Publications by authors named "Adrienne L Romer"

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by affective-interpersonal features and an impulsive-antisocial lifestyle. Psychopathy commonly co-occurs with other forms of psychopathology, but current understanding of how behavioral features of psychopathy co-occur with, or are distinct from, other mental health problems is limited. In this study, we analysed data from a large sample of young adults to study the relationship between different facets of psychopathic traits and general psychopathology ("p").

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Objective: A general psychopathology (p) factor captures shared variation across mental disorders. Structural neural alterations have been associated with the p factor concurrently, but less is known about whether these alterations relate to within-person change in the p factor over time, especially during preadolescence, a period of neurodevelopmental changes.

Method: This study examined whether baseline brain structure was prospectively related to the trajectory of the p factor and specific forms of psychopathology over 2 years in 9,220 preadolescents (aged 9-10 at baseline) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD).

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To determine the association between executive function and later externalizing and internalizing problems, we conducted a meta-analysis of 167 studies (1098 effect sizes, total N = 66,119) that explored the longitudinal associations between executive functions in children and subsequent externalizing and internalizing problems. The results indicated that greater child executive function was prospectively associated with fewer attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, fewer conduct problems, fewer oppositional defiant disorder symptoms, less substance use, fewer broad externalizing problems, fewer depression symptoms, and fewer broad internalizing problems, but not with subsequent anxiety symptoms. Moderator analyses revealed that the sample type moderated the associations of executive function with both ADHD symptoms and conduct problems.

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Background: A general psychopathology '' factor captures shared variance across mental disorders in diverse samples and may partly reflect executive dysfunction. Higher factor scores have been related to structural alterations within the visual association cortex (VAC) and a cerebello-thalamo-cerebrocortical circuit (CTCC), both of which are important for executive control. Here, we tested replicability of these direct associations as well as the indirect role of executive functioning in a sample of healthy and cross-diagnostic adult patients.

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A general psychopathology ('p') factor captures shared variation across mental disorders. One hypothesis is that poor executive function (EF) contributes to p. Although EF is related to p concurrently, it is unclear whether EF predicts or is a consequence of p.

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A general psychopathology ('p') factor captures transdiagnostic features of mental illness; however, the meaning of the p factor remains unclear. Regulatory focus theory postulates that individuals regulate goal pursuit either by maximizing gains (promotion) or minimizing losses (prevention). As maladaptive goal pursuit has been associated with multiple categorical disorders, we examined whether individual differences in promotion and prevention goal pursuit are associated with p as well as internalizing- and externalizing-specific factors using structural equation modeling of data from 1330 volunteers aged 18-22.

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Objective: Neuroimaging research has revealed that structural brain alterations are common across broad diagnostic families of disorders rather than specific to a single psychiatric disorder. Such overlap in the structural brain correlates of mental disorders mirrors already well-documented phenotypic comorbidity of psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses, which can be indexed by a general psychopathology or factor. The authors hypothesized that if general psychopathology drives the convergence of structural alterations common across disorders, then 1) there should be few associations unique to any one diagnostic family of disorders, and 2) associations with the factor should overlap with those for the broader diagnostic families.

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Vitamin D, used here to refer to both 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the main circulating form of the vitamin, and 1,25-hydroxyvitamin D, the biologically active form, has been shown to influence brain development and function. Consistent with these findings, low levels of vitamin D have been implicated in various mental disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, and autism. Recently, a shared variance across multiple categories of mental health disorders has been identified and shown to be genetically influenced.

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Transdiagnostic research has identified a general psychopathology factor-often called the 'p' factor-that accounts for shared variation across internalizing, externalizing, and thought disorders in diverse samples. It has been argued that the p factor may reflect dysfunctional thinking present in serious mental illness. In support of this, we previously used a theory-free, data-driven multimodal neuroimaging approach to find that higher p factor scores are associated with structural alterations within a cerebello-thalamo-cortical circuit (CTCC) and visual association cortex, both of which are important for monitoring and coordinating information processing in the service of executive control.

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Background: Individuals with extreme food avoidance such as Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) experience impairing physical and mental health consequences from nutrition of insufficient variety or/and quantity. Identifying mechanisms contributing to food avoidance is essential to develop effective interventions. Anxiety figures prominently in theoretical models of food avoidance; however, there is limited evidence that repeated exposures to foods increases approach behavior in ARFID.

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The prevalence rate of obesity continues to rise in the U.S., but effective treatment options remain elusive resulting in increased emphasis on prevention.

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Studies of early life extremes such as trauma, abuse, and neglect highlight the critical importance of quality caregiving in the development of brain circuits supporting emotional behavior and mental health. The impact of normative variability in caregiving on such biobehavioral processes, however, is poorly understood. Here, we provide initial evidence that even subtle variability in normative caregiving maps onto individual differences in threat-related brain function and, potentially, associated psychopathology in adolescence.

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The use of polygenic risk scores has become a practical translational approach to investigating the complex genetic architecture of schizophrenia, but the link between polygenic risk scores and pathophysiological components of this disorder has been the subject of limited research. We investigated in healthy volunteers whether schizophrenia polygenic risk score predicts hippocampal activity during simple memory encoding, which has been proposed as a risk-associated intermediate phenotype of schizophrenia. We analysed the relationship between polygenic risk scores and hippocampal activity in a discovery sample of 191 unrelated healthy volunteers from the USA and in two independent replication samples of 76 and 137 healthy unrelated participants from Europe and the USA, respectively.

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Adolescents and young adults are characterized as prone to risky behavior with a wide range of traits identified as predictors of individual differences in this behavior. Here we test a crucial difference between traits that reflect , the tendency to engage in risky behavior without consideration of consequences, versus , the tendency to be attracted to novel and rewarding experience. To test the validity of this distinction, we examined the factorial structure of eight risk-related traits in a sample of 899 18 to 22 year-olds.

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Social anxiety disorder typically begins in adolescence, a sensitive period for brain development, when increased complexity and salience of peer relationships requires novel forms of social learning. Disordered social learning in adolescence may explain how brain dysfunction promotes social anxiety. Socially anxious adolescents (n = 15) and adults (n = 19) and non-anxious adolescents (n = 24) and adults (n = 32) predicted, then received, social feedback from high and low-value peers while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

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The interpersonal model of loss of control (LOC) eating proposes that socially distressing situations lead to anxious states that trigger excessive food consumption. Self-reports support these links, but the neurobiological underpinnings of these relationships remain unclear. We therefore examined brain regions associated with anxiety in relation to LOC eating and energy intake in the laboratory.

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