Maryam Ziaei

Norwegian University of Science and Technology | NTNU · Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for Neural Computation

Background: The Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI) translates heart rate during daily activity into a weekly score. Obtaining a weekly PAI score ≥100 is associated with reduced risk of premature morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular diseases. Here, we determined whether changes in PAI score are associated with changes in risk of incident de...

Concerns regarding high rates of teacher stress and burnout are present globally. Yet there is limited current data regarding the severity of stress, or the role of intrapersonal and environmental factors in relation to teacher stress and burnout within the Australian context. The present study, conducted over an 18-month period, prior to the COVID...

The amygdala has been shown to be responsive to face trustworthiness. While older adults typically give higher face trustworthiness ratings than young adults, a direct link between amygdala response and age-related differences in face trustworthiness evaluation has not yet been confirmed. Additionally, there is a possible modulatory role of the neu...

Teacher stress and burnout has been associated with low job satisfaction, reduced emotional wellbeing, and poor student learning outcomes. Prolonged stress is associated with emotion dysregulation and has thus become a focus of stress interventions. This study examines emotional interference effects in a group of teachers suffering from high stress...

Objective Despite the importance of social cognitive functions to mental health and social adjustment, examination of these functions is absent in routine assessment of epilepsy patients. Thus, this review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on four major aspects of social cognition among temporal and frontal lobe epilepsy, w...

Empathy is one such social-cognitive capacity that undergoes age-related change. C urrently, however, not well understood is the structural and functional neurocircuitry underlying age-related differences in empathy. This study aimed to delineate brain structural and functional networks that subserve affective empathic response in younger and older...

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn by encouraging behaviors, which maximizes their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single action, leading the agent to experience ambiguity in terms of whether those actions are effective, an issu...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and there is currently no cure. Novel approaches to treat AD and curb the rapidly increasing worldwide prevalence and costs of dementia are needed. Physical inactivity is a significant modifiable risk factor for AD, estimated to contribute to 12.7% of AD cases worldwide. Exercise interve...

Objectives This study assessed the effectiveness of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR) compared to an active control intervention, the Health Enhancement Program (HEP) in reducing stress and burnout, and enhancing emotion regulation, well-being, and cognitive function in a group of Australian teachers experiencing work-related st...

Empathy, among other social-cognitive processes, changes across adulthood. More specifically, cognitive components of empathy (understanding another’s perspective) appear to decline with age, while findings for affective empathy (sharing another’s emotional state) are rather mixed. Structural and functional correlates underlying cognitive and affec...

Quality interventions addressing the important issue of teacher stress and burnout have shown promising outcomes for participating teachers in terms of decreased distress, improved well-being and increased commitment to their jobs. Less is known however about whether such interventions also benefit students. The present study investigated the downs...

Despite the importance of social cognitive functions to mental health and social adjustment, assessment of these functions is absent in routine epilepsy patients' examinations. Hence, there is a clear need for developing a clinical and practical assessment which is a critical step towards designing new interventions. To do so, we first need to gain...

In logical reasoning, difficulties in inhibition of currently-held beliefs may lead to unwarranted conclusions, known as belief bias. Aging is associated with difficulties in inhibitory control, which may lead to deficits in inhibition of currently-held beliefs. No study to date, however, has investigated the underlying neural substrates of age-rel...

Background: It is still an open to what extent the ecological validity of face stimuli modulates age-related differences in the recognition of facial expression; and to what extent eye gaze direction may play a role in this process. The present study tested whether age effects in facial expression recognition, also as a function of eye gaze directi...

Teacher stress remains a consistently reported issue nationally and internationally in both the mainstream media and academic fora. Understanding the source/s of stress, however, remains complex given the interplay of external and internal factors that have the potential to shape teachers’ stress and resilience responses. This exploratory qualitati...

Prior knowledge and beliefs influence our reasoning in daily life and may lead us to draw unwarranted conclusions with undesirable consequences. The underlying neural correlates of the interaction between belief and logic, prior to making logical decisions, are largely unknown. In this study, we aimed to identify brain regions important in distingu...

Reasoning requires initial encoding of the semantic association between premises or assumptions, retrieval of these semantic associations from memory, and recombination of information to draw a logical conclusion. Currently-held beliefs can interfere with the content of the assumptions if not congruent and inhibited. This study aimed to investigate...

Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single action, causing the agent to experience ambiguity in terms of whether those actions are effective, an issue call...

Empathy, among other social-cognitive processes, changes across adulthood. More specifically, cognitive components of empathy (understanding other perspectives) appear to decline with age, while findings for affective empathy (sharing other emotional states) are rather mixed. Not well understood yet are the neural correlates underlying cognitive an...

The volumetric and morphometric examination of hippocampus formation subfields in a longitudinal manner using in vivo MRI could lead to more sensitive biomarkers for neuropsychiatric disorders and diseases including Alzheimer's disease, as the anatomical subregions are functionally specialised. Longitudinal processing allows for increased sensitivi...

In logical reasoning, difficulties in inhibition of currently-held beliefs may lead to unwarranted conclusions, known as belief bias. Aging is associated with difficulties in inhibitory control, which may lead to deficits in inhibition of currently-held beliefs. But, no study, to date, has investigated the underlying neural substrates of age-relate...

Reasoning requires initial encoding of the semantic association between premises or assumptions, retrieval of these semantic associations from memory, and recombination of information to draw a logical conclusion. Currently-held beliefs can interfere with the content of the assumptions if not congruent and inhibited. This study aimed to investigate...

The volumetric and morphometric examination of hippocampus formation subfields in a longitudinal manner using in vivo MRI could lead to more sensitive biomarkers for neuropsychiatric disorders and diseases including Alzheimer's disease, as the anatomical subregions have different roles. Longitudinal processing allows for increased sensitivity due t...

Aging is associated with increased difficulty in facial emotion identification, possibly due to age-related network change. The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) facilitates emotion identification, but this is understudied in aging. To determine the effects of OT on dynamic facial emotion identification across adulthood, 46 young and 48 older participants...

Facial cues, such as a person's age, provide important information for social interactions. Processing such facial cues can be affected by observer bias. However, there is currently no consensus regarding how the brain is processing facial cues related to age, and if facial age processing changes as a function of the age of the observer (i.e., own-...

Introduction: Converging evidence suggests that both emotional and cognitive processes are critically involved in moral judgment, and may be mediated by discrete parts of the prefrontal cortex. The current study aimed at investigating the mediatory effect of right Frontopolar Cortex (rFPC) on the way that emotions affect moral judgments. Methods:...

Age-related declines in attention and working memory (WM) are well documented and may be worsened by the occurrence of distracting information. Emotionally valenced stimuli may have particularly strong distracting effects on cognition. We investigated age-related differences in emotional distraction using task-fMRI. WM performance in older adults w...

Eye-gaze direction plays a fundamental role in the perception of facial features and particularly the processing of emotional facial expressions. Yet, the neural underpinnings of the integration of eye gaze and emotional facial cues are not well understood. The primary aim of this study was to delineate the functional networks that subserve the rec...

Previous findings indicate age-related differences in frontal-amygdala connectivity during emotional processing. However, direct evidence for age differences in brain functional activation and connectivity during emotional processing and concomitant behavioral implications is lacking. In the present study, we examined the impact of aging on the neu...

An age-related 'positivity' effect has been identified, in which older adults show an information-processing bias towards positive emotional items in attention and memory. In the present study, we examined this positivity bias by using a novel paradigm in which emotional and neutral distractors were presented along with emotionally valenced targets...

Aim: Top-down attentional modulation is considered as an endogenous and externally-driven process, implying voluntary control, underlying the ability of focusing on relevant (enhancement) and ignoring the irrelevant stimuli (suppression). Top-down modulation is achieved via distributed connections between sensory regions, prefrontal regions, and th...

Introduction: The antinociceptive effect of morphine is, in part, mediated through the activation of a descending pathway. One of the major components of this pathway is the nucleus raphe magnus (NRM). Our previous study demonstrated the involvement of NRM in the analgesic effect of morphine microinjected into the nucleus cuneiformis (NCF) in a des...

A B S T R A C TIntroduction: The nucleus cuneiformis (NCF) and ventrolateral periaqueductal gray (vlPAG), two adjacent areas, mediate the central pain modulation and project to the nucleus raphe magnus (NRM). Methods: This study examined whether the antinociceptive effect of morphine microinjected into the NCF is influenced by inactivation of vlPAG...

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia which is still difficult to be differentiated from other types of brain disorders. Moreover, Mild Cognitive Impairment refers to the presence of cognitive impairments that is not severe enough to meet the criteria of Alzheimer's, and its diagnosis in early stages is so critical. There is curre...

Several lines of investigation show that the rostral ventromedial medulla is a critical relay for midbrain regions, including the nucleus cuneiformis (CnF), which control nociception at the spinal cord. There is some evidence that local stimulation or morphine administration into the CnF produces the effective analgesia through the nucleus raphe ma...