Publications

Life stressors are known risk factors for suicide, but the specific stressor types that most strongly precipitate suicidal outcomes, and on what timescale, remain poorly understood. Social rejection may be an especially potent interpersonal stressor because it threatens to interrupt the maintenance of social bonds and stimulates a cascade of affective, cognitive, and biological changes that promote depression and...

Schizophrenia is frequently associated with functional impairments including deficits in cognition and social interactions. These impairments are thought to emerge from dysfunction in the processing of information across distributed cortical circuits, including the primary visual cortex, the posterior parietal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Communication across these regions relies on excitatory...

Pitt Psychiatry investigators have recently published research studies on mental health in late life in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Nature Communications, and Neuropsychopharmacology. Below is a summary of original research on amyloid beta accumulation, neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, and severe worry in older adults. Periventricular Diffusivity Reflects APOE Ε4-Modulated Amyloid Accumulation and Cognitive...

Emotion dysregulation, characterized by an individual’s challenges in monitoring and modifying emotional reactivity, is more likely to occur among autistic people than among non-autistic people. Emotion dysregulation is associated with multiple forms of mental health difficulties such as depression, anxiety, and aggression in autism. In addition, emotion dysregulation in autism has been associated with the need for...

Alterations in reward-related brain activity have been linked to response to psychological treatment in adolescents with anxiety disorders. However, it remains unknown whether these effects are driven by reward anticipation or feedback, which reflect different functional roles in motivated behavior, or to what extent brain activity changes as a function of treatment response and relates to future depression. A team...