Brain, Mind and Behavior Unit

The Brain, Mind and Behavior Unit provides services, training, consulting and collaborative expertise in the areas of basic neuroscience, stress physiology, psychoneuroimmunology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychosocial processes in nonhuman primates. Particular emphasis in the Unit is on studying the interrelations of processes at multiple levels of analysis: social, psychological, neuroendocrine, and neurobiological.

Researchers in the Brain, Mind and Behavior Unit direct their efforts to a diversity of programs:

• The interconnections of various limbic system structures, as well as the role played by those structures in social and nonsocial behavior
• Primate biobehavioral organization and psychoneuroim munology: understanding individual difference factors such as personality and temperament in primates,and how such factors contribute to health and to behavioral, physiological and social organization
• Primate biosocial behavior and social processes: the factors contributing to the development and maintenance of affiliative social relationships in adult and immature individuals of both sexes. A related topic of equal concern is the functional significance of affiliative relationships as reflected in their consequences for an individual's competence, health, and well-being.
• The neuroendocrine mechanisms contributing to the generation and maintenance of primate social systems: psychosomatics and the sociophysiology of stress and reproduction in various species
• The aged nonhuman primate and spontaneous impairments in learning and memory: the temporal development of these cognitive impairments and their association with other biomarkers of aging, such as reproductive senescence; the use of neurotrophic factors in neurodegenerative diseases
• Collaborative efforts between UC San Diego and the CNPRC have resulted in FDA approval for human clinical trials on the application of gene therapy to geriatric patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. This approach inserts the human gene for Nerve Growth Factor into a patient's own fibroblasts, which are then inserted into the patient's basal forebrain. Studies in aged macaques at the CNPRC have demonstrated that this therapy restores the volume and receptor function of cholinergic neurons to levels observed in younger animals.

The studies in the Brain, Mind and Behavior Unit are directed towards:

• Understanding the physiological and health consequences of chronic stress
• Understanding how social experience and personality factors affect biobehavioral organization and immunodeficiency disease progression
• Investigating emotionality and the social deficits resulting from lesions of the amygdala, which appears to be involved in childhood autism
• Gene therapy for the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease
• Studying cognitive changes associated with aging and reproductive senescence

Staff Scientists

• Sally P. Mendoza, Ph.D., Unit Leader
• David Amaral, Ph.D.
• John P. Capitanio, Ph.D.
  
• William A. Mason, Ph.D.
• Brenda McCowan, Ph.D.