"We know that, on average, people with schizophrenia have more social impairment than people in the general population," says senior author Dr. Aristotle Voineskos in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. "But we needed to take an agnostic approach and let the data tell us what the brain-behavioural profiles of our study participants looked like. It turned out that the relationship between brain function and social behaviour had nothing to do with conventional diagnostic categories in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)." Most brain research in the mental health field compares a disease group to a non-disease or "healthy" group to search for biomarkers, a biological measure of mental health symptoms. This search for biomarkers has been elusive. This multi-site research study -- which included 179 participants recruited at CAMH in Toronto, Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore -- calls that paradigm into question because people with the same mental illness may not show the same biological patterns. The study, which involved participants completing a facial imitation task while undergoing functional MRI brain scans, found three "activation profiles," says first author Dr. Colin Hawco, also of CAMH. These can be described as typical, over-activated and de-activated profiles. - www.sciencedaily.com