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By Elaine Walker, Ph.D., Sandy Goulding, MPH, MA., Arthur Ryan, MA., Carrie Holtzman, MA., Allison MacDonald, MA. Elaine Walker is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Emory University .  She leads a research laboratory that is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health  to study risk factors for major mental illness.  Her research is focused on child and adolescent development and the brain changes that are associated with adolescence. The identification of risk factors for illness is receiving increased attention in all fields of medicine, especially cardiology, oncology, neurology and psychiatry.  There are three potential benefits to identifying risk factors. The first is to reduce morbidity by reducing risk exposure. The second is to enhance opportunities for targeting preventive treatment toward those who are most likely to benefit. Finally, the identification of risk factors can shed light o...

Regular readers of this blog know we often touch on issues about law and neuroscience: whether  it’s about crime , the lie detection seminar Emory hosted last spring , or work on ethics and free will . (Also, spoiler alert, neurolaw is to be the focus of our next journal club meeting- please come!) The field of neurolaw, which is exactly what it sounds like- neuroscience and law, has been growing rapidly over the past decade. Most of the discussions in neurolaw focus on how, and if, new discoveries in neuroscience will affect legal definitions of responsibility and culpability by changing the way we understand how the decision to commit a crime is made. However- in the past year there have been several studies looking at another side of brains the courtroom: that is, the neuroscience of judgment itself. These studies are exploring how people consider evidence and how they balance moral and ethical decisions against empathic and sympathetic reactions. This new work opens up new aven...

"Few medicines, in the history of pharmaceuticals, have been greeted with as much exultation as a green-and-white pill containing 20 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride — the chemical we know as Prozac" wrote Columbia University Assistant Professor of Medicine Siddhartha Mukherjee in a recent New York Times editorial on antidepressant efficacy. As Dr. Mukherjee points out, the rise of antidepressants over the past several decades has been swift and staggering. A recent CDC study found that antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed drug for Americans between 18 and 44 years of age, with 11% of Americans over the age of twelve utilizing such medications. Original image from the Global Information Exchange Network In light of such overwhelming usage rates, one would think that pharmaceutical companies would be falling over themselves to invent the next antidepressant superdrug. As it turns out, however, exactly the opposite trend is emerging. Pharmaceutical giants Ast...

How has research on schizophrenia recently changed? In the past twenty years, schizophrenia research has turned its attention to the symptomatic period preceding a transition to the first episode of psychosis 1 . In an attempt to prevent or at least dampen the cognitive, social, and psychological deterioration associated with the development of schizophrenia, research has identified a host of symptoms now described as “prodromal symptoms” to schizophrenia 2 . The prodrome is the period of subclinical symptoms that develop prior to the onset of an illness, such as visual aura leading up to the onset of a migraine. With schizophrenia, these symptoms have a diverse range of manifestations from depression to grandiosity (an unrealistic sense of superiority), have no definite linear progression, and can only be retrospectively identified as prodromal schizophrenia once a transition has occurred. Until the patient develops full onset schizophrenia, symptoms can only be accurately described ...