Publications by João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues

Glutathione in the nucleus accumbens regulates motivation to exert reward-incentivized effort

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Lijing Xin, Ioannis Zalachoras, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Fiona Hollis, Pascal Steiner, Alina Veronika Irene Strasser, Eva Ramos Fernandez

Emerging evidence is implicating mitochondrial function and metabolism in the nucleus accumbens in motivated performance. However, the brain is vulnerable to excessive oxidative insults resulting from neurometabolic processes, and whether antioxidant level ...

2022

CAFS: Cost-Aware Features Selection Method for Multimodal Stress Monitoring on Wearable Devices

David Atienza Alonso, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Adriana Arza Valdes, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Niloofar Momeni

Objective: Today, stress monitoring on wearable devices is challenged by the tension between high-detection accuracy and battery lifetime driven by multimodal data acquisition and processing. Limited research has addressed the classification cost on multim ...

2022

eNAMPT actions through nucleus accumbens NAD + /SIRT1 link increased adiposity with sociability deficits programmed by peripuberty stress

Johan Auwerx, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Wei Huang, Ioannis Zalachoras, Sriparna Ghosal

Obesity is frequently associated with impairments in the social domain, and stress at puberty can lead to long-lasting changes in visceral fat deposition and in social behaviors. However, whether stress-induced changes in adipose tissue can affect fat-to-b ...

2022

Doppelganger-based training: Imitating our virtual self to accelerate interpersonal skills learning

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Marion Sandy Curdy

Interpersonal skills require mastering a wide range of competencies such as communication and adaptation to different situations. Effective training includes the use of videos in which role models perform the desired behaviours such that trainees can learn ...

2021

IMVEST, an immersive multimodal virtual environment stress test for humans that adjusts challenge to individual's performance

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Stephan Streuber, Erik Hans Jakob Studer

Laboratory stressors are essential tools to study the human stress response. However, despite considerable progress in the development of stress induction procedures in recent years, the field is still missing standardization and the methods employed frequ ...

2021

Metabolic signature in nucleus accumbens for anti-depressant-like effects of acetyl-L-carnitine

Rolf Gruetter, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Antoine Timothée Cherix, Thomas Didier Larrieu

Emerging evidence suggests that hierarchical status provide vulnerability to develop stress-induced depression. Energy metabolic changes in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) were recently related to hierarchical status and vulnerability to develop depression-lik ...

2020

Locomotion in virtual environments predicts cardiovascular responsiveness to subsequent stressful challenges

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Nathalie Heidi Meyer, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Stephan Streuber, Erik Hans Jakob Studer

Individuals differ in their physiological responsiveness to stressful challenges, and stress potentiates the development of many diseases. Heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of cardiac vagal break, is emerging as a strong index of physiological stress ...

Nature Research2020

Chronic corticosterone aggravates behavioral and neuronal symptomatology in a mouse model of alpha-synuclein pathology

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Hilal Lashuel, Johannes Burtscher, Anass Chiki, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Jean-Christophe Copin

Debilitating, yet underinvestigated nonmotor symptoms related to mood/emotion, such as depression, are common in Parkinson's disease. Here, we explore the role of depression and of the amygdala, a brain region robustly linked to mood/emotion, in synucleino ...

2019

Subjective and physiological responses to façade and sunlight pattern geometry in virtual reality

Marilyne Andersen, Jan Wienold, Giorgia Chinazzo, Kynthia Chamilothori, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues

This study investigates the joint impact of façade geometry and associated sunlight patterns on occupant subjective perception and physiological responses through a novel experimental method coupling physically-based simulations shown in virtual reality wi ...

2019

Trait anxiety on effort allocation to monetary incentives: a behavioral and high-density EEG study

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Alina Veronika Irene Strasser

Trait anxiety is an important phenotype in the prediction of stress-induced neuropsychiatric disorders. While the role of trait anxiety in mental effort and cognitive impairment is well documented, much less is known about its influence on motivated behavi ...

2019