Brain morphometry points to emerging patterns of psychosis, depression, and anxiety vulnerability over a 2-year period in childhood

Background Gray matter morphometry studies have lent seminal insights into the etiology of mental illness. Existing research has primarily focused on adults and then, typically on a single disorder. Examining brain characteristics in late childhood, when the brain is preparing to undergo significant adolescent reorganization and various forms of serious psychopathology are just first emerging, may allow for a unique and highly important perspective of overlapping and unique pathogenesis. Methods A total of 8645 youth were recruited as part of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study. Magnetic resonance imaging scans were collected, and psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), depressive, and anxiety symptoms were assessed three times over a 2-year period. Cortical thickness, surface area, and subcortical volume were used to predict baseline symptomatology and symptom progression over time. Results Some features could possibly signal common vulnerability, predicting progression across forms of psychopathology (e.g. superior frontal and middle temporal regions). However, there was a specific predictive value for emerging PLEs (lateral occipital and precentral thickness), anxiety (parietal thickness/area and cingulate), and depression (e.g. parahippocampal and inferior temporal). Conclusion Findings indicate common and distinct patterns of vulnerability for varying forms of psychopathology are present during late childhood, before the adolescent reorganization, and have direct relevance for informing novel conceptual models along with early prevention and intervention efforts.

Assessing anxiety-linked impairment in attentional control without eye-tracking: The masked-target antisaccade task

Contemporary cognitive theories of anxiety and attention processing propose that heightened levels of anxiety vulnerability are associated with a decreasing ability to inhibit the allocation of attention toward task-irrelevant information. Existing performance-based research has most often used eye-movement assessment variants of the antisaccade paradigm to demonstrate such effects. Critically however, eye-movement assessment methods are limited by expense, the need for expert training in administration, and limited mobility and scalability. These barriers have likely led to researchers using suboptimal methods of assessing the relationship between attentional control and anxiety vulnerability. The present study examined the capacity for a non-eye-movement based variant of the antisaccade task, the masked-target antisaccade task (Guitton et al., 1985), to detect anxiety-linked differences in attentional control. Participants (N = 342) completed an assessment of anxiety vulnerability and performed the masked-target antisaccade task in an online assessment session. Greater levels of anxiety vulnerability predicted poorer performance on the task, consistent with findings observed from eye-movement methods and with cognitive theories of anxiety and attention processing. Result also revealed the task to have high internal reliability. Our findings indicate the masked-target antisaccade task provides a psychometrically reliable, low-cost, mobile, and scalable assessment of anxiety-linked differences in attentional control.

The analysis of psychological structure of female crime

The article investigates the problems of female crime and makes a psychological analysis of this phenomenon. It is emphasized that today female crime has a faster growth rates than male crime, which cannot but cause concern in the society. A woman is a caretaker, influences her husband’s behavior and upbringing of children, she mainly determines relationships in the family. Therefore, without exaggeration, one can say that women’s involvement in criminal activities and the spread of female crime affects the morals of society more than the spread of male crime. It is especially terrible when a woman is behind bars, losing her biological and social designation.In examining the identity of the sentenced woman, it is necessary to analyze and summarize the psychological and specific characteristics of women with persistent criminal attitude, where a penal institution can significantly affect the process of preventing crimes among women. The study of sentenced women and their psychological characteristics should be the focus of attention not only of scientists,but also of workers of the penal system and law enforcement agencies, and it is important to consider them as interdependent.Female crime has a higher latency. Women’s crime rates are the highest in the areas where women are the most involved in, like in the family and in the professions traditionally considered to be “female”. Women who have been imprisoned have more difficulties in resocializing. It is noted that women are more emotional, so they prefer to argue out loud and without leaving the scene, although their fights are mostly not bloody, but shrill and noisy. Given the emotionality of women, they often experience feelings of stress, frustration, depression, anguish, doom, etc. At the same time, most women having been imprisoned feel guilty and anxious about their future. Wariness,anxiety, vulnerability, the desire to change their position is a range of mental states of women who have been imprisoned. It is concluded that female crime is an important social problem because, in addition to the traits inherent to crime in general, it has additional negative consequences for society. First of all, it destructively affects the family institution and the younger generation, thus forming a “reserve” for future criminals. That is why we support scientists who emphasize that the crime rates among women is a kind of an indicator of the health of public life.

Anxiety-Linked Attentional Bias: Is It Reliable?

There is substantial evidence that heightened anxiety vulnerability is characterized by increased selective attention to threatening information. The reliability of this anxiety-linked attentional bias has become the focus of considerable recent interest. We distinguish between the potential inconsistency of anxiety-linked attentional bias and inconsistency potentially reflecting the psychometric properties of the assessment approaches used to measure it. Though groups with heightened anxiety vulnerability often exhibit, on average, elevated attention to threat, the evidence suggests that individuals are unlikely to each display a stable, invariant attentional bias to threat. Moreover, although existing assessment approaches can differentiate between groups, they do not exhibit the internal consistency or test-retest reliability necessary to classify individuals in terms of their characteristic pattern of attentional responding to threat. We discuss the appropriate uses of existing attentional bias assessment tasks and propose strategies for enhancing classification of individuals in terms of their tendency to display an attentional bias to threat.

Emotion-in-Motion, a Novel Approach for the Modification of Attentional Bias: An Experimental Proof-of-Concept Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Individuals with heightened anxiety vulnerability tend to preferentially attend to emotionally negative information, with evidence suggesting that this attentional bias makes a causal contribution to anxiety vulnerability. Recent years have seen an increase in the use of attentional bias modification (ABM) procedures to modify patterns of attentional bias; however, often this change in bias is not successfully achieved. OBJECTIVE This study presents a novel ABM procedure, Emotion-in-Motion, requiring individuals to engage in patterns of attentional scanning and tracking within a gamified, complex, and dynamic environment. We aimed to examine the capacity of this novel procedure, as compared with the traditional probe-based ABM procedure, to produce a change in attentional bias and result in a change in anxiety vulnerability. METHODS We administered either an attend-positive or attend-negative version of our novel ABM task or the conventional probe-based ABM task to undergraduate students (N=110). Subsequently, participants underwent an anagram stressor task, with state anxiety assessed before and following this stressor. RESULTS Although the conventional ABM task failed to induce differential patterns of attentional bias or affect anxiety vulnerability, the Emotion-in-Motion training did induce a greater attentional bias to negative faces in the attend-negative training condition than in the attend-positive training condition (P=.003, Cohen d=0.87) and led to a greater increase in stressor-induced state anxiety faces in the attend-negative training condition than in the attend-positive training condition (P=.03, Cohen d=0.60). CONCLUSIONS Our novel, gamified Emotion-in-Motion ABM task appears more effective in modifying patterns of attentional bias and anxiety vulnerability. Candidate mechanisms contributing to these findings are discussed, including the increased stimulus complexity, dynamic nature of the stimulus presentation, and enriched performance feedback.