Deanna L Wallace Donovan

• PhD
• Executive Director at University of Texas at Austin

The neurological basis of affective behaviours in everyday life is not well understood. We obtained continuous intracranial electroencephalography recordings from the human mesolimbic network in 11 participants with epilepsy and hand-annotated spontaneous behaviours from 116 h of multiday video recordings. In individual participants, binary random...

Task-based studies have uncovered distributed neural networks that support emotions, but little is known about how these networks produce affective behaviors in non-laboratory, ecological settings. We obtained continuous intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings from the emotion network in 11 patients with epilepsy during multi-day hosp...

Mood disorders cause significant morbidity and mortality, and existing therapies fail 20%-30% of patients. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an emerging treatment for refractory mood disorders, but its success depends critically on target selection. DBS focused on known targets within mood-related frontostriatal and limbic circuits has been variably...

Rationale: The prefrontal cortex (PFC) and basal ganglia (BG) have been associated with cognitive stability and cognitive flexibility, respectively. We hypothesized that increasing PFC dopamine tone by administering tolcapone (a catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) inhibitor) to human subjects should promote stability; conversely, increasing BG dop...

Background Mood disorders are dynamic disorders characterized by multimodal symptoms. Clinical assessment of symptoms is currently limited to relatively sparse, routine clinic visits, requiring retrospective recollection of symptoms present in the weeks preceding the visit. Novel advances in mobile tools now support ecological momentary assessment...

The neuromodulator acetylcholine (ACh) modulates spatial integration in visual cortex by altering the balance of inputs that generate neuronal receptive fields. These cholinergic effects may provide a neurobiological mechanism underlying the modulation of visual representations by visual spatial attention. However, the consequences of cholinergic e...

Converging evidence links individual differences in mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine (DA) to variation in the tendency to choose immediate rewards ("Now") over larger, delayed rewards ("Later"), or "Now bias". However, to date, no study of healthy young adults has evaluated the relationship between Now bias and DA using positron emission tomogr...

To date, few studies have explored the neurochemical mechanisms supporting individual differences in food preference in humans. Here we investigate how dorsal striatal dopamine, as measured by the positron emission tomography (PET) tracer [18F]fluorometatyrosine (FMT), correlates with food-related decision-making, as well as body mass index (BMI) i...

It is often assumed that the promise of a monetary bonus improves cognitive control. We show that in fact appetitive motivation can also impair cognitive control, depending on baseline levels of dopamine-synthesis capacity in the striatum. These data not only demonstrate that appetitive motivation can have paradoxical detrimental effects for cognit...

Involuntary visual spatial attention is captured when a salient cue appears in the visual field. If a target appears soon after the cue, response times to targets at the cue location are faster relative to other locations. However, after longer cue–target intervals, responses to targets at the cue location are slower, due to inhibition of return (I...

We investigated the effect of bromocriptine, a dopamine agonist, on individual differences in behavior as well as frontal–striatal connectivity during a working memory task. After dopaminergic augmentation, frontal–striatal connectivity in low working memory capacity individuals increases, corresponding with behavioral improvement whereas decreases...

The neurotransmitter dopamine has been implicated in cognitive control and working memory. Specifically, the D2 dopamine receptor agonist bromocriptine has been demonstrated to affect task switching and resistance to distraction in visual working memory. Here, we systematically manipulated spatial attention in a cueing paradigm and assessed the eff...

In contrast with the many studies of stress effects on the brain, relatively little is known about the molecular mechanisms of resilience, the ability of some individuals to escape the deleterious effects of stress. We found that the transcription factor DeltaFosB mediates an essential mechanism of resilience in mice. Induction of DeltaFosB in the...

Here, we characterized behavioral abnormalities induced by prolonged social isolation in adult rodents. Social isolation induced both anxiety- and anhedonia-like symptoms and decreased cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB) activity in the nucleus accumbens shell (NAcSh). All of these abnormalities were reversed by chronic, but not acute, ant...

The transcription factor deltaFosB (DeltaFosB), induced in nucleus accumbens (NAc) by chronic exposure to drugs of abuse, has been shown to mediate sensitized responses to these drugs. However, less is known about a role for DeltaFosB in regulating responses to natural rewards. Here, we demonstrate that two powerful natural reward behaviors, sucros...

Sexual deficits and other behavioral disturbances such as anxiety-like behaviors can be observed in animals that have undergone social isolation, especially in species having important social interactions. Using a model of protracted social isolation in adult rats, we observed increased anxiety-like behavior and deficits in both the latency to init...

The transcription factor deltaFosB is induced in the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum by chronic exposure to several drugs of abuse, and increasing evidence supports the possibility that this induction is involved in the addiction process. However, to date there has been no report of deltaFosB induction by drugs of abuse in the ventral tegment...

Methylphenidate (MPH) is a psychomotor stimulant medication widely used for the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Given the extent of prescribed use of MPH, and because MPH interacts with the same brain pathways activated by drugs of abuse, most research has focused on assessing MPH's potential to alter an individual's r...

Enhancement of the activation of GABAA receptors is a common feature of many sedative and hypnotic drugs, and it is probable that the GABAA receptor complex is a molecular target for these drugs in the mammalian central nervous system. We set out to elucidate the role of the two predominant (alpha1 and beta2) subunits of GABAA receptor in sedative...

G-protein-coupled inwardly rectifying potassium channels (GIRKs) regulate synaptic transmission and neuronal firing rates. Co-localization of GIRK2 channels and dopamine receptors in the mesolimbic system suggests a role in regulation of motor activity. To explore the role of GIRK channels in the regulation of motor behavior. GIRK2 null mutant mice...

Glycine receptors (GlyRs) are pentameric ligand-gated ion channels that inhibit neurotransmission in the adult brainstem and spinal cord. GlyR function is potentiated by ethanol in vitro, and a mutant GlyR subunit alpha(1)(S267Q) is insensitive to the potentiating effects of ethanol. To test the importance of GlyR for the actions of ethanol in vivo...

Rationale: G-protein-coupled inwardly rectifying potassium channels (GIRKs) regulate synaptic transmission and neuronal firing rates. Co-localization of GIRK2 channels and dopamine receptors in the mesolimbic system suggests a role in regulation of motor activity. Objectives: To explore the role of GIRK channels in the regulation of motor behavior....