Decision making and foraging under threat – neural activity and transdiagnostic clinical relevance

Mood instability is a feature of bipolar disorder (BD). While, fluctuating mood episodes have traditionally be seen as lasting weeks or months, more recent work has shown that, in fact, bipolar patients show large day-to-day fluctuations in mood even when symptoms are in the non-clinical range. This degree of mood instability is affected by lithium treatment. Understanding the processes underpinning these fluctuations may help us develop and assess more effective treatment approaches Here we examined the cognitive and neural mechanisms – reduced stabilizing adaptations of choices to past outcomes - underlying these fluctuations and how they are changed with the mood stabilizer lithium. 

In a separate line of work, we examined foraging under threat in a gamified task in which participants needed to balance their activities between those that were rewarding and others that ensure the safety of their avatar. In this naturalistic scenario, we measured how emotions (stress and excitement) were evoked by the environment and shaped behaviour. We also examined the impact of transdiagnostic dimensions (anxiety, apathy, compulsivity) on task behaviour in a large online sample. With 7T FMRI, we examined the neural subcortical underpinnings.

For a one-to-one meeting with Jacquie Scholl, please contact Magdalena Soukupova: magdalena.soukupova@ens.fr