Marta Portero-Tresserra

Best possible self (BPS) is a positive psychological intervention shown to enhance well-being which involves writing a description of an ideal future scenario. This paper presents a comparison of psychophysiological effects of a BPS activity that has been adapted for classroom settings and a time-matched control activity (NA). Thirty-three undergraduate students participated in the study that assessed state anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI), affect (Affective Slider, AS), and cardiac vagal activity (heart-rate variability, HRV) as an indicator of self-regulatory resource usage, at three time periods (PRE, DURING, POST). Results show that BPS led to a significantly greater increase in positive valence (DURING) and overall higher levels of cardiac vagal activity (HRV) compared to NA. These findings suggest that BPS has promising characteristics as a self-regulatory technique aimed at fostering positive affect and positively impacting self-regulatory resources. As BPS does not require expert knowledge nor specialized technology to administer, it may be a suitable activity for educators to use when teaching and having students practice self-regulation. This study presents evidence collected in a replicable multimodal approach of the self-regulatory effects of a brief BPS activity on undergraduate students.

Age-related neurobiological changes significantly affect hippocampal structure and function, such that the main cognitive impairments associated with aging are related to the integrity of this brain structure, including the deterioration in spatial object recognition (SOR) memory. Previous studies have shown that intrinsic factors such as neuroinflammation, as well as lifestyle factors such as diet, can affect aging-associated brain functions and cognitive performance. In this regard, caloric restriction (CR) produces beneficial effects on health and life expectancy, although its ability to slow down age-dependent effects on cognitive decline and hippocampus (HPC) functioning remains unclear. Therefore, we set out to evaluate the effects of CR on SOR memory in aged male Wistar rats, as well as those on hippocampal neuron loss, neurogenesis and inflammation. The data show that CR in aged rats attenuates the decline in SOR memory, age-associated hippocampal neuron loss, and age-dependent microglial activation. Furthermore, we found a significant reduction in neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the old animals relative to adult rats. These findings support the positive effect of CR on SOR memory, suggesting that it dampens hippocampal neuronal loss and reduces proinflammatory activity.

Caloric restriction (CR) can attenuate the general loss of health observed during aging, being one of the mechanisms involved the reduction of hormonal alteration, such as insulin and leptin. This change could also prevent age-specific fluctuations in brain monoamines, although few studies have addressed the effects of CR on peripheral hormones and central neurotransmitters exhaustively. Therefore, the variations in brain monoamine levels and some peripheral hormones were assessed here in adult 4-month old and 24-month old male Wistar rats fed ad libitum (AL) or maintained on a 30% CR diet from four months of age. Noradrenaline (NA), dopamine (DA), serotonin (5-HT) and its metabolites were measured by high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection (HPLC-ED) in nine brain regions: cerebellum, pons, midbrain, hypothalamus, thalamus, hippocampus, striatum, frontal cortex, and occipital cortex. In addition, the blood plasma levels of hormones like corticosterone, insulin and leptin were also evaluated, as were insulin-like growth factor 1 and other basal metabolic parameters using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs): cholesterol, glucose, triglycerides, albumin, low-density lipoprotein, calcium and high-density lipoprotein (HDLc). CR was seen to increase the NA levels that are altered by aging in specific brain regions like the striatum, thalamus, cerebellum and hypothalamus, and the DA levels in the striatum, as well as modifying the 5-HT levels in the striatum, hypothalamus, pons and hippocampus. Moreover, the insulin, leptin, calcium and HDLc levels in the blood were restored in old animals maintained on a CR diet. These results suggest that a dietary intervention like CR may have beneficial health effects, recovering some negative effects on peripheral hormones, metabolic parameters and brain monoamine concentrations.

Rationale Aging is characterized by a decrease in N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) in the hippocampus, which might be one of the factors involved in the age-dependent cognitive decline. D-Cycloserine (DCS), a partial agonist of the NMDAR glycine recognition site, could improve memory deficits associated to neurodegenerative disorders and cognitive deficits observed in normal aging. Objectives and Methods The aim of the present study was to explore whether DCS would reverse age-dependent memory deficits and decreases in NMDA receptor subunits (GluN1, GluN2A, and GluN2B) and the presynaptic protein synaptophysin in Wistar rats. We investigated the effects of pre-training infusions of DCS (10 μg/hemisphere) in the ventral hippocampus on two hippocampal-dependent learning tasks, the social transmission of food preference (STFP), and the Morris water maze (MWM). Results The results revealed that infusions of DCS administered before the acquisition sessions rescued deficits in the STFP retention and MWM reversal learning in old rats. DCS also significantly increased the hippocampal levels of synaptophysin in old rats, which correlated with STFP and MWM performance in all tests. Moreover, although the levels of the GluN1 subunit correlated with the MWM acquisition and reversal, DCS did not enhance the expression of such synaptic protein. Conclusions The present behavioral results support the role of DCS as a cognitive enhancer and suggest that enhancing the function of NMDARs and synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus may be related to improvement in social memory and spatial learning reversal in aged animals.

Psychiatric disorders constitute one of the main causes of disability worldwide. During the past years, considerable research has been conducted on the genetic architecture of such diseases, although little understanding of their etiology has been achieved. The difficulty to access up-to-date, relevant genotype-phenotype information has hampered the application of this wealth of knowledge to translational research and clinical practice in order to improve diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric patients. PsyGeNET (http://www.psygenet.org/) has been developed with the aim of supporting research on the genetic architecture of psychiatric diseases, by providing integrated and structured accessibility to their genotype–phenotype association data, together with analysis and visualization tools. In this article, we describe the protocol developed for the sustainable update of this knowledge resource. It includes the recruitment of a team of domain experts in order to perform the curation of the data extracted by text mining. Annotation guidelines and a web-based annotation tool were developed to support the curators’ tasks. A curation workflow was designed including a pilot phase and two rounds of curation and analysis phases. Negative evidence from the literature on gene–disease associations (GDAs) was taken into account in the curation process. We report the results of the application of this workflow to the curation of GDAs for PsyGeNET, including the analysis of the inter-annotator agreement and suggest this model as a suitable approach for the sustainable development and update of knowledge resources. Database URL: http://www.psygenet.org PsyGeNET corpus:http://www.psygenet.org/ds/PsyGeNET/results/psygenetCorpus.tar

A significant interaction between N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) and muscarinic receptors has been suggested in the modulation of learning and memory processes. The present study further investigates this issue and explores whether d-cycloserine (DCS), a partial agonist at the glycine binding site of the NMDA receptors that has been regarded as a cognitive enhancer, would reverse scopolamine (SCOP)-induced amnesia in two olfactory learning tasks when administered into the prelimbic cortex (PLC). Thus, in experiment 1, DCS (10 µg/site) was infused prior to acquisition of odor discrimination (ODT) and social transmission of food preference (STFP), which have been previously characterized as paradigms sensitive to PLC muscarinic blockade. Immediately after learning such tasks, SCOP was injected (20 µg/site) and the effects of both drugs (alone and combined) were tested in 24-h retention tests. To assess whether DCS effects may depend on the difficulty of the task, in the STFP the rats expressed their food preference either in a standard two-choice test (experiment 1) or a more challenging three-choice test (experiment 2). The results showed that bilateral intra-PLC infusions of SCOP markedly disrupted the ODT and STFP memory tests. Additionally, infusions of DCS alone into the PLC enhanced ODT but not STFP retention. However, the DCS treatment reversed SCOP-induced memory deficits in both tasks, and this effect seemed more apparent in ODT and 3-choice STFP. Such results support the interaction between the glutamatergic and the cholinergic systems in the PLC in such a way that positive modulation of the NMDA receptor/channel, through activation of the glycine binding site, may compensate dysfunction of muscarinic neurotransmission involved in stimulus-reward and relational learning tasks.