Melanie Blair Thies

• The Graduate Center, CUNY

Antipsychotic (AP) medications are the mainstay for the treatment of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) but their efficacy is unpredictable and widely variable. Substantial efforts have been made to identify prognostic biomarkers that can be used to guide optimal prescription strategies for individual patients. Striatal regions involved in sali...

The present study examined the role of executive control functions (ECF) in adaptive risk-taking during adolescence. Healthy individuals aged 8–25 were administered ECF measures and the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a computerized measure of risk-taking propensity. Findings demonstrated that adolescents who executed a more consistent response...

Psychotic like experiences (PLE's) are common in the general population, particularly during adolescence, which has generated interest in how PLE's emerge, and the extent to which they reflect either risk for, or resilience to, psychosis. The "attachment-developmental-cognitive" (ADC) model is one effort to model the effect of risk factors on PLEs....

Background Occasional, recreational stimulant (amphetamine and cocaine) use is an important public health problem among young adults because 16% of those who experiment develop stimulant use disorder (SUD). This study aimed to determine whether behavioral and/or neural processing measures can forecast the transition from occasional to problematic s...

Over the last several decades Quality of Life (QoL) has become increasingly important as an indicator of treatment outcomes; particularly in schizophrenia spectrum disorders because of its close association with functional disability. Numerous studies seeking to elucidate the factors that contribute to QoL in this population have implicated both sy...

Predicting which individuals may engage in aggressive behavior is of interest in today's society, however, there is little data on the neural basis of aggression in healthy individuals. Here, we tested whether regional differences in white matter (WM) microstructure were associated with later reports of aggressive tendencies. We recontacted healthy...