Biological Basis of Behavior

Cornelia de Lange Syndrome (CdLS) is the most common example of disorders of the cohesin complex, or cohesinopathies. There are a myriad of clinical issues facing individuals with CdLS, particularly in the neurodevelopmental system, which also have implications for the parents and caretakers, involved professionals, therapists, and schools. Basic research in developmental and cell biology on cohesin is showing significant progress, with improved understanding of the mechanisms and the possibility of potential therapeutics. The following abstracts are presentations from the 6th Cornelia de Lange Syndrome Scientific and Educational Symposium, which took place on June 25-26, 2014, in conjunction with the Cornelia de Lange Syndrome Foundation National Meeting in Costa Mesa, CA. The Research Committee of the CdLS Foundation organizes the meeting, reviews and accepts abstracts, and subsequently disseminates the information to the families through members of the Clinical Advisory Board. In addition to the scientific and clinical discussions, there were educationally focused talks related to practical aspects of behavior and development.

Addiction is prevalent now perhaps more than ever. It is defined as a medical illness requiring treatment and, as with other chronic illnesses, can be managed with the symptoms in remission. The rates for successful treatment are low, however, and research is needed to increase these rates. Positive psychology is being studied as a way to boost recovery from addiction in a variety of contexts and shows promise. The literature in the fields of positive psychology and addiction medicine supports a connection but further study is needed. The most current research shows that positive psychology interventions including, but not limited to, gratitude fostering exercises, the principles of resilience, strengths-based assessment, and mindfulness, are successful for substance use disorders. Positive and negative affect are determiners of success in recovery and this is an area where positive psychology may provide results. Throughout the lifespan of modern society, addiction has been pervasive and ubiquitous, discriminating against neither race, culture, intelligence, nor socioeconomic status. Addictive disorders affect every one of us in some way or another and have great costs. Such substance abuse problems have been in existence for millennia, yet remain as forceful as ever. For much of that time, cases of addiction were considered hopeless and the addicted banished to jails, prisons, and insane asylums. Modern medicine has taught us differently, though the majority of those suffering an addictive disorder suffer for a lifetime, and the disease has no cure. Hearteningly, however, the ailment can be treated and one can live with the disease in remission. Even with this knowledge, the relapse rate is abysmal, costing billions of dollars annually (National Institute on Drug Abuse 2015), and the human costs are much greater. Science and Research are ever-expanding and so hope remains. With the inception of positive psychology at the turn of the century, another hope for addiction treatment has been provided. The methods of positive psychology are new, fresh, and are subject to scientific verifiability with studies supporting their effectiveness being produced at a high frequency. The literature in the field of positive psychology shows that it is feasible to apply positive psychotherapy to clinical settings, specifically to the clinical treatment of addictive disorders including its efficacy as a tool for relapse prevention. Modern Treatment of Substance Use Disorders, A brief history As the problem of addiction has only increased with time, new insights are needed. To understand the new field of positive psychology in relation to addiction, we first must look at where research and treatment for the disorders on the addiction spectrum have been, to highlight their deficits and see where positive psychology might be used. Modern man arose some 200,000 years ago and, armed with pleasure-inducing centers in the brain, human beings have

ACTIIR Inhibition in Murine Ischemic Heart Failure - Supplementary Figures<br>Accepted for publication in AJP-Heart and Circulatory Physiology as a Research Article on December 18, 2019.<br><br> Activin Type II Receptor Ligand Signaling Inhibition After Experimental Ischemic Heart Failure Attenuates Cardiac Remodeling and Prevents Fibrosis Estibaliz Castillero, Hirokazu Akashi, Marc Najjar, Ruiping Ji, Lea Maria Brandstetter, Catherine Wang, Xianghai Liao, Xiaokan Zhang, Alexandra Sperry, Marcia Gailes, Karina Guaman, Adam Recht, Ira Schlosberg, H. Lee Sweeney, Ziad A. Ali, Shunichi Homma, Paolo C. Colombo, Giovanni Ferrari, P. Christian Schulze, Isaac George<br><br>Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery. College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University New York, NY, 10032, United States <br> Abstract Myostatin (MSTN) is a transforming growth factor (TGF)-β superfamily member that acts as a negative regulator of muscle growth and may play a r...

How do people learn when to allocate how much cognitive control to which task? According to the Learned Value of Control (LVOC) model, people learn to predict the value of alternative control allocations from features of a given situation. This suggests that people may generalize the value of control learned in one situation to other situations with shared features, even when the demands for cognitive control are different. This makes the intriguing prediction that what a person learned in one setting could, under some circumstances, cause them to misestimate the need for, and potentially over-exert control in another setting, even if this harms their performance. To test this prediction, we had participants perform a novel variant of the Stroop task in which, on each trial, they could choose to either name the color (more control-demanding) or read the word (more automatic). However only one of these tasks was rewarded, it changed from trial to trial, and could be predicted by one ...

Sebastian Musslick1, Maria Wirzberger2, Ivan Grahek3, Laura Bustamante1, Amitai Shenhav3 and Jonathan D. Cohen1 1Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. 2Institute of Educational Science, University of Stuttgart, Germany. 3Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown Institute for Brain Science, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.

Recent years have witnessed significant advances in our understanding of bounds on rationality in both cognitive psychology and economics. These two fields have been making separate progress, but time is ripe for unifying these efforts. In this article, we introduce recently developed economic tools, themselves rooted in the psychometric tradition, to quantify individual differences in the capacity for cognitive control. These tools suggest that a reliable assessment of the capacity for cognitive control may be accomplished by examining task performance as a function of reward. We demonstrate through simulation studies that an incentive-informed measure of task performance does a better job of recovering individual differences in one’s capacity for cognitive control, compared to the commonly used congruency effect. Furthermore, we show that the economic approach can be used to predict control-dependent behavior across different task settings. We conclude by discussing future directi...