The neuropeptide corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and the more recently identified family members, the urocortins (Ucns), are proposed to integrate the neuroendocrine, autonomic, metabolic and behavioral responses to stressors. Chronic hyperactivation of the CRF system has been linked to stressrelated emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. The intracerebral administration of CR...

When encountering reminders of memories that we prefer not to think about, we often try to exclude those memories from awareness. Past studies revealed that such suppression attempts can reduce subsequent recollection of unwanted memories. The current study examined whether the inhibitory effects extend even to associated behavioral responses. Participants learned cue-target pairs for emotional...

Events in a sequence may each be evaluated as good or bad. We propose that such good-bad evaluations evoke emotional responses that change current mood. A model of recurrent updating of current mood is developed and compared to a model of how a sequence of events evoking emotional responses is evaluated retrospectively. In Experiment 1, 149 undergraduates are presented sequences of lottery outc...

It was hypothesized that combined individual child vulnerability (anxious solitude) and interpersonal stress (peer exclusion) would predict the strongest responses to experimentally manipulated behavioral peer rejection. Results indicated that in a sample of 3rd graders (N = 160, 59% girls), anxious solitary excluded children displayed more behavioral manifestations of social helplessness befor...

We previously reported that noradrenergic neurons in the monkey locus coeruleus (LC) are activated selectively by target stimuli in a target detection task. Here, we varied the discrimination difficulty in this task and recorded impulse activity of LC neurons to analyze LC responses on error trials and in relation to behavioral response times (RTs). In easy and difficult discrimination conditio...

Drosophila melanogaster CRYPTOCHROME (CRY) mediates behavioral and electrophysiological responses to blue light coded by circadian and arousal neurons. However, spectroscopic and biochemical assays of heterologously expressed CRY suggest that CRY may mediate functional responses to UV-A (ultraviolet A) light as well. To determine the relative contributions of distinct phototransduction systems,...

Impulse activity was recorded extracellularly from noradrenergic neurons in the nucleus locus coeruleus (LC; 47 single-cell and 126 multicell recordings) of four cynomolgus monkeys performing an oddball visual discrimination task. For juice reward, the subjects were required to release a lever rapidly in response to an infrequent (10-20% of trials) target cue (CS+) that was randomly intermixed ...