Our preliminary results suggest that, in susceptible persons, low plasma levels of free EPA compared with AA are related to the severity of mania.

The words "No" and "Yes" are involved in conditioning to prohibit or encourage behavior, respectively. We therefore hypothesized that these words would be attributed endogenous valence, activating neuronal circuits involved with valence and emotional control. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) at 4 Tesla was used to record regional brain activity while participants were exposed to emphatic vocalizations of the words. Results showed that No and Yes were associated with opposite brain-behavior responses; while No was negatively valenced, produced slower response times, and evoked a negative signal in the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), Yes was positively valenced, produced faster response times and evoked a positive signal in a contiguous region of the OFC. Attribution of negative valence to No and trait anger control were associated with increased responsivity of the OFC to No. Inasmuch as sensitivity to the prohibitive command No develops during childhood through interaction with primary caregivers as the first social objects, our findings may implicate the lateral OFC in the neurobiology of emotion regulation and subsequent social development. Keywords fMRI; inferior frontal gyrus; OFC; valence; emotional control; anger; "yes"; "no" During human development, the meaning of certain words acquires emotional valence and motivational significance via their repeated context-dependent association with rewarding or punishing events. The elementary commanding word used to prohibit or cease behavior is the word No while Yes is the word used to encourage or to continue it. The word No, considered the earliest and most potent relational word in language development, is both expressed and received while interacting with the social environment. For example, No is expressed as internal or external feedback to refuse commands, encode failure, or to negate propositions (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1985; Gopnik & Melzoff, 1997; Peirce, 1869 Peirce, /1984. No is expressed from within and from the social environment, often as a command to stop ongoing or attempted behavior, and it may thus be experienced as unpleasant and be perceived as negatively valenced. Conversely, an emphatically expressed Yes could be encouraging and perceived as positively valenced. The neural mechanisms underlying the perception of the regulatory words No and Yes, and the relationship of this neural response to affective valence have not been studied thus far. Evidence from non-human primate research demonstrates sensitivity of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to gradations of intrinsic value, guiding approach/avoidance behavior preferences (Tremblay & Schultz, 1999). In humans, the OFC, which encompasses lateral and medial inferior prefrontal regions, is a paralimbic structure that receives inputs from each of the sensory association areas as well as from midbrain dopaminergic structures. As such it is well positioned to conjoin multimodal valence information as well as memory for previous punishment and reward associations (Zald & Rau...

This study investigated whether positive personality variables associated with the character strengths of courage and kindness, when examined in the context of situational and demographic variables, distinguish Holocaust-era courageous altruists from bystanders. Seventy-nine non-Jewish rescuers and 73 non-Jewish bystanders were administered measures of empathic concern, social responsibility, risk-taking, altruistic moral reasoning, and perceived marginality. Situational variables included wartime living arrangements, history of persecution, previous experience with Jews, and whether an individual had been asked for help. A two-group discriminant function analysis was able to correctly classify 96.1% of the sample, separating the rescuers and bystanders by more than three standard deviations. The discriminant function was best defined by social responsibility, altruistic moral reasoning, empathic concern, and risk-taking. Implications are discussed regarding the relationship between character strengths and altruistic behavior.

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