Task-related neural mechanisms of persecutory ideation in schizophrenia and community monozygotic twin-pairs.

Perceptions of spiteful behavior are common, distinct from rational fear, and may undergird persecutory ideation. To test this hypothesis and investigate neural mechanisms of persecutory ideation, we employed a novel economic social decision-making task, the Minnesota Trust Game (MTG), during neuroimaging in patients with schizophrenia (n = 30) and community monozygotic (MZ) twins (n = 38; 19 pairs). We examined distinct forms of mistrust, task-related brain activation and connectivity, and investigated relationships with persecutory ideation.

Initial and Ongoing Training of the Rural Surgeon.

Over the last 2 decades, rural locations have realized a steady decrease in surgical access and direct care. Owing to societal expectations for equal general and subspecialty surgical care in urban or rural areas, the ability to attract, train, and hold onto the rural surgeon has come into question. Our current general surgery training curriculum has been reevaluated as to its relevance for rural surgery and several alternatives to the traditional surgical training model have been proposed.

The relationship between working memory capacity and broad measures of cognitive ability in healthy adults and people with schizophrenia.

Objective: Working memory (WM) capacity, typically measured with cognitively complex span tasks, is correlated with higher order cognitive abilities in healthy adults. The goals of this study were to determine whether a more focused measure of visual WM storage capacity would show similar higher order ability correlations in healthy adults and in people with schizophrenia (PSZ), thereby demonstrating the importance of simple storage capacity; determine whether the illness alters the pattern of correlations across cognitive domains; and evaluate whether between-groups differences in WM capacity could account for the generalized cognitive impairment in PSZ.

Method: Ninety-nine PSZ and 77 healthy controls (HCs) completed a visual WM change-localization task, the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI), and the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB).

Context processing performance in bipolar disorder patients.

Objectives: Context processing is the adaptive control of current behavior through the use of prior context information. It has been found to be impaired in schizophrenia. Some studies have indicated that, compared with patients with schizophrenia, those with bipolar disorder (BPD) display a similar but less severe neuropsychological pattern of impairment.

Decreased conflict- and error-related activity in the anterior cingulate cortex in subjects with schizophrenia.

Objective: People with schizophrenia have exhibited reduced functional activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during the performance of many types of cognitive tasks and during the commission of errors. According to conflict theory, the anterior cingulate cortex is involved in the monitoring of response conflict, acting as a signal for a need for greater cognitive control. This study examined whether impaired conflict monitoring in people with schizophrenia could underlie reduced anterior cingulate activity during both correct task performance and error-related activity.

A specific deficit in context processing in the unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia.

Background: Understanding the biological basis of complex, heritable illnesses such as schizophrenia is facilitated by sensitive and functionally specific measures of intermediate processes. Context processing is a theoretically motivated construct associated with executive function. Impairments in this process have been associated with dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex.