Gratitude is an emotion and a trait linked to well-being and better health, and welcoming benefits to oneself is instrumentally valuable. However, theoretical and empirical work highlights that gratitude is more fully understood as an intrinsically valuable moral emotion. To understand the role of neural reward systems in the association between gratitude and altruistic motivations we tested tw...

The anterior thalamic nuclei occupy a central position in pathways associated with emotions and memory [AMA Arch. Neurol. Psychiatry 38 (1937) 725]. The goal of this study was to determine the anatomic interaction of the anterior nuclei with distinct prefrontal cortices that have been implicated in emotion and specific aspects of memory. To address this issue, we investigated the relationship o...

The negative interpretation of body sensations (e.g., as sign of a severe illness) is a crucial cognitive process in pathological health anxiety (HA). However, little is known about the nature and the degree of automaticity of this interpretation bias. We applied an implicit association test (IAT) in 20 subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate behavioral and n...

Six mutations in the salt-inducible kinase 1 (SIK1)-coding gene have been identified patients with early infantile epileptic encephalopathy (EIEE-30) accompanied by autistic symptoms. Two of are non-sense that truncate C-terminal region SIK1. It has shown C-terminal-truncated form SIK1 protein affects subcellular distribution protein, tempting to speculate relevance pathophysiology disorders. W...

Recent research in neuroeconomics has demonstrated that the reinforcement learning model of reward learning captures the patterns of both behavioral performance and neural responses during a range of economic decision-making tasks. However, this powerful theoretical model has its limits. Trial-and-error is only one of the means by which individuals can learn the value associated with different ...

Consistent attention and proper processing of infant faces by adults are essential for infant survival. Previous behavioral studies showed gender differences in processing infant cues (e.g., crying, laughing or facial attractiveness) and more importantly, the efforts invested in nurturing offspring. The underlying neural mechanisms of processing unknown infant faces provide hints for understand...

Probabilistic reward learning is characterised by individual differences that become acute in aging. This may be due to age-related dopamine (DA) decline affecting neural processing in striatum, prefrontal cortex, or both. We examined this by administering a probabilistic reward learning task to younger and older adults, and combining computational modelling of behaviour, fMRI and PET measureme...

Prepulse inhibition (PPI), a phenomenon in which a weak prestimulus decreases the startle response to an intense stimulus, provides an operational measure of sensorimotor gating (a process by which an organism filters sensory information) and is diminished in schizophrenia and schizotypal patients. The psychotomimetic phencyclidine and its potent congener dizocilpine are noncompetitive antagoni...

In adults, cognitive control is supported by several brain regions including the limbic system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) when processing emotional information. However, in adolescents, some theories hypothesize a neurobiological imbalance proposing heightened sensitivity to affective material in the amygdala and striatum within a cognitive control context. Yet, direct neuro...

We have developed a neurocomputational model of some attentional e!ects of nicotine. Our simulations reproduce results showing smoking abstinence to impair performance on a rapid visual information processing task involving detecting sequences of even or odd digits. Our model treats presence of nicotine as enhancement of modulatory acetylcholine signals, which focus attention on task-relevant s...