Recent evidence supports a role for genetics in autism, but other findings are difficult to reconcile with a purely genetic cause. Pathological changes in the cerebellum in autism are thought to correspond to an event before 30-32 weeks gestation. Our purpose was to determine whether there is an increased incidence of stressors in autism before…

Data from the General Social Survey (GSS) collected in the years 1990-1996 are examined for the relationship between fertility and intelligence as measured by vocabulary. The results show that the relation between fertility and intelligence has been consistently negative for successive birth cohorts from to 1900 to 1979, indicating the presence of…

The current study involved 281 early-school-age twin pairs (118 monozygotic, 163 same-sex dizygotic) participating in the ongoing Western Reserve Reading Project (S. A. Petrill, K. Deater-Deckard, L. A. Thompson, & C. Schatschneider, 2006). Twins were tested in their homes by separate examiners on a battery of reading-related skills including…

Change in task persistence was assessed in two annual assessments using teachers', testers', and observers' ratings. Participants included 79 monozygotic and 116 same-sex dizygotic twin pairs who were in Kindergarten or 1st grade (4.3 to 7.9 years old) at the initial assessment. Task persistence was widely distributed and higher among older…

Work in the fields of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory has for the most part moved well beyond biologically essentialist notions of sexualities and their attendant manifestations, behaviors, and enactments. While not denying that biology plays some role in one's sexual development and sexuality, this work is careful to insist that this…

Phosphorylation of the transcription factor CREB on Ser133 is implicated in the establishment of long-term memory for hippocampus-dependent tasks, including spatial learning and contextual fear conditioning. We reported previously that training on a hippocampus-dependent social transmission of food preference (STFP) task increases CREB…

Hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP) can be dissociated in early-LTP lasting 4-5 h and late-LTP with a duration of more than 8 h, the latter of which requires protein synthesis and heterosynaptic activity during its induction. Previous studies in vivo have shown that early-LTP in the dentate gyrus can protein synthesis-dependently be…

Does the language one speaks influence the way he thinks? Does it help define his world view? Anyone who has tried to master a foreign tongue has at least considered the possibility. Little linguistic peculiarities, though amusing, don't change the objective world people are describing. So how can they alter the way they think? Scientists and…

There is no doubt that health promotion and health education (HP/HE) in the UK are in a crisis, in view of the limited amount of financial resources available, the reduction in services and the lack of available new specialist jobs. The Government seems to have made a political decision about the reduction (if not abolition) of HP/HE services,…

Many students at minority-serving institutions are underexposed to Internet resources such as the human genome project, PubMed, NCBI databases, and other Web-based technologies because of a lack of financial resources. To change this, we designed and implemented a new bioinformatics component to supplement the undergraduate Genetics course at…

The effects of social stimuli present and absent on laughing and smiling in 2 young children with Angelman syndrome were assessed via a multielement design. Results indicated that laughing and smiling for either child was unaffected by the social stimuli assessed in the social interaction condition. Results are discussed in terms of the effects of…

Restriction enzymes are basic tools in recombinant DNA technology. To shape the molecular biology experiments, the students must know how to work with these molecular scissors. Here, we describe an integrated set of experiments, introduced in the "Advances in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology" postgraduate course, which covers the important…

In this paper, I am going to examine the disorder of psychopathy and consider how genetic anomalies could give rise to the relatively specific neuro-cognitive impairments seen in individuals with this disorder. I will argue that genetic anomalies in psychopathy reduce the salience of punishment information (perhaps as a function of noradrenergic…

The diagnostic criteria for Angelman syndrome includes sleep disturbance as an associated characteristic. There are, however, few researchers who have examined sleep problems in this population. Our goal in this study was to better characterize the sleep patterns and problems in individuals with Angelman syndrome. Parents of 339 individuals…

State and trait anxiety define different aspects of anxiety, and may represent environmentally and genetically mediated components of this phenotype. Furthermore their relationship, where trait anxiety is expressed through levels of state anxiety under threatening circumstances, may represent a process of interplay between a genetic vulnerability…