Faculty Bibliography

Practitioners who work with children and adolescents endeavor to identify and, when possible, amend threats that jeopardize the child's well-being. Yet one major risk factorthat is often overlooked is maternal depression. This oversight is of great concern, considering that an extensive body of research indicates that children are adversely affected when their mother is depressed. For instance, infants of mothers who suffer from depressive disorders evidence neurochemical and physiological differences, lag behind developmentally, and exhibit greater behavioral difficulties, eating problems, and sleeping difficulties than children of mothers who are not ill. Moreover, older children and adolescents of depressed mothers fare no better, evidencing higher rates of mental illness and greater disturbances in their academic performance, behavior, and social interactions than children whose mothers are not depressed.

This paper describes the design and integration of Third Space, an innovative computer mediated learning environment, in a couples therapy course for second year students in a MSW program. While most computer mediated teaching is used in distance education, we developed a Web-based program to supplement the teaching of clinical skills in a traditional classroom. The Third Space Web-based learning environment was developed to simulate couples therapy supervision by adding functionalities to a traditional bulletin board to enable students and instructors to view videotaped role-plays on the Web and engage in online discussions about the role-plays. The effectiveness of this learning environment was evaluated with questionnaires and focus groups

Learning and memory depend on signaling molecules that affect synaptic efficacy. The cytoskeleton has been implicated in regulating synaptic transmission but its role in learning and memory is poorly understood. Fear learning depends on plasticity in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala. We therefore examined whether the cytoskeletal-regulatory protein, myosin light chain kinase, might contribute to fear learning in the rat lateral amygdala. Microinjection of ML-7, a specific inhibitor of myosin light chain kinase, into the lateral nucleus of the amygdala before fear conditioning, but not immediately afterward, enhanced both short-term memory and long-term memory, suggesting that myosin light chain kinase is involved specifically in memory acquisition rather than in posttraining consolidation of memory. Myosin light chain kinase inhibitor had no effect on memory retrieval. Furthermore, ML-7 had no effect on behavior when the training stimuli were presented in a non-associative manner. Anatomical studies showed that myosin light chain kinase is present in cells throughout lateral nucleus of the amygdala and is localized to dendritic shafts and spines that are postsynaptic to the projections from the auditory thalamus to lateral nucleus of the amygdala, a pathway specifically implicated in fear learning. Inhibition of myosin light chain kinase enhanced long-term potentiation, a physiological model of learning, in the auditory thalamic pathway to the lateral nucleus of the amygdala. When ML-7 was applied without associative tetanic stimulation it had no effect on synaptic responses in lateral nucleus of the amygdala. Thus, myosin light chain kinase activity in lateral nucleus of the amygdala appears to normally suppress synaptic plasticity in the circuits underlying fear learning, suggesting that myosin light chain kinase may help prevent the acquisition of irrelevant fears. Impairment of this mechanism could contribute to pathological fear learning

In summary, NPY is clearly an important peptide in the adult rat dentate gyrus because it has the potential to influence synaptic transmission and neurogenesis. It may even have other functions, as yet undiscovered, mediated by glia or vasculature. The remarkable plasticity of NPY puts it in a position to allow dentate gyrus function to be modified in a changing environment. The importance of this plasticity in the context of epilepsy cannot be emphasized enough. It could help explain a range of observations about epilepsy that currently is poorly understood. For example, rapid increases in NPY could mediate postictal depression, the period of depression that can last for several hours after generalized seizures. It may mediate the 'priming effect,' which is a reduction in seizure threshold following an initial period of seizures. Finally, it could contribute to the resistance of dentate granule cells to degeneration after seizures. However, despite the focus in this review on seizure-induced changes, the changes described here also appear to occur after other types of manipulations, which considerably broadens the scope of NPY's role in the brain