Differential Impact of Anxious Misery Psychopathology on Multiple Representations of the Functional Connectome.

Background: One aim of characterizing dimensional psychopathology is associating different domains of affective dysfunction with brain circuitry. The functional connectome, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging, can be modeled and associated with psychopathology through multiple methods; some methods assess univariate relationships while others summarize broad patterns of activity. It remains unclear whether different dimensions of psychopathology require different representations of the connectome to generate reproducible associations. Methods: Patients experiencing anxious misery symptomology (depression, anxiety, and trauma; n = 192) received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. Three modeling approaches (seed-based correlation analysis, edgewise regression, and brain basis set modeling), each relying on increasingly broader representations of the functional connectome, were used to associate connectivity patterns with six data-driven dimensions of psychopathology: anxiety sensitivity, anxious arousal, rumination, anhedonia, insomnia, and negative affect. To protect against overfitting, 50 participants were held out in a testing dataset, leaving 142 participants as training data. Results: Different modeling approaches varied in the extent to which they could model different symptom dimensions: seed-based correlation analysis failed to reproducibly model any symptoms, subsets of the connectome (edgewise regression) were sufficient to model insomnia and anxious arousal, and broad representations of the entire connectome (brain basis set modeling) were necessary to model negative affect and ruminative thought. Conclusions: These results indicate that different methods of representing the functional connectome differ in the degree that they can model different symptom dimensions, highlighting the potential sufficiency of subsets of connections for some dimensions and the necessity of connectome-wide approaches in others.

Cloud-Based Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Neurofeedback to Reduce the Negative Attentional Bias in Depression: A Proof-of-Concept Study.

Individuals with depression show an attentional bias toward negatively valenced stimuli and thoughts. In this proof-of-concept study, we present a novel closed-loop neurofeedback procedure intended to remediate this bias. Internal attentional states were detected in real time by applying machine learning techniques to functional magnetic resonance imaging data on a cloud server; these attentional states were externalized using a visual stimulus that the participant could learn to control. We trained 15 participants with major depressive disorder and 12 healthy control participants over 3 functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions. Exploratory analysis showed that participants with major depressive disorder were initially more likely than healthy control participants to get stuck in negative attentional states, but this diminished with neurofeedback training relative to controls. Depression severity also decreased from pre- to posttraining. These results demonstrate that our method is sensitive to the negative attentional bias in major depressive disorder and showcase the potential of this novel technique as a treatment that can be evaluated in future clinical trials.

Integration of memory content in adults and children: Developmental differences in task conditions and functional consequences.

How separate yet related episodes of experience are associated in memory is a major question in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. Adults and children both integrate content acquired in separate episodes, yet they may do so under different task conditions. Neuroimaging studies suggest that adults integrate the contents of separate memory traces at encoding and thus without an explicit prompt; behavioral studies suggest that children do so only when specifically prompted. In the present research, we developed a novel paradigm to test integration of memory content using eye-gaze in an indirect (unprompted) test and self-derivation of new factual knowledge based on related facts in direct (open-ended and forced-choice) tests. To permit use of color images to accompany the stimuli, we developed a procedure for equating color images on 23 low-level properties that otherwise might control eye-gaze behavior. We used the paradigm with adults (Experiment 1) and 7- to 9-year-old children (Experiment 2). Both groups succeeded on the direct tests. Among adults, unprompted integration of memory content (in the indirect test) was apparent and supported open-ended self-derivation (in the direct test). Across trials, children did not show evidence of unprompted integration of memory content and performance during the unprompted indirect test did not support open-ended self-derivation; longer looking to target versus foil images during the indirect test was related to direct test performance under forced-choice conditions, however. The patterns indicate that adults and children engage the process of integration of memory content under different task conditions, and that when integration processes take place without an explicit prompt they have different functional consequences for adults and children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).