Details
- Close date
- No date set
- Academic background
- Health Sciences
- Host campus
- Dunedin
- Qualification
- Honours, Postgraduate Certificate, Postgraduate Diploma, Master's
- Department
- Neuroscience; Psychological Medicine (Dunedin)
- Supervisor
- Dr Jerry Hsu, Mr Zaine Akuhata-Huntington
Overview
Depression is a common condition, with a lifetime prevalence of 20% of people in NZ.
Common approaches for treating depression include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or Interpersonal Therapy. These therapies, however, require a qualified therapist, thereby increasing cost and limiting accessibility.
A proposed novel intervention, called Cognitive bias modification (CBM-D) for depression, is highly accessible, discrete, low-cost, and can be used alone or in adjunct with existing therapies. CBM-D targets an underlying factor – erroneous biased thinking – that is known to maintain depression, by training users to interpret texts of ambiguous, everyday scenarios in a non-erroneous manner.
Early data in the UK suggests benefits, but safety and efficacy of CBM-D have yet to be tested in the NZ context.
This project will:
- Create CBM-D materials for the NZ context
- Demonstrate CBM-D's safety and efficacy in a non-clinical sample