The impact of maternal mental health on learning infant preferences: Model-based analysis of maternal behaviour

We are seeking a talented psychologist with strong computational/statistical skills for an exciting research PhD studentship starting in September 2018 for 4 years, within a larger project funded by the European Research Council https://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/news/2017/pearson-15m-erc-grant.html.

The studentship will be based in the Centre for Academic Mental Health and Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol. The successful applicant will be supervised by Dr Rebecca Pearson and Dr Casimir Ludwig and Dr Katherine Button (University of Bath). Full funding is provided by the European Research Council.

Background

Maternal mental-health disorders are associated with long-term risks to offspring’s mental and physical health (such as obesity) as well as academic achievement. In the UK perinatal mental-health disorders are estimated to cost £8.1 billion for each one-year cohort of births, 72% of this cost relates to the impact on the child.

These effects are explained, at least in part, by the impact of mental-health on parent-child interactions. By improving parenting we can potentially reduce negative consequences for the child. Disruption to particular cognitive processes, such as learning and decision-making, in mentally ill mothers may underlie difficulties in parent-child interactions. However, this has not been investigated.

Parent-child interactions occur in a highly dynamic context in which the child’s affective, cognitive and physical state changes rapidly. An adaptive parental response to such changes requires that the parent is able to use feedback from the child to update her beliefs about the child’s current state. Dysfunctional parental responses may be down to failures to update beliefs appropriately, or failures to use the updated beliefs appropriately in choosing a parental response.

Standard experimental or observational analysis at the level of the behavioural parental response (e.g. overall proportion of “correct” responses) cannot identify which underlying cognitive processes are maladaptive. In this project we will adopt a model-based analysis of behaviour. Cognitive models of learning and decision-making will be used to characterise maternal choice behaviour in both experimental and observational contexts. By going beyond the observed behaviour and parameterising the underlying cognitive processes, we extract more and more meaningful information about individual differences in maternal behaviour.

More detailed understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in producing maladaptive parental behaviour will open up novel intervention targets. Different intervention strategies may be called for if problems are associated with impairments in learning from feedback versus impairments in decision-making.

The proposed PhD would consist of the following stages:

(i) Development of a behavioural learning task, adapting existing paradigms developed by the research team to a maternal context including eye tracking measures.

(ii) Data collection in the next generation of ALSPAC (Children or Children of the 90s) http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/cohort-profile/

(iii) Development and implementation of cognitive models and fitting the data from the tasks to estimate parameters of learning and decision-making processes that best account for the data.

(iv) Development of a real-world mother-child interaction situation to which the model may be applied.

(v) Consideration of application to interventions.

How to apply

Application: Apply online using the University of Bristol PhD application system. Select the “Faculty of Health Sciences` and “Population Health Sciences” PhD programme and state in the application that you are applying for funding from the “MRC Integrative Epidemiology PhD programme”. Please ensure you have read our admissions statement and contacted Rebecca Pearson before making an application. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/study/media/postgraduate/admissions-statements/2018/populationhealthsciencespgr.pdf

Selection process: Shortlisted applicants will be invited for interview in June 2018. The successful candidate will be offered a studentship to start in September 2018.

Stipend would be in line with RCUK rates RCUK rates (£14,777 for 18/19)