NP_Publications

Intracranial neurophysiology studies have typically ignored signals from electrodes located in white matter (WM), assuming that their information content is artifactual or related to nearby gray matter (GM). Here, we tested the electrophysiological and functional features of signals recorded from different WM locations. Signals were recorded from 19 patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for drug-resistant epilepsy by means of stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG). Each sEEG electrode was...

CONCLUSION: Atypical neural responses during the directed auditory attention oddball task are predicted primarily by PTSD symptomatology, not mTBI blast severity. Avoidance is tied to exaggerated early reflexive responses, dysphoria is related to muted novelty detection, and hyperarousal is associated with difficulty distinguishing between stimuli relevant and irrelevant to behavior.

CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that an arts-based intervention can improve mental health in college students, while the mechanistic roles of creative ideation and cognitive flexibility remain unclear. Larger samples and randomized control designs are necessary to further evaluate mechanisms behind arts-based interventions for college students.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: In this development and validation of our prediction model, CAT-Autism surpassed full item-bank scores with an average of 13 questions; these findings demonstrated that adaptively administering a small, statistically optimal subset of items can yield comparable (or better) results while reducing respondent burden. Next steps will be to test implementation parameters and confirm efficacy of CAT-Autism in clinical and community settings.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Mental health disorders are a significant public health problem with profound impacts on individual health, communities and society. Interventional approaches are limited in both utilization and access, despite their strong evidence base in specific disorders. The objective of this review is to describe factors and challenges influencing equity in interventional psychiatry.

Objective: To compare effects of adjunctive active versus sham vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) on suicidal ideation (SI) in markedly treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

No abstract

Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is associated with vast clinical, behavioral, and neurobiological heterogeneity that hinder both the efficacy of current interventions and future treatment development. While recent efforts have focused on stratifying psychiatric disorders based on underlying neurobiological markers, such approaches remain largely unexplored in AUD. To address this, we empirically-derived neurobiological subtypes of AUD and evaluated their reproducibility and clinical relevance....

CONCLUSIONS: Nucleosome-targeted host DNA depletion integrated with a fully automated mNGS platform significantly enhances microbial detection in plasma and provides a scalable approach for standardized BSI diagnostics.

Puberty is a period of profound behavioral reorganization that recalibrates social motivation, risk-taking, and sexual behavior in ways that shape lifelong human health. Yet its characterization in population-based studies relies largely on self-report, which reflects perceived physical changes rather than the neuroendocrine substrates driving the transition. The pituitary gland sits at the center of this reorganization, coordinating hypothalamic-pituitary axes that orchestrate puberty....

Finding suitable therapies for treatment-refractory neuropsychiatric disorders constitutes a major goal for translational neuroscience. Deep brain stimulation shows promise for treatment resistant depression, but treatment efficacy varies substantially across patients. Objective, electrophysiologically driven strategies to optimize deep brain stimulation for treatment resistant depression could greatly improve clinical efficacy by minimizing the trial-and-error approach needed to personalize...

CONCLUSION: These findings are consistent with a shared vulnerability for the development of INTD and alcohol-related problems, which may, in part, account for their common co-occurrence.

People with major depressive disorder (MDD) often struggle to pursue previously rewarding activities, which may relate to deficits experiencing pleasure, termed anhedonia. Anhedonia remains a challenge to target and treat. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) alleviates anhedonia in some patients with MDD, though rTMS is logistically burdensome. Identifying novel, translational phenotypes of reward pursuit may help identify who is most likely to respond to treatment. We used a...

Planning entails running simulations forward to identify possible outcomes. It is useful for situations where outcomes are uncertain, costly or dangerous to pursue. A growing body of literature is finding that during theta states in the rodent hippocampus, sequences run forward along possible futures, enabling 'episodic future thinking' that can be used within a neural circuit for planning. Emerging data suggest that the prelimbic cortex initiates these simulations, an entorhinal-hippocampal...

Clinical psychology is a young science. Psychological suffering remains extensive, with core scientific issues the subject of ongoing study and debate. Clinical practice depends on the research base for elucidating etiology, systematic improvements in provision of mental health care, improvements in public health, and credibility with clients and the larger public. Science-oriented training programs endeavor to develop students into independent scientists, clinicians, and/or administrators who...

CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate distinct behavioral and neurophysiological attentional control profiles in schizophrenia and major depressive disorder compared to control participants during language comprehension.

Functional brain networks support human cognition, yet how individualized network architecture emerges in early childhood remains poorly understood. Averaging across participants can obscure age-specific organization and person-to-person differences, particularly in slowly developing association cortices. We developed an age-appropriate functional reference that captured common structure across toddlers without averaging away individual variability, enabling estimation of each child's networks...

CONCLUSIONS: A brief, self-administered, and scalable brain health battery demonstrates associations with military vocational aptitude and with neurocognitive domains associated with cognitive resilience. Future studies should evaluate whether integrating these assessments into current practices predicts success in Basic Combat Training, guides military progression, and supports long-term cognitive screening and monitoring across the Armed Forces.

Specific phobia (SPH) is a prevalent anxiety disorder and may involve advanced biological aging. However, limited brain age research has been conducted in anxiety disorders. This mega-analysis investigated brain aging in SPH participants within the ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group. 3D brain structural MRI scans from 17 international samples (600 SPH individuals, of whom 504 formally diagnosed and 96 questionnaire-based cases; 1134 controls; age range: 22-75 years) were processed with FreeSurfer....

Precise measurement of individual variation in psychiatric symptoms is essential for developing scalable tools that can ultimately inform treatment development and clinical care. Individuals performing the same cognitive task often adopt qualitatively distinct strategies that may reflect differences in underlying neural processes and psychiatric symptom dimensions. Yet most cognitive paradigms implicitly assume that all individuals rely on the same cognitive strategy, attributing behavioral...