Amygdala activity after subchronic escitalopram administration in healthy volunteers: A pharmaco-functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

Background: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are used for the treatment of several conditions including anxiety disorders, but the basic neurobiology of serotonin function remains unclear. The amygdala and prefrontal cortex are strongly innervated by serotonergic projections and have been suggested to play an important role in anxiety expression. However, serotonergic function in behaviour and SSRI-mediated neurobiological changes remain incompletely understood.

Independent replications reveal anterior and posterior cingulate cortex activation underlying state anxiety-attenuated face encoding.

Anxiety involves the anticipation of aversive outcomes and can impair neurocognitive processes, such as the ability to recall faces encoded during the anxious state. It is important to precisely delineate and determine the replicability of these effects using causal state anxiety inductions in the general population. This study therefore aimed to replicate prior research on the distinct impacts of threat-of-shock-induced anxiety on the encoding and recognition stage of emotional face processing, in a large asymptomatic sample ( = 92).

Measuring functional outcomes in schizophrenia in an increasingly digital world.

With an unmet clinical need for effective interventions for cognitive and negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia, measures of functional status (often a co-primary endpoint) remain key clinical trial outcomes. This review aims to give an overview of the different types of functional assessments commonly used in clinical trials and research involving patients with schizophrenia and highlight pertinent challenges surrounding the use of these as reliable, sensitive, and specific assessments in intervention trials. We provide examples of commonly used functional measures and highlight emerging real-time digital assessment tools.

The Importance of Common Currency Tasks in Translational Psychiatry.

Purpose Of Review: Common currency tasks are tasks that investigate the same phenomenon in different species. In this review, we discuss how to ensure the translational validity of common currency tasks, summarise their benefits, present recent research in this area and offer future directions and recommendations.

Recent Findings: We discuss the strengths and limitations of three specific examples where common currency tasks have added to our understanding of psychiatric constructs-affective bias, reversal learning and goal-based decision making.