The primary purpose of this study is to explore a better way of measuring social anhedonia with tasks designed to measure how individuals respond to social rewards and to examine whether brief sessions of psychosocial training can change performance on those tasks. Social anhedonia refers to an inability to feel pleasure in interpersonal relationships and/or a lack of interest in pursuing social interactions. Although social anhedonia is frequent in psychosis, there is a lack of reliable behavioral measures that also engage relevant parts of the brain. This project will evaluate the role of social reward learning in social anhedonia using a perturbation-based neuroimaging approach. 

The primary purpose of this study is to characterize a pattern of cognitive performance across multiple domains during adulthood in severe mental illness. Cognitive dysfunction is prevalent in several severe mental illnesses. Although cognitive dysfunction is thought to be related to poor outcome and the underlying pathophysiology of these disorders, the developmental course of cognitive dysfunction during adulthood is poorly understood. This project will assess cognitive processing utilizing behavioral testing and questionnaires. 

The primary purpose of this study is to explore the role of a specific part of the brain in treatment resistant depression using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The World Health Organization reports that Major Depressive Disorder is one of the most common causes of disability in the world. Accumulating evidence suggests the lateral habenula is a key brain region in the pathophysiology of depression; this project will assess neural activations to punishment-related cues in treatment-resistant depression using fMRI.

The purpose of this study is to examine social cognitive processes and motivation relevant to community functioning in people with HIV. While neurocognitive impairments are prevalent in, and contribute to poor qualify of life of people with HIV, few studies examined the extent to social cogntiive processes and motivations are affected in HIV. This project aims to characterize social cognitive processes and motivation at both behavioral and neural levels and extamin the extent to which social cognition affects quality of life in the context of other key determinants of fucntioning (e.g., stigma).  

Although schizophrenia spectrum disorders are generally considered to be neurodevelopmental in orgin, emerging evidence suggests that aberrant brain aging may also occurr. Becuase this concept has only recently reemerged, much less is known about phenotypical and brain age-related trajectories in schizophrneia spectrum disorders and their underlying mechanisms. This project will emolit state-of-art multimodal neuroimaging techniques and tailored cognitive tasks to systematically evaluate age-related changes in brain structure, function and bioenegetics in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and community controls.