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Editorial
August 2016

The Salience of Reward

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Psychiatry, Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands
JAMA Psychiatry. 2016;73(8):777-778. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.1134

An important and so far minimally addressed aspect of psychosis research is the manifestation of genetic psychosis susceptibility, as measured with polygenic risk profile scores (RPSs), on human brain function. The study of more than 1500 adolescents by Lancaster et al1 in this issue of JAMA Psychiatry reveals that the genetic vulnerability to developing psychosis is associated with increased brain activity in the ventral striatum during reward processing. This finding suggests that the genetic risk of psychosis may shape the adolescent response to rewarding stimuli.

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