1999 — 2003 |
Yee-Bradbury, Cindy M. |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Attentional and Affective Modulation in Schizophrenia @ University of California Los Angeles |
0.958 |
2003 — 2007 |
Yee-Bradbury, Cindy M. |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Stress and Emotional Reactivity @ University of California Los Angeles
Although theory and research on schizophrenia suggest that stress contributes to its etiology, expression and course, the processes that lead from vulnerability for schizophrenia to an episode of illness remain poorly understood. Fundamental questions persist concerning the consequences of stress exposure, patient characteristics that predict sensitivity to stress, and the impact of different types of psychosocial stressors. This research draws from health psychology and developments in the basic science of emotion to address two broad goals: to specify stress and emotional reactivity in individuals vulnerable for schizophrenia, and to clarify the mechanisms that influence when and how these patients react to stress. By focusing on patients in the prodromal and first episode phases of illness, there is the opportunity to examine how stress and emotional reactivity might contribute to the onset and progression of illness and to functional outcome. Comparisons between patients across early and chronic phases of illness can provide some indication as to when some abnormalities might develop. The specific aims are to determine: the behavioral and physiological consequences of exposure to psychosocial stress in the laboratory among individuals vulnerable for schizophrenia, the relationship between the stress response and symptom onset or change during the initial course of illness, the contribution of stress reactivity to functional outcome, and the potential pathways that might account for sensitivity to perceived psychological threat by characterizing emotional reactivity and motivational state. A secondary aim is to examine the influence of various psychosocial factors on stress reactivity (e.g., life stress, coping, social support) to better understand the stress response observed in the lab. The experimental contexts will be translated from basic research and consist of a well-characterized social stressor task and various versions of the affective modulation of the startle blink reflex paradigm. In each instance, psychophysiological measures will be used to index stress, emotional reactivity and motivational state. Efforts to understand the interrelationship between schizophrenia, stress, and functional outcome are critical, as they will lead to an improved understanding of the contribution of stress to the onset and course of schizophrenia and to the development of interventions that can target areas of difficulty in work and social situations.
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0.958 |
2010 — 2014 |
Yee-Bradbury, Cindy M. |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Project 4- Stress and Emotional Reactivity @ University of California Los Angeles
PROIECT 4: STRESS AND EMOTIONAL REACTIVITY Memory deficits, attentional impairment, and disrupted emotional processing are prominent among the core features ofschizophrenia. Although each of these areas has been studied extensively, little research examines their interrelationships or influence on one another. This is an important gap because effective functioning in work, school, and social domains are likely to demand coordination of neurocognitive and affective processes. Work activities, for instance, may require performance of complex tasks while under stress, whereas management of dynamic social situations often occurs in emotionally engaging or emotionally significant contexts. Emanating from our general finding that, motivational systems associated with emotional responding are intact in schizophrenia, irrespective of phase of illness, whereas stress reactivity is heightened and stress recovery may be delayed, the broad goals ofthis research are to determine the malleability of memory when emotion-eliciting images are introduced and to examine the influence of stress on memory, attention and functional outcome. The experimental contexts will be translated from basic research and consist ofa well-characterized social stressor task along with two established paradigms for assessing memory. A multilevel integrative approach will be used to examine relevant behavioral, neural, neuroendocnne, and psychophysiological systems, with the aim of refining key behavioral indicators and biological markers associated with schizophrenia. Efforts to understand the interrelationships among memory, attention, emotion and stress are likely critical in defining the developmental trajectory of schizophrenia, which will be accomplished by assessing patients in the prodromal and first-episode phases of illness. Comparisons between schizophrenia patients across early and chronic phases of illness, in turn, can shed light on the temporal course of when these abnormalities develop. Improved understanding ofthe potentially beneficial influence of emotion on memory and the disruptive impact of stress will assist in the development of interventions that can target specific areas of difficulty in occupational and social situations.
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0.958 |
2017 |
Miller, Gregory Allen Nuechterlein, Keith H [⬀] Yee-Bradbury, Cindy M. |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Enhancing Cognitive Training Through Exercise Following a First Schizophrenia Episode @ University of California Los Angeles
PROJECT SUMMARY Cognitive deficits remain a major untreated problem in schizophrenia. The proposed research in this Competitive Revision application aims to examine some of the neurobiological processes by which cognitive training can rectify the pervasive cognitive deficits that characterize schizophrenia during the early course of illness. Cognitive training (CT) programs hold considerable promise for patients with schizophrenia, and recent research with animals and healthy humans demonstrates that combining CT with aerobic exercise (CT+E) can promote neuroplasticity and markedly enhance the effects of CT on cognition. However, the neurobiological mechanisms by which CT and CT+E bring about improvements in cognition among individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia remain poorly understood. We exploit recent advances in understanding auditory inhibitory processing dysfunction in schizophrenia to evaluate how CT might generate improvements in clinical ratings of attention and in performance measures of attention, working memory, and speed of processing. Specifically, we address the possibility that enhancement of early perceptual processing during CT serves to improve clinical and cognitive functioning in schizophrenia by fostering normalization of brain activation and connectivity implicated in auditory inhibitory processing. Other goals of the study include evaluating whether auditory inhibitory processing at baseline assessment predicts improvements in attentional functioning after CT and determining whether CT+E yields stronger effects than CT alone when impairments in auditory inhibitory processing are relatively severe at baseline. Neural mechanisms will be examined by obtaining electrophysiological (ERP and EEG) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) measures before and after first- episode schizophrenia patients receive either CT or CT+E through random assignment as part of the clinical trial funded by the parent grant (1 R01 MH110544-01). Clarification of the dynamic interactions between brain regions and their association with such complex behaviors as attention and working memory is an essential step towards developing more effective interventions to facilitate patients' functional outcomes.
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0.958 |