On Tuesday 11th of November Simon Braak will defend his PhD thesis titled ‘Social dysfunction across neuropsychiatric disorders: Cognitive and neurobiological studies’ in the Aula of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam at 13:45.
In this project, Simon studied the transdiagnostic cognitive and neurobiological characteristics of social dysfunction across major neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease. This study particularly focused on the brain’s default mode network. Social dysfunction is a major symptom of many neuropsychiatric disorders and strongly impacts quality of life of patients. The goal of this study was to better understand social dysfunction as a symptom to ultimately inform personalised care initiatives.
For the cognitive characteristics, Simon and colleagues investigated relationships between Theory of Mind and social dysfunction. For the neurobiological characteristics, they focused on social information processing in the brain using an implicit emotional faces fMRI task and investigated resting-state functional connectivity and grey matter structure of the default mode network (DMN).
Cross-disorder research is crucial to advance neuropsychiatric research. Social dysfunction spans across major neuropsychiatric disorders. This thesis integrated data from multiple domains (i.e., (social) behaviour, cognition, neuroimaging) to provide evidence of several transdiagnostic cognitive and neurobiological factors associated with social dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disorders.
Findings
Regarding the cognitive characteristics of patients, Simon and colleagues found that Theory of Mind deficits are transdiagnostically associated with greater social dysfunction across neuropsychiatric disorders, partly due to reduced information processing speed.
Regarding the neurobiological characteristics, they found evidence that social dysfunction is associated with altered neural processing of emotional faces, independent of diagnosis. The most robust results were found with resting-state functional connectivity, where we replicated and generalized prior findings by linking social dysfunction to diminished functional connectivity within the default mode network across schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease patients, and healthy controls. Lastly, we did not observe any relationships between social dysfunction and between-network functional connectivity and grey matter structure of the DMN.
Treatment of Social Dysfunction
This thesis expands upon the innovative transdiagnostic approach for understanding social dysfunction established in prior research by demonstrating shared cognitive and neurobiological factors associated with social dysfunction across diverse neuropsychiatric disorders. The findings of this thesis may lead to future endeavours in the understanding and treatment of social dysfunction.
Simon Braak has recently started his postdoctoral position in the department of Psychiatry Amsterdam UMC, after finishing his PhD in the same department.
On Tuesday 11th of November Simon Braak will defend his PhD thesis titled ‘Social dysfunction across neuropsychiatric disorders: Cognitive and neurobiological studies’ in the Aula of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam at 13:45. Simon’s thesis is supervised by prof. dr. Brenda Penninx, prof. dr. Yolanda Pijnenburg and co-supervised by dr. Tanja Su. More information on this dissertation can be found on the website of VU Amsterdam.
