Altered Neural Responses to Punishment Learning in Conduct Disorder.

Objective: Conduct disorder (CD) is associated with deficits in the use of punishment for reinforcement learning (RL) and subsequent decision-making, contributing to reckless, antisocial, and aggressive behaviors. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether differences in behavioral learning rates derived from computational modeling, particularly for punishment, are reflected in aberrant neural responses in youths with CD compared to typically-developing controls (TDCs).

Methods: 75 youths with CD and 99 TDCs (9-18 years, 47% girls) performed a probabilistic RL task with punishment, reward, and neutral contingencies.

Losing Control: Prefrontal Emotion Regulation Is Related to Symptom Severity and Predicts Treatment-Related Symptom Change in Adolescent Girls With Conduct Disorder.

Background: Emotion regulation skills are linked to corticolimbic brain activity (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [dlPFC] and limbic regions) and enable an individual to control their emotional experiences, thus allowing healthy social functioning.

Assessment of affective dysregulation in children: development and evaluation of a semi-structured interview for parents and for children.

Background: Children with affective dysregulation (AD) show an excessive reactivity to emotionally positive or negative stimuli, typically manifesting in chronic irritability, severe temper tantrums, and sudden mood swings. AD shows a large overlap with externalizing and internalizing disorders. Given its transdiagnostic nature, AD cannot be reliably and validly captured only by diagnostic categories such as disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD).

Altered neural anticipation of reward and loss but not receipt in adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Background: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by persistent, unwanted thoughts and repetitive actions. Such repetitive thoughts and/or behaviors may be reinforced either by reducing anxiety or by avoiding a potential threat or harm, and thus may be rewarding to the individual. The possible involvement of the reward system in the symptomatology of OCD is supported by studies showing altered reward processing in reward-related regions, such as the ventral striatum (VS) and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), in adults with OCD.