Greatly waned neurogenesis, diminished microvasculature, astrocyte hypertrophy and activated microglia are among the most conspicuous structural changes in the aged hippocampus. Because these alterations can contribute to age-related memory and mood impairments, strategies efficacious for mitigating these changes may preserve cognitive and mood function in old age. Resveratrol, a phytoalexin fo...

There is a growing interest in developing and then evaluating Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems that can provide automated access to the mood dimension of music. Mood as a music access feature, however, is not well understood in that the terms used to describe it are not standardized and their application can be highly idiosyncratic. To better understand how we might develop methods for...

The "Mozart effect" refers to claims that people perform better on tests of spatial abilities after listening to music composed by Mozart. We examined whether the Mozart effect is a consequence of between-condition differences in arousal and mood. Participants completed a test of spatial abilities after listening to music or sitting in silence. The music was a Mozart sonata (a pleasant and ener...

This study explored prospectively the effects of dispositional and situational optimism on mood (N = 90) and immune changes (N = 50) among law students in their first semester of study. Optimism was associated with better mood, higher numbers of helper T cells, and higher natural killer cell cytotoxicity. Avoidance coping partially accounted for the relationship between optimism and mood. Among...

This paper presents findings about mood representations. We aim to analyze how do people tag music by mood, to create representations based on this data and to study the agreement between experts and a large community. For this purpose, we create a semantic mood space from last.fm tags using Latent Semantic Analysis. With an unsupervised clustering approach, we derive from this space an ideal c...

The present investigation analyzes if the effect of Total Sleep Deprivation (TSD) on depressive mood in normal subjects is related to participants' activation levels. Reaction time (RT), subjective sleepiness, and depressive mood were assessed among 48 normal subjects who were subjected to 60 h of TSD. Subjects were divided into groups based on his/her depressive mood changes following TSD: sub...

Neuroplasticity is a fundamental mechanism of neuronal adaptation to external and internal stimuli. There are evidences that chronic stress and mood disorders disrupt neuroplasticity, while antidepressant treatment can enhance neuroplasticity. Mitochondria strongly affect many intracellular processes coupled to plasticity and neuron survival. Mitochondrial dysfunctions are assuming an increasin...

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of negative mood states in adolescents according to gender, to analyze variability among schools, and to evaluate the associated factors. METHODS A cross-sectional study with a cluster design was carried out. We administered the High-school students health survey to a sample of 9,340 students (aged 14-16 years) in the third and fourth year of Compulsory S...