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naom Markovitch

Congratulations to Dr. Noam Markovitch

24 May, 2023

For receiving the best doctoral award in developmental psychology from the APA organization!
Noam's doctorate deals with the understanding of children's differential sensitivity to the effects of the environment on their development. The work's contribution to developmental psychology is very significant, both in theoretical thought and methodological approaches.
Well done Noam!
Noam PhD supervisor, Prof. Ariel Knafo-Noam, has also won the award in the past

 

From acute stress to persistent post-concussion symptoms: The role of parental accommodation and child’s coping strategies

19 April, 2023

An article by PhD candidate Irit Aviv, supervised by Dr. Tammy Pilowsky Peleg and Prof. Hillel Aviezer was selected as the winner of the Eighth Annual TCN/AACN student Project Competition, from among 15 eligible manuscripts

Acute stress following mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) is highly prevalent and associated with Persistent Post-Concussion symptoms (PPCS). However, the mechanism mediating this relationship is understudied.

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The impact of sociality and affective valence on brain activation: A meta-analysis

5 February, 2023
The impact of sociality and affective valence on brain activation: A meta-analysis

Thirty years of neuroimaging reveal the set of brain regions consistently associated with pleasant and unpleasant affect in humans—or the neural reference space for valence. Yet some of humans’ most potent affective states occur in the context of other humans.

Prior work has yet to differentiate how the neural reference space for valence varies as a product of the sociality of affective stimuli. To address this question, we meta-analyzed across 614 social and non-social affective neuroimaging contrasts, summarizing the brain regions that are consistently activated for social and non-social affective information.

We demonstrate that across the literature, social and non-social affective stimuli yield overlapping activations within regions associated with visceromotor control, including the amygdala, hypothalamus, anterior cingulate cortex and insula. However, we find that social processing differs from non-social affective processing in that it involves additional cortical activations in the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulum that have been associated with mentalizing and prediction.

A Bayesian classifier was able to differentiate unpleasant from pleasant affect, but not social from non-social affective states. Moreover, it was not able to classify unpleasantness from pleasantness at the highest levels of sociality.

These findings suggest that highly social scenarios may be equally salient to humans, regardless of their valence.

See full article here