Three principles for the utility of simple tasks that assess elemental processes in parsing heterogeneity.

As clinical psychological science and biological psychiatry push to assess, model, and integrate heterogeneity and individual differences, approaches leveraging computational modeling, translational methods, and dimensional approaches to psychopathology are increasingly useful in establishing brain-behavior relationships. The field is ultimately interested in complex human behavior, and disruptions in such behaviors can arise through many different pathways, leading to heterogeneity in etiology for seemingly similar presentations. Parsing this complexity may be enhanced using "simple" tasks-which we define as those assaying elemental processes that are the building blocks to complexity.

Modeling Decision-Making in Schizophrenia: Associations Between Computationally Derived Risk Propensity and Self-Reported Risk Perception.

Background And Hypothesis: Schizophrenia is associated with a decreased pursuit of risky rewards during uncertain-risk decision-making. However, putative mechanisms subserving this disadvantageous risky reward pursuit, such as contributions of cognition and relevant traits, remain poorly understood.

Study Design: Participants (30 schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder [SZ]; 30 comparison participants [CP]) completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART).

Differential Risk: Gender and Racial Differences in the Relationship between Trauma, Discrimination, and Schizotypy.

Traumatic experiences are associated with increased experiences of positive schizotypy. This may be especially important for People of Color, who experience higher rates of trauma and racial discrimination. No study to date has examined how racial disparities in traumatic experiences may impact schizotypy.

Alterations in self-reported sensory gating and interoception in individuals frequently using cannabis.

Cannabis use is associated with altered processing of external (exteroceptive) and internal (interoceptive) sensory stimuli. However, little research exists on whether subjective experiences of these processes are altered in people who frequently use cannabis. Altered exteroception may influence externally oriented attention, whereas interoceptive differences have implications for intoxication, craving, and withdrawal states.

Measurement invariance of the Revised-Green Paranoid Thought Scale across Black and White Americans.

Given the culturally diverse landscape of mental healthcare and research, ensuring that our psychological constructs are measured equivalently across diverse populations is critical. One construct for which there is significant potential for inequitable assessment is paranoia, a prominent feature in psychotic disorders that can also be driven by culture and racial marginalization. This study examined measurement invariance-an analytic technique to rigorously investigate whether a given construct is being measured similarly across groups-of the Revised-Green Paranoid Thought Scale (R-GPTS; Freeman et al.