Ricerc@Sapienza

Using data from 1,177 families in eight countries (Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States), we tested a conceptual model of direct effects of childhood family adversity on subsequent externalizing behaviors as well as indirect effects through psychological mediators. When children were 9 years old, mothers and fathers reported on financial difficulties and their use of corporal punishment, and children reported perceptions of their parents' rejection.

Animals need to learn and to adapt to new and changing environments so that appropriate actions that lead to desirable outcomes are acquired within each context. The prefrontal cortex (PF) is known to underlie such function that directly implies that the outcome of each response must be represented in the brain for behavioral policies update. However, whether such PF signal is context dependent or it is a general representation beyond the specificity of a context is still unclear.

The outcome of an action plays a crucial role in decision-making and reinforcement learning processes. Indeed, both human and animal behavioural studies have shown that different expected reward values, either quantitatively or qualitatively, modulate the motivation of subjects to perform an action and, as a consequence, affect their behavioural performance. Here, we investigated the effect of different amounts of reward on the learning of macaque monkeys using a modified version of the object-in-place task.

The relationship between attention and incentive motivation has been mostly examined by administering Posner style cueing tasks in humans and varying monetary stakes. These studies found that higher incentives improved performance independently of spatial attention. However, the ability of the cueing task to measure actual attentional orienting has been debated by several groups that have highlighted the function of the motor system in affecting the behavioral features that are commonly attributed to spatial attention.

Background: In this paper, we reviewed translational studies concerned with environmental influences on the rewarding effects of heroin versus cocaine in rats and humans with substance use disorder. These studies show that both experienced utility (‘liking’) and decision utility (‘wanting’) of heroin and cocaine shift in opposite directions as a function of the setting in which these drugs were used. Briefly, rats and humans prefer using heroin at home but cocaine outside the home.

Some people are highly motivated to seek aggressive encounters, and among those who have been incarcerated for such behavior, recidivism rates are high. These observations echo two core features of drug addiction: high motivation to seek addictive substances, despite adverse consequences, and high relapse rates. Here we used established rodent models of drug addiction to determine whether they would be sensitive to "addiction-like" features of aggression in CD-1 mice.

In this paper, we apply the recent MPEG-DASH SAND standard for streaming-aware networking elements to develop and investigate an integrated mobile network bandwidth management and resource allocation mechanism. It is used to achieve high quality of experience of the mobile streaming users while jointly assuring high revenue operations by the network operator and by the system's video service providers.