Fusing Mobile Phone Sensing and Brain Imaging to Assess Depression in College Students.

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent in our society, so have rates of depression, particularly among young adults. Individual differences in smartphone usage patterns have been shown to reflect individual differences in underlying affective processes such as depression (Wang et al., 2018).

An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR).

: The "autonomous sensory meridian response" (ASMR) is a neologism used to describe an internal sensation of deep relaxation and pleasant head tingling which is often stimulated by gentle sounds, light touch, and personal attention. : An fMRI-based methodology was employed to examine the brain activation of subjects prescreened for ASMR-receptivity (n=10) as they watched ASMR videos and identified specific moments of relaxation and tingling. : Subjects who experienced ASMR showed significant activation in regions associated with both reward (NAcc) and emotional arousal (dACC and Insula/IFG).

Reward-related regions form a preferentially coupled system at rest.

Neuroimaging studies have implicated a set of striatal and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) regions that are commonly activated during reward processing tasks. Resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) studies have demonstrated that the human brain is organized into several functional systems that show strong temporal coherence in the absence of goal-directed tasks. Here we use seed-based and graph-theory RSFC approaches to characterize the systems-level organization of putative reward regions of at rest.

Reducing reward responsivity and daily food desires in female dieters through domain-specific training.

According to the strength model, self-regulation relies on a domain-general capacity that may be strengthened by training. From this perspective, training self-regulation in one domain may transfer to other domains. Here we used two inhibitory training paradigms, a domain-general and domain-specific stop-signal training task and compared their effects on brain reward activity as well as daily food desires in female dieters.

Tracking Depression Dynamics in College Students Using Mobile Phone and Wearable Sensing.

There are rising rates of depression on college campuses. Mental health services on our campuses are working at full stretch. In response researchers have proposed using mobile sensing for continuous mental health assessment.

Reward System Activation in Response to Alcohol Advertisements Predicts College Drinking.

Objective: In this study, we assess whether activation of the brain's reward system in response to alcohol advertisements is associated with college drinking. Previous research has established a relationship between exposure to alcohol marketing and underage drinking. Within other appetitive domains, the relationship between cue exposure and behavioral enactment is known to rely on activation of the brain's reward system.

A balance of activity in brain control and reward systems predicts self-regulatory outcomes.

Previous neuroimaging work has shown that increased reward-related activity following exposure to food cues is predictive of self-control failure. The balance model suggests that self-regulation failures result from an imbalance in reward and executive control mechanisms. However, an open question is whether the relative balance of activity in brain systems associated with executive control (vs reward) supports self-regulatory outcomes when people encounter tempting cues in daily life.

Genetic risk for obesity predicts nucleus accumbens size and responsivity to real-world food cues.

Obesity is a major public health concern that involves an interaction between genetic susceptibility and exposure to environmental cues (e.g., food marketing); however, the mechanisms that link these factors and contribute to unhealthy eating are unclear.

The Dorsal Medial Prefrontal Cortex Responds Preferentially to Social Interactions during Natural Viewing.

Unlabelled: Humans display a strong tendency to make spontaneous inferences concerning the thoughts and intentions of others. Although this ability relies upon the concerted effort of multiple brain regions, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) is most closely associated with the ability to reason about other people's mental states and form impressions of their character. Here, we investigated this region's putative social category preference using fMRI as 34 participants engaged in uninstructed viewing of a complex naturalistic stimulus.

Striatal Associative Learning Signals Are Tuned to In-groups.

An important feature of adaptive social behavior is the ability to flexibly modify future actions based on the successes or failures of past experiences. The ventral striatum (VS) occupies a central role in shaping behavior by using feedback to evaluate actions and guide learning. The current studies tested whether feedback indicating the need to update social knowledge would engage the VS, thereby facilitating subsequent learning.

ACTIVITY IN CORTICAL MIDLINE STRUCTURES IS MODULATED BY SELF-CONSTRUAL CHANGES DURING ACCULTURATION.

Recent immigrants to another culture generally experience a period of acculturation during which they show self-construal changes. Here, we examine how this acculturation period alters brain activity associated with self-referential cognition. Twenty-seven native Chinese-speaking recent immigrants completed a trait-judgment task in which they judged whether a series of psychological traits applied to themselves and, separately, whether these traits applied to their mothers.

Individual Differences in Reward and Somatosensory-Motor Brain Regions Correlate with Adiposity in Adolescents.

The prevalence of adolescent obesity has increased dramatically over the past three decades, and research has documented that the number of television shows viewed during childhood is associated with greater risk for obesity. In particular, considerable evidence suggests that exposure to food marketing promotes eating habits that contribute to obesity. The present study examines neural responses to dynamic food commercials in overweight and healthy-weight adolescents using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

In search of a human self-regulation system.

The capacity for self-regulation allows people to control their thoughts, behaviors, emotions, and desires. In spite of this impressive ability, failures of self-regulation are common and contribute to numerous societal problems, from obesity to drug addiction. Such failures frequently occur following exposure to highly tempting cues, during negative moods, or after self-regulatory resources have been depleted.

Generation and Evaluation of a Cortical Area Parcellation from Resting-State Correlations.

The cortical surface is organized into a large number of cortical areas; however, these areas have not been comprehensively mapped in the human. Abrupt transitions in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) patterns can noninvasively identify locations of putative borders between cortical areas (RSFC-boundary mapping; Cohen et al. 2008).

To apply yourself is human, to reapply divine.

Prefrontal cortex is involved in adapting our emotional response to setbacks. While we feel that some setbacks are controllable, others are not. Here, Bhanji and Delgado (2014) reveal the neural substrates of persistence in the face of controllable and uncontrollable setbacks.

Neural predictors of giving in to temptation in daily life.

The ability to control desires, whether for food, sex, or drugs, enables people to function successfully within society. Yet, in tempting situations, strong impulses often result in self-control failure. Although many triggers of self-control failure have been identified, the question remains as to why some individuals are more likely than others to give in to temptation.

Self-regulatory depletion enhances neural responses to rewards and impairs top-down control.

To be successful at self-regulation, individuals must be able to resist impulses and desires. The strength model of self-regulation suggests that when self-regulatory capacity is depleted, self-control deficits result from a failure to engage top-down control mechanisms. Using functional neuroimaging, we examined changes in brain activity in response to viewing desirable foods among 31 chronic dieters, half of whom completed a task known to result in self-regulatory depletion.

What Can the Organization of the Brain's Default Mode Network Tell us About Self-Knowledge?

Understanding ourselves has been a fundamental topic for psychologists and philosophers alike. In this paper we review the evidence linking specific brain structures to self-reflection. The brain regions most associated with self-reflection are the posterior cingulate and medial prefrontal (mPFC) cortices, together known as the cortical midline structures (CMSs).

Rejection sensitivity polarizes striatal-medial prefrontal activity when anticipating social feedback.

As a social species, humans are acutely aware of cues that signal inclusionary status. This study characterizes behavioral and neural responses when individuals anticipate social feedback. Across two fMRI studies, participants (n = 42) made social judgments about supposed peers and then received feedback from those individuals.

Neural responses to ambiguity involve domain-general and domain-specific emotion processing systems.

Extant research has examined the process of decision making under uncertainty, specifically in situations of ambiguity. However, much of this work has been conducted in the context of semantic and low-level visual processing. An open question is whether ambiguity in social signals (e.

Inducing negative affect increases the reward value of appetizing foods in dieters.

Experiencing negative affect frequently precedes lapses in self-control for dieters, smokers, and drug addicts. Laboratory research has similarly shown that inducing negative emotional distress increases the consumption of food or drugs. One hypothesis for this finding is that emotional distress sensitizes the brain's reward system to appetitive stimuli.

Individual differences in nucleus accumbens activity to food and sexual images predict weight gain and sexual behavior.

Failures of self-regulation are common, leading to many of the most vexing problems facing contemporary society, from overeating and obesity to impulsive sexual behavior and STDs. One reason that people may be prone to engaging in unwanted behaviors is heightened sensitivity to cues related to those behaviors; people may overeat because of hyperresponsiveness to food cues, addicts may relapse following exposure to their drug of choice, and some people might engage in impulsive sexual activity because they are easily aroused by erotic stimuli. An open question is the extent to which individual differences in neural cue reactivity relate to actual behavioral outcomes.

Interactions between transient and sustained neural signals support the generation and regulation of anxious emotion.

Anxious emotion can manifest on brief (threat response) and/or persistent (chronic apprehension and arousal) timescales, and prior work has suggested that these signals are supported by separable neural circuitries. This fMRI study utilized a mixed block-event-related emotional provocation paradigm in 55 healthy participants to simultaneously measure brief and persistent anxious emotional responses, testing the specificity of, and interactions between, these potentially distinct systems. Results indicated that components of emotional processing networks were uniquely sensitive to transient and sustained anxious emotion.

Individual differences in the spontaneous recruitment of brain regions supporting mental state understanding when viewing natural social scenes.

People are able to rapidly infer complex personality traits and mental states even from the most minimal person information. Research has shown that when observers view a natural scene containing people, they spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking at the social features (e.g.