Current Research Projects
Find out more about what I'm working on.
Status: Manuscript in Progress
Does rewarding people for being generous increase how much they give to a charity of their choice?
Status: Data Collection
Exerting mental effort can be exhausting. How does the state of our mental fatigue effect how we value the cognitive effort we exert?
Status: Data Collection
Psychiatric disorders are extremely heterogeneous and diagnosed based on symptom checklists. What if we used the power of machine learning to diagnose and characterize depression based on a discrete set of choices instead?
Incentivizing Altruism
Contributors: Grace Steward, Joseph Galaro, Mario Macis, Nicola Lacetera, Vikram Chib
Status: Manuscript in Progress
Blood banks rely on altruistic donation to fill their stores and save lives around the globe. It follows common economic sense that increasing the reward for such a donation would increase the supply.
Our study looks to understand if paying people monetary reward increases their likelihood to accept pain for a donation to a charity of their choice. This is contrasted with not paying subjects for the same donations to charity. Our neuroeconomics study will show how different aspects of the decisions are weighted under each condition.
Relevant Works:
Lacetera, Nicola, and Mario Macis. “Do All Material Incentives for Pro-Social Activities Backfire? The Response to Cash and Non-Cash Incentives for Blood Donations.” Journal of Economic Psychology, vol. 31, no. 4, Aug. 2010, pp. 738–48. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1016/j.joep.2010.05.007.
The Value of Cognitive Effort
Contributors: Grace Steward, Vikram Chib
Status: Data Collection
We have to exert cognitive effort daily to varying degrees. This could be as simple as deciding what to eat for breakfast or as complicated as solving problems at work. These activities all consume cognitive resources.
But what happens when we become cognitively fatigued? Are we increasingly sensitive to effort difficulty? Do we increase the value of all other cognitive effort? Does cognitive fatigue change the effort system like physical fatigue does, or is it altogether different? Our study aims to answer these questions, and then apply the results to to disorders plagued by chronic fatigue like psychiatric disorders.
Relevant Works:
Westbrook, Andrew, et al. “What Is the Subjective Cost of Cognitive Effort? Load, Trait, and Aging Effects Revealed by Economic Preference.” PLoS ONE, edited by Mathias Pessiglione, vol. 8, no. 7, July 2013, p. e68210. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0068210.
Hogan, Patrick S., et al. “Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Physical Fatigue on Effort-Based Choice.” Nature Communications, vol. 11, no. 1, Dec. 2020, p. 4026. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1038/s41467-020-17855-5.
Computational Psychiatry
Contributors: Grace Steward, Fernando Goes, Vikram Chib
Status: Data Collection
The goal of my thesis is to discover if implementing a computerized behavioral test assessing patient behavior can effectively measure and explain dimensions of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), while improving diagnostic reliability in comparison to existing depression scales.
As psychiatric treatment moves to the digital domain, the lengthy, in-person interview used as the gold-standard for diagnosing psychiatric disorders has become difficult, if not impossible, to perform. These interviews require the patient and clinician to be objective observers of the disorders. Instead, the subjectivity of these interviews can lead to poor reliability in diagnosis and assessment of treatment methods in the clinic. Thus, mental health professionals need a simple, objective way to assess patients and assure positive treatment outcomes.
The paradigm used in this study has subjects make choices in the domains on their behaviors most affected by MDD, effort exertion, reward value, aversion to loss, etc. The results of this paradigm are then fed into computational models to create behavioral profiles of the patient that detail the distortion of behavior in each dimension.
We plan to use these profiles to more easily identify MDD in the general population.
Relevant Works:
Zimmerman, Mark, et al. “An Inadequate Community Standard of Care: Lack of Measurement of Outcome When Treating Depression in Clinical Practice.” Primary Psychiatry, vol. 15, no. 6, MBL Communications, June 2008, pp. 67–75. Academic Search Ultimate.
Huys, Quentin J. M., et al. “Computational Psychiatry as a Bridge from Neuroscience to Clinical Applications.” Nature Neuroscience, vol. 19, no. 3, Mar. 2016, pp. 404–13. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1038/nn.4238.
Mauras, Thomas, et al. “Incentive Sensitivity as a Behavioral Marker of Clinical Remission From Major Depressive Episode.” The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 77, no. 06, June 2016, pp. e697–703. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.4088/JCP.15m09995.