Mary L Phillips

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..We thereby demonstrate a key role of the amygdala in mediating autonomic activity associated with human attachment insecurity...

..This study examined the effects of age and two novel factors (intensity and emotion category) on healthy children's developing emotion-processing from 4 to 15 years using two matching paradigms...

..These results therefore suggest distinct neural correlates of conscious and unconscious emotion perception...

..Taken together, these finding suggest that symptoms of depersonalization, and in particular emotional numbing, may be related to a reversal of normal patterns of autonomic and neural response to emotive stimuli...

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..The results have implications for disgust-related psychiatric disorders...

..We suggest that this differential pattern of response to different categories of emotional signals allows the preferential direction of visual attention to signals of imminent danger than to other, less-salient emotional stimuli...

..The neural mechanisms underlying this deficit and the relationship with different symptoms remain poorly understood...

..The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to examine possible sex differences in neural responses to disgust-inducing stimuli that might help explain this female predominance...

..In depressed individuals, implicit and explicit attentional biases away from happy and toward sad stimuli have been demonstrated. These may be associated with the negative cognitions in these individuals...

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..Our results suggest that networks implicated in the allocation of attentional resources (VMPFC) and emotion processing (amygdala, cerebellum) are differentially affected in patients on CONV versus RLAI...

..Depersonalisation disorder is characterised by emotion suppression, but the cerebral mechanisms of this symptom are not yet fully understood...

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..This study provides further evidence that patients with DPD do not process emotionally salient material in the same way as healthy controls, in accordance with their subjective descriptions of reduced or absent emotional responses...

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..However nobody has examined brain function in people with AS when implicitly (unconsciously) processing four primary emotions at varying emotional intensities...

..PCA-based analysis could be useful in isolating brain response to salient facial features in psychiatric populations...

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..CONCLUSIONS: Neural responses to fearful facial expressions are modulated by task instructions...

..The authors suggest that, in depressed patients, the inability to accurately identify subtle changes in facial expression displayed by others in social situations may underlie the impaired interpersonal functioning...

..These results help explain previous inconsistent findings in neuropsychological research in OCD and support recent neuroimaging data showing dissociable neural mechanisms involved in mediating the different OCD symptom dimensions...

..We wished to corroborate these results by examining neural responses to personally relevant happy and sad stimuli in MDD and healthy individuals within the same paradigm...

..Abnormalities in perception and evaluation of body shape are a hallmark of eating disorders...

..This study explored neural systems underlying sensitivity to symptom-unrelated disgust and fear in OCD using functional neuroimaging...

..Acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) temporarily lowers brain serotonin (5-HT) synthesis, and behavioral studies have shown that this alters the processing of facial expressions of emotion...

..Lamotrigine as sole agent was not found to be effective in a previous small double-blind, randomized crossover trial. However, evidence from open trials suggests that it may be beneficial as an add-on medication with antidepressants...

..Such changes may confer increased sensitivity to emotional stress and impaired social competence, contributing to relapse...

..CONCLUSIONS: Compared with healthy controls and MDD patients, BD patients demonstrated increased subcortical and ventral prefrontal cortical responses to both positive and negative emotional expressions...

..The findings of this study provide further support to the idea that patients with depersonalization have a selective impairment in the processing of threatening or unpleasant emotional stimuli...

..They reveal that deciding advantageously under initially ambiguous conditions may require both continuous and dynamic processes involving both the ventral and dorsal prefrontal cortex...

..These findings, if applicable to the wider population, may have application in a range of psychiatric disorders where interactions between emotion and cognition are relevant...

..CONCLUSIONS: People with psychopathy have biological differences from controls when processing facial emotion, and the pattern of response differs according to emotion type...

..CONCLUSIONS: Emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia are trait features of the disorder and increase with illness duration...

..Emotion recognition impairments are a common feature of schizophrenia. This pilot study investigates the effectiveness of the 'micro-expressions training tool' (METT) to help improve this skill...

..We suggest that distinct patterns of structural and functional abnormalities in neural systems important for emotion processing are associated with specific symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar and major depressive disorder...

..These initial results suggest that a CBT approach to DPD may be effective, but further trials with larger sample sizes and more rigorous research methodology are needed to determine the specificity of this approach...

..Only a few studies have applied similar methods to functional MRI (fMRI) data...

..None of the nine patients was deemed a responder to the lamotrigine arm of the cross-over. Lamotrigine does not seem to be useful as a sole medication in the treatment of depersonalization disorder...

..In this study, we tested the prediction that autonomic response to emotional stimuli would be reduced in patients with depersonalization disorder...

..Enhanced activation to facial expressions of disgust may reflect an emotion processing bias that suggests high relevance of emotion of disgust to depression...

..The Maudsley Obsessive-Compulsive Stimuli Set has excellent convergent and discriminant validity, and it will be a useful resource for OCD researchers...

..The authors sought to identify neural correlates of eating disorders in order to contribute to the debate on the genesis and classification of eating disorders and provide endophenotypes for genetic research...

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..These results also add to our growing understanding of the role of the orbitofrontal cortex in decision-making and psychopathology...

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..We suggest that the extent to which a stimulus is identified as emotive and is associated with the production of an affective state may be dependent upon levels of activity within these two neural systems...

..We sought to address this issue using meta-analytic techniques applied for the first time in bipolar disorder at the level of the individual voxel...

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..The introduction to the DSM-IV of an organic subtype of depersonalization disorder would facilitate research in this area...

..Emotional blunting may be associated with reduced limbic responses to emotional stimuli and a relative increase in the visual cortical response to neutral stimuli...

..Further investigation of the neural basis of OCD symptom dimensions is required...

..It is possible that the left hemisphere has a particular role in the perception of emotion conveyed through meaningful speech...

..The authors sought to elucidate the functional neural basis of the neurobiological abnormalities underlying the vulnerability to suicidal behavior...

..As such, clinical levels of paranoia may represent the inevitable cost of efficient threat perception--or 'justified' suspicion--that is necessary for survival of the human species...

..CONCLUSIONS: Depersonalisation disorder is a recognisable clinical entity but appears to have significant comorbidity with anxiety and depression. Research into its aetiology and treatment is warranted...

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..However, the precise regions and the neural alterations associated with this abnormality remain unclear...

..Current and future research in bipolar disorder should focus on identification of disorder biomarkers to improve diagnostic accuracy and the mental heath of those with the disorder...

..We aimed to examine the relationship between functional abnormalities, impaired task performance and the severity of depressive symptoms in bipolar patients...

..It was predicted that paranoid patients would be distinguished by a disjunction of hyperarousal but reduced amygdala and medial prefrontal activity relative to both healthy comparison subjects and patients with nonparanoid schizophrenia...

..The goal of this study was to examine whole-brain regional GM volume in healthy bipolar offspring (HBO) relative to age-matched controls to identify possible structural abnormalities that may be associated with risk for BD...

..Withdrawing all individuals from medication and examining only unmedicated individuals may be clinically unfeasible, and examining only unmedicated individuals may render findings less generalizable...

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..Past inconsistent results from structural neuroimaging studies of OCD may have resulted from the effects of these specific symptom dimensions as well as other socio-demographic and clinical variables upon gray matter (GM) volume...

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