Yeon Soon Shin
Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Princeton University
Quantifying the latent-cause inference process
New CCNP Publication: The Two Cultures of Computational Psychiatry
CCNP Researcher Daniel Bennett, along with CCNP Co-Directors Yael Niv and Steve Silverstein, have a new perspectives piece in the most recent issue of JAMA Psychiatry entitled “The Two Cultures of Computational Psychiatry”. Computational psychiatry is a rapidly growing research field that uses tools from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and machine learning to study difficult psychiatric questions. In this paper, CCNP investigators discuss two distinct research approaches that are encompassed within this field: explanatory modelling and machine learning. Explanatory modelling research aims to explain the computational-biological mechanisms of psychiatric illness, whereas machine learning research uses advanced statistical tools to predict psychiatric outcomes from large-scale datasets. In the case of machine learning, this may also involve classifying patients into subgroups based on previously unknown combinations of variables, which may help in the characterization of heterogeneity across diagnoses, and the individualization of treatment You can find the full article here.
24 April 2019: Psychiatry & Violence: Biological & Psychosocial Assessment
Jay Singh
Department of Psychiatry
University of Pennsylvania
The relationship between mental health and violence remains a controversial one. However, much attention has been paid to this relationship in recent years, with the number of secure inpatient beds in psychiatric hospitals on the rise and surveys of the criminal justice system establishing prisons and jails as the largest providers of mental healthcare in the United States. Hence, establishing valid and reliable methods of identifying patients who will commit violent acts has become an important health and safety issue. In this seminar, we will discuss current evidence-based methods of assessing violence risk in psychiatric populations, including both biological (neurological correlates and genetic markers) and psychosocial (actuarial risk assessment tools and structured professional judgment instruments) methods.
*Please note that this meeting will take place at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute this week.*