Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging

BackgroundAnomalies in default mode network (DMN) activity and alpha (8-12 Hz) oscillations have been independently observed in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Recent spatiotemporal analyses suggest that alpha oscillations support DMN functioning via inter-regional synchronization and sensory cortical inhibition. Therefore, we examined a unifying pathology of alpha deficits in the visual-cortex-DMN system in PTSD. MethodsPatients with PTSD (N = 25) and two control groups--patients with Ge...

BackgroundMisophonia is the inability to tolerate certain aversive, repetitive common sounds. MethodsUsing a within-subjects experimental design, twenty-nine participants with misophonia and thirty clinical controls with high emotion dysregulation received inhibitory neurostimulation (1Hz) over a personalized medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) target functionally connected to the left insula; excitatory neurostimulation (10Hz) over a personalized dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) target; and sham stimulati...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been associated with altered arousal regulation and dysfunction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, including changes in circulating cortisol and pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP). Both stress-related hormones affect extended amygdala to medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) circuit functioning, but it is unclear whether they relate to white matter microstructure connecting these regions. We examined this question in 139 trauma-...

BackgroundCognitive dysfunction often co-occurs with psychopathology. Advances in neuroimaging and machine learning have led to neural indicators that predict individual differences in cognition with reasonable performance. We examined whether these neural indicators explain the relationship between cognition and mental health in the UK Biobank cohort (n > 14000). MethodsUsing machine learning, we quantified the covariation between general cognition and 133 mental health indices and derived neu...

Aperiodic neural activity - activity with no characteristic frequency - has increasingly become a common feature of study, including in clinical work. Reports investigating aperiodic activity from patients from a broad range of clinical disorders have sought to evaluate aperiodic activity as a putative biomarker relating to diagnosis or treatment response, and/or as a potential marker of underlying physiological activity. However, there is thus far no clear consensus on if and how aperiodic neur...

An important aim in psychiatry is the establishment of valid and reliable associations linking profiles of brain functioning to clinically relevant symptoms and behaviors across patient populations. To advance progress in this area, we introduce an open dataset containing behavioral and neuroimaging data from 241 individuals aged 18 to 70, comprising 148 individuals meeting diagnostic criteria for a broad range of psychiatric illnesses and a healthy comparison group of 93 individuals. These data...

ObjectiveTo delineate the phenotype of juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) with a focus on obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) using multimodal psychiatric, neuropsychological, quantitative EEG (qEEG), and structural MRI markers within a predictive-processing/free-energy framework. MethodsWe prospectively studied 65 patients with JME and 68 matched healthy controls (HC). Participants completed DSM-IV SCID I/II interviews and a neuropsychological battery assessing working memory, psyc...

ObjectivePsychotic symptoms typically emerge in adolescence when connections between the thalamus and cortex are still maturing. The extent to which thalamocortical connectivity differences observed in psychosis occur as a function of age-associated alterations is not fully understood. MethodsWe analyzed diffusion-weighted imaging data from 1254 participants 8-23 years old (typically developing youth: N=626, psychosis-spectrum youth: N=329, other psychopathology: N=299) from the Philadelphia Ne...

Overlap of brain changes across mental disorders has reinforced transdiagnostic models. However, the developmental basis for this overlap is unclear as are neural differences among internalizing, externalizing and thought disorders. These issues are critical to inform the theoretical framework for hierarchical transdiagnostic psychiatric taxonomy. We examined cortical thickness (CT) difference between healthy controls (n=4041) and patients with externalizing (n=1182), internalizing (n=1959) and ...

Human cognitive processing involves dynamic interactions across brain regions, evolving over time. Traditional neuroimaging analysis often overlooks this temporal aspect, limiting insights into how functional network connectivity (FNC) supports ongoing cognition and behaviour. Using sliding window analysis, we captured FNC changes during tasks, reflecting network reconfiguration in cognitive processes. We further determined behavioural relevance of time-varying FNC by relating network measuremen...

BACKGROUNDReduced data-gathering and altered sensory precision are associated with psychotic phenotypes in tasks engaging the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). We investigated whether PPC excitability - modulated via 1 Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - differentially affects these behavioural patterns in high vs. low psychotic phenotypes. Based on prior work, we hypothesised that delusional and hallucinatory traits would moderate TMS effects on sensory precision (proxied by ...

Given the subjective nature of conventional diagnostic methods for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an objectively measurable biomarker is highly desirable. Macroscopic neural circuits measured using magnetoencephalography (MEG) has previously been shown to be indicative of the PTSD phenotype and severity. In the present study, we employed a machine learning-based classification framework using MEG neural synchrony to distinguish combat-related PTSD from trauma-exposed controls. Support ve...

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is heavily dependent on the investigative team to prescribe, or demarcate, the desired tissue volume-of-interest. Manual prescription, the current standard in the field, requires expertise in neuroanatomy to ensure spatial consistency within and across subjects. Spatial precision of MRS voxel placement thus presents challenges for cross-sectional studies, and even more so for repeated-measure and multi-acquisition designs. Furthermore, voxel prescriptions ba...

Large-scale mega-analyses of worldwide combined Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies have demonstrated brain differences between individuals with mental disorders and controls. However, the potential of large-scale observational studies using population-based clinical MRI data remains unexplored. We analyzed clinical MRI data from 23,545 patients in the Eastern half of Denmark (Capital Region of Denmark and Region Zealand). 2,774 patients with mental disorders and 2,062 non-psychiatric contr...

Large-scale brain network function is critical for healthy cognition, yet links between such network function, neurochemistry, and smaller-scale neurocircuitry are unclear. Here, we evaluated 59 healthy individuals using resting-state fMRI to determine how network-level temporal dynamics were impacted by two well-characterized pharmacotherapies targeting catecholamines: methylphenidate (20mg) and haloperidol (2mg). Network dynamic changes were tested for links with drug-induced alterations in co...

BackgroundThis study empirically tests a theoretical model of ADHD that identifies aberrant frontal-to-subcortical projections--particularly those involving the ventral tegmental area and, consequently, the nucleus accumbens (NAc)--as a core neurobiological vulnerability. The model predicts reduced frontal influence on subcortical structures and group-by-direction interaction effects, especially at the NAc. MethodsStructural and resting-state fMRI data from sixty individuals with ADHD and sixty...

Interoceptive mismatch is a perceptual discrepancy between ascending bodily signals and higher-order representation of anticipated physiological state. Inspired by predictive coding models, we present autonomic perceptual mismatch as a measure of this discrepancy for clinical application to brain-body interactions. Joint hypermobility is disproportionately found in individuals with anxiety disorders. Previous work has shown atypical autonomic reactivity represents a likely mediating mechanism co...

The human brain relies on dynamic interactions among modular networks, where connector and provincial hubs critically enable information integration. However, existing hub characterization remains predominantly qualitative, overlooking the quantitative contributions of potential hub nodes. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-Indicator Entropy Hub Score (MIEHS), a quantitative framework integrating six graph-theoretical metrics including betweenness/degree centrality, participation coeffi...

Higher-order cognitive and affective functions are supported by large-scale networks in the brain. Dysfunction in different networks is proposed to associate with distinct symptoms in neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the specific networks targeted by current clinical transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) approaches are unclear. While standard-of-care TMS relies on scalp-based landmarks, recent FDA-approved TMS protocols use individualized functional connectivity with the subgenual anterior...

BackgroundImpairment of the glymphatic system may contribute to atypical brain development and increased vulnerability to psychiatric conditions such as psychosis. In particular, disrupted glymphatic efficiency may affect neurochemical homeostasis during critical maturational windows, leading to structural and circuit-level alterations. However, its role in early neurodevelopmental trajectories remains largely unexplored. MethodsWe combined longitudinal diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and magnet...