# Cognitive Phenotype Neural Circuitry in Vivo In Mood Disorders and Suicidal Behavior

> **NIH NIH P50** · NEW YORK STATE PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE DBA RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR MENTAL HYGIENE, INC · 2021 · $124,553

## Abstract

SUMMARY – PROJECT 4
How we respond to negative events, regulate our responses to them, and later remember them – plays a
central role in mood and/or anxiety disorders, such as depression, and can lead individuals to engage in self-
destructive behaviors, including suicide. As such, a critical question for research is what psychological and
neural mechanisms generate our initial response to an aversive event, encode that event into memory, and
enable us to regulate our response to it. In the current funding period, we began addressing these issues by
examining the relationship between MDD, suicide risk, and the generation and regulation of responses to
normatively negative and positive stimuli. In this renewal, three factors guide our continued focus on negative
emotional reactivity and regulation as well as a new focus on memory. First, in the current funding period we
found that responses to aversive stimuli were most strongly related to clinically relevant variables collected in
Ps 1, 3 and 5. Second, to capture idosyncratically self-relevant negative responses that may be relevant to
suicide risk, we developed a novel variant of our emotion regulation task that involved recollecting unpleasant
autobiographical memories and in pilot data found that it was sensitive to MDD vs. control differences in
amygdala and hippocampal function. Third, chronic stress is known to impact structural integrity of the PFC
and hippocampus via HPA axis activation and neuroinflammation, and postmortem P1 data has identified such
changes in suicide decedents. Given these data, in this proposal we focus on studying how MDD and suicide
risk are related to PFC, amygdala and hippocampal systems, in the context of: (Aim 1) recollecting and
regulating responses to aversive autobiographical memories, (Aim 2) generating enduring negative emotional
states that may carry over to subsequent neutral experiences and color memory for them, and understanding
how individual differences in clinical and biological variables collected under Projects 3 and 5 relate to data
collected under Aims 1 and 2.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10207366
- **Project number:** 5P50MH090964-09
- **Recipient organization:** NEW YORK STATE PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE DBA RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR MENTAL HYGIENE, INC
- **Principal Investigator:** KEVIN N OCHSNER
- **Activity code:** P50 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $124,553
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2013-07-19 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10207366

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10207366, Cognitive Phenotype Neural Circuitry in Vivo In Mood Disorders and Suicidal Behavior (5P50MH090964-09). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10207366. Licensed CC0.

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