Differential Risk: Gender and Racial Differences in the Relationship between Trauma, Discrimination, and Schizotypy.

Traumatic experiences are associated with increased experiences of positive schizotypy. This may be especially important for People of Color, who experience higher rates of trauma and racial discrimination. No study to date has examined how racial disparities in traumatic experiences may impact schizotypy.

Narrative Forewarnings: A Qualitative Analysis of the Themes Preceding Disorganized Speech in Schizophrenia.

Disorganized speech is a critical barrier to recovery in schizophrenia, with profound negative impacts on one's ability to engage with the world. Despite the limited efficacy of existing treatments in addressing disorganization, a qualitative analysis of what leads to disorganization in patient narratives has been lacking. This study addresses this gap through inductive thematic analysis of 30 narrative interviews with individuals with schizophrenia, matched based on whether Formal Thought Disorder (FTD) is present.

Meta-analysis of the relationship between metacognition and disorganized symptoms in psychosis.

Objective: Disorganized symptoms show associations with metacognitive deficits in psychosis. However, the magnitude of this relationship is unclear. This meta-analysis aimed to 1) quantify relationships between metacognition and both disorganized symptoms and disorganized speech; and 2) examine moderators of these relationships (e.

Metacognitive Beliefs and Metacognitive Capacity: Do They Assess Related Phenomena?

Metacognition has been defined several ways across different fields. In schizophrenia, two primary approaches to assessing metacognition focus on measuring metacognitive beliefs and metacognitive capacity. The degree of association between these two approaches is unclear.

Severely Attenuated Visual Feedback Processing in Children on the Autism Spectrum.

Individuals on the autism spectrum often exhibit atypicality in their sensory perception, but the neural underpinnings of these perceptual differences remain incompletely understood. One proposed mechanism is an imbalance in higher-order feedback re-entrant inputs to early sensory cortices during sensory perception, leading to increased propensity to focus on local object features over global context. We explored this theory by measuring visual evoked potentials during contour integration as considerable work has revealed that these processes are largely driven by feedback inputs from higher-order ventral visual stream regions.

Do People With Schizophrenia Enjoy Social Activities as Much as Everyone Else? A Meta-analysis of Consummatory Social Pleasure.

Background: The "emotion paradox" of schizophrenia suggests people with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits when reporting anticipated and retrospective pleasure; yet, in-the-moment, consummatory pleasure is largely intact. It is uncertain how these findings extend to social situations. This meta-analysis aimed to (1) determine the mean difference in consummatory social pleasure between people with schizophrenia and healthy controls, and (2) examine moderators of this effect, including study design and clinical characteristics of participants.

Automated measures of speech content and speech organization in schizophrenia: Test-retest reliability and generalizability across demographic variables.

Technological advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have increased efficiency of assessing speech content and speech organization in schizophrenia. Despite these developments, there has been little focus on the psychometrics of these approaches. Using two common assessments, the current study addressed this gap by: 1) measuring test-retest reliability; and 2) assessing whether speech content and/or speech organization generalize across demographics.

Mild vs. moderate: How behavioral speech measures predict metacognitive capacity across different levels of formal thought disorder.

Disorganized speech is a key component of formal thought disorder (FTD) in schizophrenia. Recent work has tied disorganized speech to deficits in metacognition, or one's ability to integrate experiences to form complex mental representations. The level of FTD at which differences in metacognitive capacity emerge remains unclear.

Emergence of Language Related to Self-experience and Agency in Autobiographical Narratives of Individuals With Schizophrenia.

Background And Hypothesis: Disturbances in self-experience are a central feature of schizophrenia and its study can enhance phenomenological understanding and inform mechanisms underlying clinical symptoms. Self-experience involves the sense of self-presence, of being the subject of one's own experiences and agent of one's own actions, and of being distinct from others. Self-experience is traditionally assessed by manual rating of interviews; however, natural language processing (NLP) offers automated approach that can augment manual ratings by rapid and reliable analysis of text.

The strength of feedback processing is associated with resistance to visual backward masking during Illusory Contour processing in adult humans.

Re-entrant feedback processing is a key mechanism of visual object-recognition, especially under compromised viewing conditions where only sparse information is available and object features must be interpolated. Illusory Contour stimuli are commonly used in conjunction with Visual Evoked Potentials (VEP) to study these filling-in processes, with characteristic modulation of the VEP in the ∼100-150 ms timeframe associated with this re-entrant processing. Substantial inter-individual variability in timing and amplitude of feedback-related VEP modulation is observed, raising the question whether this variability might underlie inter-individual differences in the ability to form strong perceptual gestalts.

Stuck Inside: How Social Functioning in Schizophrenia Changed During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Social distancing policies enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic altered our social interactions. People with schizophrenia, who already exhibit social deficits, may have been disproportionally impacted. In this pilot study, we a) compared prepandemic social functioning to functioning during the pandemic in people with schizophrenia ( n = 21) who had data at both time points; and b) examined if patterns of decline in schizophrenia differed from healthy controls ( n = 21) across a series of repeated-measures analyses of variance.

Semantic and phonetic similarity of verbal fluency responses in early-stage psychosis.

Linguistic abnormalities can emerge early in the course of psychotic illness. Computational tools that quantify similarity of responses in standardized language-based tasks such as the verbal fluency test could efficiently characterize the nature and functional correlates of these disturbances. Participants with early-stage psychosis (n=20) and demographically matched controls without a psychiatric diagnosis (n=20) performed category and letter verbal fluency.

Revisiting the Role of Ser982 Phosphorylation in Stoichiometry Shift of the Electrogenic Na/HCO Cotransporter NBCe1.

In most cell types and heterologous expression systems, the electrogenic sodium-bicarbonate cotransporter NBCe1 operates with a 1Na-2HCO stoichiometry that, given typical transmembrane electrochemical gradients, promotes Na+ and HCO influx. However, NBCe1 in the kidney mediates HCO efflux (HCO reabsorption), a direction that has been predicted to be favored only if NBCe1 operates with a 1:3 stoichiometry. The phosphorylation state of Ser982 in the cytosolic carboxy-terminal domain of NBCe1 has been reported to be a key determinant of the transporter stoichiometry, with non-phosphorylated Ser982 favoring a 1:3 stoichiometry.

The role of disease-linked residue glutamine-913 in support of the structure and function of the human electrogenic sodium/bicarbonate cotransporter NBCe1-A.

Mutations in the sodium bicarbonate cotransporter NBCe1 (SLC4A4) cause proximal renal tubular acidosis (pRTA). We recently described a novel pRTA mutation p.Gln913Arg (Q913R), inherited in compound heterozygous form with p.

A novel mutant Na /HCO3 cotransporter NBCe1 in a case of compound-heterozygous inheritance of proximal renal tubular acidosis.

Key Points: The inheritance of two defective alleles of SLC4A4, the gene that encodes the widely-expressed electrogenic sodium bicarbonate cotransporter NBCe1, results in the bicarbonate-wasting disease proximal renal tubular acidosis (pRTA). In the present study, we report the first case of compound-heterozygous inheritance of pRTA (p.Arg510His/p.

Mouse Slc4a11 expressed in Xenopus oocytes is an ideally selective H+/OH- conductance pathway that is stimulated by rises in intracellular and extracellular pH.

The SLC4A11 gene encodes the bicarbonate-transporter-related protein BTR1, which is mutated in syndromes characterized by vision and hearing loss. Signs of these diseases [congenital hereditary endothelial dystrophy (CHED) and Harboyan syndrome] are evident in mouse models of Slc4a11 disruption. However, the intrinsic activity of Slc4a11 remains controversial, complicating assignment of its (patho)physiological role.

Effects of Nt-truncation and coexpression of isolated Nt domains on the membrane trafficking of electroneutral Na+/HCO3- cotransporters.

The SLC4 genes are all capable of producing multiple variants by alternative splicing or using alternative promoters. The physiological consequences of such diversity are of great interest to investigators. Here, we identified two novel variants of the electroneutral Na(+)/HCO3- cotransporter NBCn1, one full-length starting with "MIPL" and the other Nt-truncated starting with "MDEL".

Na+-H+ exchanger-1 (NHE1) regulation in kidney proximal tubule.

The ubiquitously expressed plasma membrane Na(+)-H(+) exchanger NHE1 is a 12 transmembrane-spanning protein that directs important cell functions such as homeostatic intracellular volume and pH control. The 315 amino acid cytosolic tail of NHE1 binds plasma membrane phospholipids and multiple proteins that regulate additional, ion-translocation independent functions. This review focuses on NHE1 structure/function relationships, as well as the role of NHE1 in kidney proximal tubule functions, including pH regulation, vectorial Na(+) transport, cell volume control and cell survival.