A team led by Deanna Barch, the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at WashU Medicine and a professor of psychological and brain sciences, has received a $3.25 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the mechanisms underlying hallucinations and delusions in schizophrenia.
Hallucinations and delusions are common and often deeply disruptive among people with schizophrenia. Severe episodes can increase the risk of self-harm and make it difficult for people to work, maintain relationships, and manage daily life.
Until recently, there has been little research on the specific psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms that contribute to the formation and persistence of hallucinations and delusions, Barch said.
“Addressing this gap to develop better treatments is critical given the major impact of hallucinations and delusions on quality of life for those suffering from psychosis,” Barch said. She noted that the economic burden of schizophrenia in 2019 was estimated at $343.2 billion.
Barch and her team — including researchers from the University of California, Irvine; the University of Chicago; the University of Minnesota Twin Cities; and the University of Maryland, Baltimore — will use advanced computational, psychometric, and electrophysiological measures to identify the specific mental processes that can lead to these symptoms.
The ongoing project, called the Cognitive Neurocomputational Task Reliability and Clinical Applications Consortium, aims to develop and validate new tools that could help researchers predict and ultimately prevent severe psychotic episodes.
The research will unfold in several stages over the next five years. Much of the work will focus on the presence and origins of unrealistic beliefs that persist despite contradictory evidence.
By comparing participants with schizophrenia and those without the condition, researchers will test whether their model of belief formation can help predict episodes of hallucinations and delusions. Online surveys of 5,000 participants will help determine whether the relationship between beliefs and psychotic episodes can be observed outside the laboratory. The team will also use electroencephalography, or EEG, to track brain activity associated with these symptoms.
After the project concludes, the researchers hope to use the findings to develop and evaluate treatments aimed at reducing the burden of hallucinations and delusions for people with psychotic disorders.
