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Glatt, Stephen
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Spring 2022
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2022-05
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The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative was introduced by the National Institute of Mental Health as a new research framework aimed at addressing longstanding pitfalls within the field of psychiatric research. This framework focuses on the study of fundamental units of human psychological behavior across multiple levels of information to inform our understanding of psychopathology. These units are categorized into larger domains of similar function, such as the Positive Valence Systems domain, which encompasses aspects of human reward-related behavior. This dissertation centers on the 'effort' component of human reward behavior, defined as the moderating effect of the perceived costs of physical or cognitive requirements on the valuation of a reinforcer. Three studies are presented from a program of research spanning five years on the study of 'effort' utilizing the RDoC research framework from both a behavior and genetics perspective. The first study (Chapter 2) is an exploratory study with the first application of RDoC to the study of 'effort' in relation to psychopathology in children and adults. It finds that behavioral measures of 'effort' in children and adults were associated with specific types of psychopathologies and with differing profiles between sexes. The second study (Chapter 3) assesses the cross-generational stability, divergent validity, and replicability of 'effort' and its associations with psychopathology in children and adults. It finds that 'effort' has divergent validity from other RDoC constructs of reward behavior, and that the specific associations with psychopathology initially observed in the first study were replicated in a larger population. It also finds that 'effort' does not display cross-generational stability between children and their parents. The third study (Chapter 4) examined the genetic contributions to 'effort', and the moderating effect of 'effort genes' on psychopathology. It found that genetic loci on three different chromosomes had genome-wide significant associations with quantitative measures of 'effort', and that polygenic risk scores generated from these measures were significant predictors of parent-reported levels of psychopathology in children. Together, this program of research provides the first comprehensive application of RDoC to the study of effort-based behavior and psychopathology in children and adults and has important implications for the advancement of the RDoC framework and future research in this area.