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Weather Alert

Due to the winter weather forecast, all classes that begin at 6 p.m. or later at Kean’s main campus in Union will be conducted remotely today, Tuesday, February 11. Classes that begin before 6 p.m. will operate as normal.

Only essential personnel should report to work as required after 6 p.m. today. Employees with questions about their status should consult their supervisors. Kean Ocean will follow the Ocean County College schedule. All students and employees at Kean Ocean are encouraged to visit the OCC website for updates.

DNA

Project A

Beyond Reward Sensitivity: Mechanisms of Estradiol and Probabilistic Reward Learning in Depression Risk for Girls 

Puberty is a sensitive time window during which a surge of sex steroids has both acute and chronic effects on brain functional activity, affecting reward sensitivity and learning. Furthermore, the prevalence of depression peaks during puberty, with females being more vulnerable than males. A key characteristic of depression that is believed to underlie this increased pubertal risk is an altered ability to learn stimulus-outcome associations from reward feedback to guide future behavior, a process known as reinforcement learning (RL). Depression is characterized by a blunted response to rewards, which may disrupt RL. Blunted neural responses to rewards in individuals at risk for depression have been extensively measured by the Reward Positivity (RewP), a fronto-central, event-related potential (ERP) component that reflects consummatory reward sensitivity. However, conventional approaches to measuring the RewP ERP do not capture a distinctive form of incentive motivation or anticipation, which is crucial for understanding reward value deficits in depression. Relatedly, sex steroid estradiol (E2), the most potent bioactive estrogen, plays a key role in RL via the dopaminergic system in brain regions that affect this learning process. Historically, low E2 levels have been linked to depression in women. Evidence now suggests that both low and high E2 levels can alter dopamine functions in an inverted U-shaped manner, with moderate levels being optimal, potentially contributing to depression. However, little is known about the mechanistic relationships between E2 levels in females during puberty and neural components of RL associated with depression risk. Such information would be extremely useful for developing sex-specific, innovative hormone-based interventions for depression that could ameliorate the manifestation of this highly treatment-resistant disorder. The central hypothesis of this project is that a non-optimal range of E2 may impair normal dopamine signaling of reward representation (i.e., RewP), and reward learning, thereby increasing the risk for depression. This proposal will use the PI's recently developed Child Probabilistic Learning task with the use of electroencephalogram to capture key aspects of RL related to depression risk. Girls aged 12-13 years, with parents who have a history of depression (risk group), as well as girls without risk, will participate in this study. Specific Aims are as follows: 1) Determine concurrent relationship between E2 and RL, 2) Determine concurrent relationship between E2 and RewP to cues predicting reward, and 3) Determine concurrent  relationship between E2, RewP, self-reported anticipatory pleasure, and depression. A concomitant goal of this work will be to engage underrepresented students from Kean University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, in the execution, analysis, and reporting of research. Moreover, this proposal will leverage the training and pedological resources offered by Kean and Rutgers Universities, which are involved in a New Jersey alliance through the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program to enhance the overall research environment at Kean University (R16GM159728-01:  Pending IRG Review)