Distinguished Career Contributions Award (DCC)

Congratulations to Dr. Deanna M. Barch, our 2027 Annual Distinguished Career Contributions in Cognitive Neuroscience Awardee. Dr. Barch will accept this prestigious award and deliver her lecture in Boston, March 22, 2027 in the Grand Ballroom of the Boston Marriott Copley Place Hotel.

Cognitive Neuroscience in the Service of Understanding Mental Health

Deanna M. Barch, Ph.D

Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Psychiatry, Radiology, and Public Health and Society; Washington University

Monday, March 22, 2027, 4:30 - 5:30 pm, Grand Ballroom

Many forms of psychopathology involve disruptions in motivation and pleasure, including depression and psychosis as well as many forms of anxiety. Clinically, these impairments can look quite similar, and standard clinical measures do a poor job of distinguishing among them. In this talk, I will argue that cognitive neuroscience gives us the tools to identify the specific mechanisms that give rise to motivational impairment in different people. If we break the positive valence system into its component processes and link each to its neural substrates, we can ask where in this system the breakdown occurs. Applying this approach to psychosis and depressive pathology suggests that similar-looking motivational deficits can come from quite different causes. In depressive pathology, the core disruption may be in hedonic response itself, which may then spread to components that depend on hedonic signals, such as anticipation, learning, effort, and action selection. These pleasure impairments could reflect disrupted dopamine and/or opioid signaling in the striatum, related either to depression generally or to anhedonia specifically. In contrast, in-the-moment pleasure appears relatively intact in psychosis. Instead, people with schizophrenia show altered reward prediction and associated striatal and prefrontal activation, impaired reward learning, impaired reward-modulated action selection, and impaired effort-cost decision-making, which may combine to disrupt goal-directed behavior in everyday life. I will close by discussing what these distinct pathways mean for intervention, since treatments aimed at hedonic capacity may help some people but miss the mechanisms driving amotivation in others.

About

Deanna Marie Barch is an American psychologist. She is vice Dean of research and professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research includes disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, cognitive and language deficits. She also focuses on behavioral, pharmacological, and neuroimaging studies with normal and clinical populations. Barch is also the Editor-In-Chief at Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience.

Copyright: Wikipedia

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Previous Winner of the Distinguished Career Contributions Award:

2026 Carol A. Barnes, Ph.D., University of Arizona
2025 Marie T. Banich, Ph.D., University of Colorado at Boulder
2024 Kia Nobre, Ph.D., Yale University
2023 Mark D'Esposito, MD, University of California, Berkeley
2022 John Jonides, Ph.D., University of Michigan
2021 Robert Desimone, Ph.D., McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
2020 Marlene Behrmann, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
2019 Daniel L. Schacter, Ph.D., Harvard University
2018 Alfonso Caramazza, Harvard University
2017 Marcia K. Johnson, Yale University
2016 James Haxby, University of Trento, Dartmouth College
2015 Marta Kutas, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
2014 Marsel Mesulam, M.D., Northwestern University
2013 Robert T. Knight, M.D., University of California, Berkeley
2012 Morris Moscovitch, Ph.D., University of Toronto