MentalHealthDaily

Teen Anxiety and Anhedonia Split Reward-Uncertainty fMRI

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of adolescent brain regions with overlapping reward and default-mode network glow, conveying uncertainty processing.

A 2026 fMRI study of 84 medication-free adolescents found that reward uncertainty had its own phase-specific brain pattern: anxiety, depression, and anhedonia separated across different task phases and brain systems.1 The clearest clinical split was narrow but useful: anxiety tracked blunted striatum/thalamus activation during uncertain non-reward expectancy, while depression and anhedonia tracked higher visual/default-network activation …

Striatal Dopamine Drops From Psychosis to Schizophrenia Remission

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of a brain with the striatum highlighted and dopamine synthesis pathways visualized, representing longitudinal PET imaging in schizophrenia.

The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia is the field’s longest-running mechanistic story, and most of its supporting evidence has been cross-sectional. A 2026 longitudinal PET study by Schulz and colleagues followed the same 28 patients across psychosis and early remission.1 Research Highlights The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia is the field’s longest-running mechanistic story. Cross-sectional 18F-DOPA PET …