To examine opinions about incentives for vaccination against COVID-19.

A qualitative study was conducted in spring 2022. The study population consisted of pairs of university students and their parents throughout Serbia. The qualitative content analysis was applied.

A total of 18 participants (9 student-parent pairs) were included. The following themes were identified: 1) Attitudes about financial incentives for vaccination, 2) Non-financial incentives for vaccination, and 3) Suggestions to enhance vaccination coverage. Theme 1 comprised several subthemes: General response to money, Dissatisfaction with financial incentives, Satisfaction with financial incentives and Amount of money to change people’s opinion. Most parents and some students expressed a clear dissatisfaction and disapproval of the concept of financial incentives for compliance with vaccination. Financial offers would not make our participants change their position on whether to receive the vaccine, as no major differences in attitude towards vaccinations between the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated study participants was observed. Non-financial incentives were more acceptable compared to financial ones, but they were also seen as beneficial for some and not others.

Financial incentive programs’ potential for inefficiency and public mistrust make other methods to boost vaccine uptake better public health choices for now.

According to the aberrant salience proposal, reward processing abnormality, specifically erroneous reward prediction error (RPE) signaling due to stimulus-independent release of dopamine, underlies delusions in schizophrenia. However, no studies to date have examined RPE-associated brain activations in relation to this symptom.

Seventy-eight patients with a DSM-5 diagnosis of schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder and 43 healthy individuals underwent fMRI while they performed a probabilistic monetary reward task designed to generate a measure of RPE. Ratings of delusions and referentiality were made in the patients.

Using whole-brain, voxel-based analysis, schizophrenia patients showed only minor differences in RPE-associated activation compared to healthy controls. Within the patient group, however, severity of delusions was inversely associated with RPE-associated activation in areas including the caudate nucleus, the thalamus and the left pallidum, as well as the lateral frontal cortex bilaterally, the pre- and postcentral gyrus and supplementary motor area, the middle cingulate gyrus, and parts of the temporal and parietal cortex. A broadly similar pattern of association was seen for referentiality.

According to this study, while patients with schizophrenia as a group do not show marked alterations in RPE signaling, delusions and referentiality are associated with reduced activation in parts of the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia, though not specifically the ventral striatum. The direction of the changes is on the face of it contrary to that predicted by aberrant salience theory.

Negative symptoms are a key feature of several psychiatric disorders. Difficulty identifying common neurobiological mechanisms that cut across diagnostic boundaries might result from equifinality (i.e., multiple mechanistic pathways to the same clinical profile), both within and across disorders. This study used a data-driven approach to identify unique subgroups of participants with distinct reward processing profiles to determine which profiles predicted negative symptoms.

Participants were a transdiagnostic sample of youth from a multisite study of psychosis risk, including 110 individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR; meeting psychosis-risk syndrome criteria), 88 help-seeking participants who failed to meet CHR criteria and/or who presented with other psychiatric diagnoses, and a reference group of 66 healthy controls. Participants completed clinical interviews and behavioral tasks assessing four reward processing constructs indexed by the RDoC Positive Valence Systems: hedonic reactivity, reinforcement learning, value representation, and effort–cost computation.

k-means cluster analysis of clinical participants identified three subgroups with distinct reward processing profiles, primarily characterized by: a value representation deficit (54%), a generalized reward processing deficit (17%), and a hedonic reactivity deficit (29%). Clusters did not differ in rates of clinical group membership or psychiatric diagnoses. Elevated negative symptoms were only present in the generalized deficit cluster, which also displayed greater functional impairment and higher psychosis conversion probability scores.

Contrary to the equifinality hypothesis, results suggested one global reward processing deficit pathway to negative symptoms independent of diagnostic classification. Assessment of reward processing profiles may have utility for individualized clinical prediction and treatment.

Ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs) emitted by rats may reflect affective states. Specifically, 50 kHz calls emitted during juvenile playing are associated with positive affect. Given that depression is characterised by profound alterations in this domain, we proposed that USV calls may configure a suitable tool for assessing depressive-like states. Utilising the Flinders Sensitive Line (FSL), a well-established animal model of depression, we assessed USV calls emitted by rats during tickling, a procedure based on juvenile rats’ rough-and-tumble play.

Juvenile FSL rats and their control counterparts, the Flinders Resistant Line (FRL) and Sprague Dawley, were submitted to tickling sessions to imitate rats playing behaviour. The rats were tickled daily for 6 weeks starting at PND21. Tickling sessions were recorded for further acoustic analysis of 50 kHz calls.

Tickling increased 50 kHz calls in all the strains. FSL rats emitted more calls than control strains and exhibited a higher number of flat-trill combination calls.

Tickling is a robust method for inducing 50 kHz USV calls. Analysing USV calls emitted during tickling configurates a suitable method for studying affective states relevant to depression. FSL rats did not present anhedonia but rather higher reward sensitivity, which may underlie their stress vulnerability.

Combining different pharmaceuticals may be beneficial when treating disorders with complex neurobiology, including alcohol use disorder (AUD). The gut-brain peptides amylin and GLP-1 may be of potential interest as they individually reduce alcohol intake in rodents. While the combination of amylin receptor (AMYR) and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) agonists have been found to decrease feeding and body weight in obese male rats synergistically, their combined impact on alcohol intake is unknown.

Therefore, the effect of the combination of an AMYR (salmon calcitonin (sCT)) and a GLP-1R (dulaglutide) agonist on alcohol intake in rats of both sexes was explored in two separate alcohol-drinking experiments. The first alcohol-drinking experiment evaluated the potential of adding sCT to an ongoing dulaglutide treatment, whereas the second alcohol-drinking experiment examined the effect when adding sCT and dulaglutide simultaneously.

When adding sCT to an ongoing dulaglutide treatment, a reduction in alcohol intake was observed in both male and female rats. However, when combining sCT and dulaglutide simultaneously, an initial reduction in alcohol intake was observed in rats of both sexes, whereas tolerance towards treatment was observed. In both alcohol-drinking experiments, this treatment combination consistently decreased food consumption and body weight in males and females. While the treatment combination did not affect inflammatory mediators, the gene expression of AMYR or GLP-1R, it changed fat tissue morphology.

Further investigation needs to be done on the combination of AMYR and GLP-1R agonists to assess their combined effects on alcohol intake.

Machine learning (ML) has developed classifiers differentiating patient groups despite concerns regarding diagnostic reliability. An alternative strategy, used here, is to develop a functional classifier (hyperplane) (e.g. distinguishing the neural responses to received reward v. received punishment in typically developing (TD) adolescents) and then determine the functional integrity of the response (reward response distance from the hyperplane) in adolescents with externalizing and internalizing conditions and its associations with symptom clusters.

Two hundred and ninety nine adolescents (mean age = 15.07 ± 2.30 years, 117 females) were divided into three groups: a training sample of TD adolescents where the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm was applied (N = 65; 32 females), and two test groups– an independent sample of TD adolescents (N = 39; 14 females) and adolescents with a psychiatric diagnosis (major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) & conduct disorder (CD); N = 195, 71 females).

SVM ML analysis identified a hyperplane with accuracy = 80.77%, sensitivity = 78.38% and specificity = 88.99% that implicated feature neural regions associated with reward v. punishment (e.g. nucleus accumbens v. anterior insula cortices). Adolescents with externalizing diagnoses were significantly less likely to show a normative and significantly more likely to show a deficient reward response than the TD samples. Deficient reward response was associated with elevated CD, MDD, and ADHD symptoms.

Distinguishing the response to reward relative to punishment in TD adolescents via ML indicated notable disruptions in this response in patients with CD and ADHD and associations between reward responsiveness and CD, MDD, and ADHD symptom severity.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by severe restriction of calorie intake, which persists despite serious medical and psychological sequelae of starvation. Several prior studies have identified impaired feedback learning among individuals with AN, but whether it reflects a disturbance in learning from positive feedback (i.e., reward), negative feedback (i.e., punishment), or both, and the extent to which this impairment is related to severity and duration of illness, has not been clarified.

Participants were female adolescents with AN (n = 76) and healthy teen volunteers (HC; n = 38) between the ages of 12–18 years who completed a probabilistic reinforcement learning task. A Bayesian reinforcement learning model was used to calculate separate learning rates for positive and negative feedback. Exploratory analyses examined associations between feedback learning and duration of illness, eating disorder severity, and self/parent reports of reward and punishment sensitivity.

Adolescents with AN had a significantly lower rate of learning from positive feedback relative to HC. Patients and HC did not differ in learning from negative feedback or on overall task performance measures. Feedback learning parameters were not significantly associated with duration of illness, eating disorder severity, or questionnaire-based reports of reward and punishment sensitivity.

Adolescents with AN showed a circumscribed deficit in learning from reward that was not associated with duration of illness or reported sensitivity to reward or punishment. Subsequent longitudinal research should explore whether differences in learning from positive feedback relate to course of illness in youth with AN.

Schizophrenia is associated with hypoactivation of reward sensitive brain areas during reward anticipation. However, it is unclear whether these neural functions are similarly impaired in other disorders with psychotic symptomatology or individuals with genetic liability for psychosis. If abnormalities in reward sensitive brain areas are shared across individuals with psychotic psychopathology and people with heightened genetic liability for psychosis, there may be a common neural basis for symptoms of diminished pleasure and motivation.

We compared performance and neural activity in 123 people with a history of psychosis (PwP), 81 of their first-degree biological relatives, and 49 controls during a modified Monetary Incentive Delay task during fMRI.

PwP exhibited hypoactivation of the striatum and anterior insula (AI) during cueing of potential future rewards with each diagnostic group showing hypoactivations during reward anticipation compared to controls. Despite normative task performance, relatives demonstrated caudate activation intermediate between controls and PwP, nucleus accumbens activation more similar to PwP than controls, but putamen activation on par with controls. Across diagnostic groups of PwP there was less functional connectivity between bilateral caudate and several regions of the salience network (medial frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate, AI) during reward anticipation.

Findings implicate less activation and connectivity in reward processing brain regions across a spectrum of disorders involving psychotic psychopathology. Specifically, aberrations in striatal and insular activity during reward anticipation seen in schizophrenia are partially shared with other forms of psychotic psychopathology and associated with genetic liability for psychosis.

Adolescence is a key developmental period for the emergence of psychopathology. Reward-related brain activity increases across adolescence and has been identified as a potential neurobiological mechanism of risk for different forms of psychopathology. The reward positivity (RewP) is an event-related potential component that indexes reward system activation and has been associated with both concurrent and family history of psychopathology. However, it is unclear whether the RewP is also associated with higher-order psychopathology subfactors and whether this relationship is present across different types of reward.

In a sample of 193 adolescent females and a biological parent, the present study examined the association between adolescent and parental psychopathology subfactors and adolescent RewP to monetary and social reward.

Results indicated that the adolescent and parental distress subfactors were negatively associated with the adolescent domain-general RewP. The adolescent and parental positive mood subfactors were negatively associated with the adolescent domain-general and domain-specific monetary RewP, respectively. Conversely, the adolescent and parental fear/obsessions subfactors were positively associated with the adolescent domain-general RewP. The associations between parental and adolescent psychopathology subfactors and the adolescent RewP were independent of each other.

The RewP in adolescent females is associated with both concurrent and parental psychopathology symptoms, suggesting that it indexes both severity and risk for higher-order subfactors.