How does psychopathology influence how we perceive our world?

Psychopathology can influence individuals’ cognitive and social perceptions. There is a peak in the emergence of psychopathology during adolescence. Our research focuses on how youth with psychopathology visually perceive their emotional world, specially focusing on their processing of social and emotional cues. We are using representational similarity analysis of functional MRI data to examine how neural representations of socioemotional cues differ in youth with and without psychopathologies. Our work focuses on information processing in early visual pathways during an emotional working memory fMRI task. We anticipate the findings will help us better understand the neural correlates of psychopathology to ultimately improve diagnostics and treatments.