Research

My program of research focuses on elucidating the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms of psychopathology risk, as related to variation in normal-range personality dimensions. The majority of my work thus far has integrated questionnaires with behavioral tasks and fMRI to identify brain networks and trait dimensions associated with trans-diagnostic mechanisms of psychopathology risk—including hypersensitive pattern detection, social cognitive deficits, and dysregulated affect. Below, I present some of my current research directions and representative publications.

Individual Differences in Social Cognition and Behavior

Though all humans are social, we vary considerably in our ability to form and maintain close relationships. One approach to explaining this variation looks to identify underlying mechanisms of social cognition—processes that allow us to recognize and interpret the thoughts and feelings of others. Much of this work, however, is methodologically limited (e.g., using small sample sizes and single tasks) and fails to provide comprehensive explanatory frameworks.

One of my lines of research applies insights from personality and network neuroscience to the study of social cognition. Across several studies, I have drawn on varied methods—questionnaires, behavioral tasks, fMRI, and neuromodulation—to elucidate how and why individuals vary in our social abilities, behaviors, and associated outcomes. For example, some of my current work examines how Agreeableness and activity of the brain’s default network might underly individual differences in theory of mind ability. On the measurement and psychometrics front, my colleagues and I are working to develop and validate a scale to measure trait affiliation.

I am also interested in how psychopathology and subclinical manifestations of mental illness might influence social cognitive abilities and associated interpersonal outcomes. For instance, levels of positive schizotypy and autistic traits are negatively associated with the ability to perceive emotional cues from gait (Blain et al., 2017, Schizophrenia Research). Sub-factors of the Agreeableness-Antagonism continuum also appear to predict individual differences in social cognitive abilities, with callousness and aggression negatively predicting social cognition but Machiavellianism positively predicting performance in this domain (Blain et al., 2020, Personality and Individual Differences/ISSID 2019).

Joint Mechanisms of Openness and Positive Schizotypy

Another area of work focuses on uncovering personality and neurocognitive risk factors for psychosis. Positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype—often termed psychoticism or positive schizotypy—are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. One promising framework for explaining positive symptoms involves apophenia, conceptualized here as a disposition toward false-positive errors. Apophenia and positive symptoms have shown relations to openness to experience (more specifically, to the openness aspect of the broader openness/intellect domain), and all of these constructs involve tendencies toward pattern seeking. This cluster of related traits and cognitive processes appears to also be linked, in part, by a shared underlying neural architecture.

Using questionnaires, tests of pattern recognition, and fMRI, I found that the personality trait openness, positive schizotypy, and their shared variance are related to the tendency to detect meaningful patterns in randomness (Blain et al., 2020, Journal of Abnormal Psychology). Moreover, my work has shown that openness and psychosis proneness are related to increased connectivity within the brain’s default network but decreased connectivity within the frontoparietal control network (Blain et al., 2020, Schizophrenia Bulletin). These findings provide insight into neurobehavioral characteristics of openness and positive schizotypy, suggesting they may be linked in part by altered pattern recognition and function in simulation-related networks.

Dimensional Approaches to Affect Dysregulation

Another line of work deals with individual differences in the processing of affect and reward and their relation to personality and psychopathology. My work using an implicit reward learning paradigm suggests that individual differences in reward sensitivity are positively related to levels of Extraversion (Blain et al., 2021, JPSP-PPID). I have also pursued research on this topic in collaboration with researchers at China’s Southwest University, where I explored the protective role of emotion regulation flexibility in depressive symptomatology (Wang, Blain, et al., 2021, Cognition and Emotion) and the functional brain correlates of adaptive coping (Wang, Blain et al., 2020, Brain and Cognition).

Domain-general Features of Psychopathology Risk