Exploring the Experience of Loneliness among People Living with Schizophrenia: A Qualitative Study.

Background: People living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder are at heightened risk for experiencing loneliness, which is associated with negative health, quality of life, and symptom-specific outcomes.

Aims: This study aimed to better understand the experience of loneliness among adults living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

Methods: Using a semi-structured interview guide, researchers interviewed twelve participants living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

Higher amplitudes of visual networks are associated with trait- but not state-depression.

Despite depression being a leading cause of global disability, neuroimaging studies have struggled to identify replicable neural correlates of depression or explain limited variance. This challenge may, in part, stem from the intertwined state (current symptoms; variable) and trait (general propensity; stable) experiences of depression.Here, we sought to disentangle state from trait experiences of depression by leveraging a longitudinal cohort and stratifying individuals into four groups: those in remission ('trait depression group'), those with large longitudinal severity changes in depression symptomatology ('state depression group'), and their respective matched control groups (total analytic = 1030).

Youth Generalized Anxiety and Brain Activation States During Socioemotional Processing.

Importance: The brain enters distinct activation states to support differential cognitive and emotional processes, but little is known about how brain activation states differ in youths with clinical anxiety.

Objective: To characterize brain activation states during socioemotional processing (movie stimuli) and assess associations between state characteristics and movie features and anxiety symptoms.

Design, Setting, And Participants: The Healthy Brain Network is an ongoing cross-sectional study of individuals aged 5 to 21 years experiencing difficulties in school, of whom approximately 45% met criteria for a lifetime anxiety disorder diagnosis.

Prenatal social disadvantage is associated with alterations in functional networks at birth.

Childhood exposure to social disadvantage is a major risk factor for psychiatric disorders and poor developmental, educational, and occupational outcomes, presumably because adverse exposures alter the neurodevelopmental processes that contribute to risk trajectories. Yet, given the limited social mobility in the United States and other countries, childhood social disadvantage is frequently preceded by maternal social disadvantage during pregnancy, potentially altering fetal brain development during a period of high neuroplasticity through hormonal, microbiome, epigenetic, and immune factors that cross the placenta and fetal blood-brain barrier. The current study examines prenatal social disadvantage to determine whether these exposures in utero are associated with alterations in functional brain networks as early as birth.

Major depression symptom severity associations with willingness to exert effort and patch foraging strategy.

Background: Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) can experience reduced motivation and cognitive function, leading to challenges with goal-directed behavior. When selecting goals, people maximize 'expected value' by selecting actions that maximize potential reward while minimizing associated costs, including effort 'costs' and the opportunity cost of time. In MDD, differential weighing of costs and benefits are theorized mechanisms underlying changes in goal-directed cognition and may contribute to symptom heterogeneity.