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  3. This may come as no surprise to residents of New York City and other big urban centers: Living there can be bad for your mental

This may come as no surprise to residents of New York City and other big urban centers: Living there can be bad for your mental

admin2012-08-10  44
问题     This may come as no surprise to residents of New York City and other big urban centers: Living there can be bad for your mental health.
    Now researchers have found a possible reason why. Imaging scans show that in city dwellers or people who grew up in urban areas, certain areas of the brain react more vigorously to stress. That may help explain how city life can boost the risks of schizophrenia (精神分裂症) and other mental disorders, researchers said.
    Previous research has found that growing up in a big city raises the risk of schizophrenia. And there’s some evidence that city dwellers are at heightened risk for mood and anxiety disorders, although the evidence is mixed.
    The study, done in Germany and published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, focused on how the brain reacts to stress caused by other people.
    To do that, investigators had volunteers lie in a brain scanner and solve math problems. The volunteers expected easy problems, but they were in fact hard enough that each volunteer ended up getting most of them wrong.
    While in the scanner, volunteers heard a researcher criticize their poor performance, saying it was surprisingly bad and disappointing, and telling the volunteers they might not be skilled enough to participate.
    To assess any effect of where the volunteers grew up, the researchers assigned each an "urbanicity" score based on how many years they’d spent by age 15 in a city, town or rural area. The higher the score, the more urban their childhood life was, and the more activity showed up in the amygdale-regulating (杏仁核控制的) circuitry during the experiment.
    A slightly different stress-producing test produced similar results with a different group of 23 volunteers.
    Jens Pruessner, a study co-author from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal, said the study illustrates a new avenue for understanding the risk factors for developing mental illness.
    An expert in emotion and the brain who wasn’t involved with the study, Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, said it’s premature to draw conclusions about what the results mean for mental illness.
    "These results are interesting but preliminary," she said. "This will raise a lot of interest in this idea. Whether or not it pans out in future research, who knows, but I think it’s worth investigating. "
We may infer from Paragraph 7 that the amygdale-regulating circuitry might be something related to people’s______.
选项 A、emotion
B、reaction
C、judgment
D、temper
答案A
解析 推理判断题。由定位句可知，城市性评分越高，试验参与者在试验中由杏仁核控制的脑部通路的活跃度就表现得越高。这就意味着试验参与者在城市成长时间越久，在受到压力时，他们的杏仁核部分的脑部活动就越激烈。而由上文可知，研究表明，在城市里长大的人的大脑某些区域对压力的反应更为强烈，并且更容易出现情绪问题及焦虑等倾向。由此推断杏仁核控制的脑部通路可能是和情绪相关的某个组织。因此A)“情绪”为答案。
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