Human emotion processing accuracy, negative biases, and fMRI activation are associated with childhood trauma.

Introduction: Emerging literature suggests that childhood trauma may influence facial emotion perception (FEP), with the potential to negatively bias both emotion perception and reactions to emotion-related inputs. Negative emotion perception biases are associated with a range of psychiatric and behavioral problems, potentially due or as a result of difficult social interactions. Unfortunately, there is a poor understanding of whether observed negative biases are related to childhood trauma history, depression history, or processes common to (and potentially causative of) both experiences.

Inflammation, depressive symptoms, and emotion perception in adolescence.

Background: Individuals with depression often demonstrate an altered peripheral inflammatory profile, as well as emotion perception difficulties. However, correlations of inflammation with overall depression severity are inconsistent and inflammation may only contribute to specific symptoms. Moreover, measurement of the association between inflammation and emotion perception is sparse in adolescence, despite representing a formative window of emotional development and high-risk period for depression onset.

Anticipation of monetary reward in amygdala, insula, caudate are predictors of pleasure sensitivity to d-Amphetamine administration.

Background: Drug addiction and dependence continue as an unresolved source of morbidity and mortality. Two approaches to identifying risk for abuse and addiction are psychopharmacological challenge studies and neuroimaging experiments. The present study combined these two approaches by examining associations between self-reported euphoria or liking after a dose of d-amphetamine and neural-based responses to anticipation of a monetary reward.

The Titrated Monetary Incentive Delay Task: Sensitivity, convergent and divergent validity, and neural correlates in an RDoC sample.

Introduction: Neuropsychological tests are designed to assay brain function via performance measurements. Many tests corresponding to visual and motor cortex function have been validated. Tests probing reward circuitry, including the ventral striatum (VS), could benefit assessment of numerous neurological and psychiatric disorders in which reward or VS function is disturbed.

Pre-scan cortisol is differentially associated with enhanced connectivity to the cognitive control network in young adults with a history of depression.

Background: We have previously demonstrated that pre-scan salivary cortisol is associated with attentuated frontal-subcortical brain activation during emotion processesing and semantic list-learning paradigms in depressed subjects. Additionally, altered functional connectivity is observed after remission of acute depression symptoms (rMDD). It is unknown whether cortisol also predicts altered functional connectivity during remission.

Self-reported affective biases, but not all affective performance biases, are present in depression remission.

Objective: Individuals with active major depressive disorder (MDD) have shown affective biases in cognitive flexibility and memory, particularly for negatively valenced stimuli. We evaluated whether impairments in affective flexibility would remain even during remission (rMDD), potentially representing trait- or scar-like effects of illness.

Method: Participants completed the Emotion Card Sort Test (ECST), a measure of cognitive flexibility containing emotionally valenced stimuli, and the Emotion Word Stimulus Test (EWST), a measure of affective biases in delayed recall and recognition memory, and several self-report measures.

Predictors of Attrition in Longitudinal Neuroimaging Research: Inhibitory Control, Head Movement, and Resting-State Functional Connectivity.

Attrition is a major problem in longitudinal neuroimaging studies, as it may lead to unreliable estimates of the stability of trait-like processes over time, of the identification of risk factors for clinical outcomes, and of the effects of treatment. Identification of characteristics associated with attrition has implications for participant recruitment and participant retention to achieve representative longitudinal samples. We investigated inhibitory control deficits, head motion, and resting-state functional connectivity within the cognitive control network (CCN) as predictors of attrition.

Integrated cross-network connectivity of amygdala, insula, and subgenual cingulate associated with facial emotion perception in healthy controls and remitted major depressive disorder.

Emotion perception deficits could be due to disrupted connectivity of key nodes in the salience and emotion network (SEN), including the amygdala, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), and insula. We examined SEN resting-state (rs-)fMRI connectivity in rMDD in relation to Facial Emotion Perception Test (FEPT) performance. Fifty-two medication-free people ages 18 to 23 years participated.

Disrupted engagement of networks supporting hot and cold cognition in remitted major depressive disorder.

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by dysfunction in cognitive and emotional systems. However, the neural network correlates of cognitive control (cold cognition) and emotion processing (hot cognition) during the remitted state of MDD (rMDD) remain unclear and not fully probed, which has important implications for identifying intermediate phenotypes of depression risk.

Methods: 43 young adults with rMDD and 33 healthy controls (HCs) underwent fMRI while completing separate tasks of cold cognition (Parametric Go/No-Go test) and hot cognition (Facial Emotion Processing Test).