MAILMAN RESEARCH CENTER
Psychology Research Laboratory
The Psychology Research Lab Staff in 2005 |
Founded in 1977 by Seymour S. Kety, M.D., the Psychology Research Laboratory has had a long tradition of distinguished leadership and scientific excellence under the stewardship of Philip S. Holzman, Ph.D. (1977-1982), Dr. Holzman and Steven Matthysse, Ph.D. (1982-1991), and, from 1991-2004, Dr. Holzman, Dr. Matthysse and Deborah L. Levy, Ph.D. The current director, Dr. Levy, carries on the tradition and vision of the laboratory since the retirement of Dr. Matthysse and the death of Dr. Holzman in 2004.
For many years this laboratory has been interested in the genetic contributions to major psychiatric illness. Certain traits are not only strongly associated with schizophrenia, but also have a much higher prevalence than schizophrenia in relatives of schizophrenics. We have focused intensively on characterizing these schizophrenia-related traits, because they may be pleiotropic effects (variable manifestations) of schizophrenia-related genes. Importantly, unlike schizophrenia, which is generally thought to involve a number of co-acting genes, family data on the schizophrenia-related traits are consistent with monogenic transmission models, and may therefore clarify the complex genetics of schizophrenia. Several of these schizophrenia-related traits stand out as especially probative for clarifying the neurobiological interpretation of schizophrenia susceptibility loci. These include smooth pursuit eye movements, specific kinds of formal thought disorder, spatial working memory, relational memory, and a certain kind of craniofacial dysmorphology. The qualitative and quantitative phenotypes that we have developed for these schizophrenia-related traits may both improve power to detect linkage to schizophrenia genes and clarify the neurobiological interpretation of linkages that are found. Analogous endophenotypes have been developed for bipolar disorder and are become a growing focus of work in the Psychology Research Laboratory.
Personnel
- Deborah L. Levy, Ph.D. - Director
- J. Alexander Bodkin, M.D. - Investigator
- Lenore Boling, M.D. - Investigator
- Jonathan Cole, M.D. - Investigator
- Michael Coleman, M.A. - Co-Investigator
- Anne Gibbs, M.S.N. - Project Manager
- Fred Johnson, Ph.D. - Investigator
- Olga Krastoshevsky - Database Manager
- Verena Krause - Research Assistant
- Jan Lerbinger, Ph.D. - Investigator
- Mei-Hua Hall, Ph.D. – Postdoctoral Fellow
- Minnie Tse - Administrative Assistant
Collaborating Scientists
- Francine Benes, M.D., Ph.D. (McLean Hospital)
- Curtis Deutsch, Ph.D. (Shriver Center)
- Howard Eichenbaum, Ph.D. (Boston University)
- Karen Froud, Ph.D. (Columbia University)
- Dennis Kinney, Ph.D. (McLean Hospital)
- Alec Marantz, Ph.D. (New York University)
- Steven Matthysse, Ph.D. (Emeritus, Harvard Medical School)
- Nancy R. Mendell, Ph.D. (SUNY at Stony Brook)
- Gregory F. Oxenkrug, M.D. (Tufts - New England Medical Center)
- Ken Nakayama, Ph.D. (Harvard University)
- Josef Parnas (Kommunehospital, Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Donald Rubin, Ph.D. (Harvard University)
- Debra Titone, Ph.D. (McGill University)
- Jonathan Sebat, Ph.D., (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Linda Brzustowicz, M.D., (Rutgers University)
- James Kennedy, (University of Toronto)
- Hakon Hakonarson, (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia)
Research Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health
- National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders
- Essel Foundation
- The Sidney R. Baer. Jr. Foundation
Selected Recent Publications
- Levy DL, Sweeney, JA. Eye tracking and mental illness. In: Squire LR, editor-in-chief.
Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (CD ROM), Academic press, Oxford, 2008, in press. - Hall M-H, Schulze K, Sham P, Kalidindi S, McDonald C, Bramon E, Levy DL, Murray RM, Rijsdijk, F. Further Evidence for Shared Genetic Effects Between Psychotic Bipolar Illness and P50 Suppression---A Combined Twin and Family Study. Am J Med Genetics, 2008, in press.
- Chen Y, Grossman ED, Bidwell LC, Yurgelun-Todd D, Gruber SA, Levy DL, Nakayama K, Holzman PS. Altered posterior and prefrontal cortical activation during visual motion processing in schizophrenia. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 2008, in press.
- Sung H, Ji F, Levy DL, Mendell NR. The power of linkage analysis of a disease-related endophenotype using asymmetrically ascertained sib pairs. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 2008, in press.
- Titone, D, Libben, M, Niman M, Ranbom L, Levy DL. Conceptual combination in schizophrenia: Contrasting property and relational interpretations.  J Neurolinguistics, 2007;20:92-110.
- Chen Y, Levy DL, Sheremata S, Holzman PS. Bipolar and schizophrenic patients differ in patterns of visual motion. Schiz Res, 2006, 88:208-216.
- Bidwell LC, Holzman PS, Chen Y. Aging and visual motion discrimination in normal adults and schizophrenia patients. Psychiatry Research, 2006, 145:1-8.
- Chen, Y., Bidwell, C., and Holzman, P.S. Visual motion integration in schizophrenia patients, their first-degree relatives, and patients with bipolar disorder. Schizophr Res, 2005, 74, 271-281.
- Brownstein J, Krastoshevsky O, McCollum C, Kundamal S, Matthysse S, Holzman PS, Mendell NR, Levy DL. Antisaccade performance is abnormal in schizophrenia patients but not in their biological relatives. Schizophrenia Research, 2003; 63:13-25.
- Coleman MJ, Cook S, Matthysse S, Barnard J, Lo Y, Levy DL, Rubin DB, Holzman PS. Spatial and object working memory impairments in schizophrenia patients: A Bayesian item-response theory. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2002; 111:425-435.
- Chen Y, Levy DL, Sheremata S, Holzman PS. Compromised late-stage motion processing in schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry, 2004; 55:834-841.
- Harte CB, Kanarek R. Effects of nicotine and sucrose on spatial memory and attention. Nutritional Neuroscience, 2004;7: 121-125.
- Heckers, S., Zalesak M, Weiss AP, Ditman T, Titone D. Hippocampal activation during transitive inference in humans. Hippocampus, 2004; 14:153-162.
- Holzman, P.S. Eye movements and the search for the essence of schizophrenia. Brain Research Reviews (Nobel Symposium Contribution), 2000;31: 350-356.
- Holzman, P.S. and Sokoloff, L. Seymour S. Kety (1915-2000). Archives of General Psychiatry, 2001; 58:604-606.
- Holzman, P.S. Less is truly more: Psychopathology research in the 21st century. In: Lenzenweger MF, Hooley J M (Eds.) Principles of Experimental Psychopathology: Essays in honor of Brendan A. Maher. Washington DC, American Psychological Association, 2003, pp. 175-194.
- Holzman, P.S. The Rorschach Method: A starting point for investigating formal thought disorder. In: Auerbach, JS, Levy Kenneth J., and Schaffer, Carrie E., (eds). Relatedness, Self-Definition, and Mental Representation. Essays in Honor of Sidney J. Blatt. New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), 2005, pp. 172-187.
- Holzman PS, Levy DL. Eye tracking dysfunction and mental illness. In: Adelman G, Smith B, editors. Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (CD ROM and Book), Elsevier; 2004.
- Holzman, PS, Levy DL, Johnston MH. The use of the Rorschach technique for assessing formal thought disorder. In Bornstein RF, Masling JM (Eds.). Scoring the Rorschach: Seven Validated Systems. Mahwah, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005, pp. 35-95.
- Levy DL. Obituary: Philip S. Holzman. Schizophrenia Research, 2005; 73:1-3.
- Levy DL, Mendell NR, Holzman PS. The antisaccade task and neuropsychological tests of prefrontal cortical integrity in schizophrenia: Empirical findings and interpretative considerations. World Psychiatry, 2004; 2:131-139.
- Levy DL, O’Driscoll G, Matthysse S, Cook, S, Holzman PS, Mendell NR. Antisaccade performance in biological relatives of schizophrenia patients: A meta-analysis. Schizophrenia Research, 2004; 71:113-125.
- Lo, Y., Matthysse, S., Rubin, D.S., Holzman, P.S. Permutation tests for detecting the presence of mixtures in task performance within groups. Statistics in Medicine, 2002;21:1937-1953.
- Manoach DS, White NS, Lindgren KA, Heckers S, Coleman MJ, Dubal S, Holzman PS. Hemispheric specialization of the lateral prefrontal cortex for strategic processing during spatial and shape working memory. Neuroimage, 2004; 21:894-903.
- Manoach D.S., White N.S., Lindgren K.A., Heckers S., Coleman, M.J., Dubal, S., Goff, D., Holzman, P.S. Intact hemispheric specialization for spatial and shape working memory in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 2005; 78:1-12.
- Matthysse S, Holzman PS, Gusella J, Levy DL, Harte C, Jørgensen A, Møller, L, Parnas. Linkage of eye movement dysfunction to chromosome 6p in schizophrenia: A confirmation. American Journal of Medical Genetics, 2004;128B:30-36.
- Titone D, Holzman PS, Levy DL. Idiom processing in schizophrenia: Literal implausibility saves the day for idiom priming. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 2002;111:313-320.
- Titone D, Levy DL. Lexical competition and spoken word identification in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 2004;68:75-85.
- Titone D, Ditman T, Holzman PS, Eichenbaum H, Levy DL. Transitive inference in schizophrenia: Impairments in relational memory organization. Schizophrenia Research, 2004;68:235-247.