Managing clinical heterogeneity in psychopathology: Perspectives from brain research.

Clinical heterogeneity is a significant factor to contend with when seeking to organize, understand, and treat psychopathology. In recent years, the field has prioritized efforts to minimize nonmeaningful heterogeneity and leverage meaningful heterogeneity to improve assessment and diagnostics, inform mechanistic understanding, and facilitate the development of novel treatments. Indeed, exciting developments such as the National Institute for Mental Health Research Domain Criteria and the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology have provided powerful frameworks for facing clinical complexity.

Reduced hippocampal volume unmasks distinct impacts of cumulative adverse childhood events (ACEs) on psychotic-like experiences in late childhood and early adolescence.

Stress is associated with increased vulnerability to psychosis, yet the mechanisms that contribute to these effects are poorly understood. Substantial literature has linked reduced hippocampal volume to both psychosis risk and early life stress. However, less work has explored the direct and indirect effects of stress on psychosis through the hippocampus in preclinical samples- when vulnerability for psychosis is accumulating.

Emotional tone in clinical high risk for psychosis: novel insights from a natural language analysis approach.

Background: Individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis experience subtle emotional disturbances that are traditionally difficult to assess, but natural language processing (NLP) methods may provide novel insight into these symptoms. We predicted that CHR individuals would express more negative emotionality and less emotional language when compared to controls. We also examined associations with symptomatology.

Developmental changes in the endorsement of psychotic-like experiences from middle childhood through young adulthood.

Background: Children tend to endorse psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) at higher rates than adults, although little is known about how specific symptom endorsement changes across the span of development. Here we take an observational approach to examine trends in PLE endorsement by age in two non-clinical samples: one of school-aged children and another of late adolescents and early adults.

Methods: Prodromal Questionnaire-Brief (child and adult versions) responses were investigated in individuals ages 9-13 (n = 11865) and 16-24 (n = 3209) from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) and the Multisite Assessment of Psychosis-risk Study (MAP), respectively.