Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

The practice of defining mental health disorders by heterogeneous categories of symptoms has failed to support accurate diagnosis and effective treatment within psychiatry. This drawback stems primarily from the significant overlap of symptoms across different diagnoses. For instance, patients diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder (BD), and borderline personality disorder (BPD) share many overlapping features which, put together, reflect difficulties in regulating their emotions, known as Emotion Dysregulation (ED). There is an increasing need to properly define and find objective biomarkers that quantify these pivotal dimensions spanning multiple diagnoses. Emerging research shows that subconscious bodily responses, like palm sweat secretion (skin conductance response) and heart-rate fluctuations, can signal the integrity of brain networks responsible for emotional control. This study explores how such non-invasive physical measures relate to behavioural scores of ED in adult patients diagnosed with ADHD, BPD, and BD. Eighty adult patients with these diagnoses, along with healthy controls, will view emotionally charged images while we record their physical and subjective reactions. We aim to group patients with similar bodily and behavioural responses by quantifying their emotional responses. This clustering method lays the groundwork for a shift toward identifying objective, brain-related physical markers that define traits like ED, which are common to several disorders. In turn, this approach can facilitate the development of treatments that target clusters of symptoms and behaviours rather than heterogeneous diagnostic categories.