B020827 - PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY

Italian

General aim: to provide knowledge and understanding of the psychobiological mechanisms underlying resilience and vulnerability, in order to gain a deeper insight into the factors contributing to individual resilience and to design intervention aimed at promoting it. We shall discuss how environmental and genetic factors, their interactions, and epigenetic mechanisms contribute to resilience by inducing long term, adaptive, plastic changes in specific neural circuits.

No textbook is available for the topics covered in this course. In addition to the slide presented during classes, a number of review papers, which will serve as lecture notes, will be put online on the e-learning site.

Knowledge and understanding
Resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to avoid negative social, psychological, and biological consequences of extreme stress that would otherwise compromise their psychological or physical well being
The Course “Psychobiology of resilience and vulnerability” aims at providing advanced knowledge on this issue, exploiting data form scientific literature coming from epidemiological and experimental studies in humans and from studies in preclinical models. In particular, it aims at: analyzing psychobiological factors differentiating resilient from vulnerable individuals, highlighting possible protective factors which might allow to cope with an adverse environment; stimulating skills in understanding and critically analyze the scientific literature in the field; developing useful competences to successfully integrate within multidisciplinary equipes working on pathogenesis, prevention and rescue of vulnerability. It also aims at developing useful skills to work on preclinical models.

Covered issues will be:
a) mechanisms of adaptive and maladaptive neural plasticity and the relative methods of study, including in neuroplasticity also hippocampal neurogenesis.
b) Examples of the approach Gene – Environment interactions in the study of resilience and vulnerability
c) Epigenetic mechanisms, discussing how environment, through them, and interacting with genetic factors, may contribute to resilience.
Before discussing issue b) and c) we shall outline the specific neural circuits Gene-Environment interactions act upon in affecting resilience and where environmental induces resilience related epigenetic modifications.
d) we shall briefly and critically discuss the animal models most frequently employed to study psychobiology of resilience and vulnerability, in order to develop the ability to critically read scientific papers in this filed.
e) the last lectures will be devoted to examine resilience in the contex of a specific part of our life, aging. We shall examine which protective factors might contribute to resilience towards major cognitive decline with age, promoting what is called “successful aging”.

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Teaching methods are indicated for every specific learning resultexpected
Knowledge and understanding: Lectures and 4 hrs of practice

Applying knowledge and understanding: Discussions and practical tests during classes


Making judgements: Discussion of the scientific results which underlie the present knowledge in the topics covered by the program.

Communication skills: Provide examples of complete and synthetic answers to the open questions present in the practical test and stimulate the students to formulate such answers by themselves.


Learning skills: Lectures.

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Knowledge and understanding
Written exam composed of two types of questions, open questions (10), short questions requiring concise answers and true or false questions with compulsory justification of the choice operated (12). Oral exam.


Applying knowledge and understanding
Tests during classes, implying discussion on examples of typical written exam questions; solving of small problems and interpretation of graphs in the written and oral exam.


Making judgements
Discussion of the scientific evidence supporting the current knowledge on the different topics covered by the program in the written and oral exam. Presentation of small problems requiring the student to justify the conclusions drawn by a set of experiments in the written and oral exam.

Communication skills
To be able to provide complete, clear and pertinent answers to open questions and justifications to true or false questions; completeness and clearness of answers in the oral exam.


Learning skills
Possess of the knowledge necessary to fully profit of the courses in the subsequent years of the Corso di Laurea will be assessed with the written and oral exam already described and within the discussions during classes and practical tests

Recent results in the scientific literature indicate that resilience is an active, adaptive process, not simply the absence of those pathological responses to environment which take place in vulnerable individuals.
Research has only recently begun to analyze biological factors which characterize resilient subjects and which are associated with their better capacity to face adverse conditions.
We shall see how environment, genetic factors, gene x environment interactions and epigenetic mechanisms contribute to resilience acting through plastic changes which take place in different neural circuits and which involve several neurotransmitters and molecular pathways.
These long term plastic changes shape the unction of neural circuits regulating emotional behaviour, stress response, reward (satisfaction). It is the combination of these plastic changes which is believed to mediate resilience to adverse conditions.

Topics covered: mechanisms of adaptive and maladaptive neural plasticity and methods of investigation; hippocampal neurogenesis and pattern separation, between contextual memory and anxiety behaviour; endogenous reward system; neural circuits underlying emotional behaviour and emotion regulation; examples of gene x environment interactions in resilience and vulnerability; epigenetic mechanisms as mediators of long term effects of environment on behaviour; psychobiology of formation an extinction of fear memories; psychobiology of cognitive aging; protective factors contributing to resilience against major cognitive aging: epidemiological studies, studies in animal models, intervention studies in humans.