Newsletter. It s Christmas, with people full of kindness and a giving spirit, but is it also true for people in Science?

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Camron McKinney
5 years ago
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Christmas is all around us, songs are everywhere, streets are starting to fill up with lights and most of all, there is an increasing sense of joy, altruism and genuine giving.

As Professor Adam Grant, mentions in the Monitor on Psychology, October 2012, it is important to recognize natural givers and reward them, but even more important to screen out the ones that are

Our solid teamwork has helped our lab in initiating as well as completing number of exciting and important projects.

1 Newsletter November 2013 Neuropsychophysiology Lab IN THIS ISSUE Message from lab director Message from lab Lab Presentations Recently in Press Traveling around Interview Telling their stories It s Christmas, with people full of kindness and a giving spirit, but is it also true for people in Science? Christmas is all around us, songs are everywhere, streets are starting to fill up with lights and most of all, there is an increasing sense of joy, altruism and genuine giving. Kindheartedness is found even in science. Helping, assisting and collaborating are all part of making successful developments in science worldwide. As Professor Adam Grant, mentions in the Monitor on Psychology, October 2012, it is important to recognize natural givers and reward them, but even more important to screen out the ones that are merely takers. On that note, it is with great pleasure that I am addressing to our selfless and giving lab members with this editorial. Our solid teamwork has helped our lab in initiating as well as completing number of exciting and important projects. director Keeping the tradition of sharing and collaborating with other institutions has been most fruitful for our lab and we hope for this to continue for a long time. Given the successful collaborations with our extended scientific family members worldwide, the contribution and dedication of our team oriented lab members is worthy of a special praise. Working together as a team, we are bound to reach new heights, as well as help our lab in growing and expanding to all quarters of the world. I would like to congratulate our lab for the wonderful work being done this past year. I truly appreciate all the efforts of our lab members and collaborators, all of whom have worked day and night to make it a successful, friendly, and happy place to work. I hope this will remain to be our benchmark for all the upcoming years. I wish you all Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and a Very Happy new 2014! Reading Suggestions

2 Lab Presentations Marcelo Dias, MSc student Based on his master s thesis entitled The role of attention in the processing of emotional vocalizations: ERP insights, Marcelo presented

Data showed that emotional vocalizations elicit more positive P300 amplitudes as compared to neutral vocalizations.

The pathogenesis of the fatigue experienced by MS patients is not fully understood.

Sónia Sousa, PhD Student Based on her PhD project, Sónia presented a review of DTI studies about the microstructural developmental trajectory of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), frontal lobe connections

2 2 Lab Presentations Marcelo Dias, MSc student Based on his master s thesis entitled The role of attention in the processing of emotional vocalizations: ERP insights, Marcelo presented electrophysiological results on the processing of emotional and neutral non-verbal vocalizations. Data showed that emotional vocalizations elicit more positive P300 amplitudes as compared to neutral vocalizations. Luciana Gomes, PhD Student Luciana s presentation main aim was to summarize key aspects of the current thinking on fatigue in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The pathogenesis of the fatigue experienced by MS patients is not fully understood. The most recent theories on the pathophysiology of fatigue in MS were analyzed as well as the pharmacological and nonpharmacological approaches to its treatment. Sónia Sousa, PhD Student Based on her PhD project, Sónia presented a review of DTI studies about the microstructural developmental trajectory of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), frontal lobe connections and linkage between behavioral measures on executive functioning and PFC development. The results point to a protracted developmental trajectory within the PFC (namely dorsolateral + orbitofrontal) and subcortical areas (striatum, thalamus) translated in higher values of fractional anisotropy and lower values of mean, radial and axial diffusivity with increasing age. In this line, studies that correlate behavioral with structural measures add evidence for a progressive efficiency achievement on executing functioning performance paralleled by white matter development from childhood up to early adulthood. Catarina Fernandes, PhD Student Based on her PhD project, Catarina presented some data about sentence norms used by Brazilian children and adolescents, using the Cloze Procedure. The cloze procedure is a method of analysis used for the categorization of a sentence context according to their relative degree of constraint and to quantify the responses elicited by that sentence context. Cloze probabilities depend on various factors such as age and culture. Thus, it becomes very important to define sentence norms for the local population.

Recently in Press 3 In Press Recently accepted for publication an article by Jorge Leite (first author) and colleagues.

therapy and Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) that have yield controversial results.

beneficial for PD patients, either by mechanisms of homeostatic plasticity and by increases in the extracellular dopamine levels over the striatum. Leite, J., Gonçalves, O.F., & Carvalho, S.

021 Another accepted article for publication by Ana Osório (first author) and colleagues.

3 Recently in Press 3 In Press Recently accepted for publication an article by Jorge Leite (first author) and colleagues. In this article the authors hypothesize that transcranial direct current stimulation (tdcs) therapy can contribute to the cognitive symptoms amelioration in PD patients, differently of levodopa therapy and Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) that have yield controversial results. Specifically, they argue that the simultaneous deliver of cathodal tdcs (or ctdcs), over the right prefrontal cortex with anodal tdcs (or atdcs) to left prefrontal cortex could be potentially beneficial for PD patients, either by mechanisms of homeostatic plasticity and by increases in the extracellular dopamine levels over the striatum. Leite, J., Gonçalves, O.F., & Carvalho, S. (In press). Facilitative effects of bihemispheric tdcs in cognitive deficits of Parkinson Disease patients. Medical Hypotheses. Doi: /j.mehy Another accepted article for publication by Ana Osório (first author) and colleagues. In this study the authors related two Genetic syndromes Smith-Magenis syndrome (SMS) and Williams syndrome (WS) because these syndromes offer unique opportunities to explore the links between specific genes and neurodevelopment disorders. The results showed that both syndromes present, albeit in distinct degrees, behavioral signs of the autistic spectrum. These results contribute to a better definition of the neurobehavioral profiles of SMS and WS that may, in turn, prove beneficial for early diagnosis and intervention. Osório, A., Sampaio, A., Regueiro, R.M., Garayzábal-Heinze, E., Carracedo, A., Prieto, M.F. (in press). Autism Spectrum Symptoms in Smith- Magenis Syndrome and Williams Syndrome: Comparisons and Contrasts. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities.

4 4 Recently in Press Published Articles Recently published an article by Jorge Alves (first author) and colleagues. In this study they present the first systematic review and meta-analysis of neuropsychological and brain morphometry studies comparing posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) to typical amnestic Alzheimer s disease (AD). This work contributes to the development of cognitive and cerebral quantitative phenotypes of Alzheimer s disease variants, which could assist AD diagnosis and future therapies. Alves, J., Soares, J. M., Sampaio, A. & Gonçalves, O. F. (2013). Posterior cortical atrophy and Alzheimer s disease: A meta-analytic review of neuropsychological and brain morphometry studies. Brain Imaging and Behavior, 7(3), Recently published an article by Joana Coutinho (first author) and colleagues. In this study the authors tested whether a pro-social orientation, as expressed in terms of Extraversion and Agreeableness, is associated with a specific grey matter phenotype. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was used to investigate the correlation between brain structure and the personality traits of Agreeableness and Extraversion. We found that Extraversion was negatively correlated with grey matter density in the middle frontal and orbitofrontal gyri while Agreeableness was negatively correlated with grey matter density in the inferior parietal, middle occipital and posterior cingulate gyri. These results suggest that prosocial personality traits seem to be associated with decreases in grey matter density in more frontal regions for Extraversion, and more posterior regions for Agreeableness. Coutinho J., Sampaio A., Ferreira, M., Soares J. M, Gonçalves O.F. (2013) Brain Correlates of Pro-Social Personality Traits: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study. Brain Imaging and Behavior.

5 Recently in Press 5 Published Articles Another published article by Jorge Alves (first author) being amongst the top 3 high impact papers. In this article the authors provide a balanced perspective on the current evidence of cognitive intervention for healthy aging, mild cognitive impairment and several types of dementia. Future directions for the advancement of the field are also provided. Alves, J., Magalhães, R., Machado, A., Gonçalves, O.F., Sampaio, A., & Petrosyan, A. (2013). Nonpharmacological cognitive intervention for aging and dementia: Current perspectives. World Journal of Clinical Cases, 1(8),

6 Traveling around November 3rd to 9th 2013, Maastricht, Netherlands Course on

hands-on exercises, the remaining lectures were completely customized focussing on

More advanced topics where Multi-Voxel Pattern Analysis (MVPA), Classification and

6 6 Traveling around November 3rd to 9th 2013, Maastricht, Netherlands Course on BrainVoyager QX software Ana Ganho Ávila was at Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience in Maastricht with Brain Innovation B.V., taking a Brain Voyager course in collaboration with Professor Jorge Almeida s PROACTION Lab, from Coimbra University. Brain Innovation experts in brain imaging and masters of the BrainVoyager QX software package conducted the course. After a 3 days basic course covering important aspects of MRI/ fmri data analysis and hands-on exercises, the remaining lectures were completely customized focussing on questions generated by the research team. More advanced topics where Multi-Voxel Pattern Analysis (MVPA), Classification and Retinotopy (namely the most recent technique of population receptive field analysis). November 29th 2013, Harvard Medical School Basic principles of neuroimaging Sandra Carvalho, PhD and Jorge Leite, PhD, gave a lecture about Basic principles of neuroimaging on the Neurorehabilitation course at Neuromodulation Lab, Harvard Medical School.

7 Interview 7 This month with Paula Castiajo, new PhD Student What prompt your decision to apply for a PhD grant at our lab? Since my father was diagnosed with a dementia about 30 years ago, I developed a strong interest for the issues regarding clinical neuroscience. My first contact with neuroscience was during my Internship at NPL. This experience allowed me to know not only the work of clinical neuropsychology, and to acquire important skills of assessment and rehabilitation in different clinical conditions, but also to set my preferred area of research. Most importantly, NPL has a strong international reputation in the neuropsychology field and high quality standards in their research, making it the right place to pursue a PhD in this domain. Can you let us know a little about your academic background? I graduated in Psychology from the University of Minho, and I hold a Master s Degree in Clinical Psychology. I started to do research as an undergraduate by collaborating in several research projects, and these collaborations continued after graduating. These experiences ignited a strong desire to pursue a scientific research career. For three years I have been working as a research fellow in a project funded by the FCT, studying school readiness in a typically developing sample of pre-school children. Over the last few years I have also had the opportunity to investigate the social cognitive development and neurocognitive functioning, as well as to collaborate with experienced researchers in these fields. Can you do a brief resume about your PhD project? In my PhD I intend to better understand the neural bases of a complex neuropsychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia (SZ), with the crucial aim of developing more effective intervention strategies for this mental illness. I am particularly interested in exploring the emotional prosody processing (EPP) in three groups (chronic SZ, early stage SZ patients and clinical high risk individuals), by using the event-related potentials (ERP) methodology. This project will help clarify the dynamic effects of a higher-order cognitive process (attention) on EPP in SZ, and to characterize EPP abnormalities in distinct stages of the illness course pre-onset, early and chronic. Notably, we hope that the results will serve as a valuable tool in the development of prevention and remediation programs for schizophrenia. Which are your expectations for the future? My expectations for the near future are to deepen my knowledge and skills in the clinical neuroscience field, hopping to become a highly qualified researcher by the end of my PhD. I also wish to provide a valuable contribution to the high publishing standards of this lab, by publishing several articles resulting both from my PhD research, and other collaborative experiences that may materialize in the future. I am looking forward to start this journey.

8 Telling their stories by Joana Coutinho, PhD in this lab I did such different things as doing a DTI mask, learning new segmentation methods or learn how to do the quality control of my neuroimaging

Martha Shenton works primarily with neuroimaging data, with a specific focus in structural neuroimaging.

8 8 Telling their stories by Joana Coutinho, PhD in this lab I did such different things as doing a DTI mask, learning new segmentation methods or learn how to do the quality control of my neuroimaging data. Can you let us know the nature of your collaboration with the Psychiatry Neuroimaging lab at Harvard Medical School? The PNL lab directed by Dr. Martha Shenton works primarily with neuroimaging data, with a specific focus in structural neuroimaging. The lab is very strong in DTI analysis and related measures such as free water measures indicative of possible neuro-inflammation or cortical atrophy. Thus the work that is being developed by Dr. Martha s team is very closely related with studies we do in our lab. In the case of my research projects, in which I use DTI and volumetric measures in a sample of OCD personality disordered patients as well as in the study of normal personality traits, the communalities regarding the methods that are used are also evident. Actually the collaboration between the PNL and ours started several years ago with the work that Dr. Adriana did back there and this is still an active collaboration in the present. The PNL is a very rich and stimulating environment, with an big team of researchers working on the processing of different types of brain images, so it s a wonderful learning opportunity to be able to work in this PNL. Actually during my stay Can you do a brief summary on your training at Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging? In Martinos Center I did a very different training, much more structured in that I was attending specific courses, lasting for 2 entire weeks from 8 am to 6 pm sometimes we also had night sessions for designing our experiments or present the results! Moreover here my training was focused on functional neuroimaging. So in a way my stay in these two contexts was complementary. Both courses that I did in Martinos Center (fellowship in fmri and connectivity course) were very complete, giving me the chance to improve my knowledge about the physics of MRI, to program fmri experiments and running data collection. This is a huge research center with 7 scanners and one of these scanners: the Human Connectome Scanner has a magnetic field of 7T, 4 to 8 times as powerful as conventional scanners! I also had the chance to get in touch with the experts in the field. In my case it was particularly interesting to get to know Susan Gabriele and to discuss with her my current research projects on the Default Mode Network.

Telling their stories by Joana Coutinho, PhD 9 What can you tell us about your work at the Northeastern University? As you know NEU is the institution in which Prof. Oscar is working at the moment.

Oscar, Jorge, Sandra and Helga regarding the institution s future projects both at the teaching and research level.

9 Telling their stories by Joana Coutinho, PhD 9 What can you tell us about your work at the Northeastern University? As you know NEU is the institution in which Prof. Oscar is working at the moment. This is a very dynamic and alive university with a very multicultural environment, as the city of Boston itself... I participated in meetings with prof. Oscar, Jorge, Sandra and Helga regarding the institution s future projects both at the teaching and research level. I also attended several workshops on grant writing, specifics of the process of grant submission for different funding agencies and grant s financial management. All these workshops were very useful for my future as a researcher, namely in terms of the preparation of future grants. Which are the main differences between those labs you visited and ours? If I may start by pointing out the similarities these labs have the same friendly environment of our lab. In the PNL, for example, everyone was very welcoming and open to help me. This is a very international lab so people are also very used to receive and work with researchers from other countries. In terms of the differences the most obvious one has to do with the resources, both physical and human resources: there s a very large number of research assistants performing specific research tasks, very large samples and MRI databases and several laptops used to process the images. This is probably why most of the analyses are done using linux and specific scripts created for each study in close collaboration with computer engineers. In my first day in the lab I was given a word document with the basics of linux. Which positive aspects you may refer from this training? I would stress the opportunity to know different people working in the research field I m currently working in and to know different ways of working and solving specific problems that we face when using neuroimaging data. To give you an example, we were able to figure out a technical problem we had in the conversion of our DTI dicom images in collaboration with Sylvan Bouix, the co-director of the PNL. Everyone that works in this research area, knows that technical problems are present in our daily lives! We just need to have the persistence and constant update of knowledge to be able to solve them. I would also stress the opportunity to know young researchers working in similar projects while I was participating in Martinos Center s courses... The experience of interacting with people from different countries and spend an entire week discussing similar studies and relevant aspects for neuroimaging was very enriching!

10 Reading Suggestions The Neuroscience of Human Relationships by Louis Cozolino I came across this book while I was working on a review about the neuroscience of empathy and I found it very useful

The author elaborates on the social brain hypothesis and describes mental disorders associated with dysfunctions of social processes such as social phobia, autism and anti-social personality disorder.

10 10 Reading Suggestions The Neuroscience of Human Relationships by Louis Cozolino I came across this book while I was working on a review about the neuroscience of empathy and I found it very useful both for social neuroscientists and for psychotherapists. The author elaborates on the social brain hypothesis and describes mental disorders associated with dysfunctions of social processes such as social phobia, autism and anti-social personality disorder. Just as neurons communicate through mutual stimulation, brains strive to connect with one another. Louis Cozolino shows us how brains are highly social organisms. Balancing cogent explanation with instructive brain diagrams, he presents an atlas of sorts, illustrating how the architecture and development of brain systems from before birth through adulthood determine how we interact with others. By Joana Coutinho

Lab Team Adriana Sampaio, PhD (Lab Director) Alberto Crego, PhD (Post-Doc) Ana Ganho, MSc (PhD Student) Ana Mesquita, PhD (Researcher) Agavni Petrosyan, PhD (Researcher) Ana Pinheiro, PhD

(PhD Student) Jorge Leite, PhD (Post-Doc) Liliana Maia, MSc (Collaborator) Luciana Gomes, MSc (PhD Student) Marcelo Dias, Collaborator Margarida Vasconcelos, Collaborator Miguel Soares, MSc

11 Lab Team Adriana Sampaio, PhD (Lab Director) Alberto Crego, PhD (Post-Doc) Ana Ganho, MSc (PhD Student) Ana Mesquita, PhD (Researcher) Agavni Petrosyan, PhD (Researcher) Ana Pinheiro, PhD (Researcher) Catarina Fernandes, MSc (PhD Student) Fernando Macedo (Lab Technician) Helga Miguel, MSc (PhD Student) Jason Ridge, MSc (Collaborator) Joana Coutinho, PhD (Post-Doc) Jorge Alves, MSc (PhD Student) Jorge Leite, PhD (Post-Doc) Liliana Maia, MSc (Collaborator) Luciana Gomes, MSc (PhD Student) Marcelo Dias, Collaborator Margarida Vasconcelos, Collaborator Miguel Soares, MSc (Collaborator) Óscar Gonçalves, PhD (Co-Director) Patrícia Oliveira-Silva, MSc (PhD Student) Raquel Rocha, Collaborator Rosana Magalhães, MSc (PhD Student) Sandra Carvalho, PhD (Post-Doc) Sónia Sousa, MSc (PhD Student) Sara Cruz, MSc (PhD Student) Tatiana Magro, MSc (PhD Student) Teresa Silva, MSc (Collaborator) NEUROPSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY LAB, School of Psychology, University of Minho Campus de Gualtar, Braga Portugal Phone: Click on the facebook icon to follow our lab and help us reach 1000 likes :)

Newsletter. Going Global!!!

Newsletter. Going Global!!! Newsletter May 2013 Neuropsychophysiology Lab IN THIS ISSUE Message from lab director Message from lab Lab Presentations Lab Rotations Recently in Press Citations Research symposium UM Traveling around