Abnormalities in motivation are hallmarks of psychosis, and have been described as key
components of the schizophrenia syndrome for a century. Motivational symptoms are often …

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disease which involves
functional and structural defects in selective central nervous system (CNS) regions that harm …

Rewards have a decisive influence on our entire lives. The scientific debate about rewards,
their motivational power, and how they influence our behavior has a long history. It goes …

Empathy has been defined as the “ability to understand and share in another's emotional
state or context''(Cohen & Strayer 1996). The variability of empathic skills and dispositions …

H. sapiens' economic growth since about 1750 is driving the species toward collapse. The
drive originates in a brain circuit that we share with all species. It is a teaching circuit. When …

While the effects of music on emotion have been heavily researched, the added influence of
lyrics is notoriously difficult to measure. Generally, negative music has been linked with …

Psychopharmacological studies in humans suggest important roles for dopamine (DA) D2
receptors in human executive functions, such as cognitive planning and spatial working …

Memory deficits are recognized in Parkinson's disease (PD). The nature of these memory
deficits is unclear because few studies have both isolated memory encoding and retrieval …

The informational content of genomes is usually interpreted as a sum of one-to-one
relationships between nucleotides at certain genomic positions and phenotypic outcomes …

To survive in an ever-changing world, organisms need to rapidly adapt to new
environments. In my dissertation, I address two molecular mechanisms that may contribute …