DoP Seminar - Professor Quentin Huys

The Division of Psychiatry hybrid seminar will be held on Wednesday 21st February at 3pm.

Venue: UCL Campus

About the Speaker

Professor Quentin Huys, UCL Division of Psychiatry

Title: Cognitive-computational mechanisms in psychotherapy

Despite extensive research, the cognitive processes mediating the impact of
psychotherapeutic interventions remain poorly understood, and as a result
difficult to quantify. Identifying such mechanisms is likely to be extremely
helpful: it could help target interventions better, could support dosing therapy
through monitoring, and could heighten the speed at which new interventions can
be developed.

I will start with an initial series of studies suggesting that
cognitive probes might be sensitive to psychotherapeutic interventions
interventions based on behavioural activation, cognitive restructuring, and
distancing, showing effects on effort-based decision making, attribution
tendencies, emotion dynamics and social trust. The next set of studies used a
randomized experimental setup to start asking whether the cognitive mechanisms
are selectively engaged by treatments, with some promising initial findings.

Finally, I will discuss a pilot study in a clinical setting suggesting that the
therapeutic effect of specific interventions may be related to the impact on
computationally defined cognitive mechanisms. The findings will be discussed
with respect to challenges in developing brief, reliable, engaging, and
user-acceptable measures of cognition. Overall, this outlines some new results
in using computational methods to understand therapeutic processes in the
psychotherapy for depression.