In Japanese saying, wellness is expressed as "sleep well, eat well, and defecate well". Keeping these three factors does not mean lack of any symptoms, but having positive feelings. In this meaning, these three words may represent health-related quality of life. The author conducted population survey on these three factors, along with major gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms and health-related behaviors. There were significant correlation between three wellness indicators and GI symptoms, and also with willing loss, perceived stress, and regularity of daily life. Meal preference also has correlation with wellness factors and GI symptoms. Namely, daily-life behavior itself may have some impact on wellness and health-related quality of life. Therefore, the author concludes that healthier eating habit itself might be important for human wellness.

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Approximately one hundred billion brain cells are produced from neural stem cells (NSCs). This phenomenon, i.e., neurogenesis, explosively occurs during fetal stages, but continues throughout the life because NSCs exist in certain regions of the brain such as the hippocampus. Neurogenesis is influenced by various genetic and environmental factors, and it also affects learning and memory. Conversely, decrease of neurogenesis seems to cause vulnerability for onset of mental diseases. We are evaluating this "neurogenesis theory" for etiology of mental diseases using rodent models, and trying to prevent/cure behavioral abnormality by increasing postnatal neurogenesis. Our approaches by treating animals with polyunsaturated fatty acids and raising animals in enriched environment can increase neurogenesis and reducing abnormal behavior. These findings are promising in future prevention and therapy for mental diseases related with decreased neurogenesis.

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Energy homeostasis is controlled by a complex neuroendocrine system consisting of peripheral and central signals, particularly leptin and brain-gut peptides. Animal experiments have demonstrated that brain-gut peptides are important not only in the regulation of feeding and metabolism, but also in other neuroendocrine and behavioural functions. Knowledge about gut-brain peptides is increasingly used in the study of the pathophysiology of behavioural disorders. Genetic studies including polymorphisms in genes encoding peptide or peptide receptors, as well as administration studies with peptide agonist/antagonist together with brain imaging have opened a new avenue for the study of peptide signaling in human behavior and behavioural disorders. This review briefly describes brain-gut peptide family and its role in feeding and other human behaviors, with a focus on the factors influencing peptide signaling such as peptide auto-antibodies, synaptic rearrangement, food-derived peptides, and environmental factors involved.

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Gut microbes live in a state of harmonious symbiosis with each other and their host, however, a disordered balance amongst gut microbes is now thought to be an associated or even causal factor for chronic medical conditions as varied as obesity and inflammatory bowel diseases. While evidence is still limited, there are rapidly coalescing clusters of evidence which point to the possibility that variations in the composition of gut microbes may be associated with changes in the normal functioning of the nervous system. This review focuses on these data and suggests that the concept should be explored further to uncover possible links to mental health and psychiatric disorders.

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How negative emotion is produced in the brain is the crucial research question in psychosomatic medicine. Research on irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) provides basic and clinical keys to solve this question. Emotion consists of emotional states as bodily condition and conscious feeling. Emotions are typically elicited by a specific stimulus via afferent neurons. The stimulus is processed in the cortical (i.e. anterior cingulate) and subcortical (i.e. amygdala) structures. Thus skeletomotor and autonomic-endocrine control systems are activated. This changes activities of the peripheral organs. Altered activities of organs are conducted to the central nervous system as interoception via afferent neurons. Visceral stimulation therefore provides simple model to clarify the process of emotion. Colonic distention in normal individuals induces activation of the thalamus,, and prefrontal cortex with increased scores of abdominal pain and anxiety. In IBS patients, these changes are exaggerated. These changes seem to be dependent on personality, gene, and experience. Activities of amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, and insula as well as regulatory substances like serotonin or corticotropin-releasing hormone may determine interoception and emotion. Further studies on interoception and emotion are warranted in the future.

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Emotion is created by the cerebrum, that is a manifestation of the cerebral functions, and may affect other cerebral functions. This paper discusses two topics on the effects of emotion on memory function in human; one is amygdalar damage affecting emotional memory, and the other is neural basis of dissociative amnesia. Everyday experience suggests that highly emotional events are often the most memorable. Experimental work in animals and humans has demonstrated that the amygdaloid complex plays a crucial role in emotional memory, i.e., memory of events arousing strong emotions. In Alzheimer disease, the amygdala is involved centrally from the initial stage of the disease as well as the hippocampus. By using memory of emotional experience (Hanshin Earthquake) and controlled experimental setting, we demonstrated that emotion reinforced memory retention in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and that the effect is related to intensity of amygdalar damage and is associated with visual memory function. These findings give a clue to the management of people with dementia, and also provide evidence of the amygdala's involvement in emotional memory in humans. Dissociative amnesia usually follows an emotionally stressful event and cannot be attributable to explicit brain damage. It is thought to reflect a reversible deficit in memory retrieval probably due to memory repression. We used fMRI to investigate neural activity associated with memory retrieval in two patients with dissociative amnesia, and found increased activity in the pFC and decreased activity in the hippocampus during seeing faces or names of actually well-known but forgotten people. After treatment, the altered pattern of brain activation disappeared in one patient whose retrograde memories were recovered, whereas it remained unchanged in the other patient whose retrograde memories were not recovered. These findings provide direct evidence that memory repression in dissociative amnesia and suggest that the pFC has an important role in inhibiting the activity of the hippocampus in memory repression.

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Objectives: It is commonly believed that the factor that disturbes giving up smoking is dependency for nicotine. However the dependency on nicotine is not heavy compared with dependency on alcohol and drugs. So investigations for other factors which contributed to disturb giving up the smoking are needed. This study focused on the factors such as stress coping behavior, strength of environmental stressors and trait anxiety related to giving up smoking. Subjects: Participants were 3,000 adult male selected randomly from the Metropolitan area within 30km. The participants' range of age is from 20 years old to 69 years old. The number of valid answers is 1978 (65.93%). We determined the cut off point of giving up smoking at 1.5 years. The participants who had smoked and have been giving up smoking at least 1.5 years ago were assigned to giving up smokers (n=402) and the participants who had given up smoking within 1.5 years and were smoking again were assigned to smokers (n=425). Method: In this survey six questionnaires contained: 1) questionnaire of daily stress coping, 2) questionnaire of environmental stressors, 3) questionnaire of appraisal for stressors, 4) questionnaire of trait anxiety, 5) questionnaire of the reasons of giving up smoking, 6) question of cigarette brand. Results: Results indicated that the factors contributed to give up smoking were following: 1) differences of amount of nicotine based on the cigarette brand, 2) frequencies of using stress coping behaviors, 3) differences of the degree of environmental stressors, 4) differences of the strength of strait anxiety, 5) cognitive aspects of controlling stress, 6) reasons of giving up smoking. However these factors differed according to the age bracket. In the age bracket from 20 to 39 years old, low trait anxiety, low degree of environmental stressors and high controllability of stressors were contributed to continue giving up smoking and low motivation to give up smoking at the beginning, high degree of environmental stressors, high trait anxiety and low controllability of stressors were contributed to start smoking again even if they used some coping behaviors. In the age bracket from 40 to 55 years old, low trait anxiety, low degree of environmental stressors and high controllability of stressors were contributed to continue giving up smoking and low motivation to give up smoking at the beginning, high degree of environmental stressors and high trait anxiety were contributed to start smoking again. In the age bracket from 56 to 69 years old, low trait anxiety, low degree of environmental stressors and low controllability of stressors were contributed to continue giving up smoking. Conclusion: In this study, it was indicated that high degree of environmental stressors were related to start smoking again. In the age bracket from 20 to 39 years old and from 40 to 55 years old, low motivation to give up smoking at the beginning and high trait anxiety were contributed to start smoking again. However the roles of trait anxiety and coping behavior in the age bracket from 56 to 69 years old were not clear compared with the age bracket from 20 to 39 years old and from 40 to 55 years old. Further study is needed to evaluate the roles of these factors. It is shown that in the brand of cigarette the high nicotine content was related to giving up smoking and low nicotine content was related to starting smoking again.

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The present study aims to develop a scale for measuring the achievement motive for medical treatment, as a part of observational study project that applies quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods in order to investigate informed consent. The motive reflects the attitude of patient at the time of outpatient chemotherapy introduction. We reviewed the previous studies of achievement motive, developed a scale with 14 items for measuring achievement motive in terms of self-derived achievement motivation (AMS) and achievement motivation derived from others (AMO), and conducted a questionnaire survey toward 31 healthy adults. In a series of statistical analysis, two factors were detected, each of which corresponded to our concepts. The reliability of these factors was validated by Item-Total correlation coefficient and Cronbachα. The concurrent validity of our scale with the previous scale was confirmed. This study was undertaken with a small number of healthy adults. In our study project including patients, the usefulness of this scale will be approached from both qualitative and quantitative standpoints.

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