McGovern Receives APA Grant

Jessica McGovern, a clinical psychology PhD student in Dr. Alex Cohen's laboratory, is one of the winners of the 2017 Psychological Science Research Grant awarded by the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS). This $1000 grant is intended to fund innovative psychological science research projects designed by graduate student members of APAGS in good standing at a regionally accredited university. Jessica’s dissertation project, titled “The (B)link Between Avolition and Dopamine in Psychosis: What Does Phasic Eye Blink Rate Reveal?,” will examine whether blunted phasic changes in eye-blink rate (a validated proxy for striatal dopamine functioning) during reward anticipation on an effort-based reward task are associated with avolition severity (i.e., motivation deficits) in outpatients with psychosis; this work, if validated, would provide support for using this method as an inexpensive, mobile, and non-invasive measure (vs. PET, fMRI) of striatal dopamine activity and reward responsivity, and would extend previous phasic eye-blink rate findings to a novel psychiatric population.

For more details about this award, see: http://www.apa.org/about/awards/apags-science.aspx