Linking social motivation, general motivation, and social cognition to interpersonal functioning in schizophrenia: insights from exploratory graph analysis.

Motivation in general, and social motivation in particular are important for interpersonal functioning in individuals with schizophrenia. Still, their roles after accounting for social cognition, are not well understood. The sample consisted of 147 patients with schizophrenia.

Normative Modeling of Brain Morphometry in Clinical High Risk for Psychosis.

Importance: The lack of robust neuroanatomical markers of psychosis risk has been traditionally attributed to heterogeneity. A complementary hypothesis is that variation in neuroanatomical measures in individuals at psychosis risk may be nested within the range observed in healthy individuals.

Objective: To quantify deviations from the normative range of neuroanatomical variation in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR-P) and evaluate their overlap with healthy variation and their association with positive symptoms, cognition, and conversion to a psychotic disorder.

Normative modeling of brain morphometry in Clinical High-Risk for Psychosis.

Importance: The lack of robust neuroanatomical markers of psychosis risk has been traditionally attributed to heterogeneity. A complementary hypothesis is that variation in neuroanatomical measures in the majority of individuals at psychosis risk may be nested within the range observed in healthy individuals.

Objective: To quantify deviations from the normative range of neuroanatomical variation in individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P) and evaluate their overlap with healthy variation and their association with positive symptoms, cognition, and conversion to a psychotic disorder.

Social cognition training improves recognition of distinct facial emotions and decreases misattribution errors in healthy individuals.

Facial emotion recognition is a key component of social cognition. Impaired facial emotion recognition is tied to poor psychological wellbeing and deficient social functioning. While previous research has demonstrated the potential for social cognition training to improve overall facial emotion recognition, questions remain regarding what aspects of emotion recognition improve.

Online Social Cognition Training in Schizophrenia: A Double-Blind, Randomized, Controlled Multi-Site Clinical Trial.

Social cognition (SC), the mental operations underlying social functioning, are impaired in schizophrenia. Their direct link to functional outcome and illness status have made them an important therapeutic target. However, no effective treatment for these deficits is currently applied as a standard of care.

Change in Objective Measure of Empathic Accuracy Following Social Cognitive Training.

The capacity for empathy plays an important role in interpersonal relationships and social functioning, and impairments in empathy can have negative effects on social interactions and overall social adjustment. This suggests that empathy may be a critical target for intervention in individuals who struggle with social interactions, yet it is unclear if the skills required for empathy are malleable. This study investigates the efficacy of targeted social cognitive training for improving empathic skills.

Connectivity-enhanced diffusion analysis reveals white matter density disruptions in first episode and chronic schizophrenia.

Reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) is a well-established correlate of schizophrenia, but it remains unclear whether these tensor-based differences are the result of axon damage and/or organizational changes and whether the changes are progressive in the adult course of illness. Diffusion MRI data were collected in 81 schizophrenia patients (54 first episode and 27 chronic) and 64 controls. Analysis of FA was combined with "fixel-based" analysis, the latter of which leverages connectivity and crossing-fiber information to assess both fiber bundle density and organizational complexity (i.

Disrupted Working Memory Circuitry in Adolescent Psychosis.

Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) consistently show deficits in spatial working memory (WM) and associated atypical patterns of neural activity within key WM regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and parietal cortices. However, little research has focused on adolescent psychosis (AP) and potential age-associated disruptions of WM circuitry that may occur in youth with this severe form of illness. Here we utilized each subject's individual spatial WM capacity to investigate task-based neural dysfunction in 17 patients with AP (16.

Spatial working memory in neurofibromatosis 1: Altered neural activity and functional connectivity.

Background: Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1) is a genetic disorder that disrupts central nervous system development and neuronal function. Cognitively, NF1 is characterized by difficulties with executive control and visuospatial abilities. Little is known about the neural substrates underlying these deficits.

Ventricular enlargement and progressive reduction of cortical gray matter are linked in prodromal youth who develop psychosis.

In a recent prospective longitudinal neuroimaging study, clinical high-risk (CHR) individuals who later developed full-blown psychosis showed an accelerated rate of gray matter thinning in superior and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and expansion of the ventricular system after applying a stringent correction for multiple comparisons. Although cortical and subcortical volume loss and enlarged ventricles are well characterized structural brain abnormalities among patients with schizophrenia, no prior study has evaluated whether these progressive changes of neuroanatomical indicators are linked in time prior to onset of psychosis. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between the changes in cortical gray matter thickness and ventricular volume using the longitudinal neuroimaging data from the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study at the whole-brain level.

Memory systems in schizophrenia: Modularity is preserved but deficits are generalized.

Objective: Schizophrenia patients exhibit impaired working and episodic memory, but this may represent generalized impairment across memory modalities or performance deficits restricted to particular memory systems in subgroups of patients. Furthermore, it is unclear whether deficits are unique from those associated with other disorders.

Method: Healthy controls (n=1101) and patients with schizophrenia (n=58), bipolar disorder (n=49) and attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder (n=46) performed 18 tasks addressing primarily verbal and spatial episodic and working memory.

Association of Thalamic Dysconnectivity and Conversion to Psychosis in Youth and Young Adults at Elevated Clinical Risk.

Importance: Severe neuropsychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia, affect distributed neural computations. One candidate system profoundly altered in chronic schizophrenia involves the thalamocortical networks. It is widely acknowledged that schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that likely affects the brain before onset of clinical symptoms.

Reliability of an fMRI paradigm for emotional processing in a multisite longitudinal study.

Multisite neuroimaging studies can facilitate the investigation of brain-related changes in many contexts, including patient groups that are relatively rare in the general population. Though multisite studies have characterized the reliability of brain activation during working memory and motor functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks, emotion processing tasks, pertinent to many clinical populations, remain less explored. A traveling participants study was conducted with eight healthy volunteers scanned twice on consecutive days at each of the eight North American Longitudinal Prodrome Study sites.

Contributions of Feature Binding During Encoding and Functional Connectivity of the Medial Temporal Lobe Structures to Episodic Memory Deficits Across the Prodromal and First-Episode Phases of Schizophrenia.

Patients with and at risk for psychosis may have difficulty using associative strategies to facilitate episodic memory encoding and recall. In parallel studies, patients with first-episode schizophrenia ( = 27) and high psychosis risk ( = 28) compared with control participants ( = 22 and = 20, respectively) underwent functional MRI during a remember-know memory task. Psychophysiological interaction analyses, using medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures as regions of interest, were conducted to measure functional connectivity patterns supporting successful episodic memory.

Neural correlates of preparatory and regulatory control over positive and negative emotion.

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activation during preparatory and regulatory control while participants (N = 24) were instructed either to simply view or decrease their emotional response to, pleasant, neutral or unpleasant pictures. A main effect of emotional valence on brain activity was found in the right precentral gyrus, with greater activation during positive than negative emotion regulation. A main effect of regulation phase was evident in the bilateral anterior prefrontal cortex (PFC), precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, right putamen and temporal and occipital lobes, with greater activity in these regions during preparatory than regulatory control.

The 3rd Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference, 14-18 April 2012, Florence, Italy: summaries of oral sessions.

The 3rd Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference was held in Florence, Italy, April 14-18, 2012 and this year had as its emphasis, "The Globalization of Research". Student travel awardees served as rapporteurs for each oral session and focused their summaries on the most significant findings that emerged and the discussions that followed. The following report is a composite of these summaries.

Persecutory delusions and the perception of trustworthiness in unfamiliar faces in schizophrenia.

Persecutory delusions, a common symptom of schizophrenia, involve a disruption in the way that patients determine the intentions of others and especially their trustworthiness. However, it is unclear to what extent general preference affects trustworthiness judgments in patients with schizophrenia and how that relates to paranoid symptomology. Patients with schizophrenia and control subjects rated unfamiliar faces for trustworthiness and attractiveness (as a proxy for preference).

Prefrontal cortical changes following cognitive training in patients with chronic schizophrenia: effects of practice, generalization, and specificity.

Cognitive training is increasingly used in the treatment of schizophrenia, but it remains unknown how this training affects functional neuroanatomy. Practice on specific cognitive tasks generally leads to automaticity and decreased prefrontal cortical activity, yet broad-based cognitive training programs may avoid automaticity and increase prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity. This study used quasi-randomized, placebo-control design and pre/post neuroimaging to examine functional plasticity associated with attention and working memory-focused cognitive training in patients with schizophrenia.

Neural correlates of verbal and nonverbal working memory deficits in individuals with schizophrenia and their high-risk siblings.

Impaired working memory and functional brain activation deficits within prefrontal cortex (PFC) may be associated with vulnerability to schizophrenia. This study compared working memory and PFC activation in individuals with schizophrenia, their unaffected siblings and healthy comparison participants. We administered a "2back" version of the "nback" task.

Sex influences on material-sensitive functional lateralization in working and episodic memory: men and women are not all that different.

Research investigating the effects of sex on the lateralization of language functions has produced mixed results to date, with some studies finding sex differences and others not [Shaywitz, B.A., Shaywitz, S.

The influence of encoding strategy on episodic memory and cortical activity in schizophrenia.

Background: Recent work suggests that episodic memory deficits in schizophrenia may be related to disturbances of encoding or retrieval. Schizophrenia patients appear to benefit from instruction in episodic memory strategies. We tested the hypothesis that providing effective encoding strategies to schizophrenia patients enhances encoding-related brain activity and recognition performance.