Effectiveness of a brief psychological intervention for mood disorders: evidence based on psychological and brain measures (Raimo Lappalainen, JY)

The project examines the effectiveness of a brief psychological intervention based on cognitive behavioral therapy for mood disorders. In addition to traditional psychological inventory data, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to emotional visual and auditory stimuli are recorded. The subjects with mood disorders will be randomized to two groups: one of which will initially receive an eight-week psychological intervention (experimental group), and another which will be at the same time in a wait-list for the intervention (wait-list control group). The subjects who will be randomized to the control group will subsequently receive the same intervention than the experimental group. In addition to data collection after interventions, follow-up data are collected six moths after the intervention. ERP data will also be collected in non-depressed control group.

Hypotheses of the present research are as follows: (a) participants with mood disorders will differ in their brain responses from healthy subjects in the pre-treatment (baseline) phase, (b) experimental group receiving psychological intervention will have less self-reported symptoms of mood disorders after the intervention than the control group, and (c) brain responses of the experimental group will change as a function of the receptiveness to the psychological intervention, and no such effect should be observed in the wait-list control group before their intervention.

The project will produce multidisciplinary evidence of the effectiveness of a brief psychological intervention. Based on two different levels of data, psychological inventory and brain response data, we will describe to whom these interventions would be best suitable. Fundamentally new knowledge about biases in information processing in mood disorders will be thus provided. Furthermore, novel biomarkers for mood disorders associated to these biases may be found. In future, such biomarkers may allow the prediction of the course of remission or relapse in mood disorders such as depression, and the accurate and cost-effective individual-based tailoring of the most appropriate type of therapy for each patient.

The research is conducted in Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. It is funded by Academy of Finland, 2011-2014, 660 000 €. The research group includes project leader (principal investigator) professor Raimo Lappalainen, PhD, and researchers Piia Astikainen, PhD, and Fengyu Cong, PhD, and yet unnamed doctoral student.