Damian Stanley
Adelphi University, NY·Psychology
Navigating daily life means figuring out what other people are like and deciding how to act toward them, and when those skills break down the costs can be serious, from lost jobs to damaged relationships. Difficulties with social thinking show up across many mental health conditions, yet there has been little systematic research connecting particular social processes to mental illness.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
- Topics
computational psychiatry
social cognition
social learning
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Identify social computational phenotypes associated with mental health spectra in an exploratory online sample of 1,000 adults, combining computational models of social and nonsocial learning tasks with HiTOP symptom assessment.
- Test replicability and out-of-sample predictive power of the three most robust social computational phenotypes in a confirmatory online study of 500 adults.
- Compare three levels of learning (nonsocial, trait, and Theory-of-Mind) and three feedback types (informational, monetary, social) to pinpoint which social processes track which dimensions of psychopathology.
- Probe the neural correlates of the single most robust social computational phenotype using model-based fMRI in 55 healthy adults aged 18–35.
More about the research
Computational psychiatry uses mathematical models to split behavior into its underlying components, producing measurable profiles of how someone learns and decides, but it has focused mainly on nonsocial situations. This project asks how broad, cross-diagnosis dimensions of mental health map onto social versions of those profiles, called social computational phenotypes.
Why it matters
Impaired social learning and decision-making cuts across many psychiatric conditions but is rarely measured directly. Tying specific, model-based social processes to continuous mental health spectra could give researchers and clinicians more precise behavioral markers, offer insight into how psychopathology develops, and suggest treatment targets that apply across diagnoses instead of to one disorder at a time.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Manish Saggar
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether constructs within the same RDoC domain overlap more than constructs across domains, by computationally mining three large general-population and patient datasets.
John O'Doherty
California Institute of Technology, CA·Neuroscience
Separate occasion-related noise, meaningful state changes and stable trait differences in computational parameters by administering a computational assessment battery repeatedly over one year online and fitting hierarchical Bayesian models.
Vanessa Brown
Emory University, GA·Psychology
Validate a new computational model of multi-step avoidance behavior by combining neural and behavioral data collected from people.
The school
Adelphi University: 2 labs on PI Pages.
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