Differential gray matter correlates and machine learning prediction of abuse and internalizing psychopathology in adolescent females.

Childhood abuse represents one of the most potent risk factors for the development of psychopathology during childhood, accounting for 30-60% of the risk for onset. While previous studies have separately associated reductions in gray matter volume (GMV) with childhood abuse and internalizing psychopathology (IP), it is unclear whether abuse and IP differ in their structural abnormalities, and which GMV features are related to abuse and IP at the individual level. In a pooled multisite, multi-investigator sample, 246 child and adolescent females between the ages of 8-18 were recruited into studies of interpersonal violence (IPV) and/or IP (i.

Decoding threat neurocircuitry representations during traumatic memory recall in PTSD.

The neurocircuitry mechanisms underlying recall of traumatic memories remain unclear. This study investigated whether traumatic memory recall engages neurocircuitry representations that mirror activity patterns engaged during generalized threat stimulus processing in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Multivariate pattern analysis was used to train 3 decoders.

How Psychedelics Modulate Multiple Memory Mechanisms in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder with defining abnormalities in memory, and psychedelics may be promising candidates for the treatment of PTSD given their effects on multiple memory systems. Most PTSD and psychedelic research has investigated memory with fear conditioning and extinction. While fruitful, conditioning and extinction provide a limited model of the complexity of PTSD and phenomenology of psychedelics, thereby limiting the refinement of therapies.

Out with the bad, in with the good: A review on augmented extinction learning in humans.

Several leading therapies for anxiety-related disorders rely on the principles of extinction learning. However, despite decades of development and research, many of these treatments remain only moderately effective. Developing techniques to improve extinction learning is an important step towards developing improved and mechanistically-informed exposure-based therapies.

Exercise and Fear and Safety Learning.

Fear conditioning paradigms have been studied for over 100 years and are of great interest to the behavioral and clinical sciences given that several safety learning processes (e.g., extinction learning and recall) are thought to be fundamental to the success of exposure-based therapies for anxiety and related disorders.

The role of recurrent trauma on post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and substance use among trauma exposed youth.

Comorbidity between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder may be explained by a prospective trauma risk conferred by both conditions. The current study modeled concurrent and prospective associations of trauma, PTSD symptoms, and substance use (SU) behavior among trauma exposed youth (ages 8-20). Clinical interviews assessed trauma exposure, PTSD symptom severity, and SU behavior at baseline and at six- and 12-month follow up study visits (N = 2,069).

The role of resilience in the development of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder after trauma in children and adolescents.

This investigation, conducted within the Texas Childhood Trauma Research Network, investigated the prospective relationships between resiliency and emergent internalizing symptoms among trauma-exposed youth. The cohort encompassed 1262 youth, aged 8-20, from twelve health-related institutions across Texas, who completed assessments at baseline and one- and six-month follow-ups for resiliency, symptoms of depression, generalized anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other demographic and clinical characteristics. At baseline, greater resilience was positively associated with older age, male (vs female) sex assigned at birth, and history of mental health treatment.

Neural differentiation of emotional faces as a function of interpersonal violence among adolescent girls.

Interpersonal violence (IV) is associated with altered neural threat processing and risk for psychiatric disorder. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is a multivariate approach examining the extent to which differences between stimuli correspond to differences in multivoxel activation patterns to these stimuli within each ROI. Using RSA, we examine overlap in neural patterns between threat and neutral faces in youth with IV.

Decoding context memories for threat in large-scale neural networks.

Humans are often tasked with determining the degree to which a given situation poses threat. Salient cues present during prior events help bring online memories for context, which plays an informative role in this process. However, it is relatively unknown whether and how individuals use features of the environment to retrieve context memories for threat, enabling accurate inferences about the current level of danger/threat (i.

Latent-state and model-based learning in PTSD.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by altered emotional and behavioral responding following a traumatic event. In this article, we review the concepts of latent-state and model-based learning (i.e.

Evaluating traumatic event scoring schemas for their predictive value to concurrent diagnostic profiles: Texas Childhood Trauma Research Network.

Background: To prospectively chart pathways of risk and resiliency following childhood trauma studies need to address three limitations of prior work: 1) recruit beyond social service/ treatment settings; 2) include broad spectrum of trauma types and 3) cast a broad longitudinal measurement framework of both clinical diagnoses and traumatic exposures. The Texas-Childhood Trauma Research Network (TX-CTRN) is a multi-site collaboration that addresses these limitations. In this baseline-only report, we examined domains of trauma and evaluated the concurrent predictive validity of various traumatic event scoring schemas for clinical diagnoses.

Decoding neural reactivation of threat during fear learning, extinction, and recall in a randomized clinical trial of L-DOPA among women with PTSD.

Background: Laboratory paradigms are widely used to study fear learning in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Recent basic science models demonstrate that, during fear learning, patterns of activity in large neuronal ensembles for the conditioned stimuli (CS) begin to reinstate neural activity patterns for the unconditioned stimuli (US), suggesting a direct way of quantifying fear memory strength for the CS. Here, we translate this concept to human neuroimaging and test the impact of post-learning dopaminergic neurotransmission on fear memory strength during fear acquisition, extinction, and recall among women with PTSD in a re-analysis of previously reported data.

The influence of aerobic exercise on model-based decision making in women with posttraumatic stress disorder.

Individuals with PTSD often exhibit deficits in executive functioning. An unexplored aspect of neurocognitive functions associated with PTSD is the type of learning system engaged in during decision-making. A model-free (MF) system is habitual in nature and involves trial-and-error learning that is often updated based on the most recent experience (e.

Decision-making for concurrent reward and threat is differentially modulated by trauma exposure and PTSD symptom severity.

Trauma exposure, particularly interpersonal violence (IPV) traumas, are significant risk factors for development of mental health disorders, particularly posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Studies attempting to disentangle mechanisms by which trauma confers risk and maintenance of PTSD have often investigated threat or reward learning in isolation. However, real-world decision-making often involves navigating concurrent and conflicting probabilities for threat and reward.

Aerobic exercise after extinction learning reduces return of fear and enhances memory of items encoded during extinction learning.

Fear conditioning paradigms are widely used in laboratory settings to discover treatments that enhance memory consolidation and various fear processes (extinction learning, limit return of fear) that are relevant targets of exposure-based therapies. However, traditional lab-based paradigms often use the exact same conditioned stimuli for acquisition and extinction (typically differentiated with a context manipulation), whereas the opposite is true in clinical settings, as exposure therapy rarely (if ever) uses precisely the exact same stimuli from an individual's learning history. Accordingly, this study utilized a novel three-day category-based fear conditioning protocol (that uses categories of non-repeating objects [animals and tools] as conditioned stimuli during fear conditioning and extinction) to determine if aerobic exercise enhances the consolidation of extinction learning (reduces return of fear) and memory (for items encoded during extinction) during subsequent tests of extinction recall.

Diminished prospective mental representations of reward mediate reward learning strategies among youth with internalizing symptoms.

Background: Adolescent internalizing symptoms and trauma exposure have been linked with altered reward learning processes and decreased ventral striatal responses to rewarding cues. Recent computational work on decision-making highlights an important role for prospective representations of the imagined outcomes of different choices. This study tested whether internalizing symptoms and trauma exposure among youth impact the generation of prospective reward representations during decision-making and potentially mediate altered behavioral strategies during reward learning.

Aerobic exercise in the treatment of PTSD: An examination of preclinical and clinical laboratory findings, potential mechanisms, clinical implications, and future directions.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with heightened emotional responding, avoidance of trauma related stimuli, and physical health concerns (e.g., metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease).

Large-scale neural network computations and multivariate representations during approach-avoidance conflict decision-making.

Many real-world situations require navigating decisions for both reward and threat. While there has been significant progress in understanding mechanisms of decision-making and mediating neurocircuitry separately for reward and threat, there is limited understanding of situations where reward and threat contingencies compete to create approach-avoidance conflict (AAC). Here, we leverage computational learning models, independent component analysis (ICA), and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) approaches to understand decision-making during a novel task that embeds concurrent reward and threat learning and manipulates congruency between reward and threat probabilities.

Test-retest reliability of fMRI during an emotion processing task: Investigating the impact of analytical approaches on ICC values.

Test-retest reliability of fMRI is often assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), a numerical representation of reliability. Reports of low reliability at the individual level may be attributed to analytical approaches and inherent bias/error in the measures used to calculate ICC. It is unclear whether low reliability at the individual level is related to methodological decisions or if fMRI is inherently unreliable.

Laboratory models of post-traumatic stress disorder: The elusive bridge to translation.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating mental illness composed of a heterogeneous collection of symptom clusters. The unique nature of PTSD as arising from a precipitating traumatic event helps simplify cross-species translational research modeling the neurobehavioral effects of stress and fear. However, the neurobiological progress on these complex neural circuits informed by animal models has yet to produce novel, evidence-based clinical treatment for PTSD.

The influence of FAAH genetic variation on physiological, cognitive, and neural signatures of fear acquisition and extinction learning in women with PTSD.

Background: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is commonly treated with exposure-based cognitive therapies that are based on the principles of fear acquisition and extinction learning. Elevations in one of the major endocannabinoids (anandamide) either via inhibition of the primary degrading enzyme (fatty acid amide hydrolase; FAAH) or via a genetic variation in the FAAH gene (C385A; rs324420) has resulted in accelerated extinction learning and enhanced extinction recall among healthy adults. These results suggest that targeting FAAH may be a promising therapeutic approach for PTSD.