Publications by authors named "Katherine L Forthman"

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  • More and more women are going to prison in the US, with many there for drug-related crimes, and programs to help them get treatment can be helpful.
  • Researchers used a machine learning technique to find out what factors might help predict whether these women would finish their treatment programs.
  • Although the models didn't perfectly predict success, they found that things like impulsive behavior and history of trauma were important in understanding who might complete the program.
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  • Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is a complex mental health issue that affects many individuals and poses significant social and economic challenges, which remain poorly understood in terms of its causes.
  • The study aimed to identify genetic factors linked to TRD by using polygenic scores (PGS) derived from large genomic data involving over 292,000 participants in the All of Us Research Program.
  • Key findings revealed that certain PGS related to traits like insomnia and neuroticism increased TRD risk, while higher education and intelligence were associated with lower risk, with these patterns being consistent across multiple data sets within the study.
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  • Recent research in Bayesian theories indicates that how we perceive bodily states depends on a combination of incoming signals and our prior beliefs about those signals.
  • A study involving heartbeat tapping showed that healthy individuals adapt their perception of cardiac signals during breath-holding, while those with anxiety or related disorders do not adjust their perception, indicating a problem with how they weight these signals.
  • Expanding a previous study with a larger sample size confirmed these findings and suggests that future research could look into how understanding interoceptive precision might help improve treatment outcomes and identify new therapeutic targets.
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Recent computational theories of interoception suggest that perception of bodily states rests upon an expected reliability- or precision-weighted integration of afferent signals and prior beliefs. The computational psychiatry framework further suggests that aberrant precision-weighting may lead to misestimation of bodily states, potentially hindering effective visceral regulation and promoting psychopathology. In a previous study, we fit a Bayesian computational model of perception to behavior on a heartbeat tapping task to test whether aberrant precision-weighting was associated with misestimation of bodily states.

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Neuroticism is a heritable trait and a risk factor for mental health due to its relevance to poor control of negative events. To examine the relationship between genetic propensity for neuroticism and control processing, we used the polygenic risk score (PRS) approach and a stop signal task during fMRI. We hypothesized that genetic propensity for neuroticism may moderate control processing as a function of control difficulty.

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  • Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is when people keep having bad thoughts that can make things like depression and anxiety worse.
  • The study used a fancy computer method to see how different feelings and behaviors, along with genetics, affect how strong RNT is in people.
  • The main finding showed that being prone to feeling bad (neuroticism) and having trouble with fear and feelings was linked to RNT, suggesting that helping people understand and manage their emotions could lessen these negative thoughts.
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Neuroticism as a personality trait represents a heritable risk for psychiatric disorders. The polygenic risk score for neuroticism (N-PRS) is used to study genetic vulnerability to neuroticism. The current data present the association of the genetic risk for neuroticism to neural reward-punishment processing using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

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Background: Neuroticism is a heritable trait that contributes to the vulnerability to depression. We used polygenic risk scores (PRS) to examine genetic vulnerability to neuroticism and its associations with reward/punishment processing in a clinical sample with mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders. It was hypothesized that higher PRS for neuroticism is associated with attenuated neural responses to reward/punishment.

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Neighborhood characteristics can have profound impacts on resident mental health, but the wide variability in methodologies used across studies makes it difficult to reach a consensus as to the implications of these impacts. The aim of this study was to simplify the assessment of neighborhood influence on mental health. We used a factor analysis approach to reduce the multi-dimensional assessment of a neighborhood using census tracts and demographic data available from the American Community Survey (ACS).

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  • The study looked at how well people with depression, anxiety, or substance use problems can feel their own heartbeats compared to healthy people.
  • They tested this by having participants tap their heartbeats in different situations, like when they could guess the beats or not, and when they held their breath to feel their heart more.
  • Healthy people got better at sensing their heartbeats in all situations, while those with mental health issues didn’t improve much, showing they might struggle to notice their heart signals, especially when stressed.
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Recent neurocomputational theories have hypothesized that abnormalities in prior beliefs and/or the precision-weighting of afferent interoceptive signals may facilitate the transdiagnostic emergence of psychopathology. Specifically, it has been suggested that, in certain psychiatric disorders, interoceptive processing mechanisms either over-weight prior beliefs or under-weight signals from the viscera (or both), leading to a failure to accurately update beliefs about the body. However, this has not been directly tested empirically.

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Survey-based studies show that neighborhood disadvantage is associated with community reported mental health problems. However, fewer studies have examined whether neighborhood characteristics have measurable impact on mental health status of individuals in general and whether neighborhood characteristics impact positive/negative valence processing at both behavioral and brain levels. This study addressed these questions by investigating effects of census-based neighborhood affluence on self-reported symptoms, brain functions, and structures associated with positive/negative valence processing in a sample of individuals with mood and anxiety disorders (n = 262).

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