Developing Computerised Tasks for Assessing Affective State - A Translational Approach

Vaida, Andrei (2024). Developing Computerised Tasks for Assessing Affective State - A Translational Approach. PhD thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00099357

Abstract

Major obstacles to the effective exploration of mood-related symptoms in neuropsychiatric illness include the lack of animal models that comprehensively replicate human symptom presentation, the limited number of assessment tools to evaluate affective state in non-human species and, where such tools do exist, the lack of similarity between them and the methods used in the clinic or in human research. This has led to the conceptualisation of a ‘translational gap’ between animal and human studies which may contribute to the levels of clinical trial failure in the neuropsychiatric therapeutic development area, with compounds found to be promising based on preclinical data ultimately proving to be ineffective in the clinical context.
The main objectives of this thesis have been the development and validation of computerised tasks for assessing CAB in humans that resemble those already available in animals (Go/No Go task) and the development of new ones with the potential to be back translated to animals (Go/Go CAB task) using visual stimuli discriminable across species. These will contribute to the facilitation of the translation of findings across species and will potentially help to better assess the likelihood of treatment success in humans.

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