Good morning. When CEDA approached me about speaking today, I was asked to concentrate on longer-term developments that will have a bearing on Australia’s future economic performance. Such an offer seemed hard to refuse, and so I looked around for a topic on which I could hopefully say something of interest. Given the impressive productivity growth that has been experienced over the past decade...

BACKGROUND Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are popular medications for anxiety and depression, but their effectiveness, particularly in patients with prominent symptoms of loss of motivation and pleasure, has been questioned. There are few studies of the effect of SSRIs on neural reward mechanisms in humans. METHODS We studied 45 healthy participants who were randomly allocate...

The amygdala has been implicated in affective and social processing for more than a century. Animals with damage to the amygdala have altered affective and social behavior patterns, though the precise nature of these behavioral changes depends on a number of factors including lesion technique, age of the subject at the time of lesion, rearing, and housing environments. Interpretations of amygda...

METHODS • Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder, characterized by profound disruptions in thinking and affecting language, perception, and the sense of self.[1] This disabling and emotionally devastating illness is manifested by ‘positive’ (e.g. delusion, hallucinations) and ‘negative’ (e.g. blunted affect, alogia) symptoms. • In 2005, the prevalence of schizophrenia patients in France was ...

Background: Schizophrenia is a disabling group of brain disorders characterized by symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, disorganized communication, poor planning, reduced motivation and blunted affect The incidence of Schizophrenia has been reported to vary with race and ethnicity. The prevalence of Schizophrenia was said to be lower in developing countries compared to developed countrie...

Usefulness of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) in distinguishing positive and negative subtypes of schizophrenia is presented. Ninety five schizophrenic patients were assessed on BPRS. Significant differences emerged between positive and negative subtypes of schizophrenia on items like emotional withdrawal, guilt feelings, tension, hallucinatory behaviour, motor retardation, blunted af...

There is increasing interest in understanding the roles of distorted beliefs about the self, ostensibly unrelated to eating, weight and shape, in eating disorders (EDs), but little is known about their neural correlates. We therefore used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural correlates of self-referent emotional processing in EDs. During the scan, unmedicated patients...

The participants in the NIMH-MATRICS Consensus Development Conference on Negative Symptoms recommended that an instrument be developed that measured blunted affect, alogia, asociality, anhedonia, and avolition. The Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS) is a 13-item instrument designed for clinical trials and other studies that measures these 5 domains. The interrater, test-retest, and internal co...

Recently, there has been considerable interest in the automated recognition of affect from written and spoken language. In this paper, we investigate how information on a speaker’s affect may be inferred from lexical features using statistical methods. Dictionaries of affect offer great promise to affect sensing since they contain information on the affective qualities of single words or phrase...