Impressions about harm are formed rapidly and then refined, modulated by serotonin.

Attributing motives to others is a crucial aspect of mentalizing, can be biased by prejudice, and is affected by common psychiatric disorders. It is therefore important to understand in depth the mechanisms underpinning it. Toward improving models of mentalizing motives, we hypothesized that people quickly infer whether other's motives are likely beneficial or detrimental, then refine their judgment (classify-refine).

(Mal)adaptive Mentalizing in the Cognitive Hierarchy, and Its Link to Paranoia.

Unlabelled: Humans need to be on their toes when interacting with competitive others to avoid being taken advantage of. Too much caution out of context can, however, be detrimental and produce false beliefs of intended harm. Here, we offer a formal account of this phenomenon through the lens of Theory of Mind.

Modelling the longitudinal dynamics of paranoia in psychosis: A temporal network analysis over 20 years.

Background: Paranoia is a key feature of psychosis that can be highly debilitating. Theories of paranoia mostly interface with short-scale or cross-sectional data models, leaving the longitudinal course of paranoia underspecified.

Methods: We develop an empirical characterisation of two aspects of paranoia - persecutory and referential delusions - in individuals with psychosis over 20 years.

D2/D3 dopamine supports the precision of mental state inferences and self-relevance of joint social outcomes.

Striatal dopamine is important in paranoid attributions, although its computational role in social inference remains elusive. We employed a simple game-theoretic paradigm and computational model of intentional attributions to investigate the effects of dopamine D2/D3 antagonism on ongoing mental state inference following social outcomes. Haloperidol, compared with the placebo, enhanced the impact of partner behaviour on beliefs about the harmful intent of partners, and increased learning from recent encounters.

The felt-presence experience: from cognition to the clinic.

The felt presence experience is the basic feeling that someone else is present in the immediate environment, without clear sensory evidence. Ranging from benevolent to distressing, personified to ambiguous, felt presence has been observed in neurological case studies and within psychosis and paranoia, associated with sleep paralysis and anxiety, and recorded within endurance sports and spiritualist communities. In this Review, we summarise the philosophical, phenomenological, clinical, and non-clinical correlates of felt presence, as well as current approaches that use psychometric, cognitive, and neurophysiological methods.

Formalising social representation to explain psychiatric symptoms.

Recent work in social cognition has moved beyond a focus on how people process social rewards to examine how healthy people represent other agents and how this is altered in psychiatric disorders. However, formal modelling of social representation has not kept pace with these changes, impeding our understanding of how core aspects of social cognition function, and fail, in psychopathology. Here, we suggest that belief-based computational models provide a basis for an integrated sociocognitive approach to psychiatry, with the potential to address important but unexamined pathologies of social representation, such as maladaptive schemas and illusory social agents.

Increased persuadability and credulity in people with corpus callosum dysgenesis.

Corpus callosum dysgenesis is one of the most common congenital neurological malformations. Despite being a clear and identifiable structural alteration of the brain's white matter connectivity, the impact of corpus callosum dysgenesis on cognition and behaviour has remained unclear. Here we build upon past clinical observations in the literature to define the clinical phenotype of corpus callosum dysgenesis better using unadjusted and adjusted group differences compared with a neurotypical sample on a range of social and cognitive measures that have been previously reported to be impacted by a corpus callosum dysgenesis diagnosis.

Knowing me, knowing you: Interpersonal similarity improves predictive accuracy and reduces attributions of harmful intent.

To benefit from social interactions, people need to predict how their social partners will behave. Such predictions arise through integrating prior expectations with evidence from observations, but where the priors come from and whether they influence the integration into beliefs about a social partner is not clear. Furthermore, this process can be affected by factors such as paranoia, in which the tendency to form biased impressions of others is common.

Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from COVID-19.

Background: There is growing concern about possible cognitive consequences of COVID-19, with reports of 'Long COVID' symptoms persisting into the chronic phase and case studies revealing neurological problems in severely affected patients. However, there is little information regarding the nature and broader prevalence of cognitive problems post-infection or across the full spread of disease severity.

Methods: We sought to confirm whether there was an association between cross-sectional cognitive performance data from 81,337 participants who between January and December 2020 undertook a clinically validated web-optimized assessment as part of the Great British Intelligence Test, and questionnaire items capturing self-report of suspected and confirmed COVID-19 infection and respiratory symptoms.

Preferences for Digital Smartphone Mental Health Apps Among Adolescents: Qualitative Interview Study.

Background: Mental health digital apps hold promise for providing scalable solutions to individual self-care, education, and illness prevention. However, a problem with these apps is that they lack engaging user interfaces and experiences and thus potentially result in high attrition. Although guidelines for new digital interventions for adults have begun to examine engagement, there is a paucity of evidence on how to best address digital interventions for adolescents.

Hallucination, imagery, dreaming: reassembling stimulus-independent perceptions based on Edmund Parish's classic misperception framework.

Within the broad field of human perception lies the category of stimulus-independent perceptions, which draws together experiences such as hallucinations, mental imagery and dreams. Traditional divisions between medical and psychological sciences have contributed to these experiences being investigated separately. This review aims to examine their similarities and differences at the levels of phenomenology and underlying brain function and thus reassemble them within a common framework.

Reduction in social learning and increased policy uncertainty about harmful intent is associated with pre-existing paranoid beliefs: Evidence from modelling a modified serial dictator game.

Current computational models suggest that paranoia may be explained by stronger higher-order beliefs about others and increased sensitivity to environments. However, it is unclear whether this applies to social contexts, and whether it is specific to harmful intent attributions, the live expression of paranoia. We sought to fill this gap by fitting a computational model to data (n = 1754) from a modified serial dictator game, to explore whether pre-existing paranoia could be accounted by specific alterations to cognitive parameters characterising harmful intent attributions.

Dopamine manipulations modulate paranoid social inferences in healthy people.

Altered dopamine transmission is thought to influence the formation of persecutory delusions. However, despite extensive evidence from clinical studies there is little experimental evidence on how modulating the dopamine system changes social attributions related to paranoia, and the salience of beliefs more generally. Twenty seven healthy male participants received 150mg L-DOPA, 3 mg haloperidol, or placebo in a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled study, over three within-subject sessions.

Paranoia, sensitization and social inference: findings from two large-scale, multi-round behavioural experiments.

The sensitization model suggests that paranoia is explained by over-sensitivity to social threat. However, this has been difficult to test experimentally. We report two preregistered social interaction studies that tested (i) whether paranoia predicted overall attribution and peak attribution of harmful intent and (ii) whether anxiety, interpersonal sensitivity and worry predicted the attribution of harmful intent.

Beliefs are multidimensional and vary in stability over time - psychometric properties of the Beliefs and Values Inventory (BVI).

The cognitive processes underlying belief are still obscure. Understanding these processes may lead to more targeted treatment to better address functional impairment, such as occurs with delusions. One way in which this might be accomplished is to understand healthy, everyday beliefs, and how these may relate to characteristics observed in delusions.

Differential Subjective Experiences in Learners and Non-learners in Frontal Alpha Neurofeedback: Piloting a Mixed-Method Approach.

In a neurofeedback paradigm, trainees learn to willfully control their brain dynamics. How this is realized remains an open question. We evaluate the hypothesis that learning success is associated with a specific phenomenology.

Mental health crisis resolution teams and crisis care systems in England: a national survey.

Unlabelled: Aims and methodA national survey investigated the implementation of mental health crisis resolution teams (CRTs) in England. CRTs were mapped and team managers completed an online survey.

Results: Ninety-five per cent of mapped CRTs (n = 233) completed the survey.

The Sensed Presence Questionnaire (SenPQ): initial psychometric validation of a measure of the "Sensed Presence" experience.

Background: The experience of 'sensed presence'-a feeling or sense that another entity, individual or being is present despite no clear sensory or perceptual evidence-is known to occur in the general population, appears more frequently in religious or spiritual contexts, and seems to be prominent in certain psychiatric or neurological conditions and may reflect specific functions of social cognition or body-image representation systems in the brain. Previous research has relied on ad-hoc measures of the experience and no specific psychometric scale to measure the experience exists to date.

Methods: Based on phenomenological description in the literature, we created the 16-item Sensed Presence Questionnaire (SenPQ).

How similar are the changes in neural activity resulting from mindfulness practice in contrast to spiritual practice?

Meditation and spiritual practices are conceptually similar, eliciting similar subjective experiences, and both appear to provide similar benefits to the practicing individuals. However, no research has examined whether the mechanism of action leading to the beneficial effects is similar in both practices. This review examines the neuroimaging research that has focused on groups of meditating individuals, groups who engage in religious/spiritual practices, and research that has examined groups who perform both practices together, in an attempt to assess whether this may be the case.