Insight, Metacognition, and Decision Making in Psychiatric Disorders
Start date: October 2018
Award: 1 fully funded 3 year IoPPN PhD studentship
Project:
The post holder will play a key role alongside a Wellcome Trust funded programme: Mental Health and Justice (MHJ: Lead: Dr Gareth Owen). The focus is on Decision Making Capacity and will address questions such as: How does metacognition/DMC fluctuate in neuropsychiatric illness/injury? What is the effect of varying mood? Is DMC domain specific? We will also examine social effects on metacognition and whether standard neuropsychological tests are useful in assessing DMC.
Experimental work will include healthy volunteers and people with different conditions such as early dementia, brain injury, mood disorders and psychosis. We will use standard cognitive task plus those derived from neuroeconomics (eg delay discounting), moral reasoning, and those pioneered by our collaborator Steve Fleming (at UCL) which measure confidence in decisions. The work will quantify disorder-related deficits and examine whether these are common across disorders or disorder-specific. The post holder will work with the other work-streams (legal, philosophical, social science, policy) within the programme.
Supervisors: Dr Gareth Owen, Prof Anthony David, Dr Steve Fleming (UCL)
Entry requirements:
Applicants should have a Bachelor’s degree with 2:1 honours. A 2:2 degree may be considered only where applicants also offer a Masters with Merit.
Award types and eligibility: Fully funded for three years, Home/EU tuitions fees, annual stipend and some research and travel costs.
Please note this studentships is only available to Home/EU fee status students.
How to apply:
Applicants must complete and submit an online admissions application, via the admissions portal by midnight (23:59 GMT), Monday 16th July 2018.
On the ‘Choosing a programme’ page, please select ‘Research degrees’ and enter the keyword Psychological Medicine MPhil/PhD (Full-time).
In your application, you will be asked to include:
- Academic Transcripts – where applicable, academic transcripts must be submitted with the online admissions application
- Details of your qualifications (you will need to attach copies)
- Details of previous employment
- A personal statement describing your interests and why you wish to apply for this project. Please include this as an attachment rather than using the text box.
- Academic References – all admissions applications require two supporting references. The applicant must ensure that their chosen referees are made aware of the funding deadline.
In the Funding section, please tick box 5 and include the following reference: AD-IoPPN-MHJ18
Please note there is no need to complete the Research Proposal section in your application as the project has already been set.
You are welcome to email Prof David for more information regarding the project and studentship.
If you have any queries regarding the application process, please contact Lauren Soules, Postgraduate Research Administrative Assistant.
References must be received by the deadline for the applicant to be eligible.
Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.
Closing date: 16/7/2018 (23:59 GMT)
Interviews: Week commencing 23rd July 2018 – to be confirmed.
Further information:
About the IoPPN
Studying at the IoPPN
Research degrees at the IoPPN
KCL Researcher Development Programme