Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Ca 2+ imaging techniques were applied to investigate the neuronal behavior of projection neurons in the honeybee antennal lobe (AL) to examine the effects of long-lasting adaptation on odorant coding. Responses to eight test odorants were measured before, during, and after an odor adaptation phase. Bees were exposed to the adapting odor for 30 min. Test odorant responses were only recorded from a sub-population of accessible glomeruli on the AL surface. Projection neurons, the output neurons of the antennal lobes, are projecting through the lateral, mediolateral, and medial AL tract to higher centers of the olfactory pathway. Due to our staining techniques, we primarily focused our study on projection neurons going through the lateral and medial tract. Test odorants comprised compounds with different functional groups (alcohol, aldehyde, ketone, and ester) representing floral and/or pheromone odorants. Strength and discriminability between combinatorial activity patterns induced by the test odorants were quantified. In two independent experiments, we investigated one group of animals adapted to a colony odor and another adapted to a synthetic odor. Within the experimental groups, we found test odorant responses either decreased or increased in AL projection neurons. Additionally, the discriminability between test odorant patterns became less distinct in the colony odor experiment and more distinct during adaptation in the synthetic mixture experiment. These results are interpreted as odor dependent adaptation effects, increasing or decreasing response strength and discriminability by altered neural coding mechanisms in the AL neuropile.

Body-image cognitive distortions and self-esteem are two socially important parameters which are reported to be associated with the skin color satisfaction in the young people. However, much of the research till date has been conducted on the populations of color in the color-stratified Western societies and on women, with contradictory results. To better understand the depths of associations between these parameters, we investigated whether greater skin color satisfaction is connected to lower body-image cognitive distortions and higher self-esteem among the young Indian men and women. Data were collected from 145 participants (male 73 and female 72), between ages 18 and 26 years. Results showed a general preference for lighter skin color among the participants with men, in our sample, expressed significant negative and positive associations of skin color satisfaction respectively with body-image cognitive distortions and self-esteem. However, skin color satisfaction is not a good predictor of self-esteem in our study, unlike the parameter body-image cognitive distortions. The findings are discussed in lights of self-perception and mental health of the young adult Indian men and women in a multi-colored society