Domestic violence, defined here as violent or aggressive behavior from one intimate partner to another, is one of the prime contributors of female homicides, known as femicide. Between 2005-2013, over 1042 women were reported murdered in Italy, increasing from 84 to 134 victims per year. My research analyzes women inequality in Italy by focusing on how domestic violence and femicide have been interpreted and portrayed to the Italian public. I pose the following question: In what ways have literature and media sources portrayed or helped raise awareness on women’s rights issues in Italy, specifically regarding domestic violence and femicide? This research is salient because most research focuses solely on developing countries, but when it comes to women’s rights, all countries including Italy are affected. In order to explore the relationship between intimate partner violence and femicide, I use synthesis and comparison of Michael Johnson’s Typology of Domestic Violence with other literature and social media. First, I analyze how literature and media sources portray domestic violence and femicide to the Italian public. Second, I compare my findings with Johnson’s interpretation of intimate partner violence. Third, I combine all said sources to formulate my own interpretation of domestic violence and femicide. Much of this research has been conducted in Italy and from Italian sources; therefore, most of the literature is translated into English. I hypothesize that cultural acceptance of gender inequality in Italy has contributed to domestic violence becoming a major factor in femicide. I anticipate that my research will help raise international awareness of femicide and domestic violence issues in Italy, and that the results will provide assistance in decreasing violence against women. I also seek to provide an alternate perspective of domestic violence, which I hope will lead to future research into the policy implications of my work.

There is a noticable lack of research done in epistemology with regards to the role of the passions (or emotions). Epistemology asks questions about what knowledge is and how we come by acquiring knowledge. Due to these types of questions, the focus is put on reason and justification. However, there is also an aspect of normativity: what methodology ought one to use in order to acquire knowledge? Given recent findings in experimental psychology, it is odd that an examination of the passions' role in normativity is less prominent in epistemology. My presentation is about my recent research into the role passions play in questions about knowledge acquisition and more specifically the normative aspects of knowledge acquisition. My primary way of doing this is not solely a review of experimental psychology literature, but also an examination of the 18th Century philosopher David Hume's work on the passions and normativity. I will show how an accurate interpetation of Hume's work is relevant to epistemological issues, and how his work can inform contemporary debates around normativity more generally. 

Circadian rhythms are daily biological processes regulated by circadian clocks, endogenous 24-hr biological clocks. Our master circadian clock, located within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the brain, modulates the activity of circadian oscillators in peripheral organs, including the adrenal gland. While the circadian rhythm in glucocorticoid hormone production correlates with adrenal clock gene expression, the molecular mechanisms of adrenal circadian clock regulation require further investigation. Since the transcription factor phosphorylated cAMP response element binding (pCREB) protein is involved in the regulation of the clock gene PER1 in the SCN, we hypothesize that similar pathways to those found in the SCN control clock gene expression and circadian hormone production in the adrenal. Previous results from our laboratory display that the phase of PER1 circadian expression, in cultured adrenal tissue, can be shifted by drug treatments that increase cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) levels. Since increases in cAMP lead to CREB phosphorylation, we propose that pCREB ultimately regulates adrenal expression of PER1 in vivo. We measured adrenal pCREB levels in rats housed under constant laboratory conditions and sacrificed 11 hours after starting their subjective day (circadian time 11, CT11) or 11 hours after starting their subjective night (CT23), equivalent time points of peak and trough cAMP levels in the SCN respectively. Immunohistochemical detection of pCREB showed significantly higher number of cells expressing pCREB in the adrenal medulla at CT11 than at CT23. Elevated expression of pCREB before the onset of nocturnal activity in rats is consistent with the predicted peak of glucocorticoid levels. Currently we are investigating the presence of pCREB in the adrenal cortex. Exploring the relationship between pCREB and PER1 expression in the adrenal, and the role of pCREB in phase shifting the adrenal clock, may help elucidating how the master circadian clock relays circadian time to the adrenal gland.

 Sleep is essential for survival, yet its function remains unknown. In our society, sleep deprivation and disruption of sleep architecture, namely the temporal structure of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep stages—are common. Sleep deprivation impairs memory consolidation dependent on the hippocampus region of the brain. We hypothesize that disruption of sleep architecture in the absence of sleep deprivation impairs hippocampus-dependent memory. Our laboratory developed a rat model in which sleep architecture is predictably disrupted without the confounding effects of sleep deprivation, and without genetic, pharmacological or surgical manipulations. Exposure to an artificially short light-dark (LD) cycle (22 hours) produces two circadian rhythms within the same animal. In this “forced desynchrony” protocol, animals cycle between “aligned” days, during which the two oscillations are in phase and sleep architecture is similar to that of 24-hour LD cycle control animals, and “misaligned” days, during which oscillations are out of phase and sleep architecture is disrupted. Previous results indicated that rats trained in a contextual fear-conditioning hippocampus-dependent memory task during misaligned days show impaired memory consolidation. Because memory consolidation was measured as “freezing”, the animal’s immobility in the fearful context, we asked whether memory consolidation would also be impaired in a hippocampus-dependent task requiring active spatial navigation (the Morris water maze or MWM). We trained aligned, misaligned and control animals to swim to a hidden escape platform within a pool containing visual cues. After removing the platform, we tested memory consolidation by measuring latency to reach the original platform location along with other parameters. Our analysis showed that while circadian forced desynchrony associated with sleep-stage architecture disruption may impact memory acquisition in the MWM task, it does not appear to impair long-term memory consolidation. We conclude that normal sleep architecture may be critical for some hippocampus-dependent memory tasks but not others.