Within-network brain connectivity during a social optimism task is related to personal optimism and optimism for in-group members.

Optimism bias is the tendency to believe desirable events are more likely to happen than undesirable ones. People often display optimistic biases for themselves (personal optimism), but also for members of groups they like or identify with (social optimism). However, the neural bases of and connections between these two concepts are poorly understood.

On the complex and dimensional relationship of maternal posttraumatic stress disorder during early childhood and child outcomes at school-age.

Background: Several studies have shown associations between maternal interpersonal violence-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), child mental health problems, and impaired socioemotional development. However, the existing literature lacks evidence linking constellations of risk factors such as maternal interpersonal-violence-related PTSD, psychopathology, and interactive behavior with toddlers and outcome measures at school-age.

Methods: This study involved a prospective, longitudinal investigation of 62 mothers and examined the relationship between maternal variables measured when children were in early childhood (mean age 27 months), and child outcomes when children were school-age (age mean = 83.

Brain Structure and Optimism Bias: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Approach.

Individuals often anticipate an unrealistically favorable future for themselves (personal optimism bias) or others (social optimism bias). While such biases are well established, little is known about their neuroanatomy. In this study, participants engaged in a soccer task and estimated the likelihood of successful passes in personal and social scenarios.

Whole-brain white matter correlates of personality profiles predictive of subjective well-being.

We investigated the white matter correlates of personality profiles predictive of subjective well-being. Using principal component analysis to first determine the possible personality profiles onto which core personality measures would load, we subsequently searched for whole-brain white matter correlations with these profiles. We found three personality profiles that correlated with the integrity of white matter tracts.

Reduced network integration in default mode and executive networks is associated with social and personal optimism biases.

An optimism bias refers to the belief in good things happening to oneself in the future with a higher likelihood than is justified. Social optimism biases extend this concept to groups that one identifies with. Previous literature has found that both personal and social optimism biases are linked to brain structure and task-related brain function.

Social optimism biases are associated with cortical thickness.

Optimism biases denote the tendency to see future desirable events as being more likely to happen to oneself than undesirable events. Such biases are important for mental health and may extend to other individuals or social groups (social optimism biases). However, little is known about whether social optimism biases relate to brain structure.

Parental Reflective Functioning correlates to brain activation in response to video-stimuli of mother-child dyads: Links to maternal trauma history and PTSD.

Parental Reflective Functioning is a parent's capacity to infer mental states in herself and her child. Parental Reflective Functioning is linked to the quality of parent-child attachment and promotes parent-child mutual emotion regulation. We examined neural correlates of parental reflective functioning and their relationship to physical abuse.

Depth-dependent intracortical myelin organization in the living human brain determined by in vivo ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging.

Background: Intracortical myelin is a key determinant of neuronal synchrony and plasticity that underpin optimal brain function. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) facilitates the examination of intracortical myelin but presents with methodological challenges. Here we describe a whole-brain approach for the in vivo investigation of intracortical myelin in the human brain using ultra-high field MRI.

Behavioral and Health Correlates of Resting-State Metastability in the Human Connectome Project.

Metastability is currently considered a fundamental property of the functional configuration of brain networks. The present study sought to generate a normative reference framework for the metastability of the major resting-state networks (RSNs) (resting-state metastability dataset) and discover their association with demographic, behavioral, physical and cognitive features (non-imaging dataset) from 818 participants of the Human Connectome Project. Using sparse canonical correlation analysis, we found that the metastability and non-imaging datasets showed significant but modest interdependency.

Limbic brain responses in mothers with post-traumatic stress disorder and comorbid dissociation to video clips of their children.

Maternal dissociative symptoms which can be comorbid with interpersonal violence-related post-traumatic stress disorder (IPV-PTSD) have been linked to decreased sensitivity and responsiveness to children's emotional communication. This study examined the influence of dissociation on neural activation independently of IPV-PTSD symptom severity when mothers watch video-stimuli of their children during stressful and non-stressful mother-child interactions. Based on previous observations in related fields, we hypothesized that more severe comorbid dissociation in IPV-PTSD would be associated with lower limbic system activation and greater neural activity in regions of the emotion regulation circuit such as the medial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC).