Nucleus accumbens (NAc) is involved in behaviors that depend on heightened wakefulness, but its impact on arousal remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that NAc dopamine D1 receptor (D1R)-expressing ...neurons are essential for behavioral arousal. Using in vivo fiber photometry in mice, we find arousal-dependent increases in population activity of NAc D1R neurons. Optogenetic activation of NAc D1R neurons induces immediate transitions from non-rapid eye movement sleep to wakefulness, and chemogenetic stimulation prolongs arousal, with decreased food intake. Patch-clamp, tracing, immunohistochemistry, and electron microscopy reveal that NAc D1R neurons project to the midbrain and lateral hypothalamus, and might disinhibit midbrain dopamine neurons and lateral hypothalamus orexin neurons. Photoactivation of terminals in the midbrain and lateral hypothalamus is sufficient to induce wakefulness. Silencing of NAc D1R neurons suppresses arousal, with increased nest-building behaviors. Collectively, our data indicate that NAc D1R neuron circuits are essential for the induction and maintenance of wakefulness.
Men and Things, Women and People Su, Rong; Rounds, James; Armstrong, Patrick Ian
Psychological bulletin,
11/2009, Letnik:
135, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for
Holland's (1959
,
1997
) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, ...Social, Enterprising, and Conventional),
Prediger's (1982)
Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (
d
= 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (
d
= 0.84) and Investigative (
d
= 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (
d
= −0.35), Social (
d
= −0.68), and Conventional (
d
= −0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (
d
= 1.11), science (
d
= 0.36), and mathematics (
d
= 0.34) interests. Average effect sizes varied across interest inventories, ranging from 0.08 to 0.79. The quality of interest inventories, based on professional reputation, was not differentially related to the magnitude of sex differences. Moderators of the effect sizes included interest inventory item development strategy, scoring method, theoretical framework, and sample variables of age and cohort. Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences. The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
The Nature and Power of Interests Rounds, James; Su, Rong
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
04/2014, Letnik:
23, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Despite their significance to both individuals and organizations, interests are often misunderstood, and their predictive power is often overlooked. In this article, we discuss the nature of ...interests, describe several key features of interests, and, contrary to the received knowledge of many, explain how interests can be used to predict career and educational choice, performance, and success. Finally, we discuss the continuity of interests across the life span and explain how evidence of stability supports conceptualizations of interests as being distinct dispositions rather than simply extensions or workplace instantiations of basic personality traits.
This paper integrates the rapidly growing literatures on the individual and organizational factors that contribute to women’s career equality. We organize studies into three research perspectives: ...career preference, gender bias, and work-family explanations. These literatures diverge on whether women “opt out” or are “pushed out” of leadership positions in organizations. Further, the interconnectedness of these “pushes” and “pulls” and micro-macro linkages are not well-integrated. This creates a lack of clarity about what scholars should study and what practices organizations should implement. We define women’s career equality as an individual and organizational phenomenon involving the degree to which women (a) have equal access to and participation in career opportunities, and (b) experience equal intrinsic and extrinsic work and nonwork outcomes compared to men. We bridge the interdisciplinary divides by developing an integrative multi-level model of women’s career equality. We propose that individuals’ career perceptions and experiences are embedded in social contexts reflecting the climate for gender inclusion and interact with these contexts to shape women’s career equality outcomes. The climate for gender inclusion has three dimensions: fairness, leveraging talent, and workplace support. We identify coalescing themes to stimulate future research, including attention to national socio-economic influences, improving metrics and measurement of gender inclusion climate, multi-level career equality outcomes, a joint focus on implicit and explicit bias, and designing cross-disciplinary interventions for experiments. In order to foster theory-based research that is linked to practice, we suggest implementing and scientifically evaluating comprehensive workplace interventions that integrate perspectives and levels.
The rapid growth of an aging population creates challenges regarding age-related diseases, including AKI, for which both the prevalence and death rate increase with age. The molecular mechanism by ...which the aged kidney becomes more susceptible to acute injury has not been completely elucidated. In this study, we found that, compared with the kidneys of 3-month-old mice, the kidneys of 20-month-old mice expressed reduced levels of the renal protective molecule sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) and its cofactor NAD
Supplementation with nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), an NAD
precursor, restored renal SIRT1 activity and NAD
content in 20-month-old mice and further increased both in 3-month-old mice. Moreover, supplementation with NMN significantly protected mice in both age groups from cisplatin-induced AKI. SIRT1 deficiency blunted the protective effect of NMN, and microarray data revealed that c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) signaling activation associated with renal injury in SIRT1 heterozygotes.
, SIRT1 attenuated the stress response by modulating the JNK signaling pathway, probably
the deacetylation of a JNK phosphatase, DUSP16. Taken together, our findings reveal SIRT1 as a crucial mediator in the renal aging process. Furthermore, manipulation of SIRT1 activity by NMN seems to be a potential pharmaceutical intervention for AKI that could contribute to the precise treatment of aged patients with AKI.
This investigation proposes an energy management system for large multizone commercial buildings that combines distributed optimization with the adaptive learning. While the distributed optimization ...provides scalability and models the fresh-air infusion as ventilation constraints, the learning algorithm simultaneously captures the influences of occupancy and user interactions. The approach employs a hierarchical architecture and uses a service-oriented framework to propose a distributed optimization method for commercial buildings. In addition, it also includes operational constraints required for optimizing the building energy consumption not studied in the literature. We show that our hierarchical architecture provides much better scalability and minimal performance loss comparable to the centralized approach. We illustrate that the influences of operational constraints on chiller, duct, damper, and ventilation are important for studying the energy savings. The energy saving potential of the proposed approach is illustrated on a 10-zone building, while its scalability is shown via simulations on a 500-zone building. To study the robustness of the approach meeting cancellations or other events that influence zone thermal dynamics, the resulting energy savings are studied. The results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm in terms of scalability, energy consumption, and robustness.
Recently, a new language-based time-optimal control framework has been proposed. We adopt that new framework in this paper and address the finite-makespan controller synthesis problem. A ...polynomial-time algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. In order to determine the potential difference between the attained finite makespan and the expected minimum makespan for the sake of evaluating the performance of a synthesized finite-makespan controller, we provide another polynomial-time algorithm to compute a strictly lower bound of the minimum makespan so that explicitly computing the minimum makespan can be avoid, as the latter turns out to be NP-hard. Experimental results are provided to show the effectiveness of our algorithms.
The current meta-analysis investigated the extent to which personality traits changed as a result of intervention, with the primary focus on clinical interventions. We identified 207 studies that had ...tracked changes in measures of personality traits during interventions, including true experiments and prepost change designs. Interventions were associated with marked changes in personality trait measures over an average time of 24 weeks (e.g., d = .37). Additional analyses showed that the increases replicated across experimental and nonexperimental designs, for nonclinical interventions, and persisted in longitudinal follow-ups of samples beyond the course of intervention. Emotional stability was the primary trait domain showing changes as a result of therapy, followed by extraversion. The type of therapy employed was not strongly associated with the amount of change in personality traits. Patients presenting with anxiety disorders changed the most, and patients being treated for substance use changed the least. The relevance of the results for theory and social policy are discussed.
With full observation the problem of synthesizing a minimum-weighted supervisor has been shown polynomial-time solvable. With partial observation the problem becomes NP-hard. In this paper we will ...show that the decision version of the problem becomes NP-complete when the natural projection is a natural observer. This NP-completeness result is unexpected, considering that the logic supervisor synthesis problem under the same assumption becomes polynomial-time solvable.
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