Childhood sexual abuse and lifetime depressive symptoms: the importance of type and timing of childhood emotional maltreatment.

Background: Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and emotional maltreatment are salient risk factors for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD) in women. However, the type- and timing-specific effects of emotional maltreatment experienced during adolescence on future depressive symptomatology in women with CSA have not been explored. The goal of this study was to fill this gap.

Psychobiological Stress Response Profiles in Current and Remitted Depression: A Person-Centered, Multisystem Approach.

Background: A dysregulated stress response, including exaggerated affective reactivity and abnormal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis responsivity, has been implicated in the etiology, maintenance, and relapse of major depressive disorder (MDD). Among adolescents, discordant affective and physiological stress response profiles have been linked to negative affective outcomes and increased risk for psychopathology. Whether these findings extend to adults with varying degree of MDD risk is unclear, as are possible links to various risk factors.

Probing Neurophysiological Processes Related to Self-Referential Processing to Predict Improvement in Adolescents With Depression Receiving Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Background: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a gold-standard approach for treating major depressive disorder in adolescents. However, nearly half of adolescents receiving CBT do not improve. To personalize treatment, it is essential to identify objective markers that predict treatment responsiveness.

Behavioral and neurophysiological signatures of cognitive control in humans and rats.

Background: Deficits in cognitive control are implicated in numerous neuropsychiatric disorders. However, relevant pharmacological treatments are limited, likely due to weak translational validity of applicable preclinical models used. Neural indices derived from electroencephalography may prove useful in comparing and translating the effects of cognition-enhancing drugs between species.

Brain encoding during perceived control as a prospective predictor of improvement in quality of life.

Perceived control is strongly related to mental health and well-being. Specifically, lack of perceived control has been associated with learned helplessness and stress-related disorders, such as depression and anxiety. However, it is unknown whether brain activation to control and its protective effect against stress can predict changes in quality of life.

Aesthetic chills modulate reward learning in anhedonic depression.

Objective: This study aimed to examine the potential of experiencing aesthetic chills to enhance reward learning in individuals with elevated depressive symptoms, specifically anhedonia, by investigating the effect of chills on participants' ability to modulate behavior as a function of rewards.

Methods: A total of 103 participants with elevated depressive symptoms took part in the experiment. Among them, 59 participants had depressive symptoms (BDI ≥ 20), with 26 classified as "High Anhedonic" (HA) and 33 as "Low Anhedonic" (LA).

EEG measures of brain arousal in relation to symptom improvement in patients with major depressive disorder: Results from a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Hyperstable arousal regulation during a 15-min resting electroencephalogram (EEG) has been linked to a favorable response to antidepressants. The EMBARC study, a multicenter randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial, provides an opportunity to examine arousal stability as putative antidepressant response predictor in short EEG recordings. We tested the hypothesis that high arousal stability during a 2-min resting EEG at baseline is related to better outcome in the sertraline arm and explored the specificity of this effect.

Daily Social Isolation Maps Onto Distinctive Features of Anhedonic Behavior: A Combined Ecological and Computational Investigation.

Background: Loneliness and social isolation have detrimental consequences for mental health and act as vulnerability factors for the development of depressive symptoms, such as anhedonia. The mitigation strategies used to contain COVID-19, such as social distancing and lockdowns, allowed us to investigate putative associations between daily objective and perceived social isolation and anhedonic-like behavior.

Methods: Reward-related functioning was objectively assessed using the Probabilistic Reward Task.

Neuroimaging Biomarkers in Addiction.

As a neurobiological process, addiction involves pathological patterns of engagement with substances and a range of behaviors with a chronic and relapsing course. Neuroimaging technologies assess brain activity, structure, physiology, and metabolism at scales ranging from neurotransmitter receptors to large-scale brain networks, providing unique windows into the core neural processes implicated in substance use disorders. Identified aberrations in the neural substrates of reward and salience processing, response inhibition, interoception, and executive functions with neuroimaging can inform the development of pharmacological, neuromodulatory, and psychotherapeutic interventions to modulate the disordered neurobiology.

Computational Modeling Differentiates Learning Rate From Reward Sensitivity Deficits Produced by Early-Life Adversity in a Rodent Touchscreen Probabilistic Reward Task.

Background: Exposure to adversity, including unpredictable environments, during early life is associated with neuropsychiatric illness in adulthood. One common factor in this sequela is anhedonia, the loss of responsivity to previously reinforcing stimuli. To accelerate the development of new treatment strategies for anhedonic disorders induced by early-life adversity, animal models have been developed to capture critical features of early-life stress and the behavioral deficits that such stressors induce.

Neighborhood Resources Associated With Psychological Trajectories and Neural Reactivity to Reward After Trauma.

Importance: Research on resilience after trauma has often focused on individual-level factors (eg, ability to cope with adversity) and overlooked influential neighborhood-level factors that may help mitigate the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Objective: To investigate whether an interaction between residential greenspace and self-reported individual resources was associated with a resilient PTSD trajectory (ie, low/no symptoms) and to test if the association between greenspace and PTSD trajectory was mediated by neural reactivity to reward.

Design, Setting, And Participants: As part of a longitudinal cohort study, trauma survivors were recruited from emergency departments across the US.

Neural and behavioral markers of inhibitory control predict symptom improvement during internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy for depression.

Poor inhibitory control contributes to deficits in emotion regulation, which are often targeted by treatments for major depressive disorder (MDD), including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Brain regions that contribute to inhibitory control and emotion regulation overlap; thus, inhibitory control might relate to response to CBT. In this study, we examined whether baseline inhibitory control and resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) within overlapping emotion regulation-inhibitory control regions predicted treatment response to internet-based CBT (iCBT).

Genetic influences on brain and cognitive health and their interactions with cardiovascular conditions and depression.

Approximately 40% of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by modifiable risk factors related to lifestyle and environment. These risk factors, such as depression and vascular disease, do not affect all individuals in the same way, likely due to inter-individual differences in genetics. However, the precise nature of how genetic risk profiles interact with modifiable risk factors to affect brain health is poorly understood.

Using Drift Diffusion and RL Models to Disentangle Effects of Depression On Decision-Making vs. Learning in the Probabilistic Reward Task.

The Probabilistic Reward Task (PRT) is widely used to investigate the impact of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) on reinforcement learning (RL), and recent studies have used it to provide insight into decision-making mechanisms affected by MDD. The current project used PRT data from unmedicated, treatment-seeking adults with MDD to extend these efforts by: (1) providing a more detailed analysis of standard PRT metrics-response bias and discriminability-to better understand how the task is performed; (2) analyzing the data with two computational models and providing psychometric analyses of both; and (3) determining whether response bias, discriminability, or model parameters predicted responses to treatment with placebo or the atypical antidepressant bupropion. Analysis of standard metrics replicated recent work by demonstrating a dependency between response bias and response time (RT), and by showing that reward totals in the PRT are governed by discriminability.

Association of Lower Rostral Anterior Cingulate GABA+ and Dysregulated Cortisol Stress Response With Altered Functional Connectivity in Young Adults With Lifetime Depression: A Multimodal Imaging Investigation of Trait and State Effects.

Objective: Preclinical work suggests that excess glucocorticoids and reduced cortical γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) may affect sex-dependent differences in brain regions implicated in stress regulation and depressive phenotypes. The authors sought to address a critical gap in knowledge, namely, how stress circuitry is functionally affected by glucocorticoids and GABA in current or remitted major depressive disorder (MDD).

Methods: Multimodal imaging data were collected from 130 young adults (ages 18-25), of whom 44 had current MDD, 42 had remitted MDD, and 44 were healthy comparison subjects.

Smoking Progression and Nicotine-Enhanced Reward Sensitivity Predicted by Resting-State Functional Connectivity in Salience and Executive Control Networks.

Introduction: The neural underpinnings underlying individual differences in nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity (NERS) and smoking progression are poorly understood. Thus, we investigated whether brain resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC.) during smoking abstinence predicts NERS and smoking progression in young light smokers.

Preclinical animal models and assays of neuropsychiatric disorders: Old problems and New Vistas - introduction to the special issue.

Preclinical research is an essential aspect of biomedical science that aids in clarifying the pathophysiology of underlying illness and devising new treatments. This special issues brings together original research and review papers that pertain to the development of novel models and behavioral assays of symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders, which may help to refine preclinical studies and to improve their translatability to the human condition.

Brain-based graph-theoretical predictive modeling to map the trajectory of anhedonia, impulsivity, and hypomania from the human functional connectome.

Clinical assessments often fail to discriminate between unipolar and bipolar depression and identify individuals who will develop future (hypo)manic episodes. To address this challenge, we developed a brain-based graph-theoretical predictive model (GPM) to prospectively map symptoms of anhedonia, impulsivity, and (hypo)mania. Individuals seeking treatment for mood disorders (n = 80) underwent an fMRI scan, including (i) resting-state and (ii) a reinforcement-learning (RL) task.

Individualized Functional Brain System Topologies and Major Depression: Relationships Among Patch Sizes and Clinical Profiles and Behavior.

Background: Neuroimaging studies of major depression have typically been conducted using group-level approaches. However, given interindividual differences in brain systems, there is a need for individualized approaches to brain systems mapping and putative links toward diagnosis, symptoms, and behavior.

Methods: We used an iterative parcellation approach to map individualized brain systems in 328 participants from a multisite, placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Effects of GABA, Sex, and Stress on Reward Learning in Current and Remitted Major Depression.

Background: Neurocognitive factors including aberrant reward learning, blunted GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), and potentiated stress sensitivity have been linked to anhedonia, a hallmark depressive symptom, possibly in a sex-dependent manner. However, previous research has not investigated the putative associations among these factors or the extent to which they represent trait- or state-based vulnerabilities for depression.

Methods: Young adults with current major depressive disorder (MDD) (n = 44), remitted MDD (n = 42), and healthy control participants (HCs) (n = 44), stratified by sex assigned at birth, underwent magnetic resonance spectroscopy to assess macromolecular contaminated GABA (GABA+) and then a reward learning task before and after acute stress.