Mastering meltdowns and big feelings with Associate Professor Erin Gonzalez Discover practical, evidence-based ways to help children manage big emotions.

“Gentle” doesn’t have to mean “no boundaries.” Associate Prof. Erin Gonzalez of explains how children with big emotions often need more structure, clear limits, and strategic attention – alongside warmth & empathy.​
Blog: https://bit.ly/3N0sSct.

Symptom-specific links between internalizing problems and functional connectivity in adolescents: a network analysis - European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Previous fMRI studies have documented links between internalizing problems in youth and brain functional connectivity of the default (DN), frontoparietal (FP), and salience (SA) networks. Characterize...

Very excited to share that our paper “Symptom-specific links between internalizing problems and functional connectivity in adolescents: a network analysis” has been published in European Child & Adolescence Psychiatry doi.org/10.1007/s007...

Congrats!!!!

Normative amygdala fMRI response during emotional processing as a trait of depressive symptoms in the UK Biobank - PubMed The amygdala response to negative stimuli was associated with an individual's risk of recurrence of depressive episodes, and AD treatment reduced these associations. This study highlights the relevance of amygdala reactivity as a trait, but not a state biomarker for (recurrent) depression. Moreover, …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41059632/

So proud of @meganspurney.bsky.social and team for this exciting new paper from my lab!

Younger adolescents' working memory performance benefits more from reward than older teens and young adults.

This occurs even though all ages report similar preferences about reward value and cognitive demand.

Amygdala reactivity to threat, negative facial perception, and risk of future psychiatric hospitalizations: a longitudinal study in major depressive and bipolar disorders Neuropsychopharmacology - Amygdala reactivity to threat, negative facial perception, and risk of future psychiatric hospitalizations: a longitudinal study in major depressive and bipolar disorders

This study identified biomarkers that predict 1-year risk of hospitalization for individuals with major MDD and BD

Results show amygdala hyperactivity & a faster recognition of negative facial expressions were significant predictors 😠

For those of you who are interested, I just pushed a draft of the final chapter of Better Code, Better Science: bettercodebetterscience.github.io/book/ - now I just have to go back and rewrite the AI coding chapter which is already outdated just five months after writing it!

Interesting to see how our lab's recruitment sources have shifted over the last 3 years (see plot).

FB/Instagram used to pull 100+ responses/month, now much less productive. Methods like flyers and mailing lists remain steady.

Curious if any other labs are seeing this or have found new methods?

Acute stress induces changes in epigenome-wide DNA methylation Neuropsychopharmacology - Acute stress induces changes in epigenome-wide DNA methylation

Analysis of 122 healthy individuals revealed that specific epigenetic markers in genes related to thyroid function and synaptic processes predict how strongly a person reacts to stress 😰

A transdiagnostic group exercise intervention for mental health outpatients in Germany (ImPuls): results of a pragmatic, multisite, block-randomised, phase 3 controlled trial ImPuls is an efficacious transdiagnostic adjunctive treatment in outpatient mental health care. Our findings suggest that exercise therapy should be implemented in outpatient mental health care as an ...

#TeamWolf super cool - www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Higher physical activity is associated with reduced odds of depressive symptoms among university students: A meta-analysis of over 66,000 participants - PubMed Depression is highly prevalent among university students, who also exhibit low levels of physical activity. Although physical activity is associated with a lower likelihood of depressive symptoms, the magnitude of its effect in this population has not been systematically assessed. This study reviewe …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41621452/

Subcomponents of reward processing in adolescent anhedonia - Nature Reviews Psychology Understanding the link between anhedonia and reward processing in adolescence can enhance mental health interventions specifically for young people. In this Review, Ma et al. examine the evidence on c...

Subcomponents of reward processing in adolescent anhedonia

Review by Xueqing Ma, Angad Sahni & Ciara McCabe

go.nature.com/4kvqfw7

Females have shorter scalp-to-cortex distances and receive stronger TMS electrical fields: Implications for clinical treatment Neuropsychopharmacology - Females have shorter scalp-to-cortex distances and receive stronger TMS electrical fields: Implications for clinical treatment

Biological sex impacts TMS intensity because ♀️ typically have shorter scalp-to-cortex distances than ♂️

While these differences are widespread, they are absent in the motor cortex—the site usually used to determine clinical dosage

Check out our new paper evaluating the performance of five brain age algorithms in two population-based cohorts of youth 🧠

@ohbmofficial.bsky.social

New tour de force from @giuliaabaracc.bsky.social. Everything you ever wanted to know about brain signal variability! 🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by James D. Kent, Alejandro de la Vega, et al:

Neurosynth Compose: A web-based platform for flexible and reproducible neuroimaging meta-analysis

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Dense Phenotyping of Human Brain Network Organization Using Precision fMRI The advent of noninvasive imaging methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) transformed cognitive neuroscience, providing insights into large-scale brain networks and their link to cog...

My review with @caterinagratton.bsky.social is (apparently) open access for those who couldn't see it before:

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

We discuss individual differences in brain network organization and how to home in on and talk about commonalities in the face of such differences

Hierarchical Phenotyping of Psychopathology: Implications and Opportunities for Precision Psychiatry When Biology Could Be Associated With Both Symptoms and Syndromes As psychiatry increasingly embraces precision medicine principles, there have been efforts to characterize the specificity of biology-psychopathology associations (e.g., is biology associated with syn...

Excited for the 1st lab paper to be live @biologicalpsych.bsky.social !

@emilyrperkins.bsky.social @keananjoyner.bsky.social and I discuss testing biology as simultaneous + unique predictors of different levels of psychopathology hierarchies 1/7🧵

www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

Built a pipeline that automatically runs each morning and pulls new papers + preprints, merges them with CV (recent pubs + grants), and prepares an LLM-ready summary of emerging research directions and relevant funding opportunities.
First pass, please improve.
OSF: lnkd.in/ev3T2ibn

Holy cow. This will be super useful for accelerating the development of all kinds of projects and methods from UKB—huge kudos to everyone in this team that made it happen (and the broader UKB team too)!

What happens at night? Differentiating within-day and overnight affective inertia Affective inertia – the degree to which affect persists over time – has, for example, been linked with neuroticism, depressive symptoms, and increased distress. The typical statistical approaches m...

Affective inertia, the association between affect at two timepoints, was stronger overnight than it was within a given day. So if you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, you likely fell asleep on it too. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

👀Looking ahead to the new year?

New research published in Affective Science (Blaxton et al., 2025) finds that anticipating future positive events is associated with reduced stressor related negative affect, both in the present and on subsequent days.

Access here: doi.org/10.1007/s427...

Early-life neural correlates of behavioral inhibition and anxiety risk Neuropsychopharmacology - Early-life neural correlates of behavioral inhibition and anxiety risk

This recent review highlights behavioral inhibition (BI) & maternal anxiety in infancy as anxiety risk factors; infants w/ BI or maternal stress exposure have altered patterns in attention & control systems, predicting greater anxiety in adolescence

Transdiagnostic prevention in youth mental health, Part I: rationale, shared risk factors Neuropsychopharmacology - Transdiagnostic prevention in youth mental health, Part I: rationale, shared risk factors

In part 1 of a 2-part series, this recent review summarizes converging evidence for a transdiagnostic model of mental illness, emphasizing shared genetic, environmental, neurobiological, & psychological risk factors that emerge early in life

Calling all Affective Neurosci, basic, clinical, animal, mineral & otherwise: SFN's accepting proposals for symposia @ the 2026 DC meeting. Please consider reaching out to your pals &, maybe even dropping a line to someone you admire from afar, & organizing a submission. www.sfn.org/meetings/neu...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ajay D. Halai, Marta M. Correia, et al:

Comparing the effect of multi-gradient echo and multi-band fMRI during a semantic task

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Capturing dynamic fear experiences in naturalistic contexts: An ecologically valid fMRI signature integrating brain activation and connectivity Enhancing our understanding of how the brain constructs conscious emotional experiences within dynamic real-life contexts necessitates ecologically valid neural models. Here, we present evidence delin...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Inferring intrinsic neural timescales using optimal control theory www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hidden Markov Models
Speaking of HMMs, really enjoyed this paper on dynamics underlying resting state and other conditions. The idea of a baseline state from which excursions lead to more integrated states is really interesting.
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
#neuroskyence

A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation - Nature NextBrain is an open source, probabilistic atlas of the entire human brain, assembled using artificial-intelligence-enabled registration and segmentation methods to reconstruct the multimodal serial h...

This is 🤯

All publicly available. Looks like an amazing new histology-based human probabilistic atlas and parcellation tool.

#neuroskyence #mri #brainmapping

A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation | Nature share.google/5AD0iW7pxgb4...