December 6th, 2014
Control and Reward Circuits in Disorders of Self-regulation
Rachel Marsh, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute
In this talk, Dr. Marsh will describe her research investigating the function and structure of the frontostriatal neural circuits that support the capacity for self-regulatory control in normal development and in the development of psychiatric disorders that arise during childhood and adolescence. Dr. Marsh will report her multi-modal imaging findings from teens with Bulimia Nervosa and adults with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Her findings and research approach are consistent with the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project at NIMH, pointing to abnormalities in the overlapping neural circuits that support both cognitive control and reward processing functions across these disorders. Through leveraging multiple levels of analysis, this work highlights how these two domains of neural function that underlie much of normal behavior can go awry in individuals with pathological repetitive thoughts and behaviors, and potentially contribute to illness development and persistence.