Rebecca Elliott

..The striatum and amygdala may mediate the function of rewards in eliciting goal-directed behaviour, while the orbitofrontal cortex mediates incentive value...

..Punishments and shift cues are associated with the same right lateral OFC focus, suggesting a fundamental connection between emotive response to negative reinforcement and use of negative information to cue behavioral change...

..These results demonstrate dissociable neural responses to rewards and penalties that are dependent on the psychological context in which they are experienced...

..Depressed patients show preferential processing of negatively toned stimuli across a range of cognitive tasks. The present study aimed to determine whether these behavioral abnormalities are associated with specific neural substrates...

..These results suggest functional distinction in response patterns within a distributed reward system...

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..Our results suggest dysfunctional responses to rewarding and aversive stimuli in Cluster B personality disordered individuals but do not support the notion of hypersensitivity to reward and hyposensitivity to loss...

..This suggests the problem might lie in the integrated functioning of emotion processing circuits...

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..Negative biases in emotional processing are well recognised in people who are currently depressed but are less well described in those with a history of depression, where such biases may contribute to vulnerability to relapse...

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..In conclusion, our study demonstrates the role of the TPH2 gene and the serotonin system in risk taking and suggests that TPH2 gene may contribute to the expression of psychiatric phenotypes through altered decision making...

..Stimuli with social context represent a distinct class of emotional stimuli, which in healthy volunteers are associated with specific neural substrates but have not previously been studied relative to vulnerability to depression...

..The final section presents an overview of this literature and considers implications for understanding the pathophysiology of mood disorder as well as developing and evaluating new treatment strategies...

..No citalopram modulation of BOLD responses to angry faces were found. These results suggest that serotonin modulates low-level amygdala activation to aversive stimuli...

..These results have implications for our understanding of disorders characterized by impairments of social cognition, such as autism and psychopathy...

..Conclusions: These results suggest a critical role for ventral and medial dysfunction in the pathology of mania, which might underpin aspects of cognitive and clinical symptomatology...

..Combining drug challenge with fMRI (pharmacoMRI; pMRI) is a promising tool for investigating these processes in healthy as well as patient groups...

..The results suggest that mCPP-challenge phMRI produces reliable patterns of response that are mediated by 5-HT(2C) receptors; these responses may therefore be useful in-vivo measures of 5-HT(2C) function in psychiatric disorders...

..Due to variability between task, volunteers, scanner, and acquisition parameters, this would need to be evaluated on individual datasets. This approach will be a useful guide for Dynamic Causal Modeling studies...

..Permutation testing was found to provide superior power compared with the nonparametric equivalent...

..Critically the response to reward in medial orbitofrontal cortex was significantly enhanced when subjects were co-operating. This suggests that rewards achieved through co-operation are more valuable than rewards achieved alone...

..Such a pattern of neural response may represent a putative neural network responsible for mediating High EE in schizophrenia...

..We hypothesize that patients with psoriasis, in this case male patients, develop a coping mechanism to protect them from stressful emotional responses by blocking the processing of disgusted facial expressions...

..They also provide the first clear demonstration, within a single experiment, of a major division of function within the neural pain matrix...

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..Hydrocortisone infusion phMRI may be a useful tool to investigate hippocampal corticosteroid receptor function in depression...

..In normal subjects functional brain imaging has been used to investigate the neuroanatomy of impulse control. There are no such imaging studies in personality-disordered populations...

..It may also allow study of the effects of physical and psychological interventions on response inhibition in clinical conditions such as antisocial personality disorder...

..Apathy and impulse control disorders (ICDs) in Parkinson's disease (PD) are clinically important complications and may exist on a common behavioral spectrum of disorders of reward and motivation...

..This study also suggests that the CNR1 gene influences vulnerability to recent psychosocial adversity to produce current symptoms of depression...

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..This region is not typically activated in working memory tasks and its activation may reflect additional requirements of dealing with uncertainty...

..Our results are consistent with acute dietary tyrosine depletion causing a reduction in brain dopamine neurotransmission but raise questions about how robust or consistent the effects are on psychological function...

..Activity time-locked to prediction errors in frontotemporal circuits suggests that they are involved in encoding the associations between visual cues and monetary rewards in the human brain...

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..We propose that this functional arrangement enables integration of adaptive bodily responses with ongoing emotional and attentional states of the organism...

..05 small volume corrected). These findings suggest that pharmacoMRI is a potentially powerful tool for investigating neurotransmitter function in humans...

..These areas included the caudate, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the striatum and the thalamus. CONCLUSION: Direct pMRI using i.v. citalopram opens new ways of investigating 5-HT mechanism in depression and its treatment...

..If this is successful then phMRI will provide a genuinely exciting opportunity for the rapid development of better treatments for psychiatric conditions...

..In confirming the results of lesion and neuropsychological studies, the current study emphasises the importance of the right hemisphere in the processing of emotional prosody, specifically the lateral temporal lobes...

..The technique of combining drug challenge with fMRI (pharmacoMRI) has promise for investigating human psychiatric disorders...

..CONCLUSIONS: Patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may display some left-lateralisation of the normal right-lateralised temporal lobe response to emotional prosody...