Lesions of the dorsal premammillary nucleus (PMd) have been reported to produce dramatic reductions in responsivity of rats to a live cat. Such lesions provide a means of analyzing the potentially differential neural systems involved in different defensive behaviors, and the relationship between these systems and concepts such as anxiety. Rats with bilateral electrolytic lesions of the PMd were...

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is one of the most prevalent and costly of all psychiatric disorders. MDD has been found to be responsive to a diverse set of brain-based interventions, including antidepressant medications and electroconvulsive therapy, strongly implicating anomalous neural functioning in its pathogenesis. Neuroimaging studies have yielded important information about depression-...

Chronic morphine treatment produces profound and long-lasting changes in the pituitary-adrenal responses to stressful stimuli. The purpose of the present study was to explore the mechanisms involved in these altered stress responses. Chronic morphine administration increased basal plasma concentrations of corticosterone and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which peaked at 36 h after the fina...

The direction of others' eye gaze has important influences on how we perceive their emotional expressions. Here, we examined differences in neural activation to direct- versus averted-gaze fear faces as a function of culture of the participant (Japanese versus US Caucasian), culture of the stimulus face (Japanese versus US Caucasian), and the relation between the two. We employed a previously v...

It is not known whether the instincts of wild horses have remained strong during their centuries of domestication. Knowledge of this matter would give riders the opportunity to know more about the behavior of horses and consequently about safety for both horses and riders. In this current research, we studied the behavior of fifteen Caspian miniature horses of different ages and sexes using sti...

Young children are often hyperreactive to somatosensory inputs hardly noticed by adults, as exemplified by irritation to seams or labels in clothing. The neurodevelopmental mechanisms underlying changes in sensory reactivity are not well understood. Based on the idea that neurodevelopmental changes in somatosensory processing and/or changes in sensory adaptation might underlie developmental dif...