Mobile app research by NMU students hopes to treat anxiety

MARQUETTE — Anxiety disorders are among those that are least diagnosed and treated. Students in Northern Michigan University’s Psychology Department have taken it upon themselves to create a mobile app that can help retrain brains to ignore stimulants that trigger a fight/flight response. In order to do so, the NMU CABIN lab is gathering data and responses from 100 participants from the community.

“Before they start the app, they come in and get MRI’s at the hospital, they do EEG scans on campus, and then we do all those measures again after the training – which lasts 6 weeks,” said Associate Professor of Psychology at NMU, Josh Carlson.

In conjunction with the National Institute of Mental Health, the CABIN Lab is in the process of a three year project, researching factors that lead to elevated levels of anxiety, and what can be done to beat those thoughts.

“One of the important things that the National Institute of Mental Health wanted us to do was recruit people from the community and try to get a more diverse sample,” said graduate student, Jeremy Andrzejewski. “Traditionally a lot of psychology experiments are done on university campuses, so you get a much more narrow age range.”

Using technology available to them, such as EEG caps and nets, students are able to map participants’ brain activity, and monitor when certain stimuli or responses signal a change in behavior.

“With the EEG test, it’s a measure of attention – the task is basically, we want to see pre and post training – whether or not  this measure has changed, and if the degree to which we see changes in the neuro-measures correspond to the degree in which we see behavioral level changes both in broad symptoms of anxiety and specifically this focus on threat,” continued Carlson.

Currently, the app itself is still under wraps, and only available to those taking part in the research. The group is still searching for over 60 participants for the project.