Lavanya Vijayaraghavan

Department
Psychiatry
Advisor

The effects of age at onset of major depressive disorder on motivation

Biography

I am interested in how the basal ganglia subserve motivation in humans. Based on Robinson & Berridge's groundbreaking work in animals, I have developed a novel behavioral task that attempts to parse motivation into two important components. These are incentive motivation, i.e, the vigor and persistence of goal-directed behavior ('WANTING') and hedonic evaluation, i.e., experience of pleasure ('LIKING'). I am using this task to evaluate motivational changes in depression, that have been linked to basal ganglia dysfunction. I am also interested in the effect of age of onset of depression: people who develop depression late in life report more apathy than people with depression since adolescence. In the future, I would like to investigate:

  1. the neural areas recruited when performing my task, using fMRI
  2. the effect of dopaminergic medication on task performance in depression.

Recent publications

Research Coordinator
MS Ramaiah Indic Centre for Ayurved & Integrative Medicine, Gokula Education Foundation
Lavanya Vijayaraghavan
Hometown
India
1998: M.B, B.S (Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery, Rajah Muthiah Medical College, Annamalai University, India)
1999: M.Sc. in Clinical Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, U.K
Sergio Paradiso