Bilingual individuals demonstrate different personality characteristics when speaking different languages. Marketers making media and language decisions when addressing multilingual markets should add this finding to their list of influencing factors.

The post Cultural Frame Switching: Different Language, Different Personality appeared first on Neuromarketing.

Try these 5 quick tips when you’re feeling grumpy and irritable. 1. Do some kind of mindfulness practice. Try this or any of these. Learn enough about the philosophy of mindfulness meditation that you know what you’re doing. Since most people won’t want to do formal practice everyday on a permanent basis, do it everyday […]

The post 5 Tips for Irritability appeared first on Dr Alice Boyes.

Academic achievement at Ohio schools eligible for School Improvement Grants during the Obama administration increased for a few years, a new study says, but SIG's legacy remains complicated.

After a summer of protests over racial injustice, school districts are embracing anti-bias programs. The problem is: Few studies show they work.

Schools and staff confront a welter of employment laws and regulations when it comes to on-site work under the pandemic.

The state, which earned a B, saw its educational strength buoyed by strong performance in areas that measure socioeconomic factors that can affect the educational environment.

The state, which earned a B-plus, led the nation in K-12 achievement rankings and outperformed other states in several key academic indicators, but fell short on funding equity.

The state, which earned a D-plus, was weak on socioeconomic factors that can affect the educational environment, and also in the school finance area.

A $12.2 million dollar grant from the state Department of Public Instruction will go to a program based at North Carolina State University to provide additional training literacy training to teachers in 16 high-needs districts across the state.

The Oklahoma Education Association has ended the nine-day statewide walkout, saying legislators are unwilling to consider any additional revenue-raising measures.

"Teaching is a political act," argues teacher-turned-politician John Waldron. And it's going to take more organizing to rescue public education.

The state, which earned a D-plus, has struggled with school finance issues and endured teacher strikes and battles over pay, but also earned B-plus for funding equity.

Eliminating gifted programs all together is the wrong solution to fixing racial and economic imbalances, argues James R. Delisle.

The U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights said that some students were placed in self-contained special education settings without an individualized justification for doing so.

The state will be required to test all students using grade level tests, except for those with significant cognitive disabilities.

The money, which will be allocated over three years, is expected to make major and minor improvements to schools throughout the city.

Fidelity is often seen as a bad word in school, but it doesn't have to be that way. In this guest blog by George Toman, the concept of fidelity is explained and defended.

The ability to discern fact from fiction and to recognize reliable news is fundamental, writes News Literacy Project’s Charles Salter.

Concerns about local school systems can pose recruitment and retention hurdles for the armed services as they seek to meet the needs of military families.

California just made school accountability much more complicated. And that's good.

Utah is one of four states where state laws conflict with components of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act meaning districts may have to answer to two separate accountability systems this fall.

The Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, or ConnCAN, has profiled five successful early childhood education programs in other states for ideas to help programs in Connecticut.

The state, which earned a B, is one of the nation’s wealthiest and turned in strong performances in the school finance arena and in areas such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment.

Performance assessments have the potential to ensure that instruction for students with disabilities is aligned with state standards.

Former Republican Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens appointed enough board members to have Commissioner Margie Vandeven fired last year, but now that he's gone, the state board decided to hire her back.

The three board members, along with a resident, request that the court grant a restraining order and preliminary injunction against the state to reverse the takeover.

In Arkansas, Ohio, and Wisconsin, educators and advocates will be on this year's ballot for governor, a position that will inevitably have an outsized role in shaping education policy.

Primary season is now upon us. Here are three ideas for teaching in the wake of the Iowa caucus fallout.

Alexandria Area High School was created to accommodate changes in education and technology.

Resurrecting an old idea about assessing school quality could allow schools to examine a broad range of data on performance and practices and lead to improvement.

When can we expect the Islanders to get healthy?

Internet connectivity, recruiting staff, and finding partners to learn from are all big challenges for an ed-tech leader in a district off the coast of Alaska.

The state, which earned a D-plus, scored low on the Chance for Success Index, which tracks a host of socioeconomic factors that can affect the educational environment.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of whether courts must find a juvenile offender permanently incorrigible before a sentence of life without parole.

Tallahassee, FL - The South Georgia Technical College Lady Jets dropped a hard fought three-point loss, 50 – 47, to the nationally ranked Eastern Florida State College Titans before rallying to a 66 – 60 victory over Tallahassee State College in the Tallahassee Community College Classic this weekend to move to 3 – 1 on the season. “We put ourselves in a position to beat a very talented team ...

Michele Deodato
Oct 2, 2024; 44:e2308232024-e2308232024
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Prithviraj Rajebhosale
Oct 23, 2024; 44:e0063242024-e0063242024
Cellular

As evidence mounts that the cardiac-sympathetic nervous system reacts to challenging cognitive settings, we ask if these responses are epiphenomenal companions or if there is evidence suggesting a more intertwined role of this system with cognitive function. Healthy male and female human participants performed an approach-avoidance paradigm, trading off monetary reward for painful electric shock, while we recorded simultaneous electroencephalographic and cardiac-sympathetic signals. Participants were reward sensitive but also experienced approach-avoidance "conflict" when the subjective appeal of the reward was near equivalent to the revulsion of the cost. Drift-diffusion model parameters suggested that participants managed conflict in part by integrating larger volumes of evidence into choices (wider decision boundaries). Late alpha-band (neural) dynamics were consistent with widening decision boundaries serving to combat reward sensitivity and spread attention more fairly to all dimensions of available information. Independently, wider boundaries were also associated with cardiac "contractility" (an index of sympathetically mediated positive inotropy). We also saw evidence of conflict-specific "collaboration" between the neural and cardiac-sympathetic signals. In states of high conflict, the alignment (i.e., product) of alpha dynamics and contractility were associated with a further widening of the boundary, independent of either signal's singular association. Cross-trial coherence analyses provided additional evidence that the autonomic systems controlling cardiac-sympathetics might influence the assessment of information streams during conflict by disrupting or overriding reward processing. We conclude that cardiac-sympathetic control might play a critical role, in collaboration with cognitive processes, during the approach-avoidance conflict in humans.

Neuronal cytotoxic edema is implicated in neuronal injury and death, yet mitigating brain edema with osmotic and surgical interventions yields poor clinical outcomes. Importantly, neuronal swelling and its downstream consequences during early brain development remain poorly investigated, and new treatment approaches are needed. We explored Ca²⁺-dependent downstream effects after neuronal cytotoxic edema caused by diverse injuries in mice of both sexes using multiphoton Ca²⁺ imaging in vivo [Postnatal Day (P)12–17] and in acute brain slices (P8–12). After different excitotoxic insults, cytosolic GCaMP6s translocated into the nucleus after a few minutes in a subpopulation of neurons, persisting for hours. We used an automated morphology-detection algorithm to detect neuronal soma and quantified the nuclear translocation of GCaMP6s as the nuclear to cytosolic intensity (N/C ratio). Elevated neuronal N/C ratios occurred concurrently with persistent elevation in Ca²⁺ loads and could also occur independently from neuronal swelling. Electron microscopy revealed that the nuclear translocation was associated with the increased nuclear pore size. The nuclear accumulation of GCaMP6s in neurons led to neocortical circuit dysfunction, mitochondrial pathology, and increased cell death. Inhibiting calpains, a family of Ca²⁺-activated proteases, prevented elevated N/C ratios and neuronal swelling. In summary, in the developing brain, we identified a calpain-dependent alteration of nuclear transport in a subpopulation of neurons after disease-relevant insults leading to long-term circuit dysfunction and cell death. The nuclear translocation of GCaMP6 and other cytosolic proteins after acute excitotoxicity can be an early biomarker of brain injury in the developing brain.

Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have associated intronic variants in PDE4B, encoding cAMP-specific phosphodiesterase-4B (PDE4B), with increased risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as schizophrenia and substance use disorders that are often comorbid with it. However, the pathophysiological mechanisms of genetic risk involving PDE4B are poorly understood. To examine the effects of PDE4B variation on phenotypes with translational relevance to psychiatric disorders, we focused on PDE4B missense variant M220T, which is present in the human genome as rare coding variant rs775201287. When expressed in HEK-293 cells, PDE4B1-M220T exhibited an attenuated response to a forskolin-elicited increase in the intracellular cAMP concentration. In behavioral tests, homozygous Pde4b^M220T male mice with a C57BL/6JJcl background exhibited increased reactivity to novel environments, startle hyperreactivity, prepulse inhibition deficits, altered cued fear conditioning, and enhanced spatial memory, accompanied by an increase in cAMP signaling pathway-regulated expression of BDNF in the hippocampus. In response to a traumatic event (10 tone–shock pairings), neuronal activity was decreased in the cortex but enhanced in the amygdala and hippocampus of Pde4b^M220T mice. At 24 h post-trauma, Pde4b^M220T mice exhibited increased startle hyperreactivity and decreased plasma corticosterone levels, similar to phenotypes exhibited by PTSD patients. Trauma-exposed Pde4b^M220T mice also exhibited a slower decay in freezing at 15 and 30 d post-trauma, demonstrating enhanced persistence of traumatic memories, similar to that exhibited by PTSD patients. These findings provide substantive mouse model evidence linking PDE4B variation to PTSD-relevant phenotypes and thus highlight how genetic variation of PDE4B may contribute to PTSD risk.

Neuregulin1 (Nrg1) signaling is critical for neuronal development and function from fate specification to synaptic plasticity. Type III Nrg1 is a synaptic protein which engages in bidirectional signaling with its receptor ErbB4. Forward signaling engages ErbB4 phosphorylation, whereas back signaling engages two known mechanisms: (1) local axonal PI3K-AKT signaling and (2) cleavage by -secretase resulting in cytosolic release of the intracellular domain (ICD), which can traffic to the nucleus (Bao et al., 2003; Hancock et al., 2008). To dissect the contribution of these alternate signaling strategies to neuronal development, we generated a transgenic mouse with a missense mutation (V₃₂₁L) in the Nrg1 transmembrane domain that disrupts nuclear back signaling with minimal effects on forward signaling or local back signaling and was previously found to be associated with psychosis (Walss-Bass et al., 2006). We combined RNA sequencing, retroviral fate mapping of neural stem cells, behavioral analyses, and various network analyses of transcriptomic data to investigate the effect of disrupting Nrg1 nuclear back signaling in the dentate gyrus (DG) of male and female mice. The V₃₂₁L mutation impairs nuclear translocation of the Nrg1 ICD and alters gene expression in the DG. V₃₂₁L mice show reduced stem cell proliferation, altered cell cycle dynamics, fate specification defects, and dendritic dysmorphogenesis. Orthologs of known schizophrenia (SCZ)-susceptibility genes were dysregulated in the V₃₂₁L DG. These genes coordinated a larger network with other dysregulated genes. Weighted gene correlation network analysis and protein interaction network analyses revealed striking similarity between DG transcriptomes of V₃₂₁L mouse and humans with SCZ.

Hyperbilirubinemia (HB) is a key risk factor for hearing loss in neonates, particularly premature infants. Here, we report that bilirubin (BIL)-dependent cell death in the auditory brainstem of neonatal mice of both sexes is significantly attenuated by ZD7288, a blocker for hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channel-mediated current (I_h), or by genetic deletion of HCN1. GABAergic inhibitory interneurons predominantly express HCN1, on which BIL selectively acts to increase their intrinsic excitability and mortality by enhancing HCN1 activity and Ca²⁺-dependent membrane targeting. Chronic BIL elevation in neonatal mice in vivo increases the fraction of spontaneously active interneurons and their firing frequency, I_h, and death, compromising audition at the young adult stage in HCN1^+/+, but not in HCN1^–/– genotype. We conclude that HB preferentially targets HCN1 to injure inhibitory interneurons, fueling a feedforward loop in which lessening inhibition cascades hyperexcitability, Ca²⁺ overload, neuronal death, and auditory impairments. These findings rationalize HCN1 as a potential target for managing HB encephalopathy.

The artists known as OSGEMEOS showcase the largest exhibition of their work in the United States at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Marrakesh, 15 December 2014 – African Ministers of Agriculture recognized the facilitating role of FAO “under the new strategic framework established with the leadership of the [...]