Know Thy Positive Self

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...

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 suscept...