OVERVIEW
UConn School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and The University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth are researching together how therapy can be enhanced to be more successful for teenagers battling addiction such as with alcohol. The co-principal investigators are Francesca Filbey, PhD, of Center for BrainHealth and UT Dallas and frequent collaborator, Sarah Feldstein Ewing, PhD, of UConn School of Medicine.“”
“When our imaging center was mapped out, hyperscanning capability was one purpose they had in mind, placing a control room in the middle of two bays for scanners. This novel project will use functional MRI (fMRI) to examine group therapy in ways that can teach us what therapeutic tactics work best and why.”
- Francesca Filbey, PhD
Professor of Psychology & and Bert Moore Chair in BrainHealth
The research duo and their teams are performing simultaneous brain scans on pairs of young adult subjects to examine activity patterns for signs that indicate strong social interactions during group intervention. The collaboration pairs Filbey’s neuroimaging expertise in Texas with Feldstein Ewing’s expertise in clinical behavioral interventions with young people in Connecticut. Filbey and her team will take advantage of the resources of the Sammons BrainHealth Imaging Center to conduct the hyperscanning experiments, which allow researchers to collect simultaneously the neurological activity of two people while they interact. Read the whole story at UConn Today
