Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Feedback Processing

Patients with social axiety disorder (SAD) are very concerned for getting negative feedback from others (Voegler, Peterburs, Bellebaum, and Straube, 2019). SAD patients have the fear that their actions may be judged as abnormal or embarrasing. Learning from feedback is an important aspect for the succesful accomplishment of interactions with the environment, allowing contingency learning among actions and their effects and waiting for the consequences of particular behavior (Voegler et al., 2019).

The authors used a probabilistic feedback learning task while recording event related potentials and their interaction with the social context in patients with SAD and healthy control subjects. During the task feedback was given as wins or losses and were either rewarded or punished. Two conditions of the task consisted of either being obseved or as being not obseved by an observer (Voegler et al., 2019).

It was found that the patients with SAD were more unconfortable than healthy control subjects during the observation condition of the task. Furthermore, the patients with SAD did learn better from negative feedback compared to positive feedback during the no obsevation condition of the task, wheras the opposite did hold for the healthy control subjects. The ERP results showed that patients with SAD showed an enhanced feedback relativity (FRN) component amplitude during observation. The effect was more evident related to positive feedback. The results of the difference FRN and learning from negative feedback in the SAD patients was negativily associated with this component in the patients with SAD in the no obsevation condition, but not in the observation condition. In contrast, the opposite was found in healthy control subjects (Voegler et al., 2019). 

It is suggested that healthy control subjects are more relying on an avoidance-oriented strategy when they are being observed, such as social stress. The patients with SAD, however, are more implicated for negative information by default.

The results may opt for an inadequate information processing style in patients with SAD while they are being obseved with regard to the neural level. This might be due to a indefinite separation of reinforcement that is either negative or positive and as a result learning from negative feedback is impaired in these patients (Voegler et al., 2019).

Attentional Bias to Social Threat in PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is related to hypersensitive responses to potential threat (Klein, Schindler, Neuner, Rosner, Renneberg, Steil et al., 2019). These authors investigated the ERP correlates to processing of emotional words in a group of adolescents with PTSD with childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and childhood physical abuse (CPA) compared to healthy comparison subjects. The stimuli of the task consisted of nouns from different affective categories: neutral, positive, threatening, and social threatening.

The ERP results revealed an enhanced late positive potential (LPP) response in patients with PTSD. Concerning the P3 component, both groups showed reduced amplitude for positively valenced words. Patients with PTSD exhibited a differential enhanced response to social threatening stimuli as compared to physical threatening words, neutral words, and positive words.

It is suggested that patients with PTSD show a different pattern of information processing concerning negative social stimuli (Klein et al., 2019). Furthermore, it is argued that because of their specific traumatic experiences this group has an elaborated fear network after trauma, and these negative cues might be the most relevant for the patients with PTSD. There was found a blunted cardiac response in patients with PTSD compared to healthy comparison subjects for physical stimuli that were threatening. No differences were found in healthy comparison subjects (Klein et al., 2019).

Depression and Neural Sensitivity to Self-Referential Processing

In two experiments, patients with depression and healthy control subjects were required to read self-relevant stimuli while event related potentiald were recorded (Benau, Hill, Atchley, O'Hare, Gibson, Hajcak et al., 2019).

In the first experiment the processing of emotional words in both groups was applied in order to make a separation among self-relevant effects compared to valence effects. The results showed that patients with depression had a relatively normal modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) ERP component related with affect for high-arousal self-relevant words compared to normative emotional words. This was found to be in contrast to healthy control subjects, as they showed the same enhancement of the LPP amplitude for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli, regardless of self-reliance. Patients with depression did only modulate stimuli when they were emotional and were personally relevant (Benau et al., 2019).

In the second experiment, self-evaluative linguistic processing was assessed by investigating the emotional reactivity to normative as compared to ideographic stimuli in patients with depression compared to healthy control subjects. The results of this second experiment revealed that patients suffering from depression were most likely to affirm negative self-referential statements as compared to positive self-referential statements.

Response times in the patient group were slower for both statements as compared to healthy control subjects. The response times for neutral stimuli did not differ among the groups. The ERP results revealed that the LPP was highest for self-referential sentences with a negative final word in the patients with depression. This effect was not found in the healthy control subjects (Benau et al., 2019).

Depression Symptoms and Reward and Loss Sensitivity

A dimensional approach was used in order to investigate the association among depression symptomatology and sustained reward responsiveness (Berry, Tanovic, Joormann, and Sanislow, 2019). ERPs were recorded to investigate how the early responses to rewards and losses do change over time. The doors task is a simple gambling task and was applied to elicit the reward positivity and the feedback related negativity. The subjects were given instructions for making a choice for the door that they thought was having a prize behind it. The remaining half of the doors consisted of losses.

During the gambling task, the authors found evidence of an association among depression symptomatology and responses to rewards and losses During the task. A sustained reward positivity and an increment in the feedback related negativity ERP components were found. Larger symptoms of depression were related to larger responses to both reward as well as losses.

According to the authors, higher depression symptomatology in the general population might be related to both reward and loss responses during the experimental task (Berry et al., 2019).

Risk Processing in Patients with Alcohol Use Disorder

Decision-associated versus feedback related aspects might probably contribute to decision making in patients with alcohol use disorder (Sehrig, Weiss, Miller, and Rockstroh, 2019). During the Ballon Analog Risk Task (BART) ERPs were recorded in patients and healthy comparison subjects. During the BART the participants could make a choice to inflate a visual balloon. The participants could also choose among pumping and "cash out".

Balloon pumping was revealed to be rewarding when not pumping, wheras popping the balloon resulted in a loss.

It was found that both subject groups did exhibit the same choice behavior, however, they did differ in the ERP results. Patients with alcohol use disorder showed an enhanced P3 amplitude which did not depend on the level of risk. In addition, patients showed a reduced feedback related negativity (FRN) which suggests that they have impaired responses during loss. There was found a larger N2-P3 complex in the patients, and the larger P3 in alcohol use disorder patients might be due to more heavily processing of the decision prompt related to outcome-expectancies due to learning. The reward prediction did not differ among both groups.

In the patients with alcohol use disorder, higher impulsivity was related to risk modulated decision P3, but not on the FRN. Based on these results, it is suggested that the decision as well as feedback-associated processes might have an impact on difficulties in the engagement of effective use of daily activities (Sehrig et al., 2019).

Hallucination-Proness, Intrisive Thoughts and Intentional Inhibition

Intentional cognitive inhibition is one way that has been found to be associated with susceptibility for auditory hallucinations (Anderson-Day, Smailes, Moffat, Mitrenga, Moseley, and Fernyhough, 2019). In a university sample, intentional inhibition capability, assessed with the Inhibition of Currently Irrelevant Memories (ICIM) task as well as a Directed Forgetting task was investigated. In addition, also source memory was investigated with a source memory task. The authors aim was to investigate in which way cognitive performance on the tasks was associated with auditory hallucination-proness and the susceptibility for thoughts that are intrusive.

The results revealed a signifacant association among auditory hullucination-proness and performance on the ICIM task. However, there was no relationship found for the Directed Forgetting task and the source memory task in these participants.

Intrusive thoughts were found to be mediating among intentional inhibition and auditory hallucination-proness. According to the authors, their data are suggestive of task such as the ICIM task pick out a tendence for experiencing cognitions that are intrusive and auditory hallucination-proness (Alderson-Day et al., 2019).

High-Risk Individuals for Psychosis show Grey-Matter Abnormalities

Abnormalities in grey-matter (GM) were investigated in a group of clinically high-risk individuals for psychosis and healthy control subjects. Furthermore, the association among psychosocial functioning and neurocognition was also investigated (Zikidi et al., in press).

The authors found no alterations in GM across the cortices, however, in clinically high-risk participants changes in a subgroup of these participants were found in the frontal lobe in addition to an association with lower psychotic symptoms in the occipital lobe.

A small correlation was found with alterations in the intensity of grey matter and impairments in neurocognitive function (Zikidi et al. in press).

Schizophrenia and Metaphor Comprehension

Deamer et al. (2019) investigated metaphor processing in patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects. The task consisted of spoken stories with a methaphor or were literally Based. Participants had to choose the correct picture that did match the spoken story. Participants performed also a first-order theory of mind task.

Eye-tracki notationg eye fixations of the participants was used when they did interpret the target sentences metaphorically, hyperbolically, and literally.

Patients with schizophrenia performed more worse than healthy control subjects on the task. When participants did choose a picture that was incorrect (did not match with the spoken sentence) in the task regarding metaphors, they almost always chose the literal picture. However, this result was found to be found significantly more pronounced in the patients with schizophrenia. Eye-tracking results revealed no differences among the groups which is according to the authors suggestive to be a result of inhibitory control impairments, due to giving more attention to litaral meanings in the patients with schizophrenia (Deamer et al., 2019).

Sustained Attention and Response Inhibition in ADHD

Hwang, Meffert, Parsley, Tyler, Erway, Botkin et al. (2019) investigated how ADHD symptom severity was related to an impaired usage of brain regions that are implicated in response inhibition or sustained attention. Three results were revealed.  treatmentHere was found a positive association among ADHD symptom severity related to the error rate of no-go trials that appeared infrequently. In addition, ADHD symptom severity exhibited a negative linear association with activation in the left insular cortex concerning no-go cues. Lastly, ADHD symptom severity revealed a quadratic association with activation in the left superior frontal cortex for low frequency trials.

Behavioral performance was also found to be impaired in ADHD, as reflected by enhanced error rates on low frequency no-go trials as well as shorter reaction times for go trials that were less frequent.

It is concluded that there are the same as well as separate neural impairments in response inhibition as found for the anterior insula as well as for sustained attention, found in the superior frontal cortex in ADHD patients (Hwang et al., 2019).

Pantomime Execution and Recognition in Autism

Children with autism spectrum disorders and typically developing children were assessed in pantomime execution and two tasks on pantomime observation consisting of meaning and error-recognition (Fabbri-Destro, Gizzonio, Bazzini, Cevallos, Cheron, and Avanzini, 2019).

In typically developping children their motor performance keeps their capability to recognize the meaning of pantomimes of the task, as well as the recognition of correctly performed pantomimes in the task of error recognition. Compared to typically developing children the children with autism spectrum disorder showed more worse performance in both pantomime execution as well as recognition. There were a lot of spatial errors made in the autism spectrum disorder group during pantomime execution.

Compared to typically developing children, the autism spectrum disorder children had an impairment in the capability for the recognition of spatial errors, and are resulting in diminished performance in autism spectrum disorder patients as a primary contributor. The agreement among deficits in execution and recognition of pantomimes is supportive that in autism there is a disorganized motor aspect that is related to how someone sees actions made by some other.

As a final conclusion, it is suggested that the findings of this study are an indication that in autism spectrum disorder patients impairments in action observation are especially closely related. And this is also associated with symptom severity arguing that the motor impairments are one of the most important aspects of autistic symptomatology (Fabbri-Destro et al., 2019).

Visual Attention, Verbal Memory and Age-Related Route Learning Impairments

Grzeschik, Conroy-Dalton, Inners, Shanker, and Wiener (2019) investigated how aging affects an individuals' capability to attent to navigational information for the selection of special objects such as landmarks. A virtual environment with different routes was created and gaze behavior was assessed with eye-tracking.

Younger and older participant groups learned different short routes. The older subjects in the study did make more errors and did need more repetition before they did learn the route successfully as compared to younger subjects. Compared to younger subjects, the older subjects were performing equally when they had to disengage from salient, but unimportant landmark cues. The performance of route learning in the older subjects was related to verbal memory and episodic memory abilities (Grzeschik et al., 2019).

Huntington's Disease ans Spatial Memory and Perception

Perception and short-term spatial memory were investigated in patients with huntington's disease (HD), HD gene carriers, unilateral basal ganglia lesion patients and healthy control subjects (Harris, Armstrong, Swain, Erzindioglu, Das, Burgess et al., 2019).

Participants performed the Four Mountains Task, which is a test of spatial memory. Either simultaneously, concerning perception, or after a two second delay, concerning memory, the subjects were presented with an array of four landscapes and were required to depict the picture that did contain the right landscape from a point of view that was different from the original picture. Incorrect picture consisted of foils, these were a spatial foil, a configural foil, and an elemental foil. There were both spatial and non-spatial blocks given for perception trials and for memory trials.

It was found that patients with HD exhibited deficits in spatial perception and memory as assessed by the Four Mountains Task. The severity of the disease was positively correlated with these impairments. It is suggested that hippocampal dysfunction resulted in HD patients impairments (Harris et al., 2019).

Autism and different Frontoamygdala Connectivity

Age-associated differences in frontoamygdala connectivity was investigated in children, adolescents, and in young adults with autism spectrum disorders. In addition, the association among frontoamygdala functional connectivity and social impairment was also investigated (Odriozola, Dajani, Burrows, Gabard-Durnam, Goodman, Baez, et al., 2019). As compared to healthy control subjects, patients with autism spectrum disorders showed diminished frontoamygdala functional connectivity, which was only found in the right hemisphere basolateral amygdala and its functional connectivity with the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. According to the authors, these findings are supportive for the differences found in intrinsic amygdala functional connectivity in patients with autism spectrum disorders across the range (Odriozola et al., 2019). In contrast to hypothesized, there were no differences among the groups concerning the age-associated trajectory of frontoamygdala functional connectivity.

The authors did find nonlinear age-associated alterations in frontoamygdala functional connectivity among the basolateral amygdala and the subgenual cingulate cortex across the full sample studied, Controlling for diagnostic status. basolateral amygdala-subgenual cingulate functional connectivity showed a quadratic pattern concerning age, in which adolescents had diminished functional connectivity as compared to both the children and the adults (Odriozola et al., 2019). Social impairment was found to be not associated with the fMRI results.

It is suggested that these findings might have an impact on the literature concerning that the amygdala is an important area of dysfunction in patients with autism spectrum disorders and highlights the changes in the frontoamygdala circuitry, especially the moderation among the basolateral amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate cortex. According to the authors, impairments in the intrinsic frontoamygdala functional connectivity might be implicated in social impairments in autism spectrum disorders (Odriozola et al., 2019).

Word Learning in Children and its Neural Correlates

Two groups of school-aged children before puberty and after puberty were trained on thirty novel japanese words consisting of new concepts, referring to unfamiliar objects in order to investigate the neural correlates of newly learned words and how these learned words might change over time (Takashima, Bakker-Marshall, van Hell, McQueen, and Janzen, 2019). The neural underpinnings were investigated with fMRI during the participants performed a lexical-decision task to reveal the word-form memory representations, either directly after the training or after a delay of one week. The behavioral outcomes of the participants were assessed as well concerning cued and free recall to test the meanings of the new words. By making use of a semantic priming task, the authors also investigated lexicalization integration effect, in which novel words that were learned were applied as primes for target words that were either semantically associated with the primes or not (Takashima et al., 2019).

The behavioral results reveiled that children had the capacity to learn new words in one training session as well as retaining those words in memory during one week. The lexicalization effect, which is indexed by semantic priming was not found in children, which was contrary to the expectations of the authors (Takashima et al., 2019).

The fMRI results revealed that the activation of the hippocampus did show a decrease over time. It was expected that their would be found enhanced activation in the posterior middle temporal gyrus with time, however this effect was not observed. It was found that there was a shift in the involvement from the right to the left hemisphere among primary school children and secondary school children. This is suggestive to be a result of the maturation of the language network (Takashima et al., 2019).

Childhood Action Obsevation and Execution, an fMRI Study

Brain development and brain areas that are associated with action execution and action observation as well as their overlap was investigated with fMRI in children and adults. Age-associated differences in brain activation were investigated by comparing those groups (Morales, Bowman, Velnoskey, Fox, and Redcay, 2019).

A network of areas of the brain that is active when persons perform an action as well as they are observing others performing the same or similar actions is called the mirror neuron system (MNS). The study investigated the neural regions that are implicated in the execution and observation of actions in addition to their overlap in children and adults. The participants had to perform, as well as to observe the same action of reaching-grasping, controlling for attentional shift during the condition in order to improve the specific brain activation that is related with observation and executing action that lays beyond the relationship with general attentional demands (Morales et al., 2019). According to the investigators, the study did allow them to make an identification of shared cortical areas among obseving and executing an action in addition to measuring age differences in those areas in order to better investigate the mirror neuron system activation during development.

During action observation and action execution the group of children showed comparable brain activation as compared to the adult group. There were, however, age related differences found during both action observation and action execution. During action execution the adults showed enhanced activity in the right superior parietal lobe as compared to the group of children (Morales et al., 2019).

This study found also support for the functional significance of the mirror neuron system as it is found by the overlap of action-observation and action-execution conditions during the task. The motor abilities and action representation skills of children were especially associated with the execution-obsevation overlap. There was found a probable dissociation among the mirror neuron system and the association among age and motor abilities and action representation related to the development of the mirror neuron system. It was found that motor abilities as well as action representation capabilities showed a direct execution-obsevation overlap and the motor ability improvements in children were more dedicated to age than by this execution-observation overlap. Accordingly, it is suggested that age might be a better indicator of fine motor ability development in childhood as compared to neural mirroring aspects. Finally, it is further suggested that the development of the mirror neuron system might be one of the aspects that underlies the changes in age associated action representations (Morales et al., 2019).

Social Exclusion and Working Memory in Adolescent Girls

Three female age groups were compared on a cyberball game an two working memory tasks in the study of Furmann, Casey, Speekenbrink, and Blakemore (2019). The three groups were girls in young adolescence, mid-adolescence and adults.

Social inclusion and social exclusion were created in a cyberball game. In the exclusion condition, the ball was not tossed to the participant. The authors wanted to know if social exclusion had detrimental effects on working memory performance. Two working memory tasks were given to the subjects. These were an n-back working memory task and a dot-matrix visuo-spatial working memory task. Participants had also to answer a mood questionnaire after ech cyberball condition.

It was found that mood was significantly lower in all three investigated groups after social exclusion, also on mood, no group differences were found.

There was found an age-dependend effect of social exclusion on cognitive performance of working memory. It was found that social exclusion affected only the young adolescent girls on the n-back working memory task, but not on the visuo-spatial working memory task. In the other two groups, performance was found to be not impaired.

It is suggestive that these results are indicative that some parts of the performance of the young adolescents' girls cognitive performance might be especially sensitive to social exclusion (Fuhrmann et al., 2019).

Visual and Linguistic Narrative Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders. ERP Evidence

Coderre, Cohn, Slipher, Cherneck, Ledoux, and Gordon (2018) investigated the comprehension of linguistic narratives with sentences and visual narrative with comic strips in adult patients with autism spectrum disorders and healthy control participants while recording event-related potentials. The authors were especially interested in the N400 ERP component, which is thought to be involved in language. The authors wanted to assess whether both linguistic as well as visual processing of narratives is impaired in autism spectrum disorders.

Adults with ASD and healthe comparison subjects were compared on this task. The N400 component was studied for this task in order to assess if the comprehension difficulties in ASD are only apparent in the linguistic domain, or also in the visual domain.

Comprehension impairments in patients with ASD were found in both the linguistic and visual domain, which is indicative of a more domain-general deficit. It is suggested that patients with ASD make more use of bottom-up processes for each part of a narrative episode. In the linguistic domain, as well as in the visual domain, patients with ASD exhibited smaller N400 ERP amplitedes as compared to healthy control subjects (Coderre et al., 2018).

Threat in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Inhibitory Control, and Dissociation

Malara, Ruglass, Fertuck, and Hien (2018) investigated the association among exposure to trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and inhibitory control in patients with PTSD, trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD, and healthy control subjects.

Participants performed on a temporal flanker paradigm in which they had to judje line orientations whilst ignoring lines that were not relevant to the task. Inhibitory control to threatening stimuli was also investigated during this task.

Event-related potentials were used during this task, focusing on the Rejection Positivity (RP). associations with the RP and dissociative symptoms were as well investigated.

As compared with trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD and healthy control subjects, patients with PTSD were less accurate on the task, reflected in more errors committed in making line decisions, which was particularly evident in the context of emotional stimuli that were threatening. In addition, the patients with PTSD showed also more distractor inhibition in blocks of threatening trials, as assessed by the RP. Furthermore, the strength of inhibitory control (RP) was related to more dissociative symptoms in patients with PTSD, especially concerning feelings of depersonalization.

Trauma-exposed individuals showed more inhibitory control (RP) that was related to less depersonalization (Melara et al., 2018).

Dipole source localization found the RP to be located in the posterior cingulate cortex in all three studied groups. In addition, another source was found to be in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in trauma-exposed individuals (Melara et al., 2018).

Motor Inhibition Impairments in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder and Neural Functions

Van Voorhuis, Kent, Kang, MacDonald III, and Sponheim (2019) investigated motor inhibition and neural processes using a Stop-Signal Task in patients with schizophrenia, relatives of patients with schizophrenia, patients with bipolar disorder and healthy control subjects while event-related potentials were recorded.

The behavioral results on the task revealed that only the patients with schizophrenia were deficient in reactive inhibition. Patients with bipolar disorder and first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients performed comparable to healthy control subjects (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019). In this study antipsychotic medication had an influence on the SSRT in the patients with schizophrenia, and they exhibited also longer reaction times as compared to controls, Which is suggestive of an information processing impairment (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019).

The ERP results showed that patients with schizophrenia as well as patients with bipolar disorder showed an enhanced stimulus locked lateralized readiness potential (S-LRP). There was found a significant positive correlation among S-LRP onset latency, RT, and SSRT, which is indicative of a common aspect that precedes the initiation of a common aspect that precedes the initiation of a response which contributes to slower response activation, a slower response completion as well as later motor inhibition. Accordingly, it is suggested that these findings are indicative of slowed processes preceding motor activation (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019).

Both patient groups did show abnormalities in the modulation of the P300 ERP component associated with the probability in case of inhibiting a response. Reduced amplitude of the P300 was related to reaction time as a function of Stop-Signal possibility.

Greater schizotypal symptoms in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients was related to diminished responsivity (P300) concerning changes in the probability to response inhibition. It is suggested that the association among schizotypal symptomatology and the modulation of the P300 might be due to a genetic liability for schizophrenia. 

Only the healthy control subjects were not impaired in adjusting time among initiation and completion associated with a stop-signal As measured with the response locked lateralized readiness potential.

An impairment in the modulation of neural processes associated with response inhibition probability as well as the slowing of the selection of a motor response are associated with both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019).

Emotional Prosody and Verbal Memory in Bipolar Disorder

The impact of emotional prosody on verbal memory was studied in euthymic bipolar 1 disorder patients and healthy control subjects (Altamura, Santamaria, Elia, Angelini, Paladino, Altamura et al., 2019). There were three groups created in which the participants had to listen to either a story told with positive, negative, and neutral prosody. In addition, recognition memory was tested.

It was found that words were better remembered when they were delivered in a neutral context.

The recognition of positive prosody in bipolar disorder patients did differ from that of healthy control subjects, due to a more worse recognition for that prosody as compared to negative and neutral prosody.

The findings show that there is a significant advantage in memory for prosody of neutral content. The bias in recognition of prosody of positive valence in bipolar disorder might cause negative verbal memories as well as a deficient emotion regulation in these patients (Altamura et al., 2019).

Bipolar Disorder, Monetary Incentives, and the Brain

Usin fMRI, Johnson, Mehta, Ketter, Gotlib, and Knutson (2019) investigated anticipated and received monetary rewards in patients with bipolar 1 disorder and matched healthy control subjects. 

Neural and behavioral responses were investigated with the Monetary Incentive Delay Task (MID).

At the behavioral level, no differences among bipolar disorder patients and healthy control subjects were found. The fMRI results revealed that patients with bipolar disorder exhibited diminished activity in the ventral striatum, including hypoactivity of the nucleus accumbens while they were anticipating monetary gains as compared to healthy control subjects.

In the conditions of responses to anticipation or loss, the two groups did not differ in their neural responses.

A hypoactivation of the nucleus accumbens was also more evident in participants reporting more impulsive responsivity regarding positive emotion (Johnson et al., 2019).

Brain Activation in Child and Adolescent OCD and Symptom Provocation

Jaspers-Feyer, Lin, Chan, Ellwyn, Lim, Best, et al. (2019) Investigated obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in children and adolescents between the ages of 9 and 18 years with fMRI during symptom provacation across the dimensions Contamination, Bad Thoughts, and Just Right symptoms.

The study also did include pictures of fear and neutral pictures for comparison. The authors wanted to investigate the neural correlates underlying symptom provocation in children and adolescents with OCD versus healthy control subjects. 

The symptom provocation task consisted of picture triads. These were 24 pictures of the five above mentioned conditions. Behavioral responses were assessed as how bothersome the picture was to the participant. The Just Right dimension, consisting of pictures associated with symmetry, ordering, and counting showed a differece among the group with OCD and healthy control subjects considering how bothersome they were, With OCD subjects scoring higher. The Contamination dimension did not differ between the two groups. Compared to healthy control subjects, the pictures of Bad Thoughts did also not differentiate them concerning bothersomness.

The fMRI results revealed that collapsing the dimensions of symptoms showed increased activation of the left temporal gyrus.

It is suggested that the involvement of the temporal poles are involved in pediatric symptom provocation (Jaspers-Feyer et al., 2019).

Emotion and Working Memory in Depression and its Neural Underpinnings

Depressed persons have problems in the processing of aspects of emotion as well as impairments in working memory (Goodin, Lamp, Hughes, Rossell, and Ciorcian, 2019).

Patients with depression and healthy control subjects performed a 3-n-back working memory task consisted of two different types of cues, facial affect and basic visual patterns while undergoing fMRI. The subjects were required to determine if the gender of the presented faces was either the same or different as the face that was presented three pictures ago.

Contrary to what was expected, there were no behavioral differences among the groups on the task. The fMRI results showed that patients with depression failed in the activation of emotional pictures of positive valence as compared to healthy control subjects in the dorsal striatum as well as in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex.

It is suggested that patients with depression have an impairment in the requirement of the dopaminergic dorsal striatum which might cause depressed mood by means of a diminishment in positive emotional stimuli while they are updating working memory (Goodin et al., 2019).

Brain responses to an Emotional Movie across Development from Childhood through Adolescence

An important question that needs to be answered is how biases in emotional information processing and related symptoms of depression occur during development (Gruskin, Rosenberg, and Holmes, in press).

In this study, brain activation assessed with fMRI related to emotional movie viewing and depressive symptoms in children and adolescence was investigated. The children and adolescents watched an emotional videoclip while undergoing fMRI.

It was found that higher depressive symptoms were related to atypical brain activity during the emotional film clip in the group of adolescents. This effect was not found in children.

The results show that there is a developmental aspect associated with brain function and emotional processes that did reflect the severity of symptoms of depression associated with the developping brain. Brain regions affected were for example the orbitofrontal cortex, the precuneus, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Gruskin et al., in press).

Depression, Pessimistic Thinking, and Hopelesness: an fMRI Study

A pessimistic thinking style about the future is one of the most prominent symptoms of major depressive disorder and is related to hopelesness (Katayama, Nakagawa, Umeda, Teresawa, Kurata, Tabuchi, et al., 2019).

fMRI was applied in participants in order to investigate task-associated brain activity concerning future-thinking. In addition, resting-state brain activation was measured in the medial fronto-polar cortex among patients with depression and healthy control subjects.

It was found that patients with depression exhibited an enhanced activation in the medial fronto-polar cortex bilaterally compared to healthy control subjects when they were thinking about the distant future (Katayama et al., 2019). This result was correlated with the pervasiveness of future-thinking in a pessimistic manner and with depression symptom severity.

It is suggested that patients with depression may already have a forethought in emotional affect related to pessimistic instances about future happenings, and have impairments in considering the distant future.  treatmentHis finding is suggested as a neuromarker for aid in the treatment of depression with for example cognitive behavioral therapy (Katayama et al., 2019).

Smoking and Learning from Punishment: an fMRI Study

The continuation of nicotine use might be associated with an attenuated processing of punishment feedback, which might cause a deficient adaptation encompassing no regard of the negative health outcomes of smoking and smokers may thus continue using nicotine (Duehlmeyer and Hester, 2019). The authors gave participants an associative learning task while they underwent fMRI. This task gave either monetary reward or monetary punishment in the performance of recall. It was found that in the group of smokers, the recall errors were corrected less than in the control participants. There was found also a diminished difference among high and low punishment conditions of the task.

The fMRI results revealed hyperactivation in the DLPFC in the group of smokers in conditions of recall and re-encoding. In the case when number-location associations were recalled in a faulty manner, the group of smokers showed reduced activation in the DLPFC as compared to control subjects.

It was suggested that the lower error-correction might be due to response inhibition demands in the DLPFC while reward was expected but lower demands when punishment was anticipated. The correction of high punishment and low punishment errors is suggestive of a reduced punishment sensitivity. This was also associated with the somatosensory cortex and motor cortex.

In conclusion, smokers are hypersensitive to reward and hyposensitive to punishment. As a result, they were more impaired in learning from errors (Duehlmeyer and Hester, 2019).

Neuropsychology in psychopaths

It is suggested that there are several executive function deficits in psychopatic individuals (Snowden, Gray, Pugh, and Atkinson, (2013). Participants scoring high on psychopathy in a student population were found to be deficient in OFC function tasks. They were impaired on the object alternation task, especially with respect to the Fearless Dominance Scale of the PPI-R. Furthermore, the scales of the PPI-revised were associated with both Fearless Dominance as well as with Self-Centered Impulsivity on the Porteus Maze task (Snowden et al., 2013).

Pham, Vanderstukken, Philippot, and Vanderlinden (2003) investigated whether criminal psychopatic individuals show impairments in selective attention and executive functions. Several tests were administered. The D-II  cancellation task assesses selective attention and scanning ability. The Porteus Maze Test assesses the capability to plan and to keep a pattern of responses in case participants are confronted with interference. The Tower of London Test measures the ability of planning. The Stroop Color Word Interference Test measures interference and maintainance of a response pattern. The Trail Making Test is a response alternation test. Finally, the Modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Test assesses the capabilities and the flexibility of cognitive sets (Pham et al., 2003). On the D-II task the psychopatic individuals did commit more errors as compared to control subjects. In addition, they were deficient in their attentional maintenance. On the Porteus Maze Test, psychopatic individuals did not make more errors of quantitative origin than control subjects. But they made more quantitative errors and had more difficulty as compared to control subjects in maintaining their course. On the Tower of London Test, psychopaths had no longer initiation times and they did not exhibit more rule breaking as compared to control subjects. It is suggested that the findings on the Porteus Maze Test and Tower of London test are not indicative of a global planning deficit in psychopatic individuals (Pham et al., 2003). On the Stroop Test, the psychopaths did not make more errors to distracting cues as well as no inability in inhibiting interference. It is further argued that psychopatic individuals have an impairment in attentional control when they are exposed to stimuli that are distracting, as revealed by making more excessive movements when they were given a misleading situation on the Tower of London Test. It is concluded that psychopaths are especially deficient during tasks considering planning abilities that need behavioral inhibition. On the Trail Making Test and the Modified WCST psychopatic individuals did not differ from control subjects (Pham et al., 2003).

In another study, selective attention was investigated in psychopatic individuals with three different Stroop Tests. These were the standard Color Word Stroop Test, a picture word Stroop test and a color word Stroop test in which the color and word were separated spatially (Hiatt, Schmitt, and Newman, 2004). Psychopatic individuals were found to be not impaired on the standard Stroop Test. However, they showed impairments on both of the other Stroop Tests. It is suggested that psychopatic individuals are not deficient in the case when incongruent contextual information is given whithin their direct focus of attention. However they show impairments when not directly in their attentional focus as revealed by the other two Stroop tests (Hiatt et al., 2004).

Psychopatic individuals performed a CPT. Response latency was assessed after given feedback (Molto et al., 2007). Perseverative behavior in psychopatic individuals was only associated with factor 2 of the PCL-R, especially related to impulsive and irresponsible lifestyle aspects. Response perseveration was found to be associated with a lack of reflection after punishment as well as after reward feedback. All participants in the experiment played more cards what was found as evidence for response perseveration and the group collected as a result lower earnings. Both, after punishment and reward feedback on the CPT an association of shorter pauses between trials was found. It is suggested that response perseveration impairments found in psychopatic individuals might not be only related to the syndrome, rather it might generally be associated with externalizing behavior, which shows an overlap with social deviance in psychopathy (Molto et al., 2007).

Psychopatic and non-psychopatic inmates performed a simultaneously visual and auditory task under the condition of focussing their attention at the visual primary task. The psychopatic inmates did respond to distractor stimuli after targets with a higher intensity which is suggested to be the result of diminished attention payed to the peripheral dimension of two-dimensional stimuli (Kosson, 1996).

Inner Speech in Schizophrenia

It is hypothesized that impairments in the monitoring of one's own thoughts might result treatment in auditory verbal hallucinations (Simons, Tracy, Sanghera, O'Daly, Gilleen, Dominguez et al., 2010). Using fMRI patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects while measuring brain activation during internally generated speech and externally generated speecH. The subjects performed active task based on both internal and external speech as well as a baseline condition. The most important result was the interaction among the groups. It was found that healthy control subjects did activate the same in the left superior temporal cortex during the listening trials. This finding might be suggestive of schizophrenia patients to be unimpaired to sentenses that were spoken. While listening, the comparison subjects did show a larger deactivation during inner speech as compared to listening as compared to the schizophrenia patients. It was concluded that patients have an impairment in self-monitoring concerning inner speech. The unability for diminishing activation this region might be assigned to verbal cues which might then lead to auditory hallucinations (Simons et al., 2010).

Attentional Bias to Worry

Hirsch, MacLeod, Mathews, Sandheer, Siyani, and, Hayes (2011) investigated worry in participants with an attentional bias modification method in order to find an effect on group differences in participants on selective attention to meanings of threat. The participants that performed the attention induction process which was invented in order to make decrease the processing of the meanings of threats were slowere in the processing of semantic aspects of the word that were disigned as threat words as compared to as compared to words that exhibited no threat content comparing the subjects that were said to increase threat processing.

The findings showed that this effect was the same in case of the bias induction process that consisted as training that had its target for biasing attentional engagement with, or bias that did disengage from threat meanings. These concepts were effective in the same manner in the induction of altered selective attention meanings to threats, had altered effects on the following patters of worry. In case the attentional bias that was induced did encourage selective attention with the meanings of the threat, the multitude of thought intrusions that were negative on the task assessing worry was larger as compared to the process that was made for discouraging selective engagement with the meanings of the threats.

Performance accuracy on the task was similar in all participants, so these findings are not associated with it. However, the findings suggest that it is indicative that a variability in selective attentional engagement related to treat, but not the variability in attentional disengagement to threats, did have a causal impact on negative thought intrusions which is indicative of worry.

It is further argued that a bias in attentional engagement with threat has an effect on processes to worry, for instance, by the affect of the amount in which selective attention is associated to these negative situational circumstances of the situation that might result in triggering thoughts of negativity (Hirsch et al., 2011).