Cognition-Emotion Interactions in Psychiatric Illness

Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric illness with dysfunction across a heterogeneous set of functional domains, including cognitive deficits and emotional abnormalities. A cardinal deficit associated with schizophrenia is the ability to represent, maintain and manipulate information in mind – an operation broadly labeled as working memory (WM). There is also substantial evidence suggesting that emotional abnormalities are a major clinical concern in this illness, such as motivation and hedonic pursuits. However, a more complete understanding of the neural correlates behind these emotional deficits and the interaction between affective and cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and psychiatric illness more broadly is still lacking. A major objective of this work is to better understand the neural systems underlying affective pathology in schizophrenia and the interaction of these circuits with those involved in cognitive operations such as working memory. This arm of research also employs functional connectivity approaches to better understand alterations in neural system both during resting state and task contexts.

Representative publications:

Anticevic, A., Brumbaugh, M.S., Winkler, A.M., Lombardo, L.E., Barrett, J., Corlett, P.R., Kober, H., Gruber, J., Repovs, G., Cole, M.W., Krystal, J.H., Pearlson, G.D., & Glahn, D.C. (In Press). Global prefrontal and fronto-amygdala dysconnectivity in bipolar I disorder with psychosis history. Biological Psychiatry. [PDF]

Anticevic, A., & Corlett, P.R. (2012). Cognition-emotion dysinteraction in schizophrenia. Frontiers in Emotion Science. Frontiers Special Topic. [PDF]

Anticevic, A., Van Snellenberg, J. X., & Barch, D.M. (2012). Neurobiology of emotional dysfunction in schizophrenia: New directions revealed through meta-analyses. Biological Psychiatry. 71(6):e23-4. [PDF]

Anticevic, A., Repovs, G., & Barch, D.M. (2011). Emotion effects on attention, amygdala activation and functional connectivity in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin. [Epub ahead of print]. [PDF]

Anticevic, A.*, Van Snellenberg, J.X.*, Cohen, R.E., Repovs, G., Dowd, E.C., & Barch, D.M. (2010). Amygdala recruitment in schizophrenia in response to aversive emotional material: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. Schizophrenia Bulletin. 38(3):608-21. [PDF] *Shared 1st authorship w/Jared Van Snellenberg. [PDF]