Quality of life in small-scaled homelike nursing homes: an 8-month controlled trial.

Background: Quality of life is a clinical highly relevant outcome for residents with dementia. The question arises whether small scaled homelike facilities are associated with better quality of life than regular larger scale nursing homes do.

Methods: A sample of 145 residents living in a large scale care facility were followed over 8 months.

Cognitive inflexibility in obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depression is associated with distinct neural correlates.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) are frequently co-morbid, and dysfunctional frontal-striatal circuits have been implicated in both disorders. Neurobiological distinctions between OCD and MDD are insufficiently clear, and comparative neuroimaging studies are extremely scarce. OCD and MDD may be characterized by cognitive rigidity at the phenotype level, and frontal-striatal brain circuits constitute the neural substrate of intact cognitive flexibility.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging correlates of emotional word encoding and recognition in depression and anxiety disorders.

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD), panic disorder, and social anxiety disorder are among the most prevalent and frequently co-occurring psychiatric disorders in adults and may be characterized by a common deficiency in processing of emotional information.

Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging during the performance of an emotional word encoding and recognition paradigm in patients with MDD (n = 51), comorbid MDD and anxiety (n = 59), panic disorder and/or social anxiety disorder without comorbid MDD (n = 56), and control subjects (n = 49). In addition, we studied effects of illness severity, regional brain volume, and antidepressant use.

Bright light treatment in elderly patients with nonseasonal major depressive disorder: a randomized placebo-controlled trial.

Context: Major depressive disorder (MDD) in elderly individuals is prevalent and debilitating. It is accompanied by circadian rhythm disturbances associated with impaired functioning of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the biological clock of the brain. Circadian rhythm disturbances are common in the elderly.

Regional brain volume in depression and anxiety disorders.

Context: Major depressive disorder (MDD), panic disorder, and social anxiety disorder are among the most prevalent and frequently co-occurring psychiatric disorders in adults and may have, at least in part, a common etiology.

Objective: To identify the unique and shared neuroanatomical profile of depression and anxiety, controlling for illness severity, medication use, sex, age of onset, and recurrence.

Design: Cross-sectional study.

Bright light in elderly subjects with nonseasonal major depressive disorder: a double blind randomised clinical trial using early morning bright blue light comparing dim red light treatment.

Background: Depression frequently occurs in the elderly. Its cause is largely unknown, but several studies point to disturbances of biological rhythmicity. In both normal aging, and depression, the functioning of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is impaired, as evidenced by an increased prevalence of day-night rhythm perturbations, such as sleeping disorders.

Reduced orbitofrontal-striatal activity on a reversal learning task in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Context: The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)-striatal circuit, which is important for motivational behavior, is assumed to be involved in the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) according to current neurobiological models of this disorder. However, the engagement of this neural loop in OCD has not been tested directly in a cognitive activation imaging paradigm so far.

Objective: To determine whether the OFC and the ventral striatum show abnormal neural activity in OCD during cognitive challenge.

Neural correlates of a reversal learning task with an affectively neutral baseline: an event-related fMRI study.

Reversal learning may conceptually be dissected into acquiring stimulus-reinforcement associations and subsequently altering behavior by switching to new associations as stimulus-reinforcement contingencies reverse (i.e., affective switching).

A goal activation approach to the study of executive function: an application to antisaccade tasks.

We argue that a general control process, responsible for the activation and maintenance of task goals, is central to the concept of executive function. Failures of this process can become manifest as goal neglect: disregard of a task requirement even though it has been understood (Duncan, 1995). We discuss the results of several published and new experiments using various versions of the antisaccade task in order to investigate the circumstances under which goal neglect is likely to occur.