Tag Archives: functional magnetic resonance imaging

 

 

HD TODAY e-NEWS: Insights from Human Development's Research & Outreach

HD TODAY e-NEWS is a quarterly digest of cutting-edge research from the Department of Human Development, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University. Explore the HD Today e-NEWS website at http://hdtoday.human.cornell.edu/ and discover a wide range of resources:

Ong & Loeckenhoff New book probes emotion, aging and health                                                                         New approaches to understanding physical and psychological changes in old age – differences in personality, for instance, or responses to stressful events and the role of positive emotions in promoting well-being – are presented in a new book co-edited                                       by Cornell human development professors Anthony Ong  and Corinna Loeckenhoff.                   
QiWangTNRetweeting may overload your brain                                                                                               In a digital world where information is at your fingertips, be prepared to hold on tight before it slips right through them. Research at Cornell and Beijing University finds retweeting or otherwise sharing information creates a “cognitive overload” that                                           interferes with learning and retaining what you’ve just seen.
bebesInside Cornell’s BABY Labs                                                                                                            Steven S. Robertson and Marianella Casasola, professors in Human Development, run baby labs at Cornell. where researchers are discovering more about the nuances of infant development. It’s a crucial area of academic research and exploration, given the                               impact early development has on later stages of life.
 20120827_rns74_portrait_25Mapping the Resting-state Brain                                                                                                         In the Department of Human Development, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) informs Nathan Spreng’s studies of large-scale brain network dynamics and their role in cognition.
BaileyPSPIimage-200x300 Checking Up on the Science of Homosexuality                                                                               A new systematic review and commentary published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest takes a sweeping look at what the evidence says about homosexuality and sexual orientation in general. 

Student in the News

 Human Ecology Faculty-Led Undergraduate Research. Eve DeRosa / Annie EricksonSide by side                                                                                                                                       Many undergraduates in Human Development work side by side with faculty in the lab. Read about this transformative approach to learning in an interview with Annie Erickson '16 and her mentor, Professor Eve De Rosa.

 More Stories

K.KinzlerStudies Suggest Multilingual Exposure Boosts Children's Communication Skills      Listen to NPR's Robert Siegel's interview with Katherine Kinzler, associate professor of psychology and human development, about her research on the development of social skills in monolingual and multilingual children.                                                                                 

Multimedia

video play button                                                                                                                                                          Professor Corinna Loeckenhoff talks about aging with Karl Pillemer, Director of the BCTR

 

By H. Roger Segelken
Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, June 15, 2015
EEV-brains460_2

MRI images show increased activity in the brains of EEV gene carriers. (Rebecca Todd)

As research subjects viewed emotion-laden pictures while an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagining) machine scanned their brains for activity, researchers in a Cornell-University of British Columbia-University of Toronto study began to think: Perhaps our genes really can regulate response to emotional information.

Carriers of a genetic variation (the ADRA2b deletion variant) showed more vivid perceptions of emotional events (called emotionally enhanced vividness or EEV), which was associated with more activity in a region of the brain responsible for regulating emotions and evaluating pleasure and threat (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), researchers reported in the April 22 Journal of Neuroscience.

The 2014 study was a relatively small one, with 39 subjects undergoing fMRI scans at the University of Toronto. Slightly more than half (21) carried the ADRA2b deletion variant, and the rest did not. But the result was clear. Some people are genetically wired, as the researchers report, to “enhance the subjective vividness of perceptual experience and its emotional enhancement.”

“Emotions are not only about how we feel about the world, but how our brains construct our perception of it,” says Adam K. Anderson, Cornell associate professor of human development and the study’s senior author.

“Our genes influence how our brains see the positive and negative aspects of our world more vividly. As a result, we may come to mistakenly believe the world has more rewards or threats.” “People really do see the world differently,” said Rebecca Todd, first author and assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “For people with this gene variation, the emotionally relevant things in the world stand out much more.”

Todd said she believes emotionally enhanced vividness may help explain why some people are more susceptible to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and intrusive memories following trauma.

The report is titled “Neurogenic Variations in Norepinephrine Availability Enhance Perceptual Vividness.” The study was supported, in part, by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.EEV-brains460_2