Since its development and theorisation in the 60s, attachment theory has greatly influenced both clinical and developmental psychology suggesting the existence of complex dynamics based on the relationship between an infant and its caregiver, that affects personality traits and interpersonal relationships in adulthood. Many studies have been conducted to explore the association between attachment styles and psychosocial functioning and mental health. By contrast, only a few studies have investigated the neurobiological underpinnings of attachment style, showing mixed results. Therefore, in this review, we described current evidence from structural and functional imaging studies with the final aim to disentangle the neural correlates of attachment style in healthy individuals. Overall, different attachment styles have been correlated with volumetric alterations mainly in the cingulate cortex, amygdala, hippocampus and anterior temporal pole. Consistently, functional imaging studies suggested patterns of activations in fronto-striatal-limbic circuits during the processing of social and attachment-related stimuli. Further studies are needed to clarify the neurobiological signature of attachment style, possibly taking into consideration a wide range of demographic, psychosocial and clinical factors that may mediate the associations between the style of attachment and brain systems (e.g., gender, personality traits, psychosocial functioning, early-life experience).

Lazzaretti M, Morandotti N, Sala M, Isola M, Frangou S, De Vidovich G, Marraffini E, Gambini F, Barale F, Zappoli F, Caverzasi E, Brambilla P. Impaired working memory and normal sustained attention in borderline personality disorder.

Objective: Although reports in the literature describe deficits in working memory in borderline personality disorder (BPD), the evidence is limited and inconsistent. The aim of this study was to evaluate further this cognitive dimension and its clinical correlates in BPD.

Method: We compared the performance of 15 BPD patients to 1:1 matched healthy controls on verbal working memory as determined by the sequential letter N-back test and sustained attention as measured using the continuous performance test (CPT).

Results: BPD patients performed significantly worse on the N-back test compared to healthy controls (p < 0.05), but not on the CPT. The N-back deficit was more pronounced and significant in the 3-back condition and inversely correlated with impulsivity.

Conclusions: These results suggest the presence of working memory deficits in BPD that may be linked to greater impulsivity and sustained by impairment in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

A growing number of studies focusing on the developmental origin of health and disease hypothesis have identified links among early nutrition, epigenetic processes and diseases also in later life. Different epigenetic mechanisms are elicited by dietary factors in early critical developmental ages that are able to affect the susceptibility to several diseases in adulthood. The studies here reviewed suggest that maternal and neonatal diet may have long-lasting effects in the development of non-communicable chronic adulthood diseases, in particular the components of the so-called metabolic syndrome, such as insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity, dyslipidaemia, hypertension, and CVD. Both maternal under- and over-nutrition may regulate the expression of genes involved in lipid and carbohydrate metabolism. Early postnatal nutrition may also represent a vital determinant of adult health by making an impact on the development and function of gut microbiota. An inadequate gut microbiota composition and function in early life seems to account for the deviant programming of later immunity and overall health status. In this regard probiotics, which have the potential to restore the intestinal microbiota balance, may be effective in preventing the development of chronic immune-mediated diseases. More recently, the epigenetic mechanisms elicited by probiotics through the production of SCFA are hypothesised to be the key to understand how they mediate their numerous health-promoting effects from the gut to the peripheral tissues.

As a double-brooded species inhabiting grassland habitats subject to mowing and located at different elevations, the Corncrake Crex crex in the Alps is potentially affected by changes in its breeding habitat within a season, thus leading to shifts in occurrence and habitat association, with potentially relevant consequences for conservation. We investigated Corncrake abundance in four sites in Trento province (N Italy); two sites were defined as ‘low elevation’ (mean elevation 975 m and 976 m a.s.l., respectively) and two as ‘high elevation’ (mean elevation 1,173 m and 1,177 m). The number of calling males showed a clear variation in relative abundance between early and late periods of the breeding season; in particular, at low elevation sites, abundance decreased from the early to late periods, while the opposite was recorded at high elevation sites. A mixed model suggested that the number of males decreased in the second half of the breeding season and at high elevations, and changed according to mid-season altitudinal shifts. Conservation strategies for this species should take into account the mid-season territory shift.

Here we briefly summarize the most consistent structural MRI studies on hippocampus in major depression and debate the effects of clinical variables on hippocampal morphology.

Imaging studies have tried to identify morphological outcome measures of schizophrenia in the last two decades. In particular, longitudinal studies have reported a correlation between larger ventricles, decreased prefrontal volumes and worse outcome. This would potentially allow to isolate subtypes of schizophrenia patients with a worse prognosis and more evident biological impairments, ultimately helping in designing specific rehabilitation interventions.

Chiesa A, Brambilla P, Serretti A. Functional neural correlates of mindfulness meditations in comparison with psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy and placebo effect. Is there a link?

Although the anatomy of the parietal lobe has been under-investigated in schizophrenia, some magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown decreased volumes, suggesting its possible implication for the pathophysiology of the disease.

The magnetic resonance imaging studies investigating the volumes of the orbitofrontal cortex in patients suffering from schizophrenia are here presented, trying to elucidate its role for the pathophysiology and for the cognition of the disease.

Language disturbances represent a core feature of schizophrenia, affecting social interactions and quality of life. Here we summarize linguistic and pragmatic deficits and illustrate the role of brain imaging studies in delineating the neural substrates of language deficits in patients with schizophrenia.

The decision making can be defined as the mental process in which a “choice is made after reflecting on the consequences of that choice” (Bechara & Van Der Linden, 2005; Bechara et al., 1997). It is a complex process that involves cognitive as well as emotion-based functions. In fact human beings make fast adaptive decisions in daily life, and that is based on the skill to relate emotion to contextual stimuli in order to anticipate outcomes through activation of emotional states (Bechara et al., 2005). In this regard, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) has been widely recognized to play a key role in the emotional decision making process. The VMPFC includes the medial part of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the more ventral sectors of the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex (Bechara et al., 1997). In particular the OFC, within the VMPFC, is part of a neural system underpinning decision-making and reward-related behaviours which are thought to be linked to social conduct (Rolls, 2000).

The corpus callosum (CC) is the brain's largest white matter tract, mostly composed by both myelinated and unmyelinated fibres, connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. The CC can be divided into different sections: rostrum, genu, body, isthmus and splenium (Aboitiz et al., 1992). Myelinated fibres predominate in the midbody and the splenium while unmyelinated fibres are more numerous in the rostrum and the genu. The callosal fiber disposition approximately reflects brain topography: the anterior sections connect the frontal lobes, the median sections connect temporal and parietal regions, and the posterior sections link occipital areas (Pandya et al., 1971). This traditional picture, however, which has been obtained mainly through studies in non-human primates has been partly modified by modern diffusion tensor imaging studies in humans (Hofer & Frahm, 2006). The CC matures after birth through adolescence and into early adulthood and is involved in different cognitive processes such as sensory-motor integration, attention, language, arousal and memory. Its size has been shown to be associated with handedness, sex (i.e., greater splenium in females and greater genu in males, Dubb et al., 2003) and cerebral laterality (i.e., inverse correlation between callosal connectivity and brain lateralization in males; Luders et al., 2003), and age (Ota et al., 2006) Specifically, age-related callosal degeneration has been detected by a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study (Ota et al., 2006) in the sub-regions that connect areas which are thought to be vulnerable to normal aging: the genu, rostral body, and isthmus. This result replicated post mortem findings of callosal degeneration in rostral body, anterior midbody and isthmus (Aboitiz et al., 1996).

The continuous performance test (CPT) is a behavioural assessment of attentional modulation of the motor system (Rosvold et al., 1956). It has firstly been used in patients with brain injuries and then applied to assess sustained attention and vigilance in epilepsy, brain tumor, dementia, schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety disorders (Rosvold et al., 1956; Honey et al., 2005; Kanaka et al., 2008). There are several versions of the test. For instance, the X-CPT version presents randomly different stimuli and subjects are asked to push a button only on presentation of the target stimuli (X). In the AX-CPT version, the subjects are required to push the button only when a cue stimulus is presented before the target one (A before X). The following items are measured for the X and AX tasks: omission errors (number of times subjects fail to respond to target stimulation), commission errors (number of times subjects respond to non target stimulation), average reaction time and coefficient of variance for both correct reactions and commission errors (Suwa et al., 2004). There are other versions, such as the CPT-not X version where the subjects are asked not to push a button when the target stimulus (X) is presented; the Degraded Stimuli (DS)-CPT (Nuechterlein, 1983); the CPT playing card version (Rutschmann et al., 1977); and the CPT Identical Pairs version (Cornblatt et al., 1988), which is a more difficult task prepared to assess high risk population. Interestingly, the Identical Pairs version has been included in the Matrics neurocognitive assessment, a consensus cognitive battery for clinical trials of cognition in schizophrenia (Nuechterlein et al., 2008).

Objective – In vivo structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have evaluated the brain anatomy of various psychiatric disorders, allowing the investigation of putative abnormal brain circuits possibly involved in the patophysiology of psychiatric disorders. Here we reviewed the structural MRI literature in mood and anxiety disorders. Methods – All anatomical MRI studies evaluating mood and anxiety disorder patients were identified through a comprehensive Medline search conducted for the period from 1966 to January 2002, and a manual search of bibliographic cross-referencing complemented the Medline search. Results – Differential patterns of anatomical brain abnormalities appear to be involved in subtypes of mood disorders, with hippocampus and basal ganglia being abnormal in unipolar disorder, and amygdala and cerebellum in bipolar disorders, suggesting that these two mood disorders are biologically distinct. As for anxiety disorders, orbital frontal regions and basal ganglia have been reported to be anatomically abnormal in obsessive-compulsive disorder, temporal lobe was found to be abnormally reduced in panic disorder, and abnormal hippocampus shrinkage was shown in posttraumatic stress disorder. Conclusions – The structural MRI findings reviewed here suggest abnormalities in specific brain regions participating in proposed neuroanatomic models possibly involved in the pathophysiology of mood disorders and anxiety disorders. Nonetheless, available MRI studies have suffered from limitations related to relatively small patient samples and involvement of medicated patients, and were largely cross-sectional investigations. Therefore, longitudinal MRI studies involving more sizeable samples of drug-free patients, patients at first episode of illness or at high risk for mood or anxiety disorders, associated to genetic studies, are likely to be extremely valuable to separate state from trait brain abnormalities and to characterize further the pathophysiology of these disorders.