Maladaptive thinking patterns in depression

Depression is amongst the most burdensome disorders world-wide because it is a common disorder with frequent relapses. Relapse risk is increased by maladaptive thinking patterns, and by stopping antidepressants, which in turn increases maladaptive thinking patterns. I will first study how maladaptive thinking patterns arise and cause emotions. I will do this by asking individuals to perform tasks that evoke emotions while recording their brain activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG). I will then look in the MEG data for signatures of task stimuli to try and understand how what they think about relates to the emotion they report. In the second part, I will study how psychotherapy and antidepressants influence MEG signatures of maladaptive thinking. Finally, I will examine whether these brain measures predict depression relapses. These studies will use brain imaging and computational modelling to understand how thoughts relate to emotions and establish whether this could help us prevent relapses.