Thomas Suslow

..This COMT variant might increase the vulnerability to panic disorder by modulating dopaminergic tonus in relevant brain regions and thus altering neuronal processing of anxiety-related emotional cues...

..We conclude that genetic variation in the MAOA gene may affect the course of major depression by disrupting cortico-limbic connectivity...

..Anorexic patients are perceptually no less sensitive to negative emotional information than normal subjects...

..Assessing neurobiological substrates of automatic emotion processing might be a more sensitive challenge for automatic negative bias in depression than behavioral measures...

..Potential explanations of the face processing effects found in anhedonia are discussed...

..The symptoms of flat affect and anhedonia do not appear to be associated with impairments in the automatic processing of verbal emotional material in schizophrenia...

..Emotional valence appears to have less organizational power in the memory of individuals with difficulties in recognizing their feelings...

..In this study, a face-in-the-crowd task was applied to examine the spatial detection of facial emotion as a function of depression and comorbid anxiety in the course of a psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment...

..For depressed women, it could be more appropriate to administer word recognition than word definition as an estimate of premorbid or verbal intelligence...

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..An implication is that lowered vigilance for facial expressions of joy and happiness may affect adversely interpersonal relationships in depressed subjects...

..The present findings underscore the role of the amygdala in the detection and consolidation of memory for marginally perceptible threatening facial expression...

..Instead, this TAS-20 scale seems to evaluate aspects of social shame...

..The aversive automatic perception of positive facial expression primarily found in anhedonic patients but also in schizophrenic control patients could lie in structural disturbances concerning the regulation of intimacy and distance...

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..g. panic disorder (PD)...

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..Low spontaneous reactivity of the amygdala to sad faces could implicate less engagement in the encoding of negative emotional stimuli...

..Heightened automatic amygdala responsivity could be involved in the development and maintenance of negative symptoms in schizophrenia...

..Neurobiologically defined threat sensitivity seems to represent an important determinant of visual scanning behaviour...

..Longitudinal studies in patients with melancholic vs. non-melancholic MDD are needed to investigate the course of cognitive functioning during the recovery from MDD...

..We conclude that 5-HTTLPR genotype predominantly impacts the central processing predominantly of negative environmental cues but not of emotionally salient stimuli in general...

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..Our data are consistent with the idea that people who withdraw from close relationships respond spontaneously to a lesser extent to negative interpersonal emotional signals than securely attached individuals...

..The task was administered to 47 schizophrenia and 48 depressed patients as well as to 46 controls. Results indicate a non-specificity of the SOA sum scores but differential abnormalities in spatial visual processing...

..Direction and strength of affective priming was directly associated with anxiety level at both times. The affective priming paradigm provides evidence for differential group effects regarding unconscious emotional information processing...

..In the present study, we extended the paradigm to a sample of 35 inpatients suffering from depression to investigate the effect of amygdala reactivity on automatic negative judgmental bias and clinical characteristics in depression...

..The neurobiological basis of cognitive remediation has not been elucidated so far, although structural, functional and metabolic abnormalities of the prefrontal cortex have been associated with cognitive impairment...

..Increasing evidence supports the hypothesis that the same neural structures involved in the experience of physical pain are involved in the experience of social pain and loss...

..This might indicate that genetic variations of the serotonin transporter could increase the risk for depression chronification via altering limbic neural activity on a preattentive level of emotion processing...

..This finding might shed some light on how amygdala hyperresponsivity contributes to negative cognitive biases commonly observed in affective disorders...

..Size of priming was not associated with depression severity, anxiety level, intelligence, medication, or clinical features. We conclude that depression is not characterized by dysfunctional automatic processing of verbal information...

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..The findings support the hypothesis that astrocyte activation might contribute to the development of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia...

..We investigated the neural correlates of this mechanism by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls...

..The aim of our study was to investigate ToM abilities in first-episode schizophrenia patients and to analyze them in relation to neuropsychological and psychopathological functioning...

..Reduced metabolite levels were not correlated with duration of illness or medication. Our results indicate glutamatergic dysfunction in chronic schizophrenia that could be evidence of a progressive brain disorder...

..This analysis provides preliminary support for a role of CNR1 gene variation in depression and anxiety, potentially mediated by subcortical hypo-responsiveness to social reward stimuli...

..Depressed patients are not characterized by a shift towards a pronounced protective pattern during symptom remission...

..Our results provide evidence for cognitive impairment in AN patients which is associated with cerebral metabolism in the prefrontal cortex...

..An increased responsivity of the amygdala to ambiguously threatening stimuli may represent a biological determinant of sensitizers' feelings of uncertainty...

..The present results are in line with the vigilance-avoidance theory which predicts heightened automatic responsivity to threatening stimuli in repression...

..This deficit would be consistent with a fronto-striatal dysfunction and might constitute a crucial factor for the acquisition of new information...

..Thereby, NPSR rs324981 apparently causes an indirect effect on anxiety-related traits and potentially contributes to the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders by shaping fear-related limbic activity...

..An enhanced sensitivity for sad facial expressions and a negatively biased automatic processing of neutral and happy facial affect appears to be associated with depression persistence...

..These serotonergic polymorphisms might increase the risk for panic disorder by contributing to an altered processing of emotional stimuli...

..Patients with increased S100B levels showed elevated myo-inositol concentrations. This pilot study demonstrates a concomitant elevation of two markers indicating astrocyte activation in a subgroup of schizophrenic patients...

..However, since the present approach deals with small sample sizes, it should be considered as a proof-of-concept study. Hence, results have to be confirmed in larger samples preferably of unmedicated subjects...

..Acutely depressed patients seem not to be impaired in the complexity of their own emotional experience, but they exhibit a reduction in the ability to empathize with other persons...

..The present data suggest that the ability to disengage attention from facial emotion in visual search is not impaired in depression...

..Further, the study was aimed to identify characteristics predicting a complicated grief reaction in depressed patients...

..Potential explanations of the location masking deficit found in schizophrenia are discussed...

..Anhedonic patients manifested more emotion inhibition than healthy controls and exhibited an affectivity pattern consistent with Meehl's model of anhedonia...

..The correlation results suggest that automatic hyporesponsiveness of the fusiform gyrus to negative emotion stimuli may reflect problems in recognizing one's emotions in everyday life...

..The present findings confirm that the amygdala but also other brain regions, especially the medial frontal cortex, appear involved in automatically elicited negative evaluative shifts...

..The short-term emotional reactions to TOP in late pregnancy due to fetal anomaly appear to be more intense than those to preterm birth. Both events can lead to severe psychiatric morbidity with a lasting psychological impact...

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..Acceptable test-retest correlations (rs) of up to .74 were found for the affective priming scores. Although measured almost 2 mo. apart, subliminal affective priming seems to be a temporally stable effect...

..In conclusion, the demands to be made on an instrument to be developed in the future are outlined...

..Contrary to former investigations the therapeutic factor "cohesion" was less important, which could hint at the fact that a medium amount of cohesion might be sufficient for an effective process of treatment...

..Evidence is reviewed suggesting that potential risk-alleles for depression are associated with functional cortico-limbic abnormalities, which frequently occur in patients with major depression...

..Our data suggest that the genetic susceptibility for major depression might be transported via dysfunctional neural activity in brain regions critical for emotion processing...

..Our data support the hypothesis of existing gender differences regarding the involvement of the left frontal cortex in verbal processing as reflected in different correlations of specific metabolites with verbal scores...

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..abstract:..

..Research on the neurobiology of extraversion could benefit from the application of implicit in addition to explicit measurement instruments when automatic neural responses are investigated...

..CONCLUSION: There is inconclusive evidence that attention training is effective in schizophrenia. Longitudinal efficacy studies are needed in which different aspects of attention are systematically exercised and assessed...

..TOP for fetal anomaly is to be seen as a major life event, which causes complicated grief reactions and psychiatric disorders for a substantial number of women...

..A central prerequisite of psychotherapeutic and pharmacological treatment of cluster A personality disorders is a strong therapeutic patient relationship...

..These results indicate that beneficial short term effects of MPH predict longer-term effects and may thus be helpful in the decision for an off-label treatment. Controlled prospective studies are now necessary...

..Changes in depressive symptoms in milder forms of depressive mood are associated with a larger decline in cognitive function than in severer forms of depressive mood...

..This novel approach might be useful in addressing the heterogeneity of cognitive impairment in depression and in predicting cognitive outcome in depression...