Posttraumatic growth (PTG) describes positive psychological change and improvement beyond one's previous functioning. It manifests as a change of self-perception, improvement in the relationship with others, and a better outlook on life. Despite consistent literature on the occurrence of PTG in healthy subjects, there is still a dearth of studies in people with pre-existing mental disorders, especially anxiety disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenetic assimilation-the evolutionary process by which an environmentally induced phenotype is made constitutive-represents a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology. Thought to reflect adaptive phenotypic plasticity, matricidal hatching in nematodes is triggered by maternal nutrient deprivation to allow for protection or resource provisioning of offspring. Here, we report natural populations harboring genetic variants expressing a derived state of near-constitutive matricidal hatching.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmental signals often control central life history decisions, including the choice between reproduction and somatic maintenance. Such adaptive developmental plasticity occurs in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, where environmental cues govern whether larvae will develop directly into reproducing adults or arrest their development to become stress-resistant dauer larvae. Here, we identified a natural variant underlying enhanced sensitivity to dauer-inducing cues in C.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAttention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been associated with neural hyposensitivity to reward-predicting cues. Methylphenidate is widely used in the management of the disorder's symptoms, but its effects on reward sensitivity in ADHD are unknown. The current study used fMRI to measure striatal responses to reward-predicting cues in adults with ADHD on and off methylphenidate and a control group, during a classical conditioning task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A growing number of studies are questioning the validity of current DSM diagnoses, either as "discrete" or distinct mental disorders and/or as phenotypically homogeneous syndromes. In this study, we investigated how symptom domains in patients with a main diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder (PD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) coaggregate. We predicted that symptom domains would be unrelated to DSM diagnostic categories and less likely to cluster with each other as severity increases.
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