Fos expression in the periaqueductal gray, but not the ventromedial hypothalamus, is correlated with psychosocial stress-induced cocaine-seeking behavior in rats.

Psychosocial stressors are known to promote cocaine craving and relapse in humans but are infrequently employed in preclinical relapse models. Consequently, the underlying neural circuitry by which these stressors drive cocaine seeking has not been thoroughly explored. Using Fos expression analyses, we sought to examine whether the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) or periaqueductal gray (PAG), two critical components of the brain's hypothalamic defense system, are activated during psychosocial stress-induced cocaine seeking.

Independent and Interactive Impacts of Prenatal Exposure to Legal Substances and Childhood Trauma on Emotion Processing in Pre-Adolescents: Preliminary Findings From the ABCD Study.

Objective: This paper investigated the effects of prenatal drug exposure (PDE), childhood trauma (CT), and their interactions on the neurobiological markers for emotion processing.

Method: Here, in a non-clinical sample of pre-adolescents (9-10 years of age) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (N = 6,146), we investigate the impact of PDE to commonly used substances (ie, alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana), CT, and their interaction on emotion processing. From the Emotional N-back functional magnetic resonance imaging task data, we selected 26 regions of interests, previously implicated in emotion processing, and conducted separate linear mixed models (108 total) and accounted for available environmental risk factors.

Dynamic Functional Connectivity Correlates of Trait Mindfulness in Early Adolescence.

Background: Trait mindfulness-the tendency to attend to present-moment experiences without judgment-is negatively correlated with adolescent anxiety and depression. Understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie trait mindfulness may inform the neural basis of psychiatric disorders. However, few studies have identified brain connectivity states that are correlated with trait mindfulness in adolescence, and they have not assessed the reliability of such states.

The Human Connectome Project of adolescent anxiety and depression dataset.

This article describes primary data and resources available from the Boston Adolescent Neuroimaging of Depression and Anxiety (BANDA) study, a novel arm of the Human Connectome Project (HCP). Data were collected from 215 adolescents (14-17 years old), 152 of whom had current diagnoses of anxiety and/or depressive disorders at study intake. Data include cross-sectional structural (T1- and T2-weighted), functional (resting state and three tasks), and diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images.