Editorial
Situating psychophysiological science within the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework

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Abstract

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) reflects a paradigm shift in mental health research aimed at establishing a science of psychopathology that is grounded in neuroscience. In many ways, the RDoC approach to research has been utilized for decades by psychophysiologists who have leveraged a range of biological measures to study variability in psychological processes as a function of individual differences. We highlight the critical role of psychophysiology in the era of RDoC, and briefly review the 13 papers and commentary that form the current special issue.

Section snippets

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)

Although the field of neuroscience has made tremendous strides in understanding how the brain works, this knowledge has not translated into significant advances in understanding, treating, and preventing mental illness. One potential reason has to do with the questionable validity of the diagnoses we study. A research investigation that compares a group of individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) to a group of healthy controls lumps individuals together based on a collection

RDoC and psychophysiology

Although RDoC is a matrix of process constructs and methods for indexing them, most measurements of these constructs implicitly need to reflect relatively stable individual differences relevant to mental health.1

Overview of articles in the special issue

Baskin-Sommers and Foti (2015) consider reward-related neural abnormalities across MDD and substance use disorders (SUD) in terms of dissociable aspects of reward processing (i.e., liking, wanting, and learning). The authors articulate an integrative model that ranges from primarily hyperthymic on the one end (e.g., ‘pure SUD’, characterized by impaired wanting and intact liking) to primarily anhedonic (e.g., ‘pure MDD’, characterized by impaired liking and intact wanting) on the other, and

Summary

Papers in the current special issue highlight a range of psychophysiological measures that are relevant to the RDoC framework and its aims. Specific ERPs (e.g., the P300 and ERN), EEG asymmetry, HRV, startle blink, and pupillometry can all be utilized to study processes and constructs relevant to RDoC. Notably, almost all of the current papers consider relations of psychophysiological measures with both diagnostic groupings and variability along more specific symptom dimensions—an approach that

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