Dr. Jim Cavanagh receives an R01 Grant.  Congratulations Dr. Cavanagh!

NIMH Biobehavioral Research Awards for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS) RO1MH119382-01:

"A Novel Bench-to-Bedside Translational Model of Anhedonia"

Anhedonia is the inability to seek and experience pleasure.  It can emerge from deficits in motivation, valuation, or hedonic appreciation, each of which reflect different neural processes and are differently expressed across individuals. The EEG response known as the Reward Positivity is a candidate biomarker specific to value-based deficiencies in anhedonia. The objective of this proposal is to test whether induced emotion, depressed mood, and learned helplessness (in mice) directly diminish the Reward Positivity.  This is innovative, since all experiments address a computational function tightly tied to a neural response that directly addresses the disease-specific phenotype in human patients and is capable of being assessed, manipulated, and recovered within a rodent model. The successful completion of the aims advanced here will create what we think is the most promising path for combining these strengths into a computationally-inspired, mechanistically tested, translatable model of aberrant valuation in anhedonia.  This novel candidate biomarker will then be translatable between species and testable in an outpatient clinic.

Total Costs for the grant: $1,889,130.