Links Between Human and Animal Models of Trauma and Psychosis: A Narrative Review.

Traumatic experiences during development are associated with an increased risk of developing psychosis. Individuals with psychosis also report a higher rate of past trauma than healthy control subjects and worse outcomes than those who do not have these experiences. It is thought that traumatic experiences negatively impact specific neurobiological processes to confer this increased risk, and that systems affected by trauma are similarly changed in individuals with psychosis.

Social Anhedonia in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Psychiatry Referrals.

Social anhedonia (SA) is a widely accepted symptom phenotype in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), depression, and schizophrenia spectrum disorder; nevertheless, its clinical implications are relatively unstudied in populations of clinic-referred youth with and without ASD. Youth with ASD (= 268) and nonASD psychiatry referrals (= 641) between 6 and 18 years of age were evaluated for SA, ASD severity, co-occurring psychiatric symptom severity, and a wide range of common clinical correlates. Participants were parsed into youth with and without parent-defined SA, and the latter were further subdivided into youth with (SA+ alone) and without (SA/-alone) a preference for being alone.

Recognition Without Words: Using Taste to Explore Survival Processing.

Many educational demonstrations of memory and recall employ word lists and number strings; items that lend themselves to semantic organization and "chunking." By applying taste recall to the adaptive memory paradigm, which evaluates memory from a survival-based evolutionary perspective, we have developed a simple, inexpensive exercise that defies mnemonic strategies. Most adaptive memory studies have evaluated recall of words encountered while imagining survival and non-survival scenarios.

Wanting it Too Much: An Inverse Relation Between Social Motivation and Facial Emotion Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This study examined social motivation and early-stage face perception as frameworks for understanding impairments in facial emotion recognition (FER) in a well-characterized sample of youth with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Early-stage face perception (N170 event-related potential latency) was recorded while participants completed a standardized FER task, while social motivation was obtained via parent report. Participants with greater social motivation exhibited poorer FER, while those with shorter N170 latencies exhibited better FER for child angry faces stimuli.