Topic: sex-specific differences

Early adversities can shape adult behavior, and the early developmental period is an important temporal window for the maturation of brain structures. Potential different phenotypes resulting from environmental modifications during development can eventually impact susceptibility to psychiatric disorders and contribute to the emergence of eating disorders, substance abuse, as well as alter cognitive processes and memory formation. Maternal separation (MS) is a model of early stress that leads to long-lasting changes in the responsiveness of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, as well as b

The field of developmental neuroscience is expanding rapidly, yet neuroimaging studies in children remain less common than in adults. Movie-watching paradigms may overcome this and further reduce head motion while increasing compliance when working with younger children. Here we characterize neural responses associated with emotion processing and regulation, utilizing a newly developed fMRI movie-watching paradigm. 55 children (6-14 years, 30 female) and 63 young adults (18-30 years, 31 female) watched a 12-minute montage of clips from the movie "Inside Out" (Docter & Del Carmen, 2015) dur

The subjective experience of internal sensation processing (interoception) which affects emotions, appears to be altered in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and anxiety disorders. Anxiety is a frequently co-occurring condition in patients with ASD, exacerbating ASD symptoms and causing functional impairments in these individuals. In contrast to anxiety in normotypic populations, our knowledge about the neuronal correlates of anxiety in ASD is very limited. Here we investigated behavioral responses to CO2 inhalation in Setd5 haploinsufficient (Setd5+/-) mice, which demonstrate signs of ASD and al

Sleep deprivation represents a significant public health problem in countries around the world, resulting in significant impairments in memory and performance. The hippocampus is particularly susceptible to the effects of sleep deprivation. Increasingly, studies suggest sex-specific behavioral differences occur following acute sleep deprivation, but almost all molecular studies have examined changes in males. Consequently, we investigated changes in gene expression following acute sleep deprivation in female mice at different estrous stages. Following one week of individual housing and pre-han