Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Schizophrenia is a complex and debilitating disorder that affects approximately one percent of the population and is accompanied by enormous personal, social and economic burden. The symptoms of this illness are typically thought of in discrete domains, including positive (e.g. hallucinations and delusions), cognitive (e.g. attention and planning deficits) and negative symptoms (e.g. lack of motivation, difficulty experiencing pleasure and decreased facial expressions). Although current treatments have helped alleviate the burden of positive symptoms, they have had minimal impact on cognitive and negative symptoms, and goals of recovery of functioning remain elusive. Negative symptoms, particularly amotivation, have been found across a number of clinical studies to be central to functioning. However, there is a paucity of effective measures to tap these symptoms and their underlying neurobiology. In the affective neuroscience literature, decades of research has used the amount of work animals are willing to perform for a given reward as a measure of their motivation. The current research program aims to use an innovative translational paradigm recently developed in humans to measure a key component of motivation: effort expenditure. This novel paradigm will be coupled with functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the neurobiology of effort-based motivational impairments in schizophrenia, which will ultimately guide the development of novel strategies for treatment of schizophrenia and the promotion of functional recovery.