Project description
How the body steers decisions under threat
How do people react when things get dangerous? Some stop and think through their options while others rely on fight or flight instincts. Most research tends to ignore what is happening inside our bodies when we are stressed. The ERC-funded HEART2ADAPT project aims to find out how our stress responses (the tug-of-war between sympathetic arousal and parasympathetic calm) actually shape how we judge risks. To investigate what is happening in our brains and bodies, researchers will test individuals with varying anxiety profiles using ultrasound and targeted chemicals to nudge those systems and see how that affects decisions under threat. The ultimate goal is to explain why anxious people keep falling into avoidance patterns.
Objective
Why do some people make highly flexible approach-avoid decisions under threat, while others can only follow fight-flight impulses? Computational psychiatry has advanced formalizations on how utility functions shape optimal decisions. But decisions are made by embodied agents, equipped with potent and competing autonomic arousal systems: Approach-avoidance conflicts elicit stress and are marked by concurrent sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal. The impact of para- and sympathetic dominance on decisions is very different, but decision science has largely ignored autonomic balance, failing to explain altered decisions in real-life threats and anxiety.
Leveraging theoretical innovations that bridge the decision and affective neurosciences, HEART2ADAPT develops a new framework to explain how our brains adapt value-based approach-avoidance decisions under the influence of our autonomic state. It will—for the first time—document the direct impact of autonomic balance on decisions in health and anxiety. HEART2ADAPT tests the hypotheses that:
(1) sympathetic overdrive and failure to reach parasympathetic dominance makes anxious individuals misinterpret random environmental changes (noise) as actual threats, causing avoidance biases, while (2) parasympathetic dominance promotes integration of phasic amygdala-signaled changes with longer-term fronto-striatal updating, facilitating flexible decision making.
To do so, HEART2ADAPT will (1) leverage groundbreaking innovations in the concurrent, real-time tracking of body-brain states (cardio- & posturography; high resolution MEG; fMRI/MRS); (2) pioneer focused ultrasound stimulation and cholinergic modulation to directly explore causal contributions of deep neural regions on decisions under threat, and (3) test these interventions in clinical proof-of-concept studies.
HEART2ADAPT articulates a novel integrated neurocomputational framework that will radically change our understanding of fearful avoidance and its management.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences neurobiology
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine psychiatry
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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6525 XZ Nijmegen
Netherlands
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