Dr. Adam Culbreth ~ Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine

Topic: “Etiology and Assessment of Motivational Impairment in People with Schizophrenia”

Schizophrenia is a neuropsychiatric disorder with profound human and economic costs. Positive symptoms (e.g., hallucinations and delusions) are frequently thought of as the cardinal symptoms of schizophrenia. However, recent work has suggested that understanding the etiology of negative symptoms (including reductions in motivation and aspects of emotional experience) may be integral to improving social and occupational functioning in those with schizophrenia. In this talk, I will outline recent work in my lab attempting to examine contributory factors to motivational impairment in people with schizophrenia. This work considers motivation in the framework of effort-cost decision-making. In this conceptualization, individuals vary in their subjective evaluation of whether an outcome is worth the effort required to obtain it. I will present work from my lab that examines effort-cost decision-making using a combination of behavioral tasks, computational models of behavior, and functional neuroimaging. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss recent efforts to assess motivational impairment using digital technology to comprehensively capture motivational experience. Mobile phones allow for assessment of motivation in-the-moment and in real-world contexts, potentially providing novel viewpoints to understanding motivational experience. Finally, I will present data integrating these two lines of research, linking studies examining mechanisms measured in the lab to motivational experience in daily life.

Dr. Adam Culbreth is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine. He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology under the mentorship of Deanna Barch at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Culbreth’s research broadly focuses on the assessment and etiology of cognitive and affective dysfunction in psychiatric disorders, with a particular focus on motivational impairment in people with schizophrenia. He uses a number of different methodologies in his research including behavioral tasks, functional neuroimaging, mobile-phone assessments, and computational models of behavior.