ANC Seminar - 03/09/2024

Belief updating in psychiatric disorders

Abstract: Differences in the strength with which individuals learn from positive and negative information have been suggested to underlie a range of symptoms (such as pessimism, apathy, anergia and anhedonia) that are prevalent in different affective disorders. I will present recent research I have conducted that examines how valence (whether information is positive or negative) impacts learning and relates to different psychopathologies. Using a belief updating task, I will first show that a bias towards negative information when learning about the likelihood of future life-events, characterises patients with unipolar depression. I will then show that a bias towards positive information exists in euthymic bipolar patients, and that this bias predicts these patients’ relapse over a subsequent 5-year period. These findings suggests that asymmetric learning could provide protection against the onset of clinical symptoms. Using a classic foraging task (the prey-selection task) I will then show that patients with unipolar depression also exhibit a tendency to over-exploit. This pattern of choices is consistent with a pessimistic estimate of the environments reward-rate, a mechanism by which specific transdiagnostic symptoms (such as anergia, and apathy) might arise. Finally, I will show how sensitivity to negative feedback in the WCST (a classic test of set-shifting) decreases with anhedonia severity in a sample of patients a diagnosis of schizophrenia, depression, and opiate use disorder. I will suggest that the dampening of responses to negative feedback could arise from pessimistic expectations and provides a plausible account of the persistence of actions associated with negative consequences.

Bio: Paolo graduated in Medicine and Surgery in Parma (Italy) where he also completed his training in General Adult Psychiatry in 2014. Since then he worked as consultant in psychiatry for the local health system (AUSL of Parma), where he's now the head of the day hospital services. In 2016 he started the tenured-track academic path at the University of Parma and, recently, he has been appointed associate professor in psychiatry. His main research interest is in computational psychiatry and specifically in how reinforcement learning and belief updating is affected by mood in affective disorders. 

Event type: Seminar

Date: Tuesday, 3rd September

Time: 11:00

Location: G.03

Speaker(s): Paolo Ossola, University of Parma, Italy

Chair/Host: Antonio Vergari