A 244-person functional MRI study found no significant evidence that ventral striatum activation during reward anticipation works as an endophenotype — a measurable trait used to connect inherited risk with diagnosed illness — for bipolar and psychotic disorders. Research Highlights The registered hypothesis failed: Barendse et al. found no significant ventral striatum reward-anticipation difference among …
A 2026 ABCD cohort preprint involving 10,112 youth found that childhood poverty strengthened the link between cumulative early-life adversity and later behavioral problems; among poverty-exposed youth, inhibitory-control fMRI profiles split children into higher-vulnerability and buffered pathways. Research Highlights Poverty steepened adversity risk: In 10,112 ABCD youth, childhood poverty amplified the baseline early-life-adversity-to-CBCL Total Problems slope …
A 2026 ABCD stop-signal fMRI study found that group-level cognitive-control brain signals often failed to describe within-person brain dynamics: across 16 comparisons, between-person and within-person associations diverged, and several reversed direction.1 The practical warning is narrow but sharp: a brain pattern that separates people in a group may be the wrong map for explaining how …
A 2026 fMRI study found language and theory-of-mind activation already separated in 54 child sessions from ages 3-9, with strict child overlap near zero in the left superior temporal lobe (Dice 0.015) and no evidence that the 2 systems disentangled with age.1 The result pushes against a simple developmental story in which language grows out …
A 2026 Singapore birth-cohort preprint found a conditional childhood-anxiety signal: the cord-blood DNA methylation component predicted less age-13 anxiety only in boys in the low DMN-limbic trajectory group from ages 4.5 to 10.5 years. The paper is useful for mapping developmental risk biology, but it is not a screening test and it does not show …
The endogenous opioid system has been a candidate target for novel anxiety treatments, but a 2026 placebo-controlled crossover fMRI study in 38 healthy volunteers ran opposite the hypothesis: instead of increasing threat-related distress and amygdala reactivity, 50 mg oral naltrexone reduced subjective distress during cognitive reappraisal (p = 0.044, d = 0.57) and shifted ventromedial …
A 2026 task-based fMRI study of 91 young adults separated misophonia from hyperacusis inside the same “sound sensitivity” experiment: misophonia-containing groups showed visual association cortex and ACC-visual network changes during unpleasant sounds, while key hyperacusis contrasts showed weaker salience-control connectivity than misophonia.1 The scan data support separating trigger-specific sound aversion from loudness-driven sound intolerance, while …