Transdiagnostic Profiles of Behaviour and Communication Relate to Academic and Socio-emotional Functioning and Neural White Matter Organisation

Behavioural and language difficulties co-occur in multiple neurodevelopmental conditions. Our understanding of these problems has arguably been slowed by an overreliance on case-control designs, which limit the conclusions we can draw because they fail to capture the overlap across different neurodevelopmental disorders and the heterogeneity within them. In this study, we recruited a large transdiagnostic cohort of children with complex diagnosed and undiagnosed needs (N = 805) to identify distinct subgroups of children with common profiles of behavioural and language strengths and difficulties. We then investigated whether and how these data-driven groupings could be distinguished from a comparison sample (N = 158) on academic, socio-emotional, and neural white matter characteristics. We identified three distinct subgroups of children, each with different levels of difficulties in structural language, pragmatic communication, and hot and cool executive functions. All three subgroups struggled with academic and socio-emotional skills relative to the comparison sample, potentially representing three alternative but related developmental pathways to difficulties in these areas. The children with the weakest language skills had the most widespread difficulties with learning, whereas those with more pronounced difficulties with hot executive skills experienced the most severe difficulties within the socio-emotional domain. Each data-driven subgroup could be distinguished from the comparison sample based on both shared and subgroup-unique patterns of neural white matter organisation. These findings advance our understanding of commonly co-morbid behavioural and language problems and their relationship to behavioural outcomes and neurobiological substrates.

The Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) Framework for Understanding Musicality-Language Links Across the Lifespan

Using individual differences approaches, a growing body of literature finds positive associations between musicality and language-related abilities, complementing prior findings of links between musical training and language skills. Despite these associations, musicality has been often overlooked in mainstream models of individual differences in language acquisition and development. To better understand the biological basis of these individual differences, we propose the Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) framework. This novel integrative framework posits that musical and language-related abilities likely share some common genetic architecture (i.e., genetic pleiotropy) in addition to some degree of overlapping neural endophenotypes, and genetic influences on musically and linguistically enriched environments. We review and discuss findings from over seventy studies in the literature demonstrating that individual differences in musical aptitude (i.e., rhythm and tonality skills) are robustly correlated with a wide range of speech-language skills that are foundational for effective communication, including speech perception, grammatical abilities, reading-related skills, and second/foreign language learning. From this body of work we conclude that musical abilities are intertwined with speech, language, and reading development over the lifespan. Drawing upon recent advances in genomic methodologies for unraveling pleiotropy, we outline testable predictions for future research on language development and how its underlying neurobiological substrates may be supported by genetic pleiotropy with musicality.

Sleep Pathophysiology

Sleep is a natural, reversible, and periodic behavioral state characterized by perceptual inattention and decreased responsiveness to external stimuli. The processes governing sleep, sleep-wake transitions, and maintenance of wakefulness are mediated by complex physiologic mechanisms, the primary neurobiological substrates of which include the neocortex, basal forebrain, thalamus, hypothalamus, pontine tegmentum, and brainstem monoaminergic nuclei. Moreover, the integrity of brainstem autonomic respiratory control networks becomes critical in the maintenance of ventilation during sleep. Pathologic insults to these systems may result in a broad constellation of clinical deficits.

Comparison of dipsogenic responses of adult offspring as a function of different perinatal programming models

The perinatal environment interacts with the genotype of the developing organism resulting in a unique phenotype through a developmental or perinatal programming phenomenon. However, it remains unclear how this phenomenon differentially affects particular targets expressing specific drinking responses depending on the perinatal conditions. The main goal of the present study was to compare the dipsogenic responses induced by different thirst models as a function of two perinatal manipulation models, defined by the maternal free access to hypertonic sodium solution and a partial aortic ligation (PAL-W/Na) or a sham-ligation (Sham-W/Na). The programmed adult offspring of both perinatal manipulated models responded similarly when was challenged by overnight water dehydration or after a sodium depletion showing a reduced water intake in comparison to the non-programmed animals. However, when animals were evaluated after a body sodium overload, only adult Sham-W/Na offspring showed drinking differences compared to PAL and control offspring. By analyzing the central neurobiological substrates involved, a significant increase in the number of Fos + cells was found after sodium depletion in the subfornical organ of both programmed groups and an increase in the number of Fos + cells in the dorsal raphe nucleus was only observed in adult depleted PAL-W/Na. Our results suggest that perinatal programming is a phenomenon that differentially affects particular targets which induce specific dipsogenic responses depending on matching between perinatal programming conditions and the osmotic challenge in the latter environment. Probably, each programmed-drinking phenotype has a particular set point to elicit specific repertoires of mechanisms to reestablish fluid balance.

Insula reactivity mediates subjective isolation stress in alexithymia

The risk for developing stress-related disorders is elevated in individuals with high alexithymia, a personality trait characterized by impaired emotional awareness and interpersonal relating. However, it is still unclear how alexithymia alters perceived psychosocial stress and which neurobiological substrates are mechanistically involved. To address this question, we examined freshmen during transition to university, given that this period entails psychosocial stress and frequently initiates psychopathology. Specifically, we used a functional magnetic resonance imaging emotional face matching task to probe emotional processing in 54 participants (39 women) at the beginning of the first year at university and 6 months later. Furthermore, we assessed alexithymia and monitored perceived psychosocial stress and loneliness via questionnaires for six consecutive months. Perceived psychosocial stress significantly increased over time and initial alexithymia predicted subjective stress experiences via enhanced loneliness. On the neural level, alexithymia was associated with lowered amygdala responses to emotional faces, while loneliness correlated with diminished reactivity in the anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortex. Furthermore, insula activity mediated the association between alexithymia and loneliness that predicted perceived psychosocial stress. Our findings are consistent with the notion that alexithymia exacerbates subjective stress via blunted insula reactivity and increased perception of social isolation.

Mental Health and Music Engagement: Review, Framework, and Guidelines for Future Studies

Is engaging with music good for your mental health? This question has long been the topic of empirical clinical and nonclinical investigations, with studies indicating positive associations between music engagement and quality of life, reduced depression or anxiety symptoms, and less frequent substance use. However, many earlier investigations were limited by small populations and methodological limitations, and it has also been suggested that aspects of music engagement may even be associated with worse mental health outcomes. The purpose of this scoping review is first to summarize the existing state of music engagement and mental health studies, identifying their strengths and weaknesses. We focus on broad domains of mental health diagnoses including internalizing psychopathology (e.g., depression and anxiety symptoms and diagnoses), externalizing psychopathology (e.g., substance use), and thought disorders (e.g., schizophrenia). Second, we propose a theoretical model to inform future work that describes the importance of simultaneously considering music-mental health associations at the levels of (1) correlated genetic and/or environmental influences versus (bi)directional associations, (2) interactions with genetic risk factors, (3) treatment efficacy, and (4) mediation through brain structure and function. Finally, we describe how recent advances in large-scale data collection, including genetic, neuroimaging, and electronic health record studies, allow for a more rigorous examination of these associations that can also elucidate their neurobiological substrates.

Mental health and music engagement: review, framework, and guidelines for future studies

Is engaging with music good for your mental health? This question has long been the topic of empirical clinical and nonclinical investigations, with studies indicating positive associations between music engagement and quality of life, reduced depression or anxiety symptoms, and less frequent substance use. However, many earlier investigations were limited by small populations and methodological limitations, and it has also been suggested that aspects of music engagement may even be associated with worse mental health outcomes. The purpose of this scoping review is first to summarize the existing state of music engagement and mental health studies, identifying their strengths and weaknesses. We focus on broad domains of mental health diagnoses including internalizing psychopathology (e.g., depression and anxiety symptoms and diagnoses), externalizing psychopathology (e.g., substance use), and thought disorders (e.g., schizophrenia). Second, we propose a theoretical model to inform future work that describes the importance of simultaneously considering music-mental health associations at the levels of (1) correlated genetic and/or environmental influences vs. (bi)directional associations, (2) interactions with genetic risk factors, (3) treatment efficacy, and (4) mediation through brain structure and function. Finally, we describe how recent advances in large-scale data collection, including genetic, neuroimaging, and electronic health record studies, allow for a more rigorous examination of these associations that can also elucidate their neurobiological substrates.

Rhythm Comes, Rhythm Goes: Short-Term Periodicity of Prosodic Phrasing

Speech is perceived as a sequence of meaningful units. Speech prosody helps to delimit these units through pauses and acoustic modulations of pitch, amplitude and speech rate. These prosodic boundaries subdivide utterances into prosodic phrases. To be understood, prosodic phrases must obey cognitive and neurobiological constraints on the side of the listener. In particular, the neurobiological substrates of speech processing have been argued to operate periodically—with one electrophysiological processing cycle being devoted to the processing of one segment of the speech stream. We hypothesized that when processing is periodic, prosodic phrases should show periodicity as well. We investigated the periodicity of prosodic phrases in a corpus of radio news that has been manually annotated for full intonational and intermediate phrases by human experts. We find that sequences of 2 to 5 intermediate phrases are periodic at 0.8 to 1.6 Hertz within their superordinate intonation phrase. Across utterances, the exact duration of intermediate phrases fluctuates with the duration of superordinate intonation phrases, pointing to a dependence of prosodic time scales. Our findings provide evidence of short-term periodicity of prosodic phrasing within a highly specific range. While the determinants of periodicity are unknown, the results are compatible with an association between elec- trophysiological processing time scales and the phonological rhythms of language as such. This is a further step towards closing the gaps between the neurobiology of language, psycholinguistics, and linguistic description.