In this interview, Claudia Gonzalez, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Thompson Rivers University, shares how her research uses neuroimaging to study neurocognitive aging. #fNIRS plays a central role in this work. Using the Brite, her lab investigates brain–behavior relationships across diverse populations, while also integrating other techniques such as eye tracking, #fMRI, and neurostimulation.

🔗 Read the full interview here https://zurl.co/Xtmon

This article examines how genetic risk for anhedonia is linked to distinct patterns of brain activity during reward processing, using polygenic risk scores and fMRI during a monetary incentive delay task. Findings suggest lower activation in reward-related regions during anticipation and feedback phases in those with higher genetic risk.

This piece is of interest to psychology readers because it connects genetic factors with neural mechanisms of motivation and pleasure, illustrating how biology can shape cognitive and affective processes involved in reward.

Article Title: Genetic risk for anhedonia linked to altered brain activity during reward processing

Link to PsyPost Article: ift dot tt/THsvVta

Copy and paste broken link above into your browser and replace "dot" with "." for link to work. We have to do it this way to avoid displaying copyrighted images.

#genetics #anhedonia #rewardprocessing #fMRI #psychobiology

I know I keep asking this but how can #Neuroscientists say that #fMRI lets you look at "neural activity patterns"?

The same BOLD signal, in a specific voxel, could be generated from an infinite combination of excitatory and inhibitory neurons being more or less active (and that's not even talking about glial cells). How could similar BOLD signals mean that the underlying neural activity patterns were similar?

I must be missing something, please explain 🙏

#Neuroscience

We don't think in words (or numbers). 🧐

https://philosophics.blog/2026/01/19/thinking-without-words-and-other-heresies/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

🎧 https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Zrt6gbJU8od7Sr00MYaTx?si=9k-th4RZRiW_XNi5Tla8MA

#Language #philosophy #cognitivescience #fmri #science #research #words #cognition #chess #fedorenko #blog #podcast #soduko #blog #podcast #perception #apologies

I've now finished Chapter 2 of "ADHD 2.0" (#Hallowell and #Ratey 2021). I've had some hard things to say about this book so far: its #extranormativity, its tone of pontificating certainty, its overconfident reliance on dubious #fMRI findings, the appalling glimpse of support for #ABA in a skimmed later chapter. But in the second half of Chapter 2, I've found something really interesting and potentially helpful, something that rings true from my experience, quite apart from any #fMRI findings.

The authors point out a way that #anxiety and #depression can arise purely from the #attentional-focus problems definitive of #ADHD, and NOT from the cognitive errors to which #CBT attributes such problems. The idea is that the obsessiveness of #ADHD, when focused on anything negative, creates a self-sustaining, self-amplifying vortex of negativity. Their description makes it sound almost like a bad trip on #psychedelics. The solution is NOT to try to debunk the negative thoughts that make up the vortex, #CBT-style; indeed, that approach might make things worse by reinforcing the focus on the negative thoughts. Instead, try to refocus on — indeed, obsess about! — something positive instead.

Indeed, #anxiety and (especially) #depression were my own psychiatric diagnoses (not counting bipolar disorder, which later psychiatrists rejected decisively as a misdiagnosis). #CBT was worse than useless. Instead, I got help from antidepressant drugs — and I don't think it was an accident that the best one for me turned out to be Wellbutrin (bupropion), which doubles as a third-line #ADHD drug. And the subjective experience of depression, and of recovery from it, matched Hallowell and Ratey's attentional account, rather than the error-correcting story #CBT tells. I suspect that if there were such a thing as "attentional psychotherapy", I might have benefited from getting that instead of #CBT.

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@autistics