PhD Studentship in Psychology: Depression and the Emotional Self

Closing Date
7 Jan 2019
Salary
£14,777
Address
University of Bath
Duration
3 years

The University of Bath (Department of Psychology) is pleased to offer a PhD project starting in October 2019, supervised by Drs Jie Sui, Katherine Button and Dr Jiaxiang Zhang (Cardiff).  

Depression is set to be the leading contributor to the global burden of disease by 2030. Effective treatment is a public health priority. While several effective treatments are available, nearly 50% of patients do not respond to their first treatment, and finding the best treatment is often a trial and error process. This project aims to develop objective measures based on self and emotion biases in order to identify early markers of treatment response in depression, and to link these biases to a well-characterised neural architecture. It will provide a proof-of-principle analysis of the clinical utility of the new measures we have developed, opening out the possibility of incorporating objective measures of self and emotion-related cognition into psychiatric practice.

Healthy individuals process stimuli relevant to themselves faster and more accurately compared to stimuli linked to others (termed ‘self-bias’) and they are also biased towards positively-valenced stimuli (‘emotion-bias’). Changes in self and emotion biases are widely reported in depression, but understanding how self and emotion biases break down in depression is hampered by relying on self-report data and there are no objective measures that can be delivered efficiently and in clinical situations. We have developed new procedures for examining self and emotion biases and their underlying neural architecture.

This project will:

(i) Apply the newly-developed paradigms to study changes in self and emotion biases in depressed individuals,

(ii) Identify the functional connectivity responsible for these biases using our existing resting-state fMRI datasets collected largely in healthy controls (N=~350), and

(iii) Include a task-based fMRI study to characterise the changes in the relevant neural networks in depressed patients.

This PhD project is an inter-disciplinary effort combining experimental psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. The Department of Psychology at Bath is an excellent place to conduct this project, with strong research groups in these areas.

Applicants should have, or be predicted to receive, a high 2.1 or 1st class degree in Psychology or a related discipline. The successful applicant will be supported in applying for studentship funding provided by the ESRC and/or the University of Bath. Full studentships cover UK/EU tuition fees and provide approx. £14,777 p.a. in living costs for 3 years. Students also receive a personal allowance for training and conference attendance. Successful applicants will acquire skills that will equip them for high-profile careers in academia and further study in clinical psychology.

What to do next

Please contact Dr Jie Sui (j.sui@bath.ac.uk) with a CV to express your interest in applying for this studentship and find out more about the project. Application is via https://www.bath.ac.uk/study/pg/applications.pl?department=Psychology. A research proposal is not required at this preliminary stage.

Please contact Dr Sui by 7th January. Note that this date is earlier than the 29th Jan 2019 deadline set by the University of Bath for studentship applications, and will enable the successful applicant to be supported in developing a research proposal.

Contact Details

Dr Jie Sui: j.sui@bath.ac.uk