Specific Patterns of Endogenous Functional Connectivity Are Associated With Harm Avoidance in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Background: Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show persistent avoidance behaviors, often in the absence of actual threat. Quality-of-life costs and heterogeneity support the need for novel brain-behavior intervention targets. Informed by mechanistic and anatomical studies of persistent avoidance in rodents and nonhuman primates, our goal was to test whether connections within a hypothesized persistent avoidance-related network predicted OCD-related harm avoidance (HA), a trait measure of persistent avoidance.

Validation of a novel method of ultraviolet-induced cutaneous inflammation and its associations with anhedonia.

Affective immunology of the skin is a growing area; however, established protocols for measuring individual differences in cutaneous inflammation are lacking. To address this, we present a preliminary validation of Precision Implementation of Minimal Erythema Dose (PI-MED) testing as a method for measuring cutaneous inflammation. PI-MED is a recently adapted protocol, optimized for reproducibility and individual differences research, that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to evoke cutaneous erythema, or inflammatory skin reddening.

Subjective arousal and perceived control clarify heterogeneity in inflammatory and affective outcomes.

Only a portion of individuals experiencing chronic stress and associated increases in inflammation go on to develop pathological elevations in mood and anxiety symptoms. Some prevailing models suggest that the outcomes of chronic stress may largely depend on individual differences in perceived control. In the current study, we used this theoretical framework to disambiguate the influence of autonomic arousal and perceived control on inflammatory and psychological outcomes in a large sample of adults from the Midlife in the United States dataset (wave 2; MIDUS-2) (Final N ​= ​1030), and further replicated our approach in a second (MIDUS-Refresher) cohort (Final N ​= ​728).

Reward Circuitry and Motivational Deficits in Social Anxiety Disorder: What Can Be Learned From Mouse Models?

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common and serious psychiatric condition that typically emerges during adolescence and persists into adulthood if left untreated. Prevailing interventions focus on modulating threat and arousal systems but produce only modest rates of remission. This gap in efficacy suggests that most mainstream treatment concepts do not sufficiently target core processes involved in the onset and maintenance of SAD.

Alexithymia as a Transdiagnostic Precursor to Empathy Abnormalities: The Functional Role of the Insula.

Distorted empathic processing has been observed across multiple psychiatric disorders. Simulation theory provides a theoretical framework that proposes a mechanism through which empathy difficulties may arise. Specifically, introspection-centric simulation theory (IST) predicts that an inability to accurately interpret and describe internal affective states may lead to empathy difficulties.

A functional connectivity-based neuromarker of sustained attention generalizes to predict recall in a reading task.

Sustaining attention to the task at hand is a crucial part of everyday life, from following a lecture at school to maintaining focus while driving. Lapses in sustained attention are frequent and often problematic, with conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder affecting millions of people worldwide. Recent work has had some success in finding signatures of sustained attention in whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) measures during basic tasks, but since FC can be dynamic and task-dependent, it remains unclear how fully these signatures would generalize to a more complex and naturalistic scenario.

Spatiotemporal dissociation of brain activity underlying threat and reward in social anxiety disorder.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) involves abnormalities in social motivation, which may be independent of well-documented differences in fear and arousal systems. Yet, the neurobiology underlying motivational difficulties in SAD is not well understood. The aim of the current study was to spatiotemporally dissociate reward circuitry dysfunction from alterations in fear and arousal-related neural activity during anticipation and notification of social and non-social reward and punishment.

Attentional control mediates fearful responding to an ecologically valid stressor.

Background And Objectives: Attentional control (AC) is defined as the ability to voluntarily shift and disengage attention and is thought to moderate the relationship between preexisting risk factors for fear and the actual experience of fear.

Design: This longitudinal study elaborates on current models of AC by examining whether AC moderates or mediates effects of an ecologically valid stressor (a college examination) and also whether AC is predictive of state-like fear over longer timescales than previously reported.

Methods: Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that AC would moderate the relationship between trait anxiety and affective distress in response to the examination stressor.