Neuroimaging of treatment response in depression and anxiety | C4C

The principle objective of the proposed study is to establish the brain systems that govern threat avoidance behaviour and whether these are overactive, giving rise to an anxious personality profile, and predict treatment response in individuals with anxiety and/or depression. Neuroimaging will also be used to study brain activation in response to emotional processing, using an existing facial expressions paradigm, and during a novel self-criticism task which has strong face validity as a marker for depression. By doing this we hope a) to identify both shared and unique neural signatures of anxiety and depression, and b) to use these to predict treatment response by testing patients before and after a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and to identify specifically markers of treatment resistance.