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Contact the study team using the details below to take part. If there are no contact details below please ask your doctor in the first instance.
Mood [affective] disorders
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With the proposed project we plan to investigate the brain activation patterns of people suffering from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and to compare them with healthy control participants as well as to track their treatment response and outcome via neuroscientific paradigms. Only little is known about the neurobiology of MDD. Our study design will address some of these gaps in the literature, mainly by focusing on brain scan paradigms during which social interactions which are assumed to be at the core of patients' difficulties will be investigated. We will link the data from our neuroimaging assessments with patients’ symptomatology, their attachment and developmental history, their mentalisation capacities and clinical outcome. This will allow us to gain a better understanding of the disorder and to develop more informed and effective treatments from which clients will benefit. More specifially, we plan to investigate the neural correlates and computational mechanisms of social processes that are fundamental both for understanding how the healthy brain computes interactions, and for characterizing diseaserelated dysfunction in MDD. Using the framework of computational psychiatry we aim to identify biomarkers or endophenotypes specific to MDD as well as those that may represent shared neurobehavioural characteristics between the it and other psychopathologies, particularly personality disorders which present a substantial cooccurring diagnosis. By drawing on socio-interactive paradigms and hyperscanning technique (the simultaneous brain scanning of two participants engaged in task in which they mutually influence one another) we will investigate the mechanisms underlying second order belief reasoning, recursive modelling of relationships, trust, and impulsivity. We will also account for individual differences such as attachment representations and reflective functioning in order to assess the variance these can explain in our computational models of both behavioural performance and brain activity in economic exchange probes.
Start dates may differ between countries and research sites. The research team are responsible for keeping the information up-to-date.
The recruitment start and end dates are as follows:
Type: Psychological & Behavioural;
You can take part if:
You may not be able to take part if:
General participants (controls): 1) Having a severe Axis 1 Mental health problem (e.g. psychosis, depression, autism spectrum disorder) as measured by the Brief Symptom Inventiry (Derogatis, 1993). 2) Having been treated in hospital for a serious head injury. 3) Having an IQ < 70 4) Having been diagnosed with neurological disorders (brain tumor, epilepsy, other degenerative or neurodevelopmental disorder) 5) Learning disability requiring specialist educational support and/or medical treatment; both groups: •Unable to understand written or spoken English. •Any metallic material in body, including unremovable piercings •Other standard MRI safety exclusion criteria (see screening form in the Appendix) •Standard safety exclusion criteria for venous blood sampling
Below are the locations for where you can take part in the trial. Please note that not all sites may be open.
The study is sponsored by University College London and funded by Wellcome Trust .
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for Trial ID: CPMS 32204
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