Transient food insecurity during the juvenile-adolescent period affects adult weight, cognitive flexibility, and dopamine neurobiology.

A major challenge for neuroscience, public health, and evolutionary biology is to understand the effects of scarcity and uncertainty on the developing brain. Currently, a significant fraction of children and adolescents worldwide experience insecure access to food. The goal of our work was to test in mice whether the transient experience of insecure versus secure access to food during the juvenile-adolescent period produced lasting differences in learning, decision-making, and the dopamine system in adulthood.

Addressing the Vaccine Hesitancy Continuum: An Audience Segmentation Analysis of American Adults Who Did Not Receive the 2009 H1N1 Vaccine.

Understanding the heterogeneity of groups along the vaccine hesitancy continuum presents an opportunity to tailor and increase the impact of public engagement efforts with these groups. Audience segmentation can support these goals, as demonstrated here in the context of the 2009 H1N1 vaccine. In March 2010, we surveyed 1569 respondents, drawn from a nationally representative sample of American adults, with oversampling of racial/ethnic minorities and persons living below the United States Federal Poverty Level.

Adolescent development of inhibition as a function of SES and gender: Converging evidence from behavior and fMRI.

The ability to adaptively inhibit responses to tempting/distracting stimuli in the pursuit of goals is an essential set of skills necessary for adult competence and wellbeing. These inhibitory capacities develop throughout childhood, with growing evidence of important maturational changes occurring in adolescence. There also has been intense interest in the role of social adversity on the development of executive function, including inhibitory control.

Crisis communication: an inequalities perspective on the 2010 Boston water crisis.

Objective: Although the field of crisis risk communication has generated substantial research, the interaction between social determinants, communication processes, and behavioral compliance has been less well studied. With the goal of better understanding these interactions, this report examines how social determinants influenced communications and behavioral compliance during the 2010 Boston, Massachusetts, water crisis.

Methods: An online survey was conducted to assess Boston residents' knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, mass and interpersonal communication, and preventive behaviors on emergency preparedness topics dealing with the water crisis.

Message formats and their influence on perceived risks of tobacco use: a pilot formative research project in India.

In India, tobacco kills 900,000 people every year though the burden of tobacco is faced disproportionately in poorer states such as Bihar. Teachers may be a particularly influential group in setting norms around tobacco use in the Indian context. However, tobacco use among teachers remains high and perceptions of tobacco-related health risks are unexplored.

Coordinating research and practice: challenges testing messages to increase medical reserve corps participation in local health department activities.

Local health departments (LHDs) increasingly depend on volunteers, often Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) volunteers, to assist with a variety of functions. While LHDs have extensive lists of volunteers, only about 10 % are actively involved in LHD activities. Psychological literature has shown that well-designed messages can motivate behavior among individuals.

Socioeconomic status, demographics, beliefs and A(H1N1) vaccine uptake in the United States.

Early vaccination against influenza viruses is a cost-effective solution to prevent contagion and reduce influenza-related morbidity and mortality. In the face of pandemic viruses, such as the A(H1N1), adequate rates of vaccine uptake play a critical role in containing the spread and effects of the disease. In order to understand the reasons underlying the relatively low 2009-2010 A(H1N1) vaccination rates, we conducted an online survey of 1569 respondents drawn from a nationally representative sample of United States (U.

Class, race, ethnicity and information needs in post-treatment cancer patients.

Objective: Health information-seeking behaviors (HISBs) are associated with active participation in cancer care decisions which, in turn, may positively impact health outcomes. The goal of this study was to develop a taxonomy of topics for which post-treatment cancer patients sought information, and to explore HISB patterns by sociodemographic factors and cancer type.

Methods: We examined how health information seeking is associated with social determinants in a survey of 521 post-treatment cancer patients.

Measuring Pavlovian fear with conditioned freezing and conditioned suppression reveals different roles for the basolateral amygdala.

In Pavlovian fear conditioning, pairing a neutral cue with aversive foot shock endows a cue with fear-eliciting properties. Studies of Pavlovian fear conditioning measuring freezing have demonstrated the basolateral amygdala (BLA) to be critical to both fear learning and memory. The nucleus accumbens core (NAc), while not important to freezing, is important to the enhancement of instrumental responding by cues paired with food reward.

The basolateral amygdala mediates the effects of cues associated with meal interruption on feeding behavior.

Considerable evidence shows that environmental cues that signal food delivery when rats are food-deprived can substantially potentiate feeding later when rats are food-sated. Similarly, cues associated with meal interruption, food removal or impending food scarcity may also induce increased eating. For example, after learning the association between a discrete "interruption" stimulus and the unexpected termination of food trials, sated rats show enhanced food consumption when exposed to that stimulus.

Effects of cues associated with meal interruption on feeding behavior.

Food consumption is controlled by both internal and external factors. Environmental signals associated with food may prepare an animal to forage, consume and digest more effectively. Furthermore, environmental cues that provide information about food availability enable animals to make predictions about future food resources and act upon that knowledge in appropriate fashion.

Pavlovian influences on goal-directed behavior in mice: the role of cue-reinforcer relations.

Two experiments refined procedures to study Pavlovian influences on goal-directed behavior in mice and studied the effects of CS-US relations in Pavlovian-instrumental interactions. Independent groups of mice underwent Pavlovian training to associate either a 10-sec or 2-min auditory stimulus (CS) with reward. We next assessed the ability of the response-contingent CS presentations to reinforce novel instrumental responding (conditioned reinforcement; CRf) or the ability of noncontingent CS presentations to increase ongoing instrumental responding (Pavlovian-instrumental transfer; PIT).

Reinforcer-specificity of appetitive and consummatory behavior of rats after Pavlovian conditioning with food reinforcers.

We examined the reinforcer-specificity of Pavlovian conditioning in the control of appetitive and consummatory behaviors in Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer, cue-potentiated eating, and devaluation procedures. Rats received pairings of one conditioned stimulus with sucrose and another conditioned stimulus with maltodextrin. In Experiment 1, rats were also trained to earn sucrose for one instrumental response and maltodextrin for another.