Alexandra C. Pike

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PostDoc Position at University College London

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe eating disorder, marked by persistent changes in behaviour, cognition and neural activity that result in insufficient body weight. Recently, there has been a growing interest in using computational approaches to understand the cognitive mechanisms that underlie AN symptoms, such as persistent weight loss behaviours...

Affective biases are commonly seen in disorders such as depression and anxiety, where individuals may show attention towards and preferential processing of negative or threatening stimuli. Affective biases have been shown to change with effective intervention: randomized controlled trials into these biases and the mechanisms that underpin them may...

Background Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are used for the treatment of several conditions including anxiety disorders, but the basic neurobiology of serotonin function remains unclear. The amygdala and prefrontal cortex are strongly innervated by serotonergic projections and have been suggested to play an important role in anxiety...

Anxiety involves the anticipation of aversive outcomes and can impair neurocognitive processes, such as the ability to recall faces encoded during the anxious state. It is important to precisely delineate and determine the replicability of these effects using causal state anxiety inductions in the general population. This study therefore aimed to r...

Catastrophizing is a transdiagnostic construct that has been suggested to precipitate and maintain a multiplicity of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, post‐traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive‐compulsive disorder. However, the underlying cognitive mechanisms that result in catastrophizing are unknown. Relating reinforcement...

Eating disorders are characterised by altered eating patterns alongside overvaluation of body weight or shape, and have relatively low rates of successful treatment and recovery. Notably, cognitive inflexibility has been implicated in both the development and maintenance of eating disorders, and understanding the reasons for this inflexibility migh...

Objective Eating disorders (EDs) are a heterogenous group of disorders characterized by disturbed eating patterns. Links have been made between ED symptoms and control‐seeking behaviors, which may cause relief from distress. However, whether direct behavioral measures of control‐seeking behavior correlate with ED symptoms has not been directly test...

The transition to principal investigator (PI), or lab leader, can be challenging, partially due to the need to fulfil new managerial and leadership responsibilities. One key aspect of this role, which is often not explicitly discussed, is creating a supportive lab environment. Here, we present ten simple rules to guide the new PI in the development...

Importance: Computational psychiatry studies have investigated how reinforcement learning may be different in individuals with mood and anxiety disorders compared with control individuals, but results are inconsistent. Objective: To assess whether there are consistent differences in reinforcement-learning parameters between patients with depress...

Purpose of Review Common currency tasks are tasks that investigate the same phenomenon in different species. In this review, we discuss how to ensure the translational validity of common currency tasks, summarise their benefits, present recent research in this area and offer future directions and recommendations. Recent Findings We discuss the str...

Anxiety and stress are adaptive responses to threat that promote harm avoidance. In particular, prior work has shown that anxiety induced in humans using threat of unpredictable shock promotes behavioural inhibition in the face of harm. This is consistent with the idea that anxiety promotes passive avoidance – i.e. withholding approach actions that...

Catastrophizing is a cognitive process that can be defined as predicting the worst possible outcome. It has been shown to be related to psychiatric diagnoses such as depression and anxiety, yet there are no self-report questionnaires specifically measuring it outside the context of pain research. Here we therefore, develop a novel, comprehensive se...

Catastrophizing is a cognitive process that can be defined as predicting the worst possible outcome. It has been shown to be related to psychiatric diagnoses such as depression and anxiety, yet there are no self-report questionnaires specifically measuring it outside the context of pain research. Here, we therefore develop a novel, comprehensive se...

Mood and anxiety disorders are associated with deficits in attentional control involving emotive and non-emotive stimuli. Current theories focus on impaired attentional inhibition of distracting stimuli in producing these deficits. However, standard attention tasks struggle to separate distractor inhibition from target facilitation. Here, we invest...

Background Catastrophising can be defined as predicting the worst possible outcome. It has been shown to be related to psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety, yet there are no self-report questionnaires specifically measuring it outside the context of pain research. Here, we therefore develop a novel, comprehensive self-report measure...

Anxiety is an adaptive response that promotes harm avoidance, but at the same time excessive anxiety constitutes the most common psychiatric complaint. Moreover, current treatments for anxiety—both psychological and pharmacological—hover at around 50% recovery rates. Improving treatment outcomes is nevertheless difficult, in part because contempora...

Mood and anxiety disorders are associated with deficits in attentional control involving emotive and non-emotive stimuli. Current theories focus on impaired attentional inhibition of distracting stimuli in producing these deficits. However, standard attention tasks struggle to separate distractor inhibition from target facilitation. Here, we invest...

Mood and anxiety disorders are associated with deficits in attentional control involving emotive and non-emotive stimuli. Current theories focus on impaired attentional inhibition of distracting stimuli in producing these deficits. However, standard attention tasks struggle to separate distractor inhibition from target facilitation. Here, we invest...

N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) is a dietary supplement and glutathione precursor which has shown benefit in the treatment of psychiatric disorders that feature prominent compulsive behaviours such as excoriation and trichotillomania [1]. Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa also possess compulsive features: both in terms of observ...

Neurosurgical interventions for psychiatric disorders have a long and troubled history (1, 2) but have become much more refined in the last few decades due to the rapid development of neuroimaging and robotic technologies (2). These advances have enabled the design of less invasive techniques, which are more focused, such as deep brain stimulation...

RationaleAnorexia nervosa (AN) is a serious psychiatric disorder with high morbidity and mortality. There are no established pharmacological treatments and the neurobiology of the condition is poorly understood. Previous studies using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) have shown that AN may be associated with reductions in indices of brain glut...

Unlabelled: It is well established that preparatory attention improves processing of task-relevant stimuli. Although it is often more important to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli, comparatively little is known about preparatory attentional mechanisms for inhibiting expected distractions. Here, we establish that distractor inhibition is not under th...