Greg Hajcak's research while affiliated with Florida State University and other places

Publications (405)

Article
Full-text available
The error-related negativity (ERN) is a neural correlate of error monitoring often used to investigate individual differences in developmental, mental health, and adaptive contexts. However, limited experimental control over errors presents several confounds to its measurement. An experimentally controlled disturbance to standing balance evokes the...
Article
Initiation of alcohol use at younger ages is prognostic of later drinking problems. Reward system dysfunction is theorized to contribute to early initiation and escalation of drinking, but existing evidence supports both hyposensitivity and hypersensitivity as risk-markers; research employing effective indices of reward processing is needed for cla...
Article
In the current article, we examined the impact of two home-delivered attentional-bias-modification (ABM) programs on a biomarker of anxiety (i.e., the error-related negativity [ERN]). The ERN is sensitivity to ABM-related changes; however, it is unclear whether ABM exerts its influence on the ERN and anxiety by increasing general attentional contro...
Article
The psychophysiological underpinnings of preschool-onset depression (PO-MDD) remain underexplored. Moreover, there is currently a limited understanding of the potential impact that PO-MDD might have on neurobiological functions later in development such as general cognitive domains and reward processing. Thus, the current study sought to examine po...
Article
Full-text available
Recent research has focused on identifying neural markers associated with risk for anxiety, including the error-related negativity (ERN). An elevated ERN amplitude has been observed in anxious individuals from middle childhood onward and has been shown to predict risk for future increases in anxiety development. The ERN is sensitive to environmenta...
Article
This longitudinal study of community dwelling older adults (N = 453) examined consequences of COVID-related worries on changes in anxiety symptoms before relative to during the pandemic. We further evaluated if pre-COVID psychological resilience (PR) buffered the impact of COVID-related worry. Pre-COVID data were collected in September 2018. COVID-...
Article
The ability to anticipate and process predictable unpleasant events, while also regulating emotional reactivity, is an adaptive skill. The current article and a companion in this issue test for potential changes in predictable event processing across the childhood-to-adolescence transition, a key developmental period for biological systems that sup...
Article
The ability to anticipate and process predictable unpleasant events, while also regulating emotional reactivity, is an adaptive skill. The current article and a companion in this issue test for potential changes in predictable event processing across the childhood-to-adolescence transition, a key developmental period for biological systems that sup...
Article
Objective: Lower neural response to reward predicts subsequent depression during adolescence. Pubertal development and biological sex each have important effects on reward system development and depression during this period. However, relationships among these variables across the transition from childhood to adolescence are not well characterized...
Article
Background: The error-related negativity (ERN) reflects individual differences in error monitoring. However, findings on the ERN in adult and adolescent depression have been inconsistent. Analyzing electroencephalographic (EEG) data in both the time- and time-frequency domain can be useful to better quantify neural response to errors. The present s...
Article
Full-text available
The P300 event-related potential (ERP) has been extensively studied across the human lifespan. However, many studies examining age-related effects are cross-sectional, and few have considered the unique role that pubertal development may have on P300 developmental trajectories. The current study examined whether age, pubertal maturation or their in...
Article
Deficits within the consummatory phase of reward processing are associated with increased depression symptoms and risk; however, few studies have also examined other aspects of reward processing in relation to depression. In the current study, a community sample of 121 adolescents (Mage = 13.1, Min = 11.14; Max = 15.12; 54% male) completed self‐rep...
Article
A previous study found that children with recent suicidal ideation had blunted neural reward processing (as measured by the reward positivity), compared with matched controls, and that this difference was driven by reduced neural responses to monetary loss rather than to reward. Here, we aimed to conceptually replicate and extend these findings in...
Article
Increased error-related negativity (ERN), a measure of error monitoring, has been suggested as a biomarker of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Additional insight into error monitoring is possible using time-frequency decomposition of electroencephalographic (EEG) data, as it allows disentangling the brain's parallel processing of information. G...
Poster
Abstract: The RDoC constructs of reward and threat sensitivity are implicated in multiple forms of psychopathology. However, studies often focus on a single diagnosis, failing to account for co-occurring disorders. Given high rates of comorbidity, this approach may not adequately describe links between reward, threat, and psychopathology. HiTOP, a...
Preprint
Two event-related brain potential (ERP) components elicited during feedback processing are the frontocentral feedback-related negativity (FRN), followed by the posterior P300. According to the Error-Related Reinforcement Learning Theory (Holroyd & Coles, 2002), the FRN amplitude is largest when the outcome is negative and unexpected. Complementing...
Preprint
Full-text available
The error-related negativity (ERN) is a neural correlate of error monitoring often used to investigate individual differences in developmental, mental health, and adaptive contexts. However, limited experimental control over errors presents several confounds to its measurement. An experimentally controlled disturbance to standing balance evokes the...
Article
Background Although corporal punishment is a common form of punishment with known negative impacts on health and behavior, how such punishment affects neurocognitive systems is relatively unknown. Method To address this issue, we examined how corporal punishment affects neural measures of error and reward processing in 149 adolescent boys and girl...
Article
Postnatal depression and anxiety disorders pose a major burden on maternal mental health. While psychosocial risk factors for perinatal depression and anxiety are well-researched, there is a dearth of research examining neural biomarkers of risk for postnatal increases in depression and anxiety. Previous studies suggest two different event-related...
Article
Full-text available
Background Reward sensitivity is a dimensional construct central to understanding the nature of depression. Psychophysiological research on this construct has primarily focused on the reward positivity (RewP), an event-related potential (ERP) that indexes consummatory reward sensitivity. The current study extended prior research by focusing on ERPs...
Article
Understanding how event-related potentials (ERPs) change following repeated assessments is critical to advance our understanding of neural mechanisms implicated in psychopathology. Specifically, it is unclear if associations between ERPs and individual differences can be reproduced when repeatedly measured within the same participants, or if clinic...
Article
Full-text available
Adolescent girls are a high-risk stratum for the emergence of depression. Previous research has established that depression is associated with blunted responses to rewards. Research using Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) has found that deficits in accumulating reward-based evidence characterize adult depression. However, little is known about how reduce...
Article
Full-text available
Background Life stress and blunted reward processing each have been associated with the onset and maintenance of major depressive disorder. However, much of this work has been cross-sectional, conducted in separate lines of inquiry, and focused on recent life stressor exposure, despite the fact that theories of depression posit that stressors can h...
Article
Background Although research has found that life stress is associated with reward-related brain activity, few studies have examined how cumulative stressors occurring over the entire lifetime affect reward processing during adolescence. Method To address this issue, we investigated how lifetime stressor exposure related to reward processing, index...
Article
Depression is associated with high levels of cognitive impairment and increased loneliness among older adults. The current study examines associations between a reliable and robust neural marker of cognitive impairment (i.e., the P300 event-related brain potential [ERP]), loneliness, and depression and assesses the role of loneliness in the P300─de...
Article
Emotion regulation (ER) processes in older adults may be important for successful aging. Neural correlates of ER processes have been examined using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), such as the late-positive potential (LPP) during cognitive reappraisal paradigms. The current study sought to extend this research by examining the LPP from an ER...
Article
Background The late positive potential (LPP) to pleasant content is an electrocortical indicator of blunted emotional reactivity in depression. A reduced time-frequency delta power has never been investigated in clinical samples. The present study examined time-frequency delta in depression and at investigated whether the combination of time-domain...
Article
Background Depressive disorders have been associated with altered effort-cost decision making (ECDM) in behavioral investigations, such as a decreased willingness to expend effort for reward attainment. However, little is known about neural mechanisms implicated in altered ECDM. Methods The study investigates neural correlates of reward attainment...
Article
Background The reward circuit is important for motivation and learning, and dysregulations of the reward circuit are prominent in anhedonic depression. Non-invasive interventions that can selectively target the reward circuit may hold promise for the treatment of anhedonia. Methods We tested a novel transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) interven...
Article
Full-text available
Background Childhood socioeconomic disadvantage is a form of adversity associated with alterations in critical frontolimbic circuits involved in the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders. Most work has focused on individual-level socioeconomic position, yet individuals living in deprived communities typically encounter additional environmental s...
Article
Full-text available
Research has consistently demonstrated a relationship between peer victimization, a major issue in early adolescence, and depression. However, longitudinal studies examining the relationship between peer victimization and depressive symptoms have yielded mixed results. Thus, the current study examined how specific aspects of peer victimization and...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The National Institutes of Health Obesity-Related Behavioral Intervention Trials model for intervention development was used to establish the feasibility and proof of concept of a motivational ketogenic nutrition adherence program for older adults with mild cognitive impairment. Methods: This was a single-arm, single-center feasibili...
Article
Motivation Depressive disorders are highly prevalent and impairing psychiatric conditions with neurocognitive abnormalities, including reduced event-related potential (ERP) measures of reward processing and emotional reactivity. Accurate classification of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) based on ERP data could help improve our understanding of thes...
Article
Parenting styles play a critical role in child well-being, yet the neural bases of parenting behaviors remain nebulous. Understanding the neural processes associated with parenting styles can both clarify etiological mechanisms underlying parenting behaviors and point us toward new targets for intervention. A novel electrocortical biomarker called...
Article
Objectives Although socioemotional selectivity (SST) suggests that people experience more positive affect as they age, symptoms of anxiety and depression persist and are often greater in older women than men. Coping strategies may influence the extent to which older adults experience these symptoms. The purpose of the current study is to examine po...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives To investigate the relationship between the P300 event-related potential, neuropsychological measures of memory, subjective memory complaints (SMCs), and indicators of psychosocial functioning. Design, setting, and participants In this cross-sectional study of 79 community-based older adults, aged 60–75 years, participants completed onl...
Article
Addiction researchers are interested in the ability of neural signals, like the P3 component of the ERP, to index individual differences in liability factors like motivational reactivity to alcohol/drug cues. The reliability of these measures directly impacts their ability to index individual differences, yet little attention has been paid to their...
Article
The reward positivity (RewP) is a widely studied measure of neural response to rewards, yet little is known about normative developmental characteristics of the RewP during early childhood. The present study utilized a pooled community sample of 309 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children who participated in the Doors guessing game to examine the latency and amp...
Article
Full-text available
A number of psychiatric disorders, including body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and social anxiety disorder, are characterized by heightened appearance concerns and increased cognitive and perceptual biases toward one’s own physical appearance. In the present study, we examined individual differences in self-reported...
Article
Recent research suggests that depressive disorders in adults are characterized by reductions in flanker P300 amplitude, and that a reduced flanker P300 may also predict worst depressive trajectories over time. The current study extended this work to adolescence—and to evaluate the specificity of the relationship between flanker P300 to depressive s...
Article
Both a hypoactive reward system and maternal depression are associated with the onset of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in youth. Recent research indicates that blunted reward processing and maternal history of depression may interact to predict increases in depressive symptoms, however, the role of specific maternal depressive symptoms has not be...
Article
Reduced neural responses to reward and pleasant stimuli-indicators of anhedonia and reduced emotional reactivity, respectively-have been reported among individuals with depressive disorders. The current study examined whether these neural measures could prospectively predict the course of depression among a community-based sample of 83 participants...
Article
Suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are thought to result from, at least in part, abnormalities in various neural systems. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a useful method for studying neural activity and can be leveraged to study neural deficits related to STBs; however, it is unknown how effective ERPs are at differentiating various STB gro...
Article
Event‐related potential (ERP) measures of reward‐ and error‐related brain activity have emerged as potential biomarkers of risk for the development of psychopathology. However, the psychometric properties of reward‐ and error‐related brain activity have been primarily investigated in adolescents and adults. It is critical to also establish the reli...
Article
Background: Previous research has found deficits in both the reward positivity (RewP) and P300 components of the event-related potential (ERP) in relation to depression. The current study examined whether the P300, elicited from imperative stimuli in a gambling task, relates to depression – and can be utilized in tandem with the RewP to better acco...
Article
Mother-to-infant attachment is critical to the health of mothers and offspring. While reward circuitry is implicated in maternal attachment, no studies have yet examined whether antenatal (i.e., in pregnancy) reward responsiveness predicts mother-to-infant bonding in the postnatal period. In a sample of 63 women, we examined whether the Reward Posi...
Article
Full-text available
Background: An increased neural response to making errors has emerged as a biomarker of anxiety. Error negativity (Ne) or errorrelated negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential generated when people commit errors; the Ne/ERN is greater among people with anxiety and predicts increases in anxiety. However, no previous study has examined whether...
Article
Impairments in theory of mind (ToM)—long considered common among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—are in fact highly heterogeneous across this population. Although such heterogeneity should be reflected in differential recruitment of neural mechanisms during ToM reasoning, no research has yet uncovered a mechanism that explains these...
Article
Depression has been characterized by a broad disengagement from the environment, as reflected by dampened positive and negative emotional reactivity. Research has shown that acute exercise may enhance positive emotional reactivity in healthy adults. It is unknown whether it can alter positive emotional reactivity in depression. In the present study...
Article
Stress and blunted reward processing are risk factors for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). The experience of acute stress reduces fMRI correlates of reward-related neural activity; however, few studies have examined how acute stress impacts measures of reward derived from event-related potentials (ERPs). The current study examined the impact of an...
Article
Background Recent efforts to classify subtypes of major depressive disorder marked by different psychophysiological indicators have identified blunted reward-related brain activation in gambling tasks as a characteristic linked specifically to depressed participants with impaired mood reactivity. Methods The current study compared individuals diag...
Article
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) represent direct measures of neural activity that are leveraged to understand cognitive, affective, sensory, and motor processes. Every ERP researcher encounters the obstacle of determining whether measurements are precise or psychometrically reliable enough for an intended purpose. In this primer, we review th...
Article
Full-text available
Increased attention to threat is considered a core feature of anxiety. However, there are multiple mechanisms of attention and multiple types of threat, and the relationships among attention, threat, and anxiety are poorly understood. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to separately isolate attentional selection (N2pc) an...
Article
The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The authors discovered an error in the processing of the ERP data included in originally published manuscript. All of the data has been reprocessed using average referencing. The primary findings in our original paper highlighted diagnostic group differences in ERPs from the 40...
Article
Full-text available
Aberrant reward processing is a cardinal feature of various forms of psychopathology. However, recent research indicates that aberrant reward processing may manifest at temporally distinct substages and involve interdependent subcomponents of reward processing. To improve our understanding of both the temporal dynamics and distinct subcomponents of...
Article
Full-text available
Background The coronavirus [coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] pandemic has introduced extraordinary life changes and stress, particularly in adolescents and young adults. Initial reports suggest that depression and anxiety are elevated during COVID-19, but no prior study has explored changes at the within -person level. The current study explore...
Article
Neurocognitive impairments commonly observed in depressive disorders are thought to be reflected in reduced P300 amplitudes. To date, depression‐related P300 amplitude reduction has mostly been demonstrated cross‐sectionally, while its clinical implication for the course of depression remains largely unclear. Moreover, the relationship between P300...
Article
Full-text available
The P300 event-related potential (ERP) is associated with aging and risk for Alzhiemer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Our study sought to replicate previous findings regarding P300 amplitude, age, and neuropsychological outcomes. We also sought to fill gaps in the literature by assessing associations in a primarily healthy samp...
Article
Background Subjective memory complaints (SMCs) are considered a requirement for diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI; Petersen, 2004). However, the evidence for a relationship between SMCs and objective cognitive impairment is mixed and often contradictory (Crumley et al., 2014; Lenehan et al., 2012; Mitchell et al., 2014; Reid & MacLullich,...
Article
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a neurodevelopmental syndrome characterized by impulsivity and distractibility, has been linked to blunted neural indicators of executive function and motivational processing. In the current study, we examined cross-sectional and prospective associations between P300 to feedback stimuli, the reward p...
Article
Background Early childhood depression is associated with anhedonia and reduced event-related potential (ERP) responses to rewarding or pleasant stimuli. Whether these neural measures are indicators of target engagement or treatment outcome is not yet known. Methods We measured ERP responses to win and loss feedback in a guessing task and to pleasa...
Article
Attentional biases are thought to be involved in the etiopathogenesis of depressive disorders. Recent studies indicate eye-tracking techniques could overcome methodological issues of traditional reaction time bias measures and be used to reliably quantify biases in attention. In the current study, 50 participants with a current depressive disorder...
Article
Background Blunted neural reward responsiveness (RR) is observed in youth depression. However, it is unclear whether symptoms of depression experienced early in development relate to adolescent RR beyond current symptoms and further, whether such relationships with RR differ during two key components of reward processing: anticipation and outcome...
Preprint
Full-text available
Despite extensive standardization, diagnostic interviews for mental health disorders encompass substantial subjective judgment. Previous studies have demonstrated that EEG-based neural measures can function as reliable objective correlates of depression, or even predictors of depression and its course. However, their clinical utility has not been f...
Article
Past research has found that P300 is smaller in depressed adults. Research examining P300 in relation to adolescent depression is more inconsistent; most studies fail to find P300 differences between currently depressed adolescents and controls. Previous studies have not examined the potential predictive utility of P300 in regard to adolescent depr...
Preprint
Event-related potentials (ERPs) represent direct measures of neural activity that are leveraged to understand cognitive, affective, sensory, and motor processes. Every ERP researcher encounters the obstacle of determining whether measurements are precise enough for an intended purpose. In this primer we review three types of measurements metrics: d...
Article
Background Aerobic exercise has demonstrated antidepressant efficacy among adults with major depression. There is a poor understanding of the neural mechanisms associated with these effects. Deficits in reward processing and cognitive control may be two candidate targets and predictors of treatment outcome to exercise in depression. Methods Sixty-...
Preprint
It is well known that most people who think about suicide do not attempt or die by suicide. Capability for suicide, a construct proposed by Joiner (2005) within the interpersonal theory of suicide, was relatively novel in that it explained a potential mechanism by which individuals move from thinking about suicide to engaging in suicidal behavior....
Article
Because obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a highly impairing and often chronic psychiatric disorder, there is high interest in novel add-on or alternative intervention approaches. The error-related negativity (ERN), a response-related ERP occurring shortly after incorrect responses, might provide a promising target for novel interventions. Inc...
Article
The pubertal period is a time of rapid increase in the incidence of anxiety disorders, and thus, pubertal hormones may play a role in the precipitation of anxious psychopathology. DHEA, a steroid hormone that surges in adolescence, has been previously linked to anxiety, although the direction of this effect has been mixed. Using a cross-sectional d...
Preprint
Full-text available
A recent study by Tsypes, Owens, and Gibb (2019) found that children with recent suicidal ideation had blunted neural reward processing, as measured by the reward positivity (RewP), compared to matched controls, and that this difference was driven by reduced neural responses to monetary loss, rather than blunted neural response to monetary reward....
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are thought to be the result, at least in part, of abnormalities in various neural systems. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a useful method for studying neural activity and can be leveraged to study neural deficits related to STBs; however, it is unknown how effective ERPs are at differentiating...
Article
Past work has demonstrated that the reward positivity (RewP) indexes a feedback-monitoring system sensitive to positive outcomes. Research on the RewP has frequently used simple guessing tasks. In the doors task, participants receive either feedback denoting monetary gain or loss on each trial after choosing one of two doors to “open.” Typically, t...
Article
Background Performance monitoring entails rapid error detection to maintain task performance. Impaired performance monitoring is a candidate pathophysiological process in psychotic disorders, which may explain the broader deficit in executive function and its known associations with negative symptoms and poor functioning. The current study models c...
Article
Event‐related potential studies of emotional processing have focused on the late positive potential (LPP), a sustained positive deflection in the ERP that is increased for emotionally arousing stimuli. A prominent theory suggests that modulation of the LPP is a response to stimulus significance, defined in terms of the activation of appetitive and...
Article
Full-text available
Loudness dependence of auditory evoked potentials (LDAEP) has long been considered to reflect central basal serotonin transmission. However, the relationship between LDAEP and individual serotonin receptors and transporters has not been fully explored in humans and may involve other neurotransmitter systems. To examine LDAEP's relationship with the...
Article
Full-text available
Contemplative practices are thought to modify one’s experience of self and fundamentally change self-referential processing. However, few studies have examined the brain correlates of self-referential processing in long-term meditators. Here, we used the self-referential encoding task (SRET) to examine event-related potentials (ERP) during assessme...
Preprint
Full-text available
Stress and blunted reward processing are risk factors for mood disorders, including Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). The experience of acute stress reduces fMRI correlates of reward-related neural activity; however, few studies have examined how acute stress impacts measures of reward derived from event-related potentials (ERPs). The current study...