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As part of its commitment to support mental health research, the IoMH has established a small grants scheme and is pleased to announce awards totalling £25,000 in the coming academic financial year.
Successful applications for our small grants scheme 2022/2023
The IoMH have successfully awarded 2022/23 Small Grants to fund three proposals that support interdisciplinary mental health research.
Mechanisms behind Worry and their role in Anxiety
This project was co-funded by the UCL Neuroscience Domain.
Lead applicants: Alexis Low (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, IoN), Michael Moutoussis (IoN), Zi Chen Ye, Prajal Mehta (Dept of Experimental Psychology, PaLS)
Description: Anxiety is highly prevalent and a cause of significant societal burden. Worry drives and accelerates anxiety, so it is often addressed in therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), but its psychological and neurobiological basis remains unclear. Leveraging on the fact that worry has, in fact, problemsolving qualities and is perceived as helpful, we propose a novel hypothesis: worry is the persistence of a strategy to search for solutions to avert threats, while maladaptive worriers are unable to stop when no longer effective.
To test this, a novel paradigm will be used which renders explicit and measurable the search of information in pursuit of a solution which occurs during worry. Firstly, a large-scale study will be conducted, where participants will answer questionnaires about their worry and related characteristics e.g. background, anxiety levels, as well as play a realistic online ‘game’ where they may choose to search for information under more or less promising circumstances. Secondly, leveraging on our expertise with video-recorded facial expression data analysis, participants’ facial expressions and body language will also be recorded, with the additional benefit of increasing the realism of the task. Then, this rich data will be used in mathematical modelling, enabling comparing our hypothesis versus key alternatives. Insights gained from this study will crucially inform a parallel neuroimaging study to delve into the neurobiological basis of worry. This set of studies offers a specific and detailed insight into worry, highlighting key underlying processes which are present across many mental health disorders from generalised anxiety to post traumatic stress disorder.
Neural and behavioural mechanisms of self-other-distinction in people with autistic traits
This project is co-funded by the UCL Neuroscience Domain.
Lead applicants: Marco Wittman, Stephen Flemming (Department of Experimental Psychology), Liz Pellicano (Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology)
Description: Scientists have made substantial progress understanding the function of different parts of the brain. We increasingly understand how the brain keeps track of other people, and how it maintains
a sense of ourselves as being different from others. But we still don’t understand very well what happens in the brain when people have difficulties navigating social situations. Autistic people are a group of people that find it particularly difficult to interact with others. Our goal is to understand how the brains of people with autistic traits function differently when navigating social situations.
To achieve this goal, we will study how large populations of people vary in their degree of autistic traits. We assess this with questionnaires. We will relate people’s responses on these questionnaires to results obtained from a 30-minute online computer task. The task will be designed to identify hidden mental processes that we can reveal using mathematical models. This will tell us how good people are distinguishing what they know about themselves from what they know about others. We have reason to believe that people with strong autistic traits may actually be very good – better than average – in distinguishing themselves from others and hence have a quite isolated sense of self. We will test this idea rigorously in hundreds of people. We also want to know if this ability is specific or whether similar findings are obtained for people with mental health issues such as social anxiety. Because people with autistic traits often face mental health issues, we need to know whether the isolated sense of self may cause social isolation and mental health issues, or whether it is rather a consequence of these mental health issues. This knowledge will ultimately help us to understand which specific brain processes cause difficulties for autistic people when interacting with others.
Decision making and eating disorders risks among adolescents —a Bayesian computational approach
Lead applicants: Youyou Wu, Amy Harrison, Eirini Flouri (IoE), Jonathan Roiser (ICN)
Description: Our previous research has shown that disadvantageous decision making in childhood is associated with eating disorder symptoms at later ages. Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that affect psychological, physical, and social functioning. Our finding is important in that it explains more about why and how people might go on to develop eating disorders – these illnesses might be, in part, a problem related to making inefficient decisions. For instance, behaviours like excessively restricting dietary intake could result from failure to weigh in the negative effects on health and wellbeing.
We would like to further explore the relationship between decision-making and eating disorders by developing computational models that track adolescents decision-making processes in high resolution. The model will be able to precisely assess individuals’ decision preferences and biases. These decision features will then be linked with eating disorder symptoms. Decision making in our research is measured by a gambling task in a large data set called the Millennium Cohort Study. The dataset tracks over 18,000 people born in the year 2000/2001 have been followed up across their life.
The proposed research will allow practitioners to accurately identify of adolescents susceptible to eating disorders and train them advantageous decision-making to prevent the development of eating disorders. The project will also showcase the utility of computational modelling in studying decision-making and mental health issues. The project will exploit the domain expertise on eating disorders from Dr Harrison and Prof Flouri, and methodological expertise on computational modelling from Dr Wu and Prof Roiser.