Recognition of emotional facial expressions in adolescents with anorexia nervosa and adolescents with major depression.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) has been suggested to be associated with abnormalities in facial emotion recognition. Most prior studies on facial emotion recognition in AN have investigated adult samples, despite the onset of AN being particularly often during adolescence. In addition, few studies have examined whether impairments in facial emotion recognition are specific to AN or might be explained by frequent comorbid conditions that are also associated with deficits in emotion recognition, such as depression.

Alterations in neural processing of emotional faces in adolescent anorexia nervosa patients - an event-related potential study.

The present study explored the neurophysiological correlates of perception and recognition of emotional facial expressions in adolescent anorexia nervosa (AN) patients using event-related potentials (ERPs). We included 20 adolescent girls with AN and 24 healthy girls and recorded ERPs during a passive viewing task and three active tasks requiring processing of emotional faces in varying processing depths; one of the tasks also assessed emotion recognition abilities behaviourally. Despite the absence of behavioural differences, we found that across all tasks AN patients exhibited a less pronounced early posterior negativity (EPN) in response to all facial expressions compared to controls.

Can intermittent theta burst stimulation as add-on to psychotherapy improve nicotine abstinence? Results from a pilot study.

Smoking is among the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Discontinuing smoking can increase life expectancy to the presmoking level. Unaided attempts are often ineffective, strengthening the necessity of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), nicotine replacement or pharmacotherapy.

NOS1 ex1f-VNTR polymorphism affects prefrontal oxygenation during response inhibition tasks.

Impulsivity is a trait shared by many psychiatric disorders and therefore a suitable intermediate phenotype for their underlying biological mechanisms. One of the molecular determinants involved is the NOS1 ex1f-VNTR, whose short variants are associated with a variety of impulsive behaviors. Fifty-six healthy controls were stratified into homozygous long (LL) (30 probands) and short (SS) (26 probands) allele groups.

Randomness of resting-state brain oscillations encodes Gray's personality trait.

Randomness of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) resting-state time-series has recently been used as a biomarker for numerous disorders including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease as well as autism. To date, however, it remains unknown whether and to what degree personality traits are associated with the randomness of resting-state temporal dynamics. To investigate this question, we estimated the Hurst exponent - a measure of the randomness of a time-series - during resting-state fMRI in brain areas previously associated with trait Impulsivity as defined in Gray's Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality in 15 healthy individuals.

NOS1 ex1f-VNTR polymorphism influences prefrontal brain oxygenation during a working memory task.

Nitric oxide (NO) synthase produces NO, which serves as first and second messenger in neurons, where the protein is encoded by the NOS1 gene. A functional variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) polymorphism in the promoter region of the alternative first exon 1f of NOS1 is associated with various functions of human behavior, for example increased impulsivity, while another, non-functional variant was linked to decreased verbal working memory and a heightened risk for schizophrenia. We therefore investigated the influence of NOS1 ex 1f-VNTR on working memory function as reflected by both behavioral measures and prefrontal oxygenation.

Suppression of emotional words in the Think/No-Think paradigm investigated with functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

The current pilot study was designed to investigate mechanisms of suppression of emotional and non-emotional words with Anderson's Think/No-Think paradigm using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found no differences in the suppression of negative, positive and neutral words on the behavioral level. Neurophysiological data, however, have shown more activation in right dlPFC and right vlPFC during attempts to suppress negative stimuli than during attempts to suppress neutral or positive stimuli.