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An fMRI and behavioural experiment investigating the role of implicit psychological conflicts vs explicitly recognised maladaptive interpersonal relationships in emotional egocentricity bias and symptom generation in patients with disordered eating, patients with functional motor disorders and healthy control participants.

Psychotherapy and Touch: Occurrence of Touch in Therapy and Traits that Predict Psychotherapy Uptake and Positive Experiences of Touch During Therapy

Disturbed interoception (i.e., the sensing, awareness, and regulation of internal body signals) has been found across several mental disorders, leading to the development of interoception-based interventions (IBIs). Searching PubMed and PsycINFO, we conducted the first systematic review of randomised-controlled trials (RCTs) investigating the efficacy of behavioural IBIs at improving interoception and target symptoms of mental disorders in comparison to a non-interoception-based control condition (preregistration at PROSPERO: CRD42021297993). Thirty-one RCTs fulfilled inclusion criteria. Across all studies, a pattern emerged with 20 (64.5%) RCTs demonstrating IBIs to be more efficacious at improving interoception compared to control conditions. The most promising results were found for post-traumatic stress disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia and substance use disorders. Regarding symptom improvement, the evidence was inconclusive. The IBIs were heterogenous in their approach to improving interoception. The quality of RCTs was moderate to good. In conclusion, IBIs are potentially efficacious at improving interoception for some mental disorders. In terms of symptom reduction, the evidence is less promising. Future research on the efficacy of IBIs is needed.

Background and aims Epistemic trust involves social judgements about the reliability, relevance and value of information conveyed by others. Developmental psychopathologists have recently proposed that entrenched epistemic mistrust, which may be partly rooted in adverse childhood experiences, is a key factor in the emergence of mental disorders. This theory, which is consistent with developmental data, has significant social and clinical implications. Empirical research is now required to develop a better understanding of epistemic trust, its developmental trajectory, and its possible relationship to wider social-political phenomena. We have recently created and validated a questionnaire assessing individuals’ epistemic stance (ES) – the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust and Credulity Questionnaire (ETMCQ) (Campbell, Tanzer et al, 2021). In two studies (Study 1, n = 500; Study 2, n = 705), we examined the psychometric properties of the ETMCQ and the relationship between EMTCQ scores and exposure to adverse childhood experiences, mental health symptoms, attachment, mentalizing and general self-efficacy. The purpose of the currently proposed study is to extend the findings reported in the previous study (Campbell, Tanzer et al, 2021) by measuring epistemic stance in relation to borderline symptomology, perceived levels of social support, perceived self agency and self-awareness, exposure to adversity in childhood and adolescence, attachment, and interoception.

Using a novel, fMRI-based inter-subject functional correlation (ISFC) approach, which isolates stimulus-locked inter-regional correlation patterns, we compared the cortical topology of the neural circuit for face processing in participants with an impairment in face recognition, congenital prosopagnosia (CP), and matched controls. Whereas the anterior temporal lobe served as the major network hub for face processing in controls, this was not the case for the CPs. Instead, this group evinced hyper-connectivity in posterior regions of the visual cortex, mostly associated with the lateral occipital and the inferior temporal cortices. Moreover, the extent of this hyper-connectivity was correlated with the face recognition deficit. These results offer new insights into the perturbed cortical topology in CP, which may serve as the underlying neural basis of the behavioral deficits typical of this disorder. The approach adopted here has the potential to uncover altered topologies in other neurodevelopmental disorders, as well.

It has long been argued that face processing requires disproportionate reliance on holistic or configural processing, relative to that required for non-face object recognition, and that a disruption of such holistic processing may be causally implicated in prosopagnosia. Previously, we demonstrated that individuals with congenital prosopagnosia (CP) did not show the normal face inversion effect (better performance for upright compared to inverted faces) and evinced a local (rather than the normal global) bias in a compound letter global/local (GL) task, supporting the claim of disrupted holistic processing in prosopagnosia. Here, we investigate further the nature of holistic processing impairments in CP, first by confirming, in a large sample of CP individuals, the absence of the normal face inversion effect and the presence of the local bias on the GL task, and, second, by employing the composite face paradigm, often regarded as the gold standard for measuring holistic face processing. In this last task, we show that, in contrast with controls, the CP group perform equivalently with aligned and misaligned faces and was impervious to (the normal) interference from the task-irrelevant bottom part of faces. Interestingly, the extent of the local bias evident in the composite task is correlated with the abnormality of performance on diagnostic face processing tasks. Furthermore, there is a significant correlation between the magnitude of the local bias in the GL and performance on the composite task. These results provide further evidence for impaired holistic processing in CP and, moreover, corroborate the critical role of this type of processing for intact face recognition.