NCMD Seminars Series Presents 'Reward-driven attention in bipolar disorder: Plans for an EEG/eye-tracking study' and 'SAVi-M: The Development of a Standardised Auditory-Visual Misophonia Database'

Today we were delighted to have two presentations from Newcastle University PhD students.

Susanna Carella, also on our of NCMD hosts, is a second-year NUCoRE Neuroscience PhD student at the NCMD. Her PhD focuses on the role of reward processing in the pathophysiology and treatment of bipolar disorder, using methods from cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, and computational psychiatry. Prior to her PhD, she completed a BSc Psychology and MRes Neuroscience at Newcastle University. She is particularly interested in the interplay between "hot" and "cold" cognition in mood disorders.

She presented on 'Reward-driven attention in bipolar disorder: Plans for an EEG/eye-tracking study'. Reward processing dysregulation has been theorised to be central to the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder. However, the extent and direction of such dysregulation and the affected domains remain poorly defined. An open question regards the role of value-based attentional mechanisms in reward processing in this population. These processes can be assessed using a value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) task by Anderson (2011), designed to assess the ability of task-irrelevant distractors to attract attention based on their previously learned association with high or low monetary rewards. I will present my plans for a study assessing value-based attentional mechanisms in relation to bipolar disorder symptomology. The study will combine behaviour from the VDAC task with EEG and eye-tracking measures, in an attempt to disentangle reward-based and attention-based mechanisms, and their interactions.

Paris Arizona Ash is a Second-Year PhD researcher at Newcastle University, investigating misophonia from a multisensory perspective, with a focus on audio-visual interactions. Their research combines eye-tracking, reflexive thematic analysis, and psychophysiological measures to explore emotional and cognitive responses to trigger stimuli.

She presented on 'SAVi-M: The Development of a Standardised Auditory-Visual Misophonia Database'. Misophonia is characterized by decreased emotional tolerance to specific auditory and/or visual stimuli, commonly known as ‘triggers.’ While research has primarily focused on auditory triggers, the SAVi-M database provides 250 standardized audiovisual stimuli to explore other symptom dimensions, such as visual triggers. In a study with 96 participants (misophonia, misophonia-misokinesia, and control groups), we assessed emotional responses using arousal, valence, and dominance ratings. Our findings indicate that individuals with misophonia and misophonia-misokinesia show heightened negative emotional responses to SAVi-M triggers.

Thank you so much to both speakers this week for these fascinating presentations.