Know Thy Positive Self

Maren, S. (2014). Nature and causes of the immediate extinction deficit: A brief review. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 113(Supplement C), 19-24. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2013.10.012 Last week, one of my colleagues raised a question that I didn't aware before: the immediate extinction and delayed extinction may be different substantially. This difference is so huge that, as she said, replicate a delayed extinction paradigm with an immediate extinction one may be of great danger. So I checked the literature, and do found many studies did the comparison. In the article review part, the author mentioned 17 article, including 4 studies using human subjects and 13 studies used animals (mostly rats). Although the initial reports about the immediate extinction are very positive ( immediate extinction could "erase" fear memory) (Meyers, et al., 2006), but later studies found complicated results. There are more studies reported the immediate extinction deficit, i.e., immediate

Bonanno, G. A., Westphal, M., & Mancini, A. D. (2011). Resilience to Loss and Potential Trauma. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7(1), 511-535. doi:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032210-104526 Today I read this review on the train from Mainz to Amsterdam, the swinging train made me a little bit impatient, so the reading experience is not so good.  In this classic review, Bonanno et al., (2013) pointed out that using new analytic method -- latent growth mixture modelling -- could overcome the disadvantages of two previous approach (i.e., psychopathology approach and  the trauma event approach).  figure 1, adapted from Banonno (2004) The interesting results from the latent growth mixture modelling are that higher percentage of resilience was found.  Then this paper reviewed factors that influence resilience: personality, exposure, SES etc. The trait self-enhancement was specially mentioned in the personality factors. Also interesting to me is that  personality  r

Dranovsky, A., & Leonardo, E. D. (2015). The power of positivity. Nature, 522, 294. doi:10.1038/522294a Ramirez, S., Liu, X., MacDonald, C. J., Moffa, A., Zhou, J., Redondo, R. L., & Tonegawa, S. (2015). Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour. Nature, 522, 335. doi:10.1038/nature14514 I didn't totally understand the experiments in Ramirez et al (2015), but it reads like a lot of works had been done by the authors.  The basic idea is simple: if we re-activated the positive memory of mice that currently depressed, the positive memory will decrease the depressive behaviours. This basic idea was clearly illustrated by Dranovsky & Leonardo (2015), see below Of course, the actual experiment is more complicated, as well as the figures: The above figure is the figure 1a of Ramirez et al. (2015). So, there are 6 groups. The key manipulation is the positive experience, which was exposed the mice to a female conspecific in a

Friedman, A. K., Walsh, J. J., Juarez, B., Ku, S. M., Chaudhury, D., Wang, J., . . . Han, M.-H. (2014). Enhancing Depression Mechanisms in Midbrain Dopamine Neurons Achieves Homeostatic Resilience. Science, 344(6181), 313-319. doi:10.1126/science.1249240 This paper is really a good read, easy to grasp what it to says. So, basically, in a series of experiments, the authors found that activation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA) neurons will make the susceptible mice, which could be selected by social defeat stress paradigm, more resilient. The novelty of this paper lies in the fact that VTA DA neuron activities were previously found to be the positive correlated to depression-like behaviours. Backgrounds:  1) Tyrosine hydroxylase-driven green fluorescent protein (TH-GFP) transgenic mice were used in these series of experiments, because of they allow to visualize and reliably record from VTA DA neurons. 2) Mice can be distinguished to resilient and susceptible

Bouton, M. E. (2004). Context and Behavioral Processes in Extinction. Learning & Memory, 11(5), 485-494. doi:10.1101/lm.78804 Milad, M. R., & Quirk, G. J. (2012). Fear Extinction as a Model for Translational Neuroscience: Ten Years of Progress. Annual Review of Psychology, 63(1), 129-151. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131631 Quirk, G. J., & Mueller, D. (2008). Neural Mechanisms of Extinction Learning and Retrieval. Neuropsychopharmacology, 33(1), 56-72. doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1301555 As I begin to do research using fear extinction paradigm, which is apparently very different from what I was doing during my PhD study, so I need to get familiar with this paradigm first. After reading a few papers related to fear extinction, I found that these three reviews are very good for a newcomer. Bouton (2004) is definitely the must-read. In this review, Bouton listed the different effects that can be considered as fear extinction. With a clear logic flow, this paper is easy to fo

Hermans, E. J., van Marle, H. J. F., Ossewaarde, L., Henckens, M. J. A. G., Qin, S., van Kesteren, M. T. R., . . . Fernández, G. (2011). Stress-Related Noradrenergic Activity Prompts Large-Scale Neural Network Reconfiguration. Science, 334(6059), 1151-1153. doi:10.1126/science.1209603 After re-read this paper I think I get more information from it. This study included two experiments, one regular fMRI study, one with Neuro-pharmaceutical manipulations. In the first experiment, participants viewed highly stressful video clips with self-referential instruction while their brain was scanned. Using model free data-analysis (i.e., multi-voxel), the authors found that the sensory network (visual cortex) are highly correlated among participants in both aversive and neutral conditions. However, brain regions previous claimed to be involved in the intrinsic connectivity network (ICN, include autonomic neuroendocrine control [frontoinsular cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC),

Chen, J., Leong, Y. C., Honey, C. J., Yong, C. H., Norman, K. A., & Hasson, U. (2017). Shared memories reveal shared structure in neural activity across individuals. Nat Neurosci, 20(1), 115-125. doi:10.1038/nn.4450 How memory is formed and retrieved is one of the most "hard-core" questions in cognitive neuroscience. Recently, a paper published in  Nature Neuroscience found that the pattern of neural activity when recalling memorized information across individuals is more similar than the neural pattern between encoding-recall.  In this study, participants are required to view two video clips that were extracted from TV series "Sherlock", then they recall the episode of the video without any cues. That's, free-viewing, free-recalling. Like we view a TV and then tell it to a friend, but in a fMRI scanner.  The authors found that the neural activities in certain brain regions during viewing and recalling are highly correlated, including the  defa

Whittle, N., Maurer, V., Murphy, C., Rainer, J., Bindreither, D., Hauschild, M., . . . Singewald, N. (2016). Enhancing dopaminergic signaling and histone acetylation promotes long-term rescue of deficient fear extinction. Transl Psychiatry, 6, e974. doi:10.1038/tp.2016.231 Ok, I write this post just to help me understand this paper better. The studies of Extinction all hope to solve one problem: how to make the extinction context-independent? This problem is important because extinction is the key for exposure-therapy in clinical settings. Make the extinction context-independent means that it will help the exposure-therapy more effective. Haaker et al. (2013) found that single dose of L-dopa can help the extinction less context-dependent. In this study, Whittle et al. replicated the key results of Haaker et al. (2013). Here is some methodology part of this paper, as I paraphrased. Methods      subject: 129S1/SvImJ (S1) mice, which that exhibit normal fear learnin

In the summer of 2016, I became an ambassador of Center for Open Science (COS). As can be seen from the website, ambassadors are supposed to promote transparent and open science in their own community. So here are the things I have done to promote transparent and open science in China during the past several months (all of these activities were finished using Chinese): 2016.10.14 I organized a workshop titled Enhancing the Reproducibility of Psychological Research during the 19th Annual Meeting of Chinese Psychological Society. This workshop was held in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province. About 150 psychology students and researchers participated in this workshop. The Speakers of this workshop include Dr Fei Wang (Tsinghua University), Dr Qiang Shen (Zhejiang University of Technology), Dr Lijia Wei (Wuhan University), Mr Jichengsi Guo (Tsinghua University), Ms Mengdi Song (Tsinghua University) and I.  2016.11.01 I introduced the transparent and open science practices at Pro