Understanding Pandemic Increases in Long-Stay Psychotropic Prescribing for Dementia Symptoms: A Survey of Nursing Home Clinicians.

To explore the perceptions of nursing home (NH) clinicians regarding factors underpinning known increases in psychotropic prescribing over the COVID-19 pandemic. : Three iterative online surveys were fielded to Virginia NH prescribing clinicians (11/2021-6/2022) to assess their perspectives regarding factors driving pandemic increases in NH psychotropic use. Existing literature and emerging survey data informed survey content.

Examining measures of schizotypy for gender and racial bias using item response theory and differential item functioning.

Schizotypy involves schizophrenia-like traits and symptoms, with the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales (WSS) being frequently used in previous research. There is some evidence that schizophrenia-spectrum symptom levels, including when using the WSS, might vary both by gender and by race and ethnicity. However, previous research has rarely examined to what extent the WSS show gender and racial bias.

Examining associations between social anhedonia and convergent thinking using the Remote Associates Test.

Social anhedonia (SocAnh) predicts increased risk of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, with evidence that these disorders are associated with increased creativity. However, it is still largely unknown whether SocAnh is associated with one central aspect of creative thinking, convergent thinking. In two studies, college students with either extreme levels of SocAnh ( = 44 and  = 70) or controls with an average level of SocAnh ( = 111 and  = 100) completed a convergent thinking task, the Remote Associates Test, and also completed measures of current affect.

Alcohol use in emerging adults associated with lower rich-club connectivity and greater connectome network disorganization.

Background: Emerging adulthood is a critical neurodevelopmental stage, with alcohol use during this period consistently associated with brain abnormalities and damage in anatomical structure and white matter integrity. However, it is less clear how alcohol use is associated with the brain's structural organization (i.e.

Relations between lab indices of emotion dysregulation and negative affect reactivity in daily life in two independent studies.

Background: We investigated the extent to which physiological/biological measures of emotion dysregulation collected in the lab, resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in Study 1 and amygdala activation in response to negative stimuli in Study 2, combined with daily measures of interpersonal stressors predicted negative emotional states in outpatients better than the stressors alone.

Methods: Participants were adult outpatients with emotional distress disorders (N=30 individuals in Study 1, and N=26 women in Study 2). After completing a laboratory session that collected physiological/biological measures of emotion dysregulation, participants then completed 1-3 weeks of ambulatory assessment during which they reported on interpersonal stressors and negative affective states several times per day.

Associations between long-term psychosis risk, probabilistic category learning, and attenuated psychotic symptoms with cortical surface morphometry.

Neuroimaging studies have consistently found structural cortical abnormalities in individuals with schizophrenia, especially in structural hubs. However, it is unclear what abnormalities predate psychosis onset and whether abnormalities are related to behavioral performance and symptoms associated with psychosis risk. Using surface-based morphometry, we examined cortical volume, gyrification, and thickness in a psychosis risk group at long-term risk for developing a psychotic disorder (n = 18; i.

Functional connectivity between the ventral anterior cingulate and amygdala during implicit emotional conflict regulation and daily-life emotion dysregulation.

Emotional conflict adaptation involving ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) suppression of the amygdala is thought to be important in emotion regulation, with evidence of impaired implicit emotion regulation in emotional distress disorders. However, it is unclear how this impairment is associated with daily-life emotion dysregulation in emotional distress disorders. In the current study, female participants with an emotional distress disorder (N = 27) were scanned with MRI while completing an implicit emotion conflict regulation task that involved identifying the facial expression of an image while ignoring an overlaid congruent or incongruent affect label.

Unreported Antipsychotic Use Increasing in Nursing Homes: The Impact of Quality-Measure Exclusions on the Percentage of Long-Stay Residents Who Got an Antipsychotic Medication Quality-Measure.

Objective: Excluded from reporting to CMS's Percentage of long-stay residents who got an antipsychotic medication quality-measure are antipsychotics prescribed to nursing home patients with schizophrenia, Tourette's, or Huntington's. Over the 4 years following its 2012 debut, the quality-measure calculated a 27% reduction in inappropriate antipsychotic use but also an 18.3% increase in exclusion claims.

Prospective Study Examining the Effects of Extreme Drinking on Brain Structure in Emerging Adults.

Background: Emerging adulthood is a critical neurodevelopment period in which extreme drinking has a potentially pronounced neurotoxic effect. Therefore, extreme drinking, even a single episode, could be particularly harmful to the developing brain's structure. Relatedly, heavy alcohol use in emerging adults has been associated with structural brain damage, especially in the corpus callosum.

Positive schizotypy, maladaptive openness, and openness facets.

Positive schizotypy includes magical beliefs and unusual perceptual experiences and is highly correlated with the cognitive-perceptual symptoms of schizotypal personality disorder. Increased openness to experience is associated with increased genetic risk for schizophrenia, and it has been commonly thought that positive schizotypy might also be related to increased openness. However, much previous research has failed to identify a sizable association between positive schizotypy and openness.

Psychosis risk is associated with decreased white matter integrity in limbic network corticostriatal tracts.

It is thought that altered connectivity between the striatum and the cortex could contribute to psychosis. However, whether psychosis risk is associated with altered white matter connectivity between the striatum and any cortical region is still unclear. Further, no previous study has directly examined whether psychosis risk is associated with altered striatal connectivity with specific cortical networks.

Alcohol use in young adults associated with cortical gyrification.

Background: Young adulthood has the highest rates of alcohol use and high-risk drinking behavior. This period is also a critical neurodevelopmental stage, with neural insults having a profound neurotoxic effect on the brain. Cortical gyrification is thought, in part, to reflect early brain maturation (e.

Daily-life affective instability in emotional distress disorders is associated with function and structure of posterior parietal cortex.

Affective instability (i.e., large and frequent shifts in negative emotions) is a key emotion dysregulation symptom in emotional distress disorders and can be reliably and validly assessed using ambulatory assessment.

Twenty-first birthday drinking: Extreme-drinking episodes and white matter microstructural changes in the fornix and corpus callosum.

The 21st birthday celebration is characterized by extreme alcohol consumption. Accumulating evidence suggests that high-dose bingeing is related to structural brain changes and cognitive deficits. This is particularly problematic in the transition from adolescence to adulthood when the brain is still maturing, elevating the brain's sensitivity to the acute effects of alcohol intoxication.

Examining associations between two different jumping to conclusions scores with positive schizotypy and recent distress.

Jumping to conclusions is associated with delusions. It is unclear whether positive schizotypy, which refers to delusion-like and hallucination-like symptoms, is associated with jumping to conclusions. Relatedly, the relative validity of two jumping to conclusions scores, extreme responding and draws to decision, is unclear, particularly whether extreme responding (responding after one or two draws) reflects the same bias as decreased draws to decision on non-extreme responding trials.

Explicit and Implicit Affect and Judgment in Schizotypy.

Although emotion deficits in schizotypy have been reported, the exact nature of these deficits is now well understood. Specifically, for social anhedonia (SocAnh), there are questions about whether any decrease in positive affect only reflects an explicit bias not observed in other measures (e.g.

Striatum-related functional activation during reward- versus punishment-based learning in psychosis risk.

Psychosis is strongly related to increased striatal dopamine. However, the neural consequences of increased striatal dopamine in psychosis risk are still not fully understood. Consistent with an increase in striatal dopamine, in previous research, psychosis risk has been associated with neural EEG evidence of a greater response to unexpected reward than unexpected punishment feedback on a reversal-learning task.

The subjective-objective deficit paradox in schizotypy extends to emotion regulation and awareness.

There is an emerging subjective-objective deficit paradox in schizotypy. Individuals with schizotypy report severe subjective complaints in several key functional domains commensurate with that of individuals with schizophrenia. However, objective assessments of the same domains show relatively intact performance.

Psychosis risk is associated with decreased resting-state functional connectivity between the striatum and the default mode network.

Psychosis is linked to aberrant salience or to viewing neutral stimuli as self-relevant, suggesting a possible impairment in self-relevance processing. Psychosis is also associated with increased dopamine in the dorsal striatum, especially the anterior caudate (Kegeles et al., 2010).

Differentiating positive schizotypy and mania risk scales and their associations with spontaneous eye blink rate.

Positive schizotypy and mania risk scales are strongly correlated, and both are linked to alterations in striatal dopamine. Previous research has not examined whether these risk scales form distinct factors or whether they are differentially related to other measures of psychopathology risk or striatal dopamine. In the current study (N = 596), undergraduate students completed both positive schizotypy and mania risk scales as well as scales assessing related psychopathology (i.

Probabilistic Category Learning and Striatal Functional Activation in Psychosis Risk.

Background: Psychosis risk is associated with striatal dysfunction, including a previous behavioral study that found that psychosis risk is associated with impaired performance on a probabilistic category learning task (PCLT; ie, the Weather Prediction Task), a task strongly associated with striatal activation. The current study examined whether psychosis risk based on symptom levels was associated with both poor behavioral performance and task-related physiological dysfunction in specific regions of the striatum while performing the PCLT.

Methods: There were 2 groups of participants: psychosis risk (n = 21) who had both (a) extreme levels of self-reported psychotic-like beliefs and experiences and (b) interview-rated current attenuated psychotic symptoms (APS); and a comparison group (n = 20) who had average levels of self-reported psychotic-like beliefs and experiences.

Tracking salience in young people: A psychometric field test of the Aberrant Salience Inventory (ASI).

Aim: To explore the prevalence of Aberrant Salience (AS, an alleged experiential feature of psychosis-proneness) in Italian young people and corroborate the transcultural validity of the Aberrant Salience Inventory (ASI).

Methods: Young adults attending an Italian university (n = 649) underwent serial evaluations with the ASI together with psychometric proxies for help seeking General Health Questionnaire and attenuated positive and negative symptoms Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). The distribution of ASI scores was explored with latent class analysis (LCA).

Caregiver Perspectives About Using Antipsychotics and Other Medications for Symptoms of Dementia.

Background And Objectives: To avoid "chemical restraints," policies and guidelines have been implemented to curb the use of medications for behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). Antipsychotics have been particularly targeted because of their rare severe side effects. Consequently, caregiver directed non-pharmacologic therapies have increased while medication use for BPSD has diminished.

Emotional word usage in groups at risk for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders: An objective investigation of attention to emotion.

Both extreme levels of social anhedonia (SocAnh) and extreme levels of perceptual aberration/magical ideation (PerMag) indicate increased risk for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and are associated with emotional deficits. For SocAnh, there is evidence of self-reported decreased trait positive affect and abnormalities in emotional attention. For PerMag, there is evidence of increased trait negative affect and increased attention to negative emotion.

An electrophysiological investigation of emotional abnormalities in groups at risk for schizophrenia-spectrum personality disorders.

Both extreme levels of social anhedonia (SocAnh) and perceptual aberration/magical ideation (PerMag) are associated with risk for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and with emotional abnormalities. Yet, the nature of any psychophysiological-measured affective abnormality, including the role of automatic/controlled processes, is unclear. We examined the late positive potential (LPP) during passive viewing (to assess automatic processing) and during cognitive reappraisal (to assess controlled processing) in three groups: SocAnh, PerMag, and controls.