Yasmin Padovan-Hernandez, a graduate student working in the Aponte Lab, received a 2024 NIH Graduate Student Research Award (NGSRA) for the poster she presented at the NIH Graduate Student Research Symposium on February 15, 2024. Yasmin’s poster was titled was “Hypothalamic Circuits Controlling Interoceptive Hunger”. There were 12 winners out of over 120 posters. Yasmin… [Read More]
Hot Off the Press
µ-Opioid receptor antagonism facilitates the anxiolytic-like effect of oxytocin in mice
Hot Off the Press – March 26, 2024 Published in Translational Psychiatry by Khalin Nisbett, Leandro Vendruscolo and George Koob from the NIDA IRP Stress & Addiction Neuroscience Unit and Neurobiology of Addiction Section. Summary Nisbett et al. discovered that the anxiolytic-like (anxiety-reducing) effect of oxytocin can be modulated by the endogenous opioid system. We… [Read More]
Reviews To Read
Modeling methamphetamine use disorder and relapse in animals: Short- and long-term epigenetic, transcriptional., and biochemical consequences in the rat brain
Reviews To Read – January 2024. Published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews by Khalid Elhadi, Atul P. Daiwile, and Jean Lud Cadet of the NIDA IRP Molecular Neuropsychiatry Research Section. Methamphetamine use disorder (MUD) is very widespread in the world because methamphetamine is easy to make and cheap to buy. Heavy users usually take the drug… [Read More]
Featured Papers
A linguistic analysis of dehumanization toward substance use across three decades of news articles
Featured Paper of the Month – April 2024
Published in Frontiers in Public Health by Salvatore Giorgi and Brenda Curtis, et al. of the NIDA IRP Technology and Translational Research Unit.
In this work, we apply a computational linguistic framework to measure dehumanization to 3 million news articles. We show that popular media in the U.S. has dehumanized people who used substances to varying degrees. Substances such as heroin have been strongly dehumanized for decades, while marijuana use is becoming less dehumanized over time, aligning with increased public support for legalization.