Publications by authors named "Timothy J McDermott"

Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualised meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions (MIs), that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past decade, neuroimaging has examined the neuroscientific basis of meditation practices, effects, states, and outcomes for clinical and non-clinical populations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - This study investigates the relationship between dissociation, a common trauma response, and the microstructure of white matter (WM) in the brain, particularly looking at how brain connectivity may be affected in trauma-exposed women.
  • - Researchers analyzed data from 135 women to examine how different facets of dissociation related to fractional anisotropy (FA), a measure of WM integrity, finding significant negative correlations between FA and overall dissociation across several important brain tracts.
  • - The results suggest that greater severity of dissociation is associated with reduced WM integrity in areas linked to sensory processing, emotional regulation, and memory, highlighting potential targets for therapy and neuromodulation interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • This study investigates the effectiveness of exposure-based therapy (EXP) versus behavioral activation (BA) for adults with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), as previous research has primarily focused on EXP without direct comparison to BA.! -
  • Conducted as a randomized clinical trial with 102 participants in Tulsa, OK, both EXP and BA showed significant improvements in GAD symptoms according to the GAD-7 self-report scale after treatment and at a 6-month follow-up.! -
  • Results suggest that while both treatments are effective, BA leads to quicker reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms and overall may provide greater improvement compared to EXP, indicating the need for further research into tailored treatment options for GAD.!
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: We have previously reported activation in reward, salience and executive control regions during functional MRI (fMRI) using an approach-avoidance conflict (AAC) decision-making task with healthy adults. Further investigations into how anxiety and depressive disorders relate to differences in neural responses during AAC can inform their understanding and treatment. We tested the hypothesis that people with anxiety or depression have altered neural activation during AAC.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Researchers studied how college students' mental health changed during the pandemic.
  • They found that many students felt worse, especially in Fall 2020 compared to Fall 2019.
  • Those who stayed mentally strong used better coping strategies and drank less alcohol before the pandemic began.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • This study focused on the quality of resting-state fMRI data and how it correlates with clinical and sociodemographic variables in adolescents.
  • It compared two groups: one with low average motion (quality data) and another with high average motion (lower quality data), finding that the higher quality group had more favorable characteristics like higher parental education and fewer mental health issues.
  • The researchers concluded that the lower motion sample may not represent the general youth population well, suggesting future studies should address these quality and representativeness issues to improve their findings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mindfulness training (MT) promotes the development of one's ability to observe and attend to internal and external experiences with objectivity and nonjudgment with evidence to improve psychological well-being. Real-time functional MRI neurofeedback (rtfMRI-nf) is a noninvasive method of modulating activity of a brain region or circuit. The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) has been hypothesized to be an important hub instantiating a mindful state.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study looked at how people with major depressive disorder (MDD) respond to rewards and how that might predict their success in therapy.
  • They compared MDD patients to healthy people and found that MDD patients reacted faster but had different brain wave patterns when seeing rewards.
  • It was suggested that those with bigger brain responses (P300) when facing challenges were more likely to finish therapy successfully.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Positive valence system dysregulation is a relatively unexplored transdiagnostic mechanism and potential treatment target underpinning alcohol use and anxiety and depression symptoms. The current study examined the feasibility and potential benefit of a behavioral intervention focused on amplification of positivity (AMP) with eight adults (five female) diagnosed with alcohol use disorder and clinically significant depression or anxiety (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04278365).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Maladaptive behavior in approach-avoidance conflict is linked to various psychiatric disorders, highlighting a common issue among those with depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders.
  • A follow-up study of 325 participants demonstrated that key decision-making parameters related to emotional conflict and decision uncertainty showed stable patterns over one year, particularly among patients compared to healthy controls.
  • The findings suggest that computational modeling can serve as a reliable method to track and understand transdiagnostic aspects of mental health conditions, providing insights into decision-making processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Neural and behavioral mechanisms during approach-avoidance conflict decision-making are relevant across various psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety disorders. Studies using approach-avoidance conflict paradigms in healthy adults have identified preliminary neural mechanisms, but findings must be replicated and demonstrated as reliable before further application. This study sought to replicate previous findings and examine test-retest reliability of behavioral (approach behavior, reaction time) and neural (regions of interest [ROIs]) responses during an approach-avoidance conflict task conducted during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study looked at how well brain scans measure people's reactions to emotional faces and if different methods of analyzing this data give consistent results.
  • The researchers tested 42 healthy adults using brain scans on two different days to see if their brain responses were the same each time.
  • They found that while the average brain activity patterns matched over time, only a few specific brain areas showed strong consistency at the individual level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: One in three college students experience significant depression or anxiety interfering with daily functioning. Resilience programs that can be administered to all students offer an opportunity for addressing this public health problem. The current study objective was to assess the benefit of a brief, universal resilience program for first-year college students.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To identify the neural markers of attention dysfunction in patients with HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND).

Methods: Sixty participants, including 40 HIV-infected adults (half with HAND) and 20 demographically matched controls performed a visual selective attention task while undergoing high-density magnetoencephalography. Neuronal activity related to selective attention processing was quantified and compared across the 3 groups, and correlated with neuropsychological measures of attention and executive function.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The ability to preferentially deploy neural resources to the visual space is an important component of normative cognitive function, however, the population-level cortical dynamics that sub-serve this ability are not fully understood. Specifically, rhythmic activity in the occipital cortices (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Numerous studies of motor control have confirmed beta and gamma oscillations in the primary motor cortices during basic movements. These responses include a robust beta decrease that precedes and extends through movement onset, a transient gamma response that coincides with the movement, and a post-movement beta rebound (PMBR) response that occurs after movement offset. While the existence of these responses has been confirmed by many studies, very few studies have examined their developmental trajectory.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The emotional stress response is relevant to a number of psychiatric disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in particular. Research using neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to probe stress-related neural processing have provided some insights into psychiatric disorders. Treatment providers and individual patients would benefit from clinically useful fMRI paradigms that provide information about patients' current brain state and responses to stress in order to inform the treatment selection process.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

It is now generally accepted that diabetes increases the risk for cognitive impairment, but the precise mechanisms are poorly understood. A critical problem in linking diabetes to cognitive impairment is that patients often have multiple comorbidities (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Numerous studies connect beta oscillations in the motor cortices to volitional movement, and beta is known to be aberrant in multiple movement disorders. However, the dynamic interplay between these beta oscillations, motor performance, and spontaneous beta power (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF