Dysfunctional Alpha Modulation as a Mechanism of Working Memory Impairment in Serious Mental Illness.

Background: People with psychosis and mood disorders experience disruptions in working memory; however, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. We focused on 2 potential mechanisms: poor attentional engagement should be associated with elevated levels of prestimulus alpha-band activity within the electroencephalogram (EEG), whereas impaired working memory encoding should be associated with reduced poststimulus alpha suppression.

Methods: We collected EEG data from 68 people with schizophrenia, 43 people with bipolar disorder with a history of psychosis, 53 people with major depressive disorder, and 90 healthy comparison subjects while they completed a spatial working memory task.

Assessing Trial-by-Trial Electrophysiological and Behavioral Markers of Attentional Control and Sensory Precision in Psychotic and Mood Disorders.

Background And Hypothesis: The current study investigated the extent to which changes in attentional control contribute to performance on a visual perceptual discrimination task, on a trial-by-trial basis in a transdiagnostic clinical sample.

Study Design: Participants with schizophrenia (SZ; N = 58), bipolar disorder (N = 42), major depression disorder (N = 51), and psychiatrically healthy controls (N = 92) completed a visual perception task in which stimuli appeared briefly. The design allowed us to estimate the lapse rate and the precision of perceptual representations of the stimuli.

Psychometric validation and clinical correlates of an experiential foraging task.

Measuring the function of decision-making systems is a central goal of computational psychiatry. Individual measures of decisional function could be used to describe neurocognitive profiles that underpin psychopathology and offer insights into deficits that are shared across traditional diagnostic classes. However, there are few demonstrably reliable and mechanistically relevant metrics of decision making that can accurately capture the complex overlapping domains of cognition whilst also quantifying the heterogeneity of function between individuals.

Value Representations of Spite Sensitivity in Psychosis on the Minnesota Trust Game.

Background: Spite sensitivity provides a valuable construct to understand persecutory ideation and its underlying neural mechanisms. We examined the relationship between persecution and spite sensitivity in psychosis to identify their neural substrates.

Methods: In a 3T magnetic resonance imaging scanner, 49 participants with psychosis played the Minnesota Trust Game, in which they decided whether to take a small amount of money or trust a partner to choose between fair and unfair distributions of money.

A Transdiagnostic Study of Effort-Cost Decision-Making in Psychotic and Mood Disorders.

Background: Research suggests that effort-cost decision-making (ECDM), the estimation of work required to obtain reward, may be a relevant framework for understanding motivational impairment in psychotic and mood pathology. Specifically, research has suggested that people with psychotic and mood pathology experience effort as more costly than controls, and thus pursue effortful goals less frequently. This study examined ECDM across psychotic and mood pathology.

Transdiagnostic Predictors of Everyday Functioning: Examining the Relationships of Depression and Reinforcement Learning.

Background And Hypothesis: Impairments in function (ie, the ability to independently accomplish daily tasks) have been established in psychotic disorders. Identifying factors that contribute to these deficits is essential to developing effective interventions. The current study had several goals: examine potential differential relationships across domains of neurocognition, assess whether reinforcement learning is related to function, identify if predictors of function are transdiagnostic, determine whether depression and positive symptoms contribute to function, and to explore whether the modality of assessment impacts observed relationships.

Managing EEG studies: How to prepare and what to do once data collection has begun.

In this paper, we provide guidance for the organization and implementation of EEG studies. This work was inspired by our experience conducting a large-scale, multi-site study, but many elements could be applied to any EEG project. Section 1 focuses on study activities that take place before data collection begins.

Theories of psychopathology: Introduction to a special section.

This special section on theories of psychopathology provides an opportunity to collect the emergent, cross-cutting scholarship that is challenging traditional approaches to understanding mental illness. Here, we appraise the state of theory in the field and emphasize the pitfalls of working in the context of overly flexible, unchallenged, and essentially unchallengeable theoretic models, such as the biopsychosocial model, which we argue has become the de facto theoretic model for our field. We further posit that theoretic shortcomings are contributing to the often-referenced pessimism regarding our progress in understanding and treating mental illness, and introduce the charge of the authors of the papers in this section to articulate novel, falsifiable theories of psychopathology.

Shared Neural Activity But Distinct Neural Dynamics for Cognitive Control in Monkey Prefrontal and Parietal Cortex.

To better understand how prefrontal networks mediate forms of cognitive control disrupted in schizophrenia, we translated a variant of the AX continuous performance task that measures specific deficits in the human disease to 2 male monkeys and recorded neurons in PFC and parietal cortex during task performance. In the task, contextual information instructed by cue stimuli determines the response required to a subsequent probe stimulus. We found parietal neurons encoding the behavioral context instructed by cues that exhibited nearly identical activity to their prefrontal counterparts (Blackman et al.

Sunk cost sensitivity during change-of-mind decisions is informed by both the spent and remaining costs.

Sunk cost sensitivity describes escalating decision commitment with increased spent resources. On neuroeconomic foraging tasks, mice, rats, and humans show similar escalations from sunk costs while quitting an ongoing countdown to reward. In a new analysis taken across computationally parallel foraging tasks across species and laboratories, we find that these behaviors primarily occur on choices that are economically inconsistent with the subject's other choices, and that they reflect not only the time spent, but also the time remaining, suggesting that these are change-of-mind re-evaluation processes.

Comparing the functional neuroanatomy of proactive and reactive control between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.

Cognitive control deficits are associated with impaired executive functioning in schizophrenia. The Dual Mechanisms of Control framework suggests that proactive control requires sustained dorsolateral prefrontal activity, whereas reactive control marshals a larger network. However, primate studies suggest these processes are maintained by dual-encoding regions.

Cognitive [Computational] Neuroscience Test Reliability and Clinical Applications for Serious Mental Illness (CNTRaCS) Consortium: Progress and Future Directions.

The development of treatments for impaired cognition in schizophrenia has been characterized as the most important challenge facing psychiatry at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) project was designed to build on the potential benefits of using tasks and tools from cognitive neuroscience to better understanding and treat cognitive impairments in psychosis. These benefits include: (1) the use of fine-grained tasks that measure discrete cognitive processes; (2) the ability to design tasks that distinguish between specific cognitive domain deficits and poor performance due to generalized deficits resulting from sedation, low motivation, poor test taking skills, etc.

Resting-State Functional Connectivity Explained Psychotic-like Experiences in the General Population and Partially Generalized to Patients and Relatives.

Background: Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) are considered the subclinical portion of the psychosis continuum. Research suggests that there are resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) substrates of PLEs, yet it is unclear if the same substrates underlie more severe psychosis. Here, to our knowledge, we report the first study to build a cross-validated rsFC model of PLEs in a large community sample and directly test its ability to explain psychosis in an independent sample of patients with psychosis and their relatives.

Integrating development into the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework: Introduction to the special section.

The goal of this Special Section is to highlight the generativity of taking a developmental perspective toward the RDoC framework that considers developmental processes and principles and the environmental and contextual processes relevant at different ages and developmental stages. The 9 papers in this Special Section and 2 invited commentaries exemplify and highlight sophisticated efforts to integrate development and principles of developmental psychopathology into the RDoC framework. In so doing, the papers both demonstrate how a developmental perspective can bolster strengths of the RDoC approach and identify notable gaps and shortcomings in how the RDoC framework, assumptions, and constructs are currently conceptualized.

A Computational Model of Non-optimal Suspiciousness in the Minnesota Trust Game.

This study modelled , the worry that others are willing to incur a loss to hurt you, which is thought to undergird suspiciousness and persecutory ideation. Two samples performed a parametric, non-iterative trust game known as the Minnesota Trust Game (MTG). The MTG distinguishes suspicious decision-making from otherwise rational mistrust by incentivizing the player to trust in certain situations but not others.

New titles can give new perspectives: Reflections on language and equity in clinical science.

Rebranding of the as the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science is insufficient, and will not move the dial on the stigma and discrimination against people suffering from mental illness without a good deal more effort on the part of our community of scholars. In this editorial to inaugurate the new title of this Journal, coauthored by the prompter of this change along with the current editor, we unpack ways in which researchers can be mindful of language, research practices such as representation, and advocacy to promote a healthier science going forward. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Resting-State Networks Associated with Behavioral and Self-Reported Measures of Persecutory Ideation in Psychosis.

Persecutory ideations are self-referential delusions of being the target of malevolence despite a lack of evidence. Wisner et al. (2021) found that reduced connectivity between the left frontoparietal (lFP) network and parts of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) correlated with increased persecutory behaviors among psychotic patients performing in an economic social decision-making task that can measure the anticipation of a partner's spiteful behavior.

Task-related neural mechanisms of persecutory ideation in schizophrenia and community monozygotic twin-pairs.

Perceptions of spiteful behavior are common, distinct from rational fear, and may undergird persecutory ideation. To test this hypothesis and investigate neural mechanisms of persecutory ideation, we employed a novel economic social decision-making task, the Minnesota Trust Game (MTG), during neuroimaging in patients with schizophrenia (n = 30) and community monozygotic (MZ) twins (n = 38; 19 pairs). We examined distinct forms of mistrust, task-related brain activation and connectivity, and investigated relationships with persecutory ideation.

Introspective accuracy for substance use across a year of treatment for first episode psychosis.

Substance use exacerbates psychosis, mania, depression, and poor functioning in people with first episodes of psychosis (FEP) and is associated with poor treatment outcomes, even when it does not reach the level of a formal disorder. Impaired insight and substance use are common issues that may interfere with treatment outcomes among people experiencing FEP, yet both are treatable. Improvements in these domains are associated with better outcomes.

Reliability and Replicability of Implicit and Explicit Reinforcement Learning Paradigms in People With Psychotic Disorders.

Background: Motivational deficits in people with psychosis may be a result of impairments in reinforcement learning (RL). Therefore, behavioral paradigms that can accurately measure these impairments and their change over time are essential.

Methods: We examined the reliability and replicability of 2 RL paradigms (1 implicit and 1 explicit, each with positive and negative reinforcement components) given at 2 time points to healthy controls (n = 75), and people with bipolar disorder (n = 62), schizoaffective disorder (n = 60), and schizophrenia (n = 68).

Using Computational Modeling to Capture Schizophrenia-Specific Reinforcement Learning Differences and Their Implications on Patient Classification.

Background: Psychiatric diagnosis and treatment have historically taken a symptom-based approach, with less attention on identifying underlying symptom-producing mechanisms. Recent efforts have illuminated the extent to which different underlying circuitry can produce phenotypically similar symptomatology (e.g.

Sensitivity to Sunk Costs Depends on Attention to the Delay.

In the WebSurf task, humans forage for videos paying costs in terms of wait times on a time-limited task. A variant of the task in which demands during the wait time were manipulated revealed the role of attention in susceptibility to sunk costs. Consistent with parallel tasks in rodents, previous studies have found that humans (undergraduates measured in lab) preferred shorter delays, but waited longer for more preferred videos, suggesting that they were treating the delays economically.

The Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science is the future of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: An editorial.

This editorial describes the rationale behind changing this journal's title beginning in 2022. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Both unmedicated and medicated individuals with schizophrenia show impairments across a wide array of cognitive and reinforcement learning tasks.

Background: Schizophrenia is a disorder characterized by pervasive deficits in cognitive functioning. However, few well-powered studies have examined the degree to which cognitive performance is impaired even among individuals with schizophrenia not currently on antipsychotic medications using a wide range of cognitive and reinforcement learning measures derived from cognitive neuroscience. Such research is particularly needed in the domain of reinforcement learning, given the central role of dopamine in reinforcement learning, and the potential impact of antipsychotic medications on dopamine function.

Mental health and clinical psychological science in the time of COVID-19: Challenges, opportunities, and a call to action.

COVID-19 presents significant social, economic, and medical challenges. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate huge increases in mental health problems, clinical psychological science must assert a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, COVID-19 is conceptualized as a unique, compounding, multidimensional stressor that will create a vast need for intervention and necessitate new paradigms for mental health service delivery and training.