Dr. Augustin Hennings, a postdoctoral fellow in the Norman and Niv labs at Princeton University, has been awarded a National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). This prestigious two-year fellowship will support Dr. Hennings' innovative research on "Using latent cause modeling and neurofeedback to understand fear relapse and its relationship to anxiety" in our center.
Tackling a Major Challenge in Anxiety Treatment
Dr. Hennings' research addresses a common problem in mental health care: why do many patients experience a return of anxiety symptoms after initially successful treatment?
Exposure therapy - where patients gradually confront feared situations in a safe environment - is currently the most effective treatment for anxiety disorders. However, many patients find their anxiety returns over time. This can be explained in part by laboratory studies using aversive conditioning - associating a stimulus with an aversive outcome - followed by extinction - removing the aversive outcome. The extinction phase can be viewed as a model of exposure therapy: the original negative association can sometimes return – a process known as spontaneous recovery – similarly to how patients can relapse.
Dr. Hennings' research investigates the relationship between memory-control processes and the ability to suppress the retrieval of the original "fear" memory, even in the presence of evidence that the situation is now "safe".
New Approaches to Understand Relapse
Dr. Hennings' research will pursue two main objectives:
First, he will conduct a large-scale online study to investigate relationships between memory-control ability, spontaneous recovery of fear, anxiety symptoms, and computational parameters of latent cause inference.
Second, he will test a novel intervention that uses real-time fMRI neurofeedback to target brain networks involved in spontaneous recovery. This intervention aims to reduce spontaneous recovery in individuals prone to it and could potentially prevent relapse in those most susceptible.
The work represents an exciting intersection of computational neuroscience, clinical psychology, and cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques. The insights from this project could significantly advance how clinicians approach anxiety treatment by helping identify patients at higher risk for relapse and developing targeted interventions to prevent it.
About the Award
The NRSA is one of the most competitive individual fellowships offered by the NIMH, supporting promising researchers in health-related fields who demonstrate potential for significant contributions to their area of study.
The LCI Conte Center congratulates Dr. Hennings on this prestigious fellowship and is excited to support his innovative research on anxiety disorders.
