Clinical high risk for psychosis syndrome is associated with reduced neural responding to unpleasant images.

Deficits in emotion processing are core features of psychotic disorders. Electrophysiology research in schizophrenia suggests deficits in sustained engagement with emotional content (indexed by the late positive potential [LPP]) may contribute to emotion processing impairments. Despite similar behavioral emotion processing dysfunction in those at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis, limited research has examined neural mechanisms of impaired emotion processing in the high-risk period, where research can inform risk models.

Neural mechanisms of motor dysfunction in individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis: Evidence for impairments in motor activation.

Motor abnormalities are a core feature of psychotic disorders observed from the premorbid period through chronic illness, suggesting motor dysfunction may reflect the pathophysiology of psychosis. Electrophysiology research in schizophrenia suggests impaired motor activation and preparation may underlie these motor abnormalities. Despite behavioral studies suggesting similar motor dysfunction in those at clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychosis, there have been no studies examining neural mechanisms of motor dysfunction in the CHR period, where research can inform pathophysiological and risk models.

Recoiling from Threat: Anxiety is Related to Heightened Suppression of Threat, Not Increased Attention to Threat.

Increased attention to threat is considered a core feature of anxiety. However, there are multiple mechanisms of attention and multiple types of threat, and the relationships among attention, threat, and anxiety are poorly understood. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to separately isolate attentional selection (N2pc) and suppression (P) of (photos of weapons, snakes, etc.

ERP CORE: An open resource for human event-related potential research.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are noninvasive measures of human brain activity that index a range of sensory, cognitive, affective, and motor processes. Despite their broad application across basic and clinical research, there is little standardization of ERP paradigms and analysis protocols across studies. To address this, we created ERP CORE (Compendium of Open Resources and Experiments), a set of optimized paradigms, experiment control scripts, data processing pipelines, and sample data (N = 40 neurotypical young adults) for seven widely used ERP components: N170, mismatch negativity (MMN), N2pc, N400, P3, lateralized readiness potential (LRP), and error-related negativity (ERN).

How many trials does it take to get a significant ERP effect? It depends.

In designing an ERP study, researchers must choose how many trials to include, balancing the desire to maximize statistical power and the need to minimize the length of the recording session. Recent studies have attempted to quantify the minimum number of trials needed to obtain reliable measures for a variety of ERP components. However, these studies have largely ignored other variables that affect statistical power in ERP studies, including sample size and effect magnitude.

Behavioral and ERP measures of attentional bias to threat in the dot-probe task: poor reliability and lack of correlation with anxiety.

The dot-probe task is often considered a gold standard in the field for investigating attentional bias to threat. However, serious issues with the task have been raised. Specifically, a number of studies have demonstrated that the traditional reaction time (RT) measure of attentional bias to threat in the dot-probe task has poor internal reliability and poor test-retest reliability.