James Owers and Sam Rupprechter
Tue 11 Dec 2018, 11:00 - 12:00
IF 4.31/4.33

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Gareth Beedham (gbeedham)

Abnormal Reward Valuation and Connectivity in Major Depressive Disorder

I will briefly introduce (model-based) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis and the potential it has to help us better understand psychiatric disorders. I will then present our work involving participants suffering from major depressive disorder who performed a reward based decision-making task while in the scanner.  Our analysis revealed abnormal activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate at decision time, and altered reward value encoding in regions including hippocampus and rostral anterior cingulate in depression.  Finally, current analysis of a large (>600 participants) Scotland-wide study ("STRADL - Stratifying Resilience and Depression Longitudinally") will be outlined and future work indicated. The talk is intended to be accessible for people from diverse backgrounds.