Social & Affective Neuroscience Laboratory

Check out our new paper, led by grad student Leslie Roos, on the effects of acute stress on inhibitory control performance! The abstract is below:

Identifying environmental influences on inhibitory control (IC) may help promote positive behavioral and social adjustment. Although chronic stress is known to predict lower IC, the immediate effects of acute stress are unknown. The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) may be a mechanism of the stress-IC link, given its psychophysiological regulatory role and connections to prefrontal brain regions critical to IC. We used a focused assessment of IC (the stop-signal task) to test whether an acute social stressor (the Trier Social Stress Test) affected participants’ pre- to post-IC performance (n = 58), compared to a control manipulation (n = 31). High frequency heart-rate variability was used as an index of PNS activity in response to the manipulation. Results indicated that stress impaired IC performance, blocking the practice effects observed in control participants. We also investigated the associations between PNS activity and IC; higher resting PNS activity predicted better pre-manipulation IC, and greater PNS stressor reactivity protected against the negative effects of stress on IC. Together, these results are the first to document the immediate effects of acute stress on IC and a phenotypic marker (PNS reactivity to stressors) of susceptibility to stress-induced IC impairment. This study suggests a new way to identify situations in which individuals are likely to exhibit IC vulnerability and related consequences such as impulsivity and risk taking behavior. Targeting PNS regulation may represent a novel target for IC-focused interventions.

Roos, L.E., Knight, E.L., Beauchamp, K.G., Berkman, E.T., Faraday, K., Hyslop, K., and Fisher, P.A. (in press). Acute stress impairs inhibitory control based on individual differences in parasympathetic nervous system activity. Biological Psychology. [pdf]

We have some great news!

Professor Elliot Berkman received the 2017 Early Career Award from the Social Personality & Health Network for his work integrating social and personality psychology and health behavior research. Congrats, Dr. Berkman!

The award was announced at the annual Social Personality Health preconference to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Meeting in San Antonio, TX.

Here is a guest post by Lisa May about her recent paper, published in the journal Mindfulness.

Relationship between parents and their adolescent children are notoriously rocky. Nonetheless, research shows that a warm, caring parent-child bond can protect kids from problems during adolescence such as substance abuse, depression, and delinquency. That’s why it’s important to understand how parents can strengthen their relationships with their teenage kids. In this study, we tested whether mindfulness training might help. Parents and their early adolescent children (ages 9-13) attended an eight-week course together. In contrast to a traditional parenting class, parents and kids in our study learned mindfulness exercises that were designed to help them be present, kind, and open in their moment-to-moment experience. Parents and kids each answered questions about their lives and relationships before and after the eight-week course, and we measured parents’ brain activity before and after the course, too. This allowed us to look at how the mindfulness training affected parents’ brain activity, the parent-child relationship, and the connections between the two. Parent brain activity increased in areas related to self-awareness and emotion. Increases in parents’ brain activity in an area involved in empathy and emotion tracked with increases in their children’s reports of the parent–child relationship. In other words, the kids of parents whose brain activity changed the most in this empathy/emotion area felt the most improvement in their relationship with their parents. Based on this, we believe that parent empathy and emotion might be particularly important in parent-child relationships during adolescence. Mindfulness training might help parents be more empathetic with their adolescent kids.

Full citation info:

May, L. M., Reinka, M. A., Tipsord, J. M., Felver, J. C., & Berkman, E. T. (in press). Parenting an early adolescent: A pilot study examining neural and relationship quality changes of a mindfulness intervention. Mindfulness. [pdf]

Listen to Elliot discuss his blog post about the effect of poverty on self-control over at The Academic Minute.

We are proud to announce the formation of the new Center for Translational Neuroscience within the Prevention Science Institute at the UO. Check out the mission statement:

The mission of the CTN is to translate knowledge from basic neuroscience and apply it to improve well-being, promote resilience, and mitigate the effects of early adverse experiences. Activities at the CTN address scientific issues of social importance with the goal of informing policy and practice. Core focal areas include, but are not limited to, poverty and maltreatment and their effects on addiction and mental health disorders. CTN takes a lifespan development approach to understand how specific brain and biological systems are affected by genetic and environmental influences. The knowledge obtained from this work is deployed in the development of evidence-based practices and science-informed public policy. An emphasis is placed on using experimental designs to help understand mechanisms and individual differences in response to interventions. The CTN employs successive iterations of neuroscience research, theory building, and practice to drive the scientific knowledge base forward. The CTN interfaces with other Centers and departments at the UO, including the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging, in the fulfillment of its mission. Relevant to the CTN mission is a focus on training at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels in neuroscience-informed approaches to prevention and intervention. Researchers and staff at the CTN embrace a collaborative, multidisciplinary, team-based approach in all of their activities. Like its parent Prevention Science Institute, the CTN is a multi-disciplinary center that includes faculty from several colleges and units on campus, including the Department of Psychology and the College of Education.

What is translational neuroscience? Here are 10 Principles of the field:

1. Identify environmentally malleable neurobiological functions, circuits, and systems that underlie behavioral risk and resilience.
2. Focus on central processes (e.g., executive function, reward) broadly implicated in well-being and maladjustment.
3. Emphasize developmental processes, sensitive periods, and inflection points that may inform intervention strategies.
4. Use intervention trials to test theories that connect causes to outcomes via underlying neurobiological mediators.
5. Include rigorous measurement of contextual factors (e.g., poverty, neighborhood, culture) that confer risk or resiliency.
6. Apply precision interventions that are (a) tailored to individuals based on biobehavioral characteristics, and (b) grounded in robust neuroscience.
7. Prioritize those neurobiological models that parsimoniously add explanatory power to behavioral theories and evidence.
8. Emphasize on applications of neuroscience to interpersonal processes such as co-regulation.
9. Elucidate linkages between physical health and mental health (e.g., immune system, inflammation, neuroendocrine system, autonomic nervous system, and gut microbiome).
10. Select neurobiological methodologies and measures based on their suitability to the hypotheses being tested.

Elliot and other SANlabbers will be presenting new work at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) conference, April 28-30 in New York!