Neuropsychologia
July 28, 2026
Feng Chen, Weizhe Xu, Changye Li et al.
Formal thought disorder (FTD), a hallmark of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, manifests as incoherent speech and poses challenges for clinical assessment. Traditional clinical rating scales, though validated, are resource-intensive and lack scalability. Automated speech recognition (ASR) allows for objective quantification of linguistic and temporal features of speech, offering scalable...
Psychopathology
June 15, 2026
Ary Gadelha, Bernardo Haguiara, Pedro Gabriel Lorencetti et al.
Contemporary psychiatry has advanced by decomposing behavior into discrete constructs, improving reliability but fragmenting conceptual foundations. Excessive comorbidity, blurred diagnostic boundaries, and the reification of operational criteria have created a gap between empirical data and the understanding of mental life as a coherent, lived whole - the modern paradox of "more data, less...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
2026
Lena Palaniyappan
Biological psychiatry faces a significant epistemic challenge in identifying valid objects for mechanistic research. Both diagnostic constructs and individual symptoms are abstract symbols defined circularly within a closed hermeneutic system, creating a symbol grounding problem that hinders the discovery of biophysical substrates (biomarkers). I argue that progress requires an epistemological...
JAMA Psychiatry
April 9, 2025
Jessica Ahrens, Sabrina D. Ford, Betsy Schaefer et al.
This cohort study investigates the association between cannabis and the midbrain dopamine pathway involved in psychosis.
Journal of Psychopharmacology
February 16, 2025
Sachin Ahuja, Farida Zaher, Lena Palaniyappan
4 citations
Psychoactive substances used for recreational purposes have mind-altering effects, but systematic evaluation of these effects is largely limited to self-reports. Automated analysis of expressed language (speech and written text) using natural language processing (NLP) tools can provide objective readouts of mental states. In this pre-registered systematic review, we investigate findings from...
Schizophrenia Research
September 1, 2023
Angelica M Silva, Roberto Limongi, Michael Mackinley et al.
49 citations
In the clinical linguistics of schizophrenia, syntactic complexity has received much attention. In this study, we address whether syntactic complexity deteriorates within the six months following the first episode of psychosis in those who develop a diagnosis of schizophrenia. We collected data from a cohort of twenty-six first-episode psychosis and 12 healthy control subjects using the Thought...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
March 22, 2023
Eric J Tan, Iris E C Sommer, Lena Palaniyappan
This special issue of DISCOURSE in Psychosis focuses on the role of language in psychosis, including the relationships between formal thought disorder and conceptual disorganization, with speech and language markers and the neural mechanisms underlying these features in psychosis. It also covers the application of computational techniques in the study of language in psychosis, as well as the...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
January 26, 2020
Paul Frewen, M. Schroeter, Giuseppe Riva et al.
We review neuroimaging research investigating self-referential processing (SRP), that is, how we respond to stimuli that reference ourselves, prefaced by a lexical-thematic analysis of words indicative of "self-feelings". We consider SRP as occurring verbally (V-SRP) and non-verbally (NV-SRP), both in the controlled, "top-down" form of introspective and interoceptive tasks, respectively, as...
bioRxiv
November 2, 2019
Roberto Limongi, P. Jeon, Michael Mackinley et al.
preprint
In the dysconnection hypothesis, psychosis is caused by NMDA hypofunction resulting in aberrant network connectivity. Combining a cognitive-control task, functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested this hypothesis in the salience network of 20 first-episode psychosis (FEP) and 20 healthy control (HC) subjects. Across groups, glutamate...
Biological Psychiatry
2019
Kaustubh Supekar, Weidong Cai, R. Krishnadas et al.
BACKGROUND Schizophrenia is a highly disabling psychiatric disorder characterized by a range of positive "psychosis" symptoms. However, the neurobiology of psychosis and associated systems-level disruptions in the brain remain poorly understood. Here, we test an aberrant saliency model of psychosis, which posits that dysregulated dynamic cross-network interactions among the salience network...