Speaker
Description
Psychiatric disorders are increasingly conceptualized as disturbances in dynamic networks in which psychological processes, symptoms, and neurobiological mechanisms interact over time. While pharmacological interventions such as esketamine show promising clinical effects in the treatment of depression, our understanding of how such treatments simultaneously influence psychological and neurobiological network dynamics remains limited. This placebo-controlled, double-blind study investigates how esketamine affects network dynamics in healthy individuals. Ninety participants will receive esketamine, midazolam (active control), or placebo. Psychological processes (cognitive functioning, reward processing, language comprehension) are assessed using behavioral tasks and ecological momentary assessment and are integrated with neurobiological measurements obtained through fMRI and EEG. Examining how esketamine alters the dynamic interplay between psychological and neurobiological networks will provide deeper insight into its therapeutic mechanisms and may inform the development of more targeted interventions based on individual network characteristics.