Effects of cigarette smoking on neuropsychological performance in mood disorders: a comparison between smoking and nonsmoking inpatients.

Objective: To investigate the effects of cigarette smoking on neuropsychological performance in patients with mood disorders.

Method: One hundred depressed patients with DSM-IV-TR-defined major depressive disorder (n = 61) or bipolar disorder (n = 39), hospitalized for a 4-week psychiatric rehabilitation program, were included. Forty-five were active regular smokers, and 55 were nonsmokers who had never smoked in their lifetime.

Genetic and environmental influences on anxiety dimensions in Italian twins evaluated with the SCARED questionnaire.

This study explored the factorial structure of the Italian version of the Screen for Child Anxiety-Related Emotional Disorders questionnaire (SCARED), and investigated the contributions of genetic and environmental influences of individual variation of anxiety dimensions as reported in the SCARED. Three hundred and seventy-eight twin pairs aged 8-17 from the Italian Twin Registry filled in the SCARED through a mail survey. Four, distinct empirical factors, that corresponded closely to the original SCARED subscales of Generalized Anxiety (GAD), Panic (PD), Social Phobia (SP), and Separation Anxiety (SAD) disorder emerged from Exploratory Factor Analysis.

Taxonic structure of schizotypal personality disorder: a multiple-instrument, multi-sample study based on mixture models.

This study used a multi-sample, multiple-instrument strategy to evaluate the hypothesis that schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) is taxonic. In Study 1, 721 consecutively admitted inpatients and outpatients were evaluated with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Personality Disorders (SCID-II) and the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-4+ (PDQ-4+). The data from both questionnaire types were submitted to multivariate normal mixture analysis, which was carried out on factor scores obtained from a three-factor model of SPD criteria; these results supported the hypothesis that SPD is taxonic.

A family-based association study does not support DYX1C1 on 15q21.3 as a candidate gene in developmental dyslexia.

We applied a family-based association approach to investigate the role of the DYX1C1 gene on chromosome 15q as a candidate gene for developmental dyslexia (DD) to 158 families containing at least one dyslexic child. We directly sequenced exons 2 and 10 of the DYX1C1 gene and found eight single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs), three of which (-3G>A, 1249 G>T, 1259 C>G) were suitable for the genetic analyses. We performed single- and multimarker association analyses with DD as a categorical trait by FBAT version 1.

Influence of the serotonin transporter promoter gene and shyness on children's cerebral responses to facial expressions.

Background: Childhood shyness can predate social anxiety disorder and may be associated with biased discrimination of facial expressions of emotions.

Objective: To determine whether childhood shyness, or the serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism genotype, can predict participants' visual event-related potentials in response to expressions of children of similar ages.

Design: Study group drawn from an inception cohort of 149 subjects characterized 1 year before the present study by their degree of shyness.

Children's discrimination of expressions of emotions: relationship with indices of social anxiety and shyness.

Objective: To conduct an exploratory investigation of possible relationships between individual levels of social anxiety and the ability to classify emotional expressions in a group of schoolchildren observing pictures of children of similar age.

Method: One hundred forty-nine second- and third-grade schoolchildren underwent a facial expression discrimination trial. Children were characterized on the basis of the number of spontaneous comments they made during a pause in the trial, and on their scores on the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, the Stevenson-Hinde and Glover Shyness-to-the-Unfamiliar Scale, and the Cloninger Harm Avoidance scale.