PhD Studentship in Model-driven approaches to identifying markers of altered multisensory emotion processing in trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder

This project is being advertised as one that is in competition for a fully funded studentship. The successful candidate would work with the proposed supervisors to put forward an application to the ESRC South-West Doctoral Training Partnership.

It is estimated that 70% of individuals will experience a psychologically traumatic event in their lifetime, and approximately 10% of these will go on develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a stress-related disorder that is associated with significant emotional difficulties, including an inability to manage overwhelming emotions and/or emotional numbing. There is also evidence that trauma exposure itself can negatively impact brain function, independently of PTSD, and there is initial evidence that alteration in emotional information from more than one sensory modality may be altered in PTSD. Therefore, more attention is required to understand how emotional cognition is altered in trauma and PTSD, and to identify the unique signatures of emotional processing deficits in the two conditions.

Studying nervous system function using techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and heart rate variability has successfully identified biomarkers of emotional functioning and psychological wellbeing in a number of clinical and non-clinical populations. The aim in this project would be to apply this approach to trauma and PTSD using an existing dataset compiled by the supervisors which combines behavioural, EEG and other physiological measures (e.g., heart rate and skin conductance). This will involve the use of state-of-the-art mathematical methods designed to fuse data from multiple sources to understand differences in multisensory emotion processing in trauma and/or PTSD.

Employed methods will include distance-based data analysis, dynamic network analysis, dynamic mode decomposition and tensor decomposition. The methods will exploit mathematical model of interactions between different sources of data to derive individual signatures of trauma and/or PTSD. The individual trauma signatures will be used to design a classification algorithm that allows us to discriminate between patients and healthy individuals. The ultimate aim of the project is development of personalised approaches allowing for objective stratification of people affected by trauma and/or PTSD.

If interested, please contact Karin Petrini (kp504@bath.ac.uk) for more information.

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