Nicolas L Camacho

I’ve spent the last 8 years(!) working from the position that HiTOP relies too much on analyses of traditional diagnoses, baking in limitations of the DSM, and that we need to move to symptom-level analyses to fix it

It turns out that rebuilding HiTOP from the ground up doesn’t change much 💀

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Thanks Corinne! 😄

Absolutely honored to be part of this brilliant cohort! Looking forward to growing in new & exciting ways this year thru the amazing clinical opportunities Pitt/WPH has to offer ☺️🧠

If you, or anyone you know, would like to chat about internship & applications (at Pitt or elsewhere), plz DM me! ✉️

Spread the word!! DANS 2025 registration is opening very soon…take a look at some of our amazing speakers! You can present a poster you will present or have presented elsewhere…the goal is to foster discussion. Check dans.pitt.edu for updates!

I will be interviewing for a clinical psychology PhD student in the Precision Psychopathology + Dynamic Immunopsychiatry Lab this interview cycle.

Please see our website for more info about what we do + share with applicants you think might be a good fit.

share.google/uJRyS3NY9Kdo...

Infant EEG microstate dynamics relate to fine-grained patterns of infant attention during naturalistic play with caregivers | PNAS As infants grow, they develop greater attentional control during interactions with others, shifting from patterns of attention primarily driven by ...

So happy to have published the fourth & final paper of my dissertation - check it out! Infant EEG microstate dynamics relate to fine-grained patterns of infant attention during naturalistic play with caregivers www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint! 🚨
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Traditional categorial frameworks, like the DSM and the ICD, have several key limitations, including heterogeneity within diagnoses, comorbidity issues, arbitrary categorical boundaries, and limited clinical application and utility.
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Announcing.....a new edition of Uncensored Advice for getting into grad school! Now with some info on emerging opps for a masters in psychology! Check it out for FREE: mitch.web.unc.edu/wp-content/u....
#psychology
#PsychSky
#mentalhealth
#PsychSciSky
#ClinPsych

The current official HiTOP model - a hierarchy of dimensional psychopathology constructs ranging in breadth from superspectra at the top down to individual signs, symptoms, and maladaptive behaviours at the bottom (as well as a list of disorders and related constructs that are linked to the subfactors and spectra)

Can you help me build a list of things that are (or might be) wrong in the current HiTOP model while I'm sick and recovering on the couch? Some of my top hunches are:

-My PhD was wrong (☹️) and low sexual function shouldn’t be neatly nested under internalizing

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New paper out in #nature #mentalhealth from my work applying machine learning to identify which early adversities are most important for predicting mental health risk in children - results might surprise you!

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

How measurement noise limits the accuracy of brain-behaviour predictions - Nature Communications Our ability to identify associations between behaviour and brain imaging is important for uncovering markers of cognition and disease. Here, the authors illustrate the importance of the reliability of...

The limiting factor for MRI based prediction of behavioral traits may be neither the imaging nor the pipeline or learning algorith but rather the reliability of the target phenotypes

Thought provoking work my Martin Gell et al:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

P.S. you can "target" loadings to whatever value you want - I'm fairly certain it doesn't only have to be 0, at least in Mplus. Some packages in R may only allow targeting to 0.

These "targeted loadings" would then be biased towards 0 without being fixed. You can allow some loadings to be freely estimated. And this should work beyond just a measurement model! Mplus is probably your best bet here (that I know of). Hope this helps!

Hi David! Another option that seems accessible is Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) with a Target Rotation. Typically, in this approach, one would specify "targeted" loadings that are expected to be close to 0.

New pre-print that has been a long time coming! A pre-registered replication + extension of our past work on hierarchical inflammatory phenotypes of depression, with, imo, much stronger assessments of both inflammation and depression symptoms 1/X

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Please apply and share with prospective grad students interested in learning more about Duke's Psych & Neuro department!

✨️Application deadline is August 11th ✨️

We hope this work will elevate the study of the role of altered neural reward processing in the experience and expression of early childhood depressive symptoms and highlight the importance of improving our developmental understanding of depressive disorders 🧠

Further, we extend this work by providing longitudinal data suggestive of a specific association between right caudate reward reactivity and future elevations in depressive symptom severity in children.

These findings conceptually replicate prior findings in the left amygdala and provide further evidence of links between depressive symptoms and caudate and mPFC reward reactivity, particularly in early childhood.

However, only right caudate reactivity to reward outcomes at baseline (negatively) associated with child depressive symptom severity one year later.

We found that left amygdala reactivity to salient outcomes (i.e., reward & loss vs. neutral) and right caudate and right mPFC reactivity to reward outcomes (i.e., reward vs. neutral) negatively associated with concurrent child depressive symptom severity.

During an fMRI scan, children played a simple guessing task intended to elicit responses to rewards and losses relative to a neutral condition. Caregivers reported on their own and their children's depressive symptom severity at baseline and one year later.

🚨NEW PREPRINT🚨

Mike and I conducted a conceptual replication and extension of prior work linking neural reward-related reactivity in specific brain regions-of-interest to concurrent and later depressive symptom severity in young children.

It is a FREE, in-person opportunity for prospective PhD students to learn more about Duke through seminars, workshops, and conversations with graduate students and faculty. Please complete the following application by the August 11, 2024 deadline and direct all questions to pnarc@duke.edu

Duke Psychology & Neuroscience’s Future Blue Devil Days 2024 aims to give individuals who want to learn more about the department’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, both in culture and research, a first look at graduate student life at Duke University.

You can access the full accepted manuscript here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

We are currently working on follow-up studies on the factor structure of the PFC-S to improve a multidimensional understanding of early emerging depressive symptoms and advance the identification of neurobiological and environmental correlates

Dimensions of Depressive Symptoms in Young Children: Factor Analysis of the Preschool Feelings Checklist–Scale - Nicolas L. Camacho, Carina H. Fowler, Michael S. Gaffrey, 2024 The current study is an investigation of the dimensionality of the Preschool Feelings Checklist–Scale (PFC-S), a caregiver-report questionnaire of early childho...

🌟NEW PAPER ALERT🌟

In my ✨1st first-author paper✨ published at Assessment, we explored the factor structure of a measure of depressive symptoms in young children, identifying age & sex invariant factors related to anhedonia, emotion & behavior dysregulation, and guilt-sadness doi.org/m6rg

I know the feeling 🥲 experienced similar challenges when trying to decide between glmmTMB and glmmPQL. Not unlike trying to identify influential cases on a set of multiply imputed datasets!