Author Archives: samweiss

The concepts set and setting have been thought to be crucial to outcomes from psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for 50 years, but they have faced several methodological challenges. Here we highlight an underappreciated challenge: that they have been vaguely defined in a way that limits research advances and clinical guidance. After outlining...

Ovarian steroids, like estrogen and progesterone, affect brain activity, including energy use and serotonin signaling, especially during changes in the female reproductive cycle or menopause. Studies using brain imaging techniques suggest these hormones can influence brain metabolism and might have potential roles in brain protection and inflammation, but more research...

On June 18–19, 2025, ACCESS Mental Health welcomed ten undergraduate students from local universities to the UNC School of Medicine’s Roper Hall for the inaugural 2025 Psychiatry Careers Pathway Program (PCPP), a two-day immersive experience for undergraduate students to explore psychiatry as a potential career. Throughout the program, students engaged...

Via usual smartphone use following trauma exposure, this study identified language markers associated with patient-reported severity and change in severity for multiple symptoms. Using language markers as a proxy for the status of and changes in specific symptoms supports efficient remote health status monitoring and can provide clinicians with valuable...

Hyperarousal symptoms such as jumpiness and over-alertness are central features of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and are partly explained by hyper-reactivity of the right amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional learning. In the current study, we found that people who showed right amygdala hyper-reactivity shortly after trauma were more...

In a survey of adults with cystic fibrosis attending a large, academic medical center, 32% scored high enough on a standardized screening tool to suggest they probably have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This rate is much higher than the rate in the general population and 2-3 times higher than in other populations...

We developed a Motor Assisted Commutator to Harness Electronics in Tethered Experiments (MACHETE), an open-source device that helps behavioral neuroscientists retain naturalistic behavior during tethered, freely moving experiments in mice. We were particularly interested in freely-moving experiments relevant to studying arousal disorders, including the open field test, splash test, and...

Anxiety disorders arise when the brain’s response to threats become too intense or persists when not needed, leading to maladaptive behaviors and excessive arousal. We found that specialized arousal neurons in a brain region called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis activate when mice escape an aversive stimulus, offering...