Research Notes

The recipients are Esther Chapin Penick and John F. Todaro.

Penick, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology, proposes studying in the rat the dopamine and GABA-producing neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the brain, to get a better understanding of the pathology of schizophrenia. Penick will examine the basic properties of GABA synapses in normal rat brain, using electrophysiological recordings from individual dopamine and GABA neurons. She will then give the rat older and the newer atypical antipsychotic drugs and monitor their respective effects.

Todaro, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior (Research), notes that depression is a risk factor for the development of coronary heart disease (CHD) in healthy men and women. Depressed individuals have a 64 percent increased risk of developing CHD. Recent studies suggest that elevated systematic inflammation may be responsible for the increased risk by accelerating the atherosclerotic process. However, it is still unknown if treating depression alters the inflammatory processes, and thus ultimately reduces the risk of developing CHD. Todaro will conduct a preliminary clinical trial to determine if cognitive behavioral therapy has an effect on inflammatory markers associated with atherosclerosis.

NARSAD is the largest donor-supported organization in the world devoted exclusively to funding scientific research on psychiatric disorders.

Bullfrogs communicate through stutters in their croaks: Male bullfrogs communicate with other bullfrogs through calls made up of a series of croaks, some of which contain stutters, according to a new Brown study which describes a pattern not previously identified in scientific literature.

Researchers recorded 2,536 calls from 32 male bullfrogs in natural chorus and analyzed the number of croaks in each call and the number of stutters in each croak. A male bullfrogÕs call attracts females for mating, maintains territorial boundaries with other males, and indicates that the frog is healthy and aggressive.

"Some animals have evolved large, complex vocabularies to communicate, while others say a lot with very limited numbers of calls," said Andrea Simmons, professor of psychology, who presented the findings at 75th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America on May 24. "A fundamental question in the study of communication by sound is 'how much information can a sender convey in a single sound?'"

Within a single vocalization, the frogs exhibited a pattern of croaks with and without stutters that appeared to have a communication function and did not simply represent that a male was getting tired, Simmons said.

Simmons conducted the study with Dianne Suggs, a member of the Class of 2004 who used it as the basis of her undergraduate honors thesis in psychology. Suggs was supported by a grant through the Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantship (UTRA) program. SimmonsÕ laboratory is supported by a research grant from the National Institutes of Health. - Kristen Cole

Scents will not rouse us from slumber: Although sound can disrupt sleep, scents cannot. People cannot rely on their sense of smell to awaken them to the danger of fire, according to a new Brown study.

Study participants easily detected odors when awake and in the early transition into sleep (Stage One sleep) but, once asleep, did not. The findings indicate a significant alteration of perceptual processing as a function of sleep.

"Human olfaction appears insufficiently sensitive and reliable to act as a sentinel system," said Rachel S. Herz, visiting assistant professor of psychology and an author of a study titled "Minimal Olfactory Perception During Sleep: Why Odor Alarms Will Not Work for Humans," published in a recent issue of the journal Sleep.

"As the saying goes," said the paper's co-author Mary A. Carskadon, "we 'wake up and smell the coffee,' not the other way around." Carksadon is a professor of psychiatry and human behavior in the Medical School and director of chronobiology at E.P. Bradley Hospital.

The research was supported by a Grass Foundation Trustee Grant. - Kristen Cole

Who does the housework affects whether couples have a second child: In dual-earner couples, the probability of having a second child varies substantially according to the division of housework, says a new study in Population Development and Review.

Eighty-one percent of couples in which the husband does at least half of the housework will have a second child. For couples in which the wife does most or all of the housework, the figure is 74 percent. But when the wife does between 54 and 84 percent of the housework, the likelihood of the couple having a second child is 55 percent.

"It's the couples who are no longer following the traditional division of labor but haven't quite figured out how to divide the housework that are least likely to have a second child," said Berna Miller Torr, lead author of the study. "These couples may well struggle with the balance between work and family, choosing less family as a result."

Torr, a graduate student in sociology, co-wrote the paper with Susan E. Short, associate professor of sociology. Torr was supported by a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development training fellowship. - Kristen Cole