Kellogg College

Abstract: Research has consistently shown that control is critical to psychological functioning, with perceived lack of control considered to play a crucial role in the manifestation of symptoms in psychiatric disorders In a model of behavioral control based on nonhuman animal work, Maier and colleagues posited that the presence of control activates areas of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which in turn inhibit the normative stress response in the dorsal raphe nucleus and amygdala To test Maier’s model in humans, we investigated the effects of control over potent aversive stimuli by presenting video clips of snakes to 21 snake phobics who were otherwise healthy with no comorbid psychopathologies Based on prior research documenting that disrupted neural processing during the anticipation of adverse events can be influenced by different forms of cognitive processing such as perceptions of control, analyses focused on the anticipatory activity preceding the videos We found that phobics exhibited greater vmPFC activity during the anticipation of snake videos when they had control over whether the videos were presented as compared to when they had no control over the presentation of the videos In addition, observed functional connectivity between the vmPFC and the amygdala is consistent with previous work documenting vmPFC inhibition of the amygdala Our results provide evidence to support the extension of Maier’s model of behavioral control to include anticipatory function in humans

Abstract: David Bailey, Alex de Ruyter, Jonathan Michie and Peter Tyler Coventry University Business School, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK, david.bailey@coventry.ac.uk Business School, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley PA1 2BE, UK, alex.deruyter@uws. ac.uk Department for Continuing Education and Kellogg College, Oxford University, 62 Banbury Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX2 6PN, UK, jonathan.michie@kellogg.ox.ac.uk Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, 19 Silver Street, Cambridge CB3 9EP, UK, pt23@cam.ac.uk

Abstract: Neuropsychiatric conditions account for one third of years lost to disability among adults worldwide and in the United Kingdom account for almost half of all health issues for people under the age of 65. At the same time, mental health budgets (especially in low- and middle-income countries) are increasingly stretched denying care to those that need it. The WHO predicts that unipolar depressive disorders will become the leading cause of disabilities worldwide by 2030. This paper describes a smartphone-based system that allows remote realtime monitoring of psychiatric patient symptoms, behaviour and physiology to enable allocation of psychiatric resources most efficiently. We present preliminary results from an ongoing study of over 100 participants showing qualitative differences between healthy controls and pathological subjects.