included are circuits responsible for defense, energy and nutrition management, fluid balance, thermoregulation, and procreation, among others.”

    LeDoux acknowledges that research on feelings is “complicated because feelings cannot be measured directly. We rely on the outward expression of emotional responses, or on verbal declarations by the person experiencing the feeling, as ways of assessing what that person is feeling. This is true both when scientists do research on emotions and when people judge emotions in their social interactions with one another.”

    We are even more limited in interpreting animals’ emotions.

    “When a deer freezes to the sound of a shotgun we say it is afraid, and when a kitten purrs or a dog wags its tail, we say it is happy,” writes LeDoux, who is also director of the Emotional Brain Institute, part of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. “We use words that refer to human subjective feelings to describe our interpretation of what is going on in the animal’s mind when it acts in way that has some similarity to the way we act when we have those feelings.”

    But while he concedes that “we will never know what an animal feels,” the basis for our interpretations of their emotions could eventually become more informed.

    “If we can find neural correlates of conscious feelings in humans—and distinguish them from correlates of unconscious emotional computations in survival circuits—and show that similar correlates exists in homologous brain regions in animals, then some basis for speculating about animal feelings and their nature would exist,” LeDoux posits.

    LeDoux, a professor in NYU’s Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, has worked on emotion and memory in the brain for more than 20 years. His research, mostly on fear, shows how we can respond to danger before we know what we are responding to. It has also shed light on how emotional memories are formed and stored in the brain. Through this research, LeDoux has mapped the neural circuits underlying fear and fear memory through the brain, and has identified cells, synapses, and molecules that make emotional learning and memory possible.

    In addition to numerous publications in scholarly journals, LeDoux has published books that present his work to a wider audience, including The Emotional Brain (Simon and Schuster, 1998), which focuses mainly on emotion, and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (Viking, 2002), which casts a broader net into the areas of personality and selfhood.

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  6. Study suggests World of Warcraft may help boost cognitive functioning in some seniors

    by Sue

    From the North Carolina State University press release:

    For some older adults, the online video game World of Warcraft (WoW) may provide more than just an opportunity for escapist adventure. Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that playing WoW actually boosted cognitive functioning for older adults – particularly those adults who had scored poorly on cognitive ability tests before playing the game.

    “We chose World of Warcraft because it has attributes we felt may produce benefits – it is a cognitively challenging game in a socially interactive environment that presents users with novel situations,” says Dr. Anne McLaughlin, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the study. “We found there were improvements, but it depended on each participant’s baseline cognitive functioning level.”

    Researchers from NC State’s Gains Through Gaming laboratory first tested the cognitive functioning of study participants, aged 60 to 77, to set a baseline. The researchers looked at cognitive abilities including spatial ability, memory and how well participants could focus their attention.

    An “experimental” group of study participants then played WoW on their home computers for approximately 14 hours over the course of two weeks, before being re-tested. A “control” group of study participants did not play WoW, but were also re-tested after two weeks.

    Comparing the cognitive functioning test scores of participants in the experimental and control groups, the researchers found the group that played WoW saw a much greater increase in cognitive functioning, though the effect varied according to each participant’s baseline score.

    “Among participants who scored well on baseline cognitive functioning tests, there was no significant improvement after playing WoW – they were already doing great,” McLaughlin says. “But we saw significant improvement in both spatial ability and focus for participants who scored low on the initial baseline tests.” Pre- and post-game testing showed no change for participants on memory.

    “The people who needed it most – those who performed the worst on the initial testing – saw the most improvement,” says Dr. Jason Allaire, an associate professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the study.

    The paper, “Individual differences in response to cognitive training: Using a multi-modal, attentionally demanding game-based intervention for older adults,” is published online in Computers in Human Behavior. Lead author of the paper is Laura Whitlock, an NC State Ph.D. student. The research was supported by NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

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  7. Study looks at relationship between social and physical pain

    by Sue

    From the Association for Psychological Science press release:

    “Broken-hearted” isn’t just a metaphor—social pain and physical pain have a lot in common, according to Naomi Eisenberger of the University of Califiornia-Los Angeles, the author of a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the paper, she surveys recent research on the overlap between physical and social pain.

    “Rejection is such a powerful experience for people,” Eisenberger says. “If you ask people to think back about some of their earliest negative experiences, they will often be about rejection, about being picked last for a team or left out of some social group.” People talk about hurt feelings and broken hearts, but Eisenberger realized they might be onto something when she and a colleague noticed how similar their images of brain activity looked in people who had experienced social rejection and others who had experienced physical pain. “We were sitting next to each other and noticed how similar the two brain images looked,” she says.

    That similarity has held up in later research. Physical pain and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain. Physical pain has two aspects: the sensory experience of pain and the emotional component, in which your brain decides how negative or distressing the pain is. It is the latter that is shared with social pain, although some research has suggested that severe social rejection, like being dumped, can also be processed in the part of your brain that handles the sensory component of pain.

    People who are more sensitive to physical pain are also more sensitive to social pain; they feel more rejected after completing a social exclusion task, in which the other two players in a computer version of catch refuse to share the ball. One study even found that people who took Tylenol for three weeks reported less hurt feelings than people who took a placebo. Even Eisenberger was surprised by that. “It follows in a logical way from the argument that the physical and social pain systems overlap, but it’s still kind of hard to imagine,” she says. “We take Tylenol for physical pain; it’s not supposed to work on social pain.”

    Eisenberger does not recommend taking painkillers so you don’t feel social pain. And, besides, there may be value to experiencing the pain of rejection.  “I think it’s probably there for a reason—to keep us connected to others,” she says. “If we’re constantly numbing the feeling of social rejection, are we going to be more likely do things that get us rejected, that alienate us?” There may be some cases where the social pain is too much, though; future research may look at whether it should sometimes be treated.

    The research validates the hurt feelings of people who have been socially rejected, Eisenberger says. “We seem to hold physical pain in higher regard than social pain,” she says. While bystanders understand that physical pain hurts and can be debilitating, the same empathy doesn’t always extend to people feeling social pain. “The research is sort of validating. It suggests that there is something real about this experience of pain that we have following rejection and exclusion.”

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  8. Study suggests girls’ verbal skills give them an advantage in math

    by Sue

    From the Association for Psychological Science press release:

    While boys generally do better than girls in science and math, some studies have found that girls do better in arithmetic. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the advantage comes from girls’ superior verbal skills.

    “People have always thought that males’ advantage is in math and spatial skills, and girls’ advantage is in language,” says Xinlin Zhou of Beijing Normal University, who cowrote the study with Wei Wei, Hao Lu, Hui Zhao, and Qi Dong of Beijing Normal University and Chuansheng Chen of the University of California-Irvine. “However, some parents and teachers in China say girls do arithmetic better than boys in primary school.”

    Zhou and his colleagues did a series of tests with children ages 8 to 11 at 12 primary schools in and around Beijing. Indeed, girls outperformed boys in many math skills. They were better at arithmetic, including tasks like simple subtraction and complex multiplication. Girls were also better at numerosity comparison—making a quick estimate of which of two arrays had more dots in it. Girls outperformed boys at quickly recognizing the larger of two numbers and at completing a series of numbers (like “2 4 6 8”). Boys performed better at mentally rotating three-dimensional images.

    Girls were also better at judging whether two words rhymed, and Zhou and his colleagues think this is the key to their better math performance. “Arithmetic and even advanced math needs verbal processing,” Zhou says. Counting is verbal; the multiplication table is memorized verbally, and when people are doing multiple-digit calculations, they hold the intermediate results in their memory as words.

    “Better language skills could lead to more efficient verbal processing in arithmetic,” Zhou says. He thinks it might be possible to use these results to help both boys and girls learn math better. Boys could use more help with verbal strategies for learning math terms, while girls might benefit from more practice with spatial skills.

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  9. Researchers develop way to reduce symptoms of phantom pain by “fooling” the brain

    by Sue

    From the Medical University of Vienna press release via MedicalXPress:

    A team of researchers led by Stefan Seidel from the University Department of Neurology at the MedUni Vienna has demonstrated that – and how – mirror therapy, as it is known, can help patients reduce the symptoms of phantom pain following limb amputations. This is achieved by stimulating a “motor network” in the brain that “substitutes for” the original motor centre.

    In the study, which has now been published in the specialist journal Fortschritt Röntgenstrahlen, eight leg amputees completed a total of twelve mirror therapy sessions in which they practiced functional movements of the healthy leg. In mirror therapy, the patients position their bodies in front of a mirror so that they can only see the remaining leg, not the stump. As soon as the healthy leg is moved, the brain is “fooled” into thinking that the missing body part is the one seen in the mirror and is suddenly restored again.

    Before the first and following the last session as part of the MedUni study, fMRT measurements (functional magnetic resonance tomography) were carried out: the average intensity of the phantom pain reduced markedly, and the patients also exhibited significantly increased activity in the frontal and temporal lobes after mirror therapy. Says Seidel: “These centres are actually not primarily responsible for motor functions.” It was possible to demonstrate that, following amputation of a limb, the brain activates a “motor network” which “substitutes for” the original motor centre for the lost limb originally found in the mid-brain. Says Seidel: “After a while, the brain has re-learned.”

    The team of researchers also discovered that the modified brain activity does not occur in the same way in all patients, nor at the same loci in the temporal and frontal lobes. Says Seidel: “If this motor network is custom-activated and custom-trained through mirror therapy or other ‘mind-body’ interventions, the phantom pain experienced is significantly less.”

    More information: Mirror Therapy in Lower Limb Amputees – A Look Beyond Primary Motor Cortex Reorganization. S. Seidel, et al. RoFo, 2011, Nov; 183(11):1051-7. DOI: 10.1055/s-0031-1281768

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  10. Study suggests anticipation of stressful situations accelerates cellular aging

    by Sue

    From the UC San Francisco press release by Juliana Bunim:

    The ability to anticipate future events allows us to plan and exert control over our lives, but it may also contribute to stress-related increased risk for the diseases of aging, according to a study by UCSF researchers.

    In a study of 50 women, about half of them caring for relatives with dementia, the psychologists found that those most threatened by the anticipation of stressful tasks in the laboratory and through public speaking and solving math problems, looked older at the cellular level. The researchers assessed cellular age by measuring telomeres, which are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes. Short telomeres index older cellular age and are associated with increased risk for a host of chronic diseases of aging, including cancer, heart disease and stroke.

    “We are getting closer to understanding how chronic stress translates into the present moment,” said Elissa Epel, PhD, an associate professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and a lead investigator on the study. “As stress researchers, we try to examine the psychological process of how people respond to a stressful event and how that impacts their neurobiology and cellular health. And we’re making some strides in that.”

    The researchers also found evidence that caregivers anticipated more threat than non-caregivers when told that they would be asked to perform the same public speaking and math tasks. This tendency to anticipate more threat put them at increased risk for short telomeres. Based on that, the researchers propose that higher levels of anticipated threat in daily life may promote cellular aging in chronically stressed individuals.

    “How you respond to a brief stressful experience in the laboratory may reveal a lot about how you respond to stressful experiences in your daily life,” said Aoife O’Donovan, PhD, a Society in Science: Branco Weiss Fellow at UCSF and the study’s lead author. “Our findings are preliminary for now, but they suggest that the major forms of stress in your life may influence how your respond to more minor forms of stress, such as losing your keys, getting stuck in traffic or leading a meeting at work. Our goal is to gain better understanding of how psychological stress promotes biological aging so that we can design targeted interventions that reduce risk for disease in stressed individuals. We now have preliminary evidence that higher anticipatory threat perception may be one such mechanism.”

    The study will be published in the May issue of the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

    Research on telomeres, and the enzyme that makes them, was pioneered by three Americans, including UCSF molecular biologist and co-author on this manuscript Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, who co-discovered the telomerase enzyme in 1985. The scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for this work.

    The research related to anticipation was funded by grants from the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute of Aging/National Institutes of Health and Bernard and Barbro Foundation as well as by a Society in Science: Branco Weiss Fellowship.

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