By Sara Manning Peskin Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human Guy Leschziner William Collins (2024) There is no food in sight in Alex’s house. Even the rubbish bin is fastened closed. The kitchen is like a bank vault, hidden behind a locked door from which staff members bring out portioned meals for Alex and her six housemates, all of whom have a genetic disorder called Prader–Willi syndrome. Although Alex was born underweight, by early adulthood she could eat three servings in a sitting, had gorged on cat food and carried 110 kilograms on her small frame. Her ‘gluttony’, writes neurologist Guy Leschziner in Seven Deadly Sins, is the result of a condition that instils such a voracious appetite that some people have eaten to the point of bursting their stomachs. Whereas marketers of diet programmes have conventionally coupled obesity to a lack of willpower, Leschziner uses Alex’s case to argue that body size is driven less by moralistic factors and more by genetics, hormones and gut microorganisms. Similar themes run throughout the book, as the author examines lust, envy and other supposed infractions, gathering examples of people who exhibit these traits because of neurological disorders. Like his earlier books about sleep and the senses, Seven Deadly Sins educates as much as it entertains, turning complex neuroscientific topics into fodder for cocktail-party conversations. The biology of behaviour Exploring wrath, Leschziner introduces two men with epilepsy. One lurches into rages in the wake of his seizures and finds himself surrounded by shards of broken dishes afterwards. Another, a “gentle giant”, has anger outbursts because of a medication prescribed to control his disease. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29564 - Posted: 11.20.2024

By Angie Voyles Askham Keeping track of social hierarchies is crucial for any animal. Primates in particular must adapt their behaviors based on the status of those around them, or risk losing their own rank. “True, smart social behavior in humans and in monkeys is dependent on a full adjustment to the context,” says Katalin Gothard, professor of physiology and neuroscience at the University of Arizona. Multiple brain areas keep track of social information. Among them, the amygdala—known for processing emotions—responds to faces, facial expressions and social status, and activates as people learn social hierarchies. But the brain adapts this information for different social settings, a new study reveals: Neurons in the macaque amygdala encode knowledge about social status in a context-specific way, Gothard and her colleagues discovered. Just like people, macaques can infer social standing from videos, and the activity of amygdala cells captures information about both the identity of the individual they are watching and how that animal relates to others in the scene. These findings help explain how primates process information about social position, says Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. And because the monkeys could successfully learn this information from videos, the results open up a new avenue for studying how the primate brain encodes these relationships in a complex and dynamic way, he adds. “That’s a big step forward.” Like people, macaques have no physical traits that directly convey dominance, Gothard says. “The status of these individuals is inferred.” So she and her colleagues tested two macaques’ ability to understand a hierarchy that the team invented among four unfamiliar monkeys in a series of videos. Each clip simulated status-appropriate interactions between two of the four monkeys on a split screen to convey those two animals’ relative positions: a scene of a higher-ranked animal acting aggressive juxtaposed with one of a lower-ranked monkey smacking its lips in appeasement, for example. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29544 - Posted: 11.06.2024

Ian Sample Science editor Where does our personal politics come from? Does it trace back to our childhood, the views that surround us, the circumstances we are raised in? Is it all about nurture – or does nature have a say through the subtle levers of DNA? And where, in all of this, is the brain? Scientists have delved seriously into the roots of political belief for the past 50 years, prompted by the rise of sociobiology, the study of the biological basis of behaviour, and enabled by modern tools such as brain scanners and genome sequencers. The field is making headway, but teasing out the biology of behaviour is never straightforward. Take a study published last week. Researchers in Greece and the Netherlands examined MRI scans from nearly 1,000 Dutch people who had answered questionnaires on their personal politics. The work was a replication study, designed to see whether the results from a small 2011 study, bizarrely commissioned by the actor Colin Firth, stood up. Firth’s study, conducted at UCL, reported structural differences between conservative and liberal brains. Conservatives, on average, had a larger amygdala, a region linked to threat perception. Liberals, on average, had a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in decision-making. In the latest study of Dutch people, the researchers found no sign of a larger anterior cingulate cortex in liberals. They did, however, find evidence for a very slightly larger amygdala in conservatives. The MailOnline declared evidence that conservatives were more “compassionate”, but later changed their headline noting that the study said nothing about compassion. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29493 - Posted: 09.25.2024

By R. Douglas Fields It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps appear on your arms, sweat on your palms. Your stomach knots and your muscles coil, ready to sprint or fight. Now imagine the same scene, but without any of the body’s innate responses to an external threat. Would you still feel afraid? Experiences like this reveal the tight integration between brain and body in the creation of mind — the collage of thoughts, perceptions, feelings and personality unique to each of us. The capabilities of the brain alone are astonishing. The supreme organ gives most people a vivid sensory perception of the world. It can preserve memories, enable us to learn and speak, generate emotions and consciousness. But those who might attempt to preserve their mind by uploading its data into a computer miss a critical point: The body is essential to the mind. How is this crucial brain-body connection orchestrated? The answer involves the very unusual vagus nerve. The longest nerve in the body, it wends its way from the brain throughout the head and trunk, issuing commands to our organs and receiving sensations from them. Much of the bewildering range of functions it regulates, such as mood, learning, sexual arousal and fear, are automatic and operate without conscious control. These complex responses engage a constellation of cerebral circuits that link brain and body. The vagus nerve is, in one way of thinking, the conduit of the mind. Nerves are typically named for the specific functions they perform. Optic nerves carry signals from the eyes to the brain for vision. Auditory nerves conduct acoustic information for hearing. The best that early anatomists could do with this nerve, however, was to call it the “vagus,” from the Latin for “wandering.” The wandering nerve was apparent to the first anatomists, notably Galen, the Greek polymath who lived until around the year 216. But centuries of study were required to grasp its complex anatomy and function. This effort is ongoing: Research on the vagus nerve is at the forefront of neuroscience today. © 2024.Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 29454 - Posted: 08.28.2024

Joe Hernandez If a human or another animal close to them dies, does a cat grieve the loss? That was the question a team of researchers from Oakland University in Michigan set out to answer when they surveyed hundreds of cat owners about their cat’s behavior after another cat or dog in the household passed away. The data showed that cats exhibited behaviors associated with grief — such as eating and playing less — more often after the death of a fellow pet, suggesting they may in fact have been in mourning. “It made me a little more optimistic that they are forming attachments with each other,” said Jennifer Vonk, a professor of psychology at Oakland University, who co-authored the study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. “It’s not that I want the cats to be sad,” Vonk went on, “[but] there is a part of us, I think, as humans that wants to think that if something happens to us our pets would miss us.” Though animals from elephants to horses to dogs have been shown to express signs of grief, less is known about the emotional life of the domesticated house cat. Vonk said she knew of only one other study on grief in domestic cats. For their research, Vonk and her coauthor, Brittany Greene, surveyed 412 cat caregivers about how their feline companion acted after another pet in the house died. They found that, after the death of a fellow pet, cats on average sought more attention from their owners, spent more time alone, appeared to look for the deceased animal, ate less and slept more. © 2024 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29426 - Posted: 08.11.2024

By Freda Kreier Dogs’ ability to feel your pain could be innate. It is the result of centuries of co-evolution with humans, suggests a community-science study that compared the responses of dogs and pet pigs to the sound of humans crying and humming. The results were published on 2 July in Animal Behaviour1. Humans pay attention to how the animals in their lives are feeling, and it seems that this attentiveness is reciprocal. Researchers have found that horses will stop and listen longer to human growls than to laughter2. Pigs respond more strongly to sounds made by people than wild boars do3. But studies testing whether the animals are just reacting to weird human sounds, or are capable of true emotional contagion — the ability to interpret and reflect people’s emotional states — are thin on the ground. Most animals can accurately echo the feelings of only other members of their species. But studies have shown that dogs (Canis familiaris) can mirror the emotions of the people around them4,5. One question is whether this emotional contagion is rooted in ‘universal vocal signals of emotion ’ that can be understood by all domesticated animals, or is specific to companion animals such as dogs. To test this, researchers compared the stress response of dogs and pet pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) to human sounds. Pet sounds Like dogs, pet pigs are social animals that are from a young age raised around people. But unlike dogs, pigs have been kept as livestock for most of their history with humans. So, if emotional contagion can be learnt through just proximity to people, pet pigs should respond in similar ways to dogs. The team recruited dog or pig owners around the world to film themselves in a room with their pets while playing recorded sounds of crying or humming. Researchers then tallied the number of stress behaviours — such as whining and yawning for dogs, and rapid ear flicks for pigs — exhibited during the experiment. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29394 - Posted: 07.18.2024

By Laura Sanders Everyone knows that the brain influences the heart. Stressful thoughts can set the heart pounding, sometimes with such deep force that we worry people can hear it. Anxiety can trigger the irregular skittering of atrial fibrillation. In more extreme and rarer cases, emotional turmoil from a shock — the death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, an intense argument — can trigger a syndrome that mimics a heart attack. But not everyone knows that the heart talks back. Subscribe to Science News Powerful signals travel from the heart to the brain, affecting our perceptions, decisions and mental health. And the heart is not alone in talking back. Other organs also send mysterious signals to the brain in ways that scientists are just beginning to tease apart. A bodywide perspective that seeks to understand our biology and behavior is relatively new, leaving lots of big, basic questions. The complexities of brain-body interactions are “only matched by our ignorance of their organization,” says Peter Strick, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Exploring the relationships between the heart, other organs and the brain isn’t just fascinating anatomy. A deeper understanding of how we sense and use signals from inside our bodies — a growing field called interoception — may point to new treatments for disorders such as anxiety. “We have forgotten that interactions with the internal world are probably as important as interactions with the external world,” says cognitive neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry of École Normale Supérieure in Paris. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 29313 - Posted: 05.18.2024

By Gillian Dohrn “Puppy-dog eyes didn’t just evolve for us, in domestic dogs,” says comparative anatomist Heather Smith. Her team’s work has thrown a 2019 finding1 that the muscles in dogs’ eyebrows evolved to communicate with humans in the doghouse by showing that African wild dogs also have the muscles to make the infamous pleading expression. The study was published on 10 April in The Anatomical Record2. Now, one of the researchers who described the evolution of puppy-dog eyebrow muscles is considering what the African dog discovery means for canine evolution. “It opens a door to thinking about where dogs come from, and what they are,” says Anne Burrows, a biological anthropologist at the Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and author of the earlier paper. The 2019 study garnered headlines around the world when it found that the two muscles responsible for creating the sad–sweet puppy-dog stare are pronounced in several domestic breeds (Canis familiaris), but almost absent in wolves (Canis lupus). If the social dynamic between humans and dogs drove eyebrow evolution, Smith wondered whether the highly social African wild dog might also have expressive brows. African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are native to sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1997 and 2012, their numbers dropped by half in some areas. With only 8,000 or so remaining in the wild, studying them is difficult but crucial for conservation efforts. Smith, who is based at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, and her colleagues dissected a recently deceased African wild dog from Phoenix Zoo. They found that both the levator anguli oculi medalis (LAOM) and the retractor anguli oculi lateralis (RAOL) muscles, credited with creating the puppy-dog expression, were similar in size to those of domestic dog breeds.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 29295 - Posted: 05.07.2024

By Sabrina Malhi The phrase “anger kills” might have a more literal meaning: New research suggests a possible reason frequent anger has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, emphasizes the potential health risks associated with intense anger and illuminates the influence of negative emotions on our overall well-being. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the study involved 280 healthy adults who were randomly assigned to a different eight-minute task, each designed to elicit feelings of anger, anxiety, sadness or neutrality. Before and after these emotional tasks, researchers assessed the participants’ endothelial health. Endothelial cells, which line the insides of blood vessels, are essential for maintaining vessel integrity and are vital for proper circulation and cardiovascular health. The findings revealed that anger had a significant negative impact on endothelial function, limiting the blood vessels’ ability to dilate. The response was not as pronounced with anxiety or sadness. According to Daichi Shimbo, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the lead study author, this research marks a step toward understanding how different negative emotions particularly affect physical health. “It's fascinating that anxiety and sadness did not have the same effect as anger, suggesting that the ways in which negative emotions contribute to heart disease differ,” Shimbo said.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29282 - Posted: 05.02.2024

By Helen Bradshaw With its hairless silicone skin and blue complexion, Emo the robot looks more like a mechanical re-creation of the Blue Man Group than a regular human. Until it smiles. In a study published March 27 in Science Robotics, researchers detail how they trained Emo to smile in sync with humans. Emo can predict a human smile 839 milliseconds before it happens and smile back. Right now, in most humanoid robots, there’s a noticeable delay before they can smile back at a person, often because the robots are imitating a person’s face in real time. “I think a lot of people actually interacting with a social robot for the first time are disappointed by how limited it is,” says Chaona Chen, a human-robot interaction researcher at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. “Improving robots’ expression in real time is important.” Through synced facial expressions, future iterations of robots could be sources of connection in our loneliness epidemic, says Yuhang Hu, a roboticist at Columbia University who, along with colleagues, created Emo (SN: 11/7/23). Cameras in the robot’s eyes let it detect subtleties in human expressions that it then emulates using 26 actuators underneath its soft, blue face. To train Emo, the researchers first put it in front of a camera for a few hours. Like looking in a mirror would do for humans and their muscles, looking at itself in the camera while researchers ran random motor commands on the actuators helped Emo learn the relationships between activating actuators in its face and the expressions it created. “Then the robot knows, OK, if I want to make a smiley face, I should actuate these ‘muscles,’” Hu says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29258 - Posted: 04.16.2024

By Christina Caron Anxious ahead of a big job interview? Worried about giving a speech? First date nerves? The solution, some digital start-ups suggest, is a beta blocker, a type of medication that can slow heart rate and lower blood pressure — masking some of the physical symptoms of anxiety. Typically a trip to the doctor’s office would be necessary to get a prescription, but a number of companies are now connecting patients with doctors for quick virtual visits and shipping the medication to people’s homes. “No more ‘Shaky and Sweaty,’” one online ad promised. “Easy fast 15 minute intake.” That worries Dr. Yvette I. Sheline, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. “The first question is: What is going on with this person?” Dr. Sheline said. Are they depressed in addition to anxious? Do they have chronic anxiety or is it just a temporary case of stage fright? “You don’t want to end up prescribing the wrong thing,” she added. In addition, although beta blockers are generally considered safe, experts say they can carry unpleasant side effects and should be used with caution. What are beta blockers? Beta blockers such as propranolol hydrochloride have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for chest pain, migraine prevention, involuntary tremors, abnormal heart rhythms and other uses. Some are still prescribed for hypertension, although they’re no longer considered the preferred treatment, mainly because other medications are more effective in preventing stroke and death. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29247 - Posted: 04.06.2024

James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which is situated like a bun at the back of the brain. This is no small oversight: The cerebellum contains three-quarters of all the brain’s neurons, which are organized in an almost crystalline arrangement, in contrast to the tangled thicket of neurons found elsewhere. Encyclopedia articles and textbooks underscore the fact that the cerebellum’s function is to control body movement. There is no question that the cerebellum has this function. But scientists now suspect that this long-standing view is myopic. Or so I learned in November in Washington, D.C., while attending the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the largest meeting of neuroscientists in the world. There, a pair of neuroscientists organized a symposium on newly discovered functions of the cerebellum unrelated to motor control. New experimental techniques are showing that in addition to controlling movement, the cerebellum regulates complex behaviors, social interactions, aggression, working memory, learning, emotion and more. The connection between the cerebellum and movement has been known since the 19th century. Patients suffering trauma to the brain region had obvious difficulties with balance and movement, leaving no doubt that it was critical for coordinating motion. Over the decades, neuroscientists developed a detailed understanding of how the cerebellum’s unique neural circuitry controls motor function. The explanation of how the cerebellum worked seemed watertight. Then, in 1998, in the journal Brain, neurologists reported on wide-ranging emotional and cognitive disabilities in patients with damage to the cerebellum. For example, in 1991, a 22-year-old female college student had fallen while ice skating; a CT scan revealed a tumor in her cerebellum. After it was removed surgically, she was a completely different person. The bright college student had lost her ability to write with proficiency, do mental arithmetic, name common objects or copy a simple diagram. Her mood flattened. She hid under covers and behaved inappropriately, undressing in the corridors and speaking in baby talk. Her social interactions, including recognizing familiar faces, were also impaired.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 29118 - Posted: 01.27.2024

By Amber Dance 01.08.2024 We all want to be happy — and for decades, psychologists have tried to figure out how we might achieve that blissful state. The field’s many surveys and experiments have pointed to a variety of approaches, from giving stuff away to quitting Facebook to forcing one’s face into a toothy grin. But psychology has undergone serious upheaval over the last decade, as researchers realized that many studies were unreliable and unrepeatable. That has led to a closer scrutiny of psychological research methods, with the study of happiness no exception. So — what really makes us happy? Under today’s more careful microscope, some routes to happiness seem to hold up, while others appear not to, or have yet to re-prove themselves. Here’s what we know so far, and what remains to be reassessed, according to a new analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology. One long-standing hypothesis is that smiling makes you feel happier. In a classic 1988 study, researchers asked 92 Illinois undergraduates to hold a felt tip pen in their mouth either with their teeth, forcing an unnatural grin, or with their lips, making them pout. The students then looked at four examples of The Far Side comics. On average, those with the forced smiles found the one-panel comics slightly funnier than those with the forced pouts. But when 17 different research labs got together to retest the pen-clench smile’s effects on 1,894 new participants, the finding failed to hold up, the researchers reported in 2016. The repetition study was part of a broader effort to counter psychology’s reproducibility crisis, which in part has been attributed to the variety of ways in which researchers could examine and reanalyze their data until they arrived at publishable results. “It’s kind of like shooting a bunch of arrows at the wall and drawing the bullseye on after,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and coauthor of the new Annual Review of Psychology paper.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29086 - Posted: 01.09.2024

Saga Briggs Trauma is not merely a phenomenon of the mind but also a condition physically embedded in the body, often eluding our conscious awareness and affecting our overall health. That was the main argument in psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, which quickly became a modern classic among trauma researchers, clinicians, and survivors. The book shifted how many in the West view psychiatric illness, which was often viewed solely through a psychological or neurochemical lens, and it sparked new interest in more holistic treatments for trauma that had long been considered alternative: yoga, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), the performing arts, and psychedelics, to name a few. But what does it really mean for the body to “keep the score”? Is it biologically possible for the viscera to actually store and release trauma? In his book, van der Kolk writes: “The body keeps the score. If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.” Can the body “keep score”? Recently, neuroscientists have expressed skepticism over the notion that the body can “keep score” of anything. In a 2023 Big Think video, Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that everything, including trauma, is in our heads, and that “the brain keeps the score and the body is the scorecard.” In her view, everything we experience is constructed by the brain, which learns to predict how we will feel based on past experiences, issues, and sensations that seem to come from our body but actually come from our brain. “When you feel your heart beating, you are not feeling it in your chest, you are feeling it in your brain,” she said. “Your body is always sending sensory signals to the brain, of course, but emotions are made in the brain, not in the body. They are experienced in the brain, like everything else you experience, not in the body. If you experience a trauma, you experience it in your brain.”

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29031 - Posted: 12.06.2023

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre A gray cat stares quietly at a nearby orange tabby, squinting her eyes, flattening her ears, and licking her lips. The tabby glares back, wrinkles his nose, and pulls back his whiskers. Cat people know what’s about to go down: a fight. If looks and growls don’t resolve the budding tiff, claws will pop out and fur will fly. Those faces aren’t the only ones cats make at each other, of course—not by a long shot. In a study published this month in Behavioural Processes, researchers tallied 276 different feline facial expressions, used to communicate hostile and friendly intent and everything in between. What’s more, the team found, we humans might be to thank: Our feline friends may have evolved this range of sneers, smiles, and grimaces over the course of their 10,000-year history with us. “Many people still consider cats—erroneously—to be a largely nonsocial species,” says Daniel Mills, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Lincoln who was not involved in the study. The facial expressions described in the new study suggest otherwise, he notes. “There is clearly a lot going on that we are not aware of.” Cats can be solitary creatures, but they often form friendships with fellow kitties in people’s homes or on the street; feral cats can live in colonies of thousands, sometimes taking over entire islands. Lauren Scott, a medical student and self-described cat person at the University of Kansas, long wondered how all these felines communicated with one another. There has to be love and diplomacy, not just fighting, yet most studies of feline expression have focused on aggression. Fortunately in 2021, Scott was studying at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), just minutes from the CatCafé Lounge. There, human visitors can interact—and even do yoga—with dozens of group-housed, adoptable cats. From August to June, Scott video recorded 194 minutes of cats’ facial expressions, specifically those aimed at other cats, after the café had closed for the day. Then she and evolutionary psychologist Brittany Florkiewicz, also at UCLA at the time but now at Lyon College, coded all their facial muscle movements—excluding any related to breathing, chewing, yawning, and the like.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 28977 - Posted: 10.28.2023

By Charles Digges Is there any kind of fence that can make humans and elephants good neighbors? It’s a question Dominique Gonçalves has had to ponder as she leads the elephant ecology project at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, which is not surrounded by a physical barrier. A number of pioneering studies throughout Sub-Saharan Africa over the past several years showed a solution that was simple and natural: bees. As it turns out, the tiny, ubiquitous honeybee has the power to terrify a mammal that’s 22 million times its size. In fact, even the sound of the insect’s buzz is enough to send a family of elephants into a panic, showed studies by Lucy King, an Oxford zoologist and preeminent researcher in human-elephant coexistence at the nonprofit Save the Elephants. Upon hearing the telltale hum, elephants will run, kick up dust, shake their heads as if trying to swat the bees out of the air, trumpeting distressed warnings to other elephants as they flee. Of course, a bee’s stinger can’t penetrate the thick hide of an elephant. But when bees swarm—and African bees swarm aggressively—hundreds of bees might sting an elephant in its most sensitive areas, like the trunk, the mouth, and eyes. And it works. Building on King’s insights, Paola Branco of the University of Idaho conducted a massive two-year-long experiment in Gorongosa that culminated in a 2019 paper she co-authored with King, Marc Stalmans, Gorongosa’s director of scientific services, Princeton zoologist Robert Pringle, and others.1 Their research aimed to settle tensions between human farmers and the park’s growing population of marauding pachyderms—with the help of bees. © 2023 NautilusNext Inc.,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 28976 - Posted: 10.28.2023

By Simon Makin Rats are extremely playful creatures. They love playing chase, and they literally jump for joy when tickled. Central to this playfulness, a new study finds, are cells in a specific region of rats’ brains. Neurons in the periaqueductal gray, or PAG, are active in rats during different kinds of play, scientists report July 28 in Neuron. And blocking the activity of those neurons makes the rodents much less playful. The results give insight into a poorly understood behavior, particularly in terms of how play is controlled in the brain. “There are prejudices that it’s childish and not important, but play is an underrated behavior,” says Michael Brecht, a neuroscientist at Humboldt University in Berlin. Scientists think play helps animals develop resilience. Some even relate it to optimal functioning. “When you’re playing, you’re being your most creative, thoughtful, interactive self,” says Jeffrey Burgdorf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who was not involved in the new study. This is the opposite of depressive states, and Burgdorf’s own research aims to turn understanding the neuroscience of play into new therapies for mood disorders. For the new study, Brecht and colleagues got rats used to lab life and being tickled and played with in a game of chase-the-hand. When rats play, they squeal with glee at a frequency of 50 kilohertz, which humans can’t hear. The researchers recorded these ultrasonic giggles as a way of measuring when the rats were having fun. To explore how a specific brain region in rats might relate to their well-documented play behavior, researchers tickled rats on their bellies and backs and played chase-the-hand. Rats also played together, chasing and play-fighting. Ultrasonic giggles, processed to make them audible to humans, coordinate social play and show that the rats are having fun. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 28864 - Posted: 08.02.2023

By Ula Chrobak A couple of weeks after I adopted my dog, Halle, I realized she had a problem. When left alone, she would pace, bark incessantly, and ignore any treats I left her in favor of chewing my belongings. When I returned, I’d find my border collie mix panting heavily with wide, fearful eyes. As frustrated as I was, though, I restrained the urge to scold her, realizing her destruction was born out of panic. Halle’s behavior was a textbook illustration of separation anxiety. Distressed over being left alone, an otherwise perfectly mannered pup might chomp the couch, scratch doors, or relieve themselves on the floor. Problem behaviors like these tend to be interpreted as acts of willful defiance, but they often stem from intense emotions. Dogs, like humans, can act out of character when they are distressed. And, as with people, some dogs may be neurologically more prone to anxiety. So concluded a recent brain imaging study, published in PLOS One, in which researchers performed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging on 25 canines that were deemed behaviorally “normal,” and 13 that had been diagnosed with anxiety, based on a behavioral evaluation. The scans revealed that anxious dogs had stronger connections between several of five brain regions that the researchers called the anxiety circuit: the amygdala, frontal lobe, hippocampus, mesencephalon, and thalamus. The team also saw weaker connections between the hippocampus and midbrain in anxious dogs, which can signal difficulties in learning and might explain why the owners reported decreased trainability in these dogs. That the neurological architecture of anxious dogs seems to parallel the signatures of human anxiety comes as little surprise to many animal behavior experts.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 28782 - Posted: 05.13.2023

By Bethany Brookshire When you’re stressed and anxious, you might feel your heart race. Is your heart racing because you’re afraid? Or does your speeding heart itself contribute to your anxiety? Both could be true, a new study in mice suggests. By artificially increasing the heart rates of mice, scientists were able to increase anxiety-like behaviors — ones that the team then calmed by turning off a particular part of the brain. The study, published in the March 9 Nature, shows that in high-risk contexts, a racing heart could go to your head and increase anxiety. The findings could offer a new angle for studying and, potentially, treating anxiety disorders. The idea that body sensations might contribute to emotions in the brain goes back at least to one of the founders of psychology, William James, says Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. In James’ 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, he put forward the idea that emotion follows what the body experiences. “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” James wrote. The brain certainly can sense internal body signals, a phenomenon called interoception. But whether those sensations — like a racing heart — can contribute to emotion is difficult to prove, says Anna Beyeler, a neuroscientist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux. She studies brain circuitry related to emotion and wrote a commentary on the new study but was not involved in the research. “I’m sure a lot of people have thought of doing these experiments, but no one really had the tools,” she says. Deisseroth has spent his career developing those tools. He is one of the scientists who developed optogenetics — a technique that uses viruses to modify the genes of specific cells to respond to bursts of light (SN: 6/18/21; SN: 1/15/10). Scientists can use the flip of a light switch to activate or suppress the activity of those cells. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 28705 - Posted: 03.15.2023

By Elizabeth Preston Several years ago, Christian Rutz started to wonder whether he was giving his crows enough credit. Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his team were capturing wild New Caledonian crows and challenging them with puzzles made from natural materials before releasing them again. In one test, birds faced a log drilled with holes that contained hidden food, and could get the food out by bending a plant stem into a hook. If a bird didn’t try within 90 minutes, the researchers removed it from the dataset. But, Rutz says, he soon began to realize he was not, in fact, studying the skills of New Caledonian crows. He was studying the skills of only a subset of New Caledonian crows that quickly approached a weird log they’d never seen before — maybe because they were especially brave, or reckless. The team changed their protocol. They began giving the more hesitant birds an extra day or two to get used to their surroundings, then trying the puzzle again. “It turns out that many of these retested birds suddenly start engaging,” Rutz says. “They just needed a little bit of extra time.” Scientists are increasingly realizing that animals, like people, are individuals. They have distinct tendencies, habits and life experiences that may affect how they perform in an experiment. That means, some researchers argue, that much published research on animal behavior may be biased. Studies claiming to show something about a species as a whole — that green sea turtles migrate a certain distance, say, or how chaffinches respond to the song of a rival — may say more about individual animals that were captured or housed in a certain way, or that share certain genetic features. That’s a problem for researchers who seek to understand how animals sense their environments, gain new knowledge and live their lives. “The samples we draw are quite often severely biased,” Rutz says. “This is something that has been in the air in the community for quite a long time.” In 2020, Rutz and his colleague Michael Webster, also at the University of St. Andrews, proposed a way to address this problem. They called it STRANGE. © 2023 Annual Reviews

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 28700 - Posted: 03.11.2023