Roberto Umansky's research while affiliated with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and other places

... Thus, carrying the D4.7 variant has been linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), major depressive disorder, gambling, drug dependence, smoking, alcoholism, and Parkinson's disease Kaplan et al. 2008;Faraone et al. 1999;Manki et al. 1996;Ricketts et al. 1998;Laucht et al. 2005). Several studies suggested that the longer allele variants, with 7 and more repeats, are connected to specific behavioural phenotypes, including novelty seeking and risky behaviour, impulsivity, limited emotional feedback, but effective problem solving (Hohmann et al. 2009;Dmitrieva et al. 2011;Ebstein et al. 1996). Remarkably, schizophrenic patients with the shorter alleles (D4.2 and D4.4) manifest a higher therapeutic response to typical antipsychotic drugs (APDs) compared to those with D4.7 (Cohen et al. 1999). ...

... Yet, semantic disinhibition does not seem to successfully or integrally explain the phenomenon, because hyperpriming effects are heterogeneous. Specifically, hyperpriming in schizophrenia, especially in PTD, is typically observed with distant semantic relations (Kreher et al., 2008(Kreher et al., , 2009Spitzer et al., 1993Spitzer et al., , 1994Manschreck et al., 1988;Weisbrod et al., 1998;Moritz et al., 1999Moritz et al., , 2001aMoritz et al., , 2001bMoritz et al., , 2003Safadi et al., 2013;Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 2003;Wentura et al., 2008;Pomarol-Clotet et al., 2008;Kuperberg et al., 1998Kuperberg et al., , 2006aKuperberg et al., , 2006b; see also Kwapil et al., 1990), whereas findings on closer associations are more equivocalranging from hypo- (Pomarol-Clotet et al., 2008;Kreher et al., 2009;Minzenberg et al., 2003;Aloia et al., 1998;Passerieux et al., 1997;Rossell and Stefanovic, 2007;Henik et al., 1992;Besche et al., 1997;Besche-Richard and Passerieux, 2003;Ober et al., 1995;Barch et al., 1996;Hokama et al., 2003) to normal/no correlation (e.g., Barch et al., 1996;Chapin et al., 1989Chapin et al., , 1992Vinogradov et al., 1992;Tan et al., 2015, Tan andRossell, 2017;Kreher et al., 2008Kreher et al., , 2009Kuperberg et al., 1997Kuperberg et al., , 2006aKuperberg et al., , 2006bKuperberg et al., , 2019Besche-Richard and Passerieux, 2003;Blum and Freides, 1995;Rossell, 2004;Passerieux et al., 1995) to hyperpriming (e.g., Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 2003;Moritz et al., 1999;Manschreck et al., 1988;Kiefer et al., 2009;Kreher et al., 2008Kreher et al., , 2009Pomarol-Clotet et al., 2008;Rossell and David, 2006;Henik et al., 1995;Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 2003;Spitzer et al., 1994;Weisbrod et al., 1998;Safadi et al., 2013;Neill et al., 2014;Salisbury, 2004Salisbury, , 2008. While this peculiar anomaly may seem compatible with the aforementioned "loosening of associations", it has fueled significant theoretical debate, with alternative views most notably encompassing suggestions that these are artefacts of psychomotor slowing (Pomarol-Clotet et al., 2008;Rossell and Stefanovic, 2007), relatedness proportions (Vinogradov et al., 1992;Rossell and Stefanovic, 2007), caused by looser lexico-semantic networks (Kuperberg et al., 2019) or disorganised semantic storage (Tan et al., 2015, Tan andRossell, 2017;Rossell and David, 2006), or by an inepsy to mobilise contextual information (e.g., Hardy-Baylé et al., 2003;Brown and Kuperberg, 2015;Titone et al., 2000;Kuperberg, 2010aKuperberg, , 2010bSitnikova et al., 2002;Meyer et al., 2021; see also Sharpe et al., 2020) (see section 6). ...

... Based on these findings, which underline the potential implication of mI in the pathogenesis of psychosis, inositol supplementation was assessed as a treatment for schizophre-nia in three studies, conducted between 1993 and 1994 by Levine et al. [19,20,119] and then reported in a meta-analysis [120]. In the first crossover randomized controlled trial (RCT) [19], inositol supplementation was given to patients with chronic schizophrenia at a dose of 6 g per day for 10 days in add-on to the antipsychotic therapy. ...

... Previous semantic priming studies in schizophrenia have been unable to address this question because they were carried out under conditions that encouraged not only predictive processes but also retroactive matching processes. For example, many behavioral [24][25][26]28 studies used a lexical decision task, which encourages a retrospective evaluation of the semantic relationship between target and prime to bias the decision about whether the target is a word or nonword. 15,29,30 Moreover, in these previous behavioral [24][25][26]31,32 and ERP 22,27,28 studies, the proportion of directly associated word-pairs was less than 30% (sometimes because of the inclusion of nonwords), which discourages prediction. ...