Measuring mental wellbeing in clinical and non-clinical adolescents using the COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale.

Introduction: Adolescence is a key period of vulnerability for poor mental health as the brain is still developing and may be more sensitive to the negative impacts of stress and adversity. Unfortunately, few measures comprehensively assess wellbeing in adolescents.

Methods: The 26-item COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale for adults was validated in a sample of 1,078 adolescents aged 13-17 years old (51.

Resilience to Stress and Adversity: A Narrative Review of the Role of Positive Affect.

The modern conception of mental health encompasses not only mental illness but also mental wellbeing, including positive emotional states and other forms of positive experience. Accordingly, research on resilience - that is, recovery or adaptation following adversity - has recently expanded to consider the roles of positive affect in the resilience process. To review this research, we performed a keyword search of all peer-reviewed journals within the American Psychological Association's PsycInfo database, retrieving all studies of positive affect in the context of resilience.

Heritability of cognitive and emotion processing during functional MRI in a twin sample.

Despite compelling evidence that brain structure is heritable, the evidence for the heritability of task-evoked brain function is less robust. Findings from previous studies are inconsistent possibly reflecting small samples and methodological variations. In a large national twin sample, we systematically evaluated heritability of task-evoked brain activity derived from functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Negative association between anterior insula activation and resilience during sustained attention: an fMRI twin study.

Background: While previous studies have suggested that higher levels of cognitive performance may be related to greater wellbeing and resilience, little is known about the associations between neural circuits engaged by cognitive tasks and wellbeing and resilience, and whether genetics or environment contribute to these associations.

Methods: The current study consisted of 253 monozygotic and dizygotic adult twins, including a subsample of 187 early-life trauma-exposed twins, with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data from the TWIN-E study. Wellbeing was measured using the COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale while resilience was defined as a higher level of positive adaptation (higher levels of wellbeing) in the presence of trauma exposure.

Associations between mental wellbeing and fMRI neural bases underlying responses to positive emotion in a twin sample.

Background: Although mental wellbeing has been linked with positive health outcomes, including longevity and improved emotional and cognitive functioning, studies examining the underlying neural mechanisms of both subjective and psychological wellbeing have been sparse. We assessed whether both forms of wellbeing are associated with neural activity engaged during positive and negative emotion processing and the extent to which this association is driven by genetics or environment.

Methods: We assessed mental wellbeing in 230 healthy adult monozygotic and dizygotic twins using a previously validated questionnaire (COMPAS-W) and undertook functional magnetic resonance imaging during a facial emotion viewing task.

The effect of target-related and target-irrelevant novel stimuli on response behaviour.

Novel events catch our attention, which can influence performance of a task. Whether this attentional capture by novelty benefits or impairs performance depends on several factors, such as the relevance of the stimulus, task requirements, and the timing of the event. Additionally, it has been argued that novel stimuli can hold intrinsic reward value, which may directly affect approach motivation, similar to positive valence stimuli.

TWIN-10: protocol for a 10-year longitudinal twin study of the neuroscience of mental well-being and resilience.

Introduction: Mental well-being is a core component of mental health, and resilience is a key process of positive adaptive recovery following adversity. However, we lack an understanding of the neural mechanisms that contribute to individual variation in the trajectories of well-being and resilience relative to risk. Genetic and/or environmental factors may also modulate these mechanisms.

Wellbeing and brain structure: A comprehensive phenotypic and genetic study of image-derived phenotypes in the UK Biobank.

Wellbeing, an important component of mental health, is influenced by genetic and environmental factors. Previous association studies between brain structure and wellbeing have typically focused on volumetric measures and employed small cohorts. Using the UK Biobank Resource, we explored the relationships between wellbeing and brain morphometrics (volume, thickness and surface area) at both phenotypic and genetic levels.

Grey matter covariation and the role of emotion reappraisal in mental wellbeing and resilience after early life stress exposure.

Resilience is a process of adaptive recovery crucial in maintaining mental wellbeing after stress exposure. A psychological factor known to buffer stress and promote positive wellbeing outcomes is the ability to regulate emotions. However, the neural networks underlying resilience, and the possible mediating role of emotion regulation, remain largely unknown.

Emotional face processing correlates with depression/anxiety symptoms but not wellbeing in non-clinical adults: An event-related potential study.

Whilst alterations in emotional face processing, as indicated by event-related potentials (ERPs), are associated with depression and anxiety symptoms in clinical and non-clinical samples, it has remained unclear whether they are related to mental wellbeing. The current study aimed to address this question in a non-clinical sample. The analysis included 402 adult twins from the TWIN-E study.

Cortical and subcortical neuroanatomical signatures of schizotypy in 3004 individuals assessed in a worldwide ENIGMA study.

Neuroanatomical abnormalities have been reported along a continuum from at-risk stages, including high schizotypy, to early and chronic psychosis. However, a comprehensive neuroanatomical mapping of schizotypy remains to be established. The authors conducted the first large-scale meta-analyses of cortical and subcortical morphometric patterns of schizotypy in healthy individuals, and compared these patterns with neuroanatomical abnormalities observed in major psychiatric disorders.

Neural underpinnings of valence-action interactions triggered by cues and targets in a rewarded approach/avoidance task.

Incentive-valence signals have a large impact on our actions in everyday life. While it is intuitive (and most often beneficial) to approach positive and avoid negative stimuli, these prepotent response tendencies can also be maladaptive, as exemplified by clinical conditions such as overeating or pathological gambling. We have recently shown that targets associated with monetary incentives can trigger such valence-action biases (target condition), and that these are absent when valence and action information are provided by advance cues (cue condition).

Approach Coping Mitigates Distress of COVID-19 Isolation for Young Men With Low Well-Being in a Sample of 1,749 Youth From Australia and the USA.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has led to lockdowns across the world with people being separated from their loved ones including partners, family, and friends. Here, using a large sample of 1,749 Australians and Americans, we investigated the impact of COVID-19 isolation on younger populations (13-25 years), and the influence of coping strategies and mental well-being on this impact. Overall, COVID-19 isolation had a more negative impact on adolescence (13-17 years) than young adulthood (18-25 years), but with no difference apparent between men and women, or between Australian and American residents.

Associations between different white matter properties and reward-based performance modulation.

Humans can be motivated by the prospect of gaining a reward. However, the extent to which we are affected by reward information differs from person to person. A possible mechanism underlying these inter-individual differences may be alterations in white matter (WM) microstructure; however, the relationship between WM properties and reward-based behaviour in healthy participants has not yet been explored.

Diverse phenotypic measurements of wellbeing: Heritability, temporal stability and the variance explained by polygenic scores.

Wellbeing, a key aspect of mental health, is moderately heritable with varying estimates reported from independent studies employing a variety of instruments. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled the construction of polygenic scores (PGS) for wellbeing, providing the opportunity for direct comparisons of the variance explained by PGS for different instruments commonly employed in the field. Nine wellbeing measurements (multi-item and single-item), two personality domains (NEO-FFI neuroticism and extraversion), plus the depression domain of the DASS-42 were drawn from a larger self-report battery applied to the TWIN-E study-an Australian longitudinal twin cohort (N = 1660).

Electroencephalography profiles as a biomarker of wellbeing: A twin study.

Alterations to electroencephalography (EEG) power have been reported for psychiatric conditions such as depression and anxiety, but not for mental wellbeing in a healthy population. This study examined the resting EEG profiles associated with mental wellbeing, and how genetics and environment contribute to these associations using twin modelling. Mental wellbeing was assessed using the COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale which measures both subjective and psychological wellbeing.

Are all behavioral reward benefits created equally? An EEG-fMRI study.

Reward consistently boosts performance in cognitive tasks. Although many different reward manipulations exist, systematic comparisons are lacking. Reward effects on cognitive control are usually studied using monetary incentive delay (MID; cue-related reward information) or stimulus-reward association (SRA; target-related reward information) tasks.

Neural correlates of reward-related response tendencies in an equiprobable Go/NoGo task.

Previous research has shown that motivational signals bias action over inaction, which may be due to putative inherent valence-action mappings, similar to those observed in the emotional domain. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we sought to investigate the neural underpinnings of such reward-related response tendencies, and in particular, how valence-action compatibility effects arising from predominant response tendencies are reflected at the neural level, and whether overlapping emotional valence amplifies these effects. To this end, we employed an equiprobable (50:50) Go/NoGo task in which reward (reward/no-reward) and response mode (Go/NoGo) were signaled by orthogonal features of number targets that were overlaid on emotional images (positive, neutral, negative).

Winning smiles: Signalling reward by overlapping and non-overlapping emotional valence differentially affects performance and neural activity.

It is well-known that both emotional and motivational events greatly impact our behaviour. Based on previous work on the interplay between these two constructs, the present study aimed to test whether and how concurrent emotion and reward signals interact in terms of their basic valence, when both are equally relevant to the task. To this end, we employed a novel fMRI paradigm in which reward availability was explicitly signalled by positive, neutral, or negative facial expressions (using block-wise instructions).

Smiling faces and cash bonuses: Exploring common affective coding across positive and negative emotional and motivational stimuli using fMRI.

Although it is clear that emotional and motivational manipulations yield a strong influence on cognition and behaviour, these domains have mostly been investigated in independent research lines. Therefore, it remains poorly understood how far these affective manipulations overlap in terms of their underlying neural activations, especially in light of previous findings that suggest a shared valence mechanism across multiple affective processing domains (e.g.

Modulation of locus coeruleus activity by novel oddball stimuli.

It has long been known from animal literature that the locus coeruleus (LC), the source region of noradrenergic neurons in the brain, is sensitive to unexpected, novel, and other salient events. In humans, however, direct assessment of LC activity has proven to be challenging due to its small size and difficult localization, which is why noradrenergic activity has often been assessed using more indirect measures such as electroencephalography (EEG) and pupil recordings. Here, we combined high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a special anatomical sequence to assess neural activity in the LC in response to different types of salient stimuli in an oddball paradigm (novel neutral oddballs, novel emotional oddballs, and familiar target oddballs).

Identifying grey matter changes in schizotypy using partial least squares correlation.

Neuroimaging research into the brain structure of schizophrenia patients has shown consistent reductions in grey matter volume relative to healthy controls. Examining structural differences in individuals with high levels of schizotypy may help elucidate the course of disorder progression, and provide further support for the schizotypy-schizophrenia continuum. Thus far, the few studies investigating grey matter differences in schizotypy have produced inconsistent results.

Associations between schizotypy and cerebral laterality.

Atypical lateralization for language has been found in schizophrenia, suggesting that language and thought disorders on the schizophrenia spectrum may be due to left hemispheric dysfunction. However, research with those with non-clinical schizotypy has been inconsistent, with some studies finding reduced or reversed language laterality (particularly with positive schizotypal traits), and others finding typical left hemispheric specialization. The aim of the current study was to use both a behavioural (dual reading-finger tapping) task and an functional magnetic resonance imaging lexical decision task to investigate language laterality in a university sample of high- and low-schizotypal adults.

Neural correlates of creative thinking and schizotypy.

Empirical studies indicate a link between creativity and schizotypal personality traits, where individuals who score highly on schizotypy measures also display greater levels of creative behaviour. However, the exact nature of this relationship is not yet clear, with only a few studies examining this association using neuroimaging methods. In the present study, the neural substrates of creative thinking were assessed with a drawing task paradigm in healthy individuals using fMRI.