Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies of Postpartum Depression: An Overview.

Postpartum depression is a frequent and disabling condition whose pathophysiology is still unclear. In recent years, the study of the neural correlates of mental disorders has been increasingly approached using magnetic resonance techniques. In this review we synthesize the results from studies on postpartum depression in the context of structural, functional, and spectroscopic magnetic resonance studies of major depression as a whole.

Linking novelty seeking and harm avoidance personality traits to basal ganglia: volumetry and mean diffusivity.

Novelty Seeking (NS) and Harm Avoidance (HA) temperamental traits are related to approaching or avoiding motivational circuits relying on the integrity and functionality of distributed brain areas implicated in arousal and action. The present study verified whether and how macro- and micro-structural variations of basal ganglia are correlated with scores obtained in the NS and HA temperamental scales of the Temperament and Character Inventory by Cloninger. To this aim, 125 healthy adults aged 18-67 years of both sexes completed the Temperament and Character Inventory and underwent a high-resolution T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and a diffusion tensor imaging using a 3T scanner.

Linking novelty seeking and harm avoidance personality traits to cerebellar volumes.

Personality traits are multidimensional traits comprising cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics, and a wide array of cerebral structures mediate individual variability. Differences in personality traits covary with brain morphometry in specific brain regions, and neuroimaging studies showed structural or functional abnormalities of cerebellum in subjects with personality disorders, suggesting a cerebellar role in affective processing and an effect on personality characteristics. To test the hypothesis that cerebellar [white matter (WM) and cortex] volumes are correlated with scores obtained in the four temperamental scales of the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) by Cloninger, a total of 125 healthy participants aged 18-67 years of both genders (males = 52) completed the TCI and underwent magnetic resonance imaging.

The neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive insight in schizophrenia.

Insight has been mostly studied from a clinical perspective. Recently, attention moved to cognitive insight or the ability to monitor and correct one's erroneous convictions. Here, we investigated the neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive insight.

Positive correlation in the bisection of long and short horizontal Oppel-Kundt illusory gradients: Implications for the interpretation of the "cross-over" effect in spatial neglect.

Right brain damaged patients with left spatial neglect typically bisect long horizontal lines to the right of their midpoint. However, bisections of very short lines can favour the emergence of a paradoxical "cross-over" effect in which lines are bisected to the left of the true midpoint. It has been suggested that in healthy participants similar variations in the position of the subjective line midpoint can be observed in the bisections of long and short Oppel-Kundt (O-K) illusory gradients (Savazzi et al.

Neural correlates of the spatial and expectancy components of endogenous and stimulus-driven orienting of attention in the Posner task.

Voluntary orienting of visual attention is conventionally measured in tasks with predictive central cues followed by frequent valid targets at the cued location and by infrequent invalid targets at the uncued location. This implies that invalid targets entail both spatial reorienting of attention and breaching of the expected spatial congruency between cues and targets. Here, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to separate the neural correlates of the spatial and expectancy components of both endogenous orienting and stimulus-driven reorienting of attention.