Psychiatry research
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Psychiatry research · Apr 2012
Regional gray matter changes in obsessive-compulsive disorder: relationship to clinical characteristics.
Regional brain volumes were compared between 23 participants with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and 36 healthy controls using magnetic resonance imaging with voxel-based morphometry. A volumetric decrease in OCD was found in the right mediofrontal cortex. An increase was found in the left temporoparietal cortex. Volume alterations were related to symptom severity and age of onset.
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Psychiatry research · Apr 2012
Test-retest reliability of the proposed DSM-5 eating disorder diagnostic criteria.
The proposed DSM-5 classification scheme for eating disorders includes both major and minor changes to the existing DSM-IV diagnostic criteria. It is not known what effect these modifications will have on the ability to make reliable diagnoses. Two studies were conducted to evaluate the short-term test-retest reliability of the proposed DSM-5 eating disorder diagnoses: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and feeding and eating conditions not elsewhere classified. ⋯ Acceptable rates of agreement were identified for the individual eating disorder diagnoses, including DSM-5 anorexia nervosa (κ's of 0.81 to 0.97), bulimia nervosa (κ=0.84), binge eating disorder (κ's of 0.75 and 0.61), and feeding and eating disorders not elsewhere classified (κ's of 0.70 and 0.46). Further, improved short-term test-retest reliability was noted when using the DSM-5, in comparison to DSM-IV, criteria for binge eating disorder. Thus, these studies found that trained interviewers can reliably diagnose eating disorders using the proposed DSM-5 criteria; however, additional data from general practice settings and community samples are needed.
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Psychiatry research · Apr 2012
Misperceiving facial affect: effects of laterality and individual differences in susceptibility to visual hallucinations.
It has been suggested that certain types of auditory hallucinations may be the by-product of a perceptual system that has evolved to be oversensitive to threat-related stimuli. People with schizophrenia and high schizotypes experience visual as well as auditory hallucinations, and have deficits in processing facial emotions. We sought to determine the relationship between visual hallucination proneness and the tendency to misattribute threat and non-threat related emotions to neutral faces. ⋯ The high RVHS group made more false positive errors (ascribing emotions to neutral faces) than the low RVHS group, particularly when detecting threat-related emotions. All participants made more false positives when neutral faces were presented to the right visual field than to the left visual field. Our results support continuum models of visual hallucinatory experience in which tolerance for false positives is highest for potentially threatening emotional stimuli and suggest that lateral asymmetries in face processing extend to the misperception of facial emotion.