Publications

Hesitation, the act of pausing in the face of uncertainty, is a behavior that gives humans and other animals crucial extra time to deliberate on the best option in uncertain situations. Given the ubiquity of hesitation in everyday life, and the devastating toll that impairments in hesitation can play in impulsivity disorders—such as addiction, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder...

Adolescent suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and deaths by suicide have increased substantially in the past 15 years, yet the drivers behind this increase are unknown. While much has been written about the potential role of social media on adolescent suicidal behavior, there is another potential contributor hiding in plain sight—the rise in parental deaths of despair that parallels in the increase in adolescent...

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...