Faculty

Negative symptoms of schizophrenia—including apathy, anhedonia, and asociality, as well as blunted affect and alogia—are present during early stages of the disorder, and contribute to marked declines in social and occupational functioning. Few therapeutic options ameliorate negative symptoms, and much remains unknown regarding their neurobiological origins. To improve our understanding of the pathophysiology of...

Despite the prevailing focus on executive functioning impairments as primary contributors to clinical outcomes in individuals with psychosis, the contribution of sensory disruptions to disease morbidity in psychosis is receiving increasing attention among scientists who study schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Reductions in neurophysiological markers of both auditory and visual early perceptual processing...

Scientists specializing in the field of psychosis research have characterized schizophrenia as a syndrome of brain dysconnectivity. Visual working memory, an executive function that relies upon coordinated activity across distributed brain regions to support various cognitive operations, has consistently exhibited impairments in schizophrenia. Indeed, cognitive symptoms account for significant functional and...

For individuals with schizophrenia, impairment in the ability to selectively focus attention on some environmental stimuli while ignoring others is associated with worse symptoms and poor functional outcomes. Moreover, these cognitive impairments are largely resistant to treatment through medication. To improve understanding of how dysfunction in the neural selective attention system contributes to these cognitive...

In 2018, an international group of scientists founded the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics Through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Clinical High Risk for Psychosis Working Group to improve understanding of brain differences in individuals with clinical high risk for developing psychosis, who later develop a psychotic disorder, compared with those who do not. In an international multisite neuroimaging study published in JAMA...