Stress-induced overeating behaviors explained from a (transitory) relief-learning perspective.

People use various behaviors to cope with stressful events. These behaviors are mostly adaptive, as they allow a successful release of stress without impacting other aspects of life: How nice is it to have a break with a few spoons of that favorite ice cream during a hectic working day? However, when excessive consumption of high-sugar/salt ultra-processed food becomes the gateway to find relief from stress, eating loses this adaptive function and may escalate to binge eating, lead to obesity, and other medical conditions linked to overweight. Several etiological models attempt to explain stress-induced eating and excessive overeating behaviors characterizing these clinical conditions.

Challenges and Opportunities behind the Use of in Paleogenomics Studies.

Paleogenomics focuses on the recovery, manipulation, and analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA) from historical or long-dead organisms to reconstruct and analyze their genomes. The aDNA is commonly obtained from remains found in paleontological and archaeological sites, conserved in museums, and in other archival collections. collections represent a great source of phenotypic and genotypic information, and their exploitation has allowed for inference and clarification of previously unsolved taxonomic and systematic relationships.

Impaired action-safety learning and excessive relief during avoidance in patients with anxiety disorders.

Anxiety-related disorders are characterized by high levels of avoidance, but experimental research into avoidance learning in patients is scarce. To fill this gap, we compared healthy controls (HC, n = 47) with patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD, n = 33), panic disorder with agoraphobia (PDA, n = 40), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, n = 66) in a computer-based avoidance learning task, in order to examine (1) differences in rates of avoidance responses, (2) differences in action-safety learning during avoidance, and (3) differences in subjective relief following successful avoidance. The task comprised aversive negative pictures (unconditional stimulus, US) that followed pictures of two colored lamps (conditional stimuli, CS+), but not a third colored lamp (safety stimulus, CS-), and could be avoided by pressing a button during one CS+ (CS+ avoidable) but not the other (CS+ unavoidable).

Overnight fasting affects avoidance learning and relief.

prolonged fasting influences threat and reward processing, two fundamental systems underpinning adaptive behaviors. In animals, overnight fasting sensitizes the mesolimbic-dopaminergic activity governing avoidance, reward, and fearextinction learning. Despite evidence that overnight fasting may also affect reward and fear learning in humans, effects on human avoidance learning have not been studied yet.